Religious people, do you have arguments as to why God exists that don't stem from the Bible or church?

Entropy and causality used as a proof for God's existence

The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of energy in a system that is available to do work is decreasing. Entropy increases as available energy decreases. In other words, the purely natural tendency of things is to move toward chaos, not order, and available energy necessary for work is lost (mostly as heat) in this process. Eventually, the universe will run down and all life and motion will cease. This is the natural tendency of all things. Batteries run down, machines break, buildings crumble, roads decay, living things die, etc. Left to the natural state, all things would eventually cease to function.

The universe is not infinitely old because it has not "run down."

If the universe were infinitely old, it would have reached a state where all usable energy was gone.

But, we are not in this state; therefore, the universe is not infinitely old and must have had a beginning.

Because the universe had a beginning, it is not infinite in size.

It would require an infinite amount of time to become infinite in size. Since the universe had a beginning, it has not had an infinite amount of time to expand; therefore, it is finite in size.

All events have causes.

There cannot be an infinite regress of events because that would mean the universe were infinitely old.

We've already established that the universe cannot be infinitely old.

If it were infinitely old, the universe would be in a state of unusable energy, which it is not.

If it were infinitely old, the universe would be infinitely large, which it is not.

Since the universe is finite and had a beginning, and there cannot be an infinite number of regressions of causes to bring it into existence, there must be a single uncaused cause of the universe.

A single uncaused cause of the universe must be greater in size and duration than the universe it has brought into existence.

Otherwise, we have the uncaused cause bringing into existence something greater than, or equal to, itself.

Any cause that is natural to the universe is part of the universe.

An event that is part of the universe cannot cause itself to exist.

Therefore, there must be an uncaused cause outside the universe.

An uncaused cause cannot be a natural part of the universe, which is finite.

An uncaused cause would be infinite in both space and time since it is greater than which it has caused to exist.

An uncaused cause would be separate from the universe.

Being separate from the universe, which was caused to be, it would not be subject to the laws of the universe since it existed independent of the universe and its laws.

This would mean that entropy need not be required of the uncaused cause.

This uncaused cause is supernatural.

By supernatural, it is meant completely 'other' than the universe and is not the product of it.

This uncaused cause must be incredibly powerful to bring the universe into existence.

The Bible teaches that God is uncaused, is not part of the universe, created the universe, and is incredibly powerful.

God's existence (in Christianity) is not an event, but a state.

Psalm 90:2 says that God is God without a beginning.

This means that God is uncaused.

Therefore, the God of the Bible is the uncaused cause of the universe.

First, the existence of the Jews.

The Jews were a small band of people that lived in the area of Mesopotamia in the time of the Phoenicians, the Lydians, etc. Even the Babylonians have been absorbed or destroyed. Why do the Jews continue to survive and prosper with their culture intact in spite of almost universal hatred? As an amateur historian I would say that the Jews should have been wiped out before written history. However, as a Bible student I am not surprised. It was just as the Bible predicted it should be.

This same argument can be made for the survival of Christianity. The Christians were a very small band of an off shoot of a unpopular religion. They should have been wiped out by the Jews and / or the Romans within the lifetime of the apostles. Yet, just 300 years later, we find Constintine converting to keep his empire for splitting because there are too many Christians for the Roman army to subdue them.

Prophecy.

Several Biblical prophecies have been fulfilled exactly like they were said against the expectations of history. One was the destruction of Nineva. The most obvious though, was the propehcy of Daniel 2, where Daniel predicted Western History through divided Europe. Some skeptics say that the book was written later, but even the manuscripts that exist date before the writer could have known about Greece, Rome and the irreparible divisions of the Roman Empire.

Anthropology

Biblical cities not recorded in secular works have been found in the conditions the Bible predicts.

Personal Evidence:

What I know for sure is that God gives me peace beyond my imagination, and is slowly changing me from my bitter, violent past into a kinder, gentler person. I know that you don't give this kind of evidence much credibility, but in my experience it can't be denied.

Psychology:

The venom of the anti-religious is one of the best proofs of religion. Normally people don't fight against things they don't believe in with great passion. They do fight against things they know are true, that they can't deal with that way.

I am, as you have probably guessed, a historian and not a scientist.

I have a limited belief in natural selection. That is to say that I have noticed that strong, sexy people are more likely to have more children.

However, I don't believe in evolutionary theory mostly because it doesn't make sense. Something does not come out of nothing. The big bang does not have any more scientific basis than 'God spoke and it was so' Life doesn't come from nonlife even in a primoral soup. Scientists in the 1900s-1950s tried with electricity. We could try with radiation. All that you do is kill the bacteria on the dead thing.

When I was in high school not too long ago. The science books at my public high school all defined theory as 'something that is believed or not proven.' Suddenly now, all evolutioniists are saying (as do the new books) that a theory is something that is virtually a fact. I have a nasty, suspicious mind and always have to question authorities. Now, when you need to change scientific terminology to maintain your scientific claims, well, I gotta question whether it's science or emotion that makes you cling to your theory.

I am not Christian, and reject most of the bible. For the most part, its a good moral story to live by. Allegorically speaking of course. When I think about God, I think about the great spirit that is a part of everything. Nature, animals, and our consciousness.

Evolution isnt something you can "believe or disbelieve".. There is proof of it everywhere. Now, that being said, scientists arent so sure we came from primates anymore. Evolution is just natural selection at its finest. No one can deny that species change and adapt over time.

Hell, people thousands of years ago only had their own inclusive enviornment to base thier beliefs on. They thought the sun WAS God. And now, the idea of God as gotten smaller and smaller, and becomming more and more of a hipocratic delusion than an actual object or worship.

They didnt have 'bible" or even a local pastor to confide in. They based life and belief and worship off of what they knew. The pagans were the best at this, I think. They used herbs from the earth, to heal, to eat, to make jewelry and decoration. They celebrated the full moon, the new moon, the solstices and the eclipses..

Would you accept Aristotle as a valid source?

Warning: most of what I've linked to here is "Professional Grade" philosophy, so don't feel at all bad if some of it is over your head, it's grad school level stuff.

I did that because I didn't want to give you a "dumbed down" answer. If you want intro level stuff on the subject, it is out there. I want to show you here is that some of the brightest philosophers that have ever walked the Earth (in fact THE brightest in the case of Aristotle) have used logic and pure reason to prove that God does indeed exist.

The first logical proofs of the existence of God that I know of comes from Aristotle, about 300 B.C. He developed the Cosmological Proof and the Teleological Proof, amongst others. (Philosophers debate this because some claim that some of his proofs aren't independent proofs, but just variations of the Cosmological and Teleological Proofs).

Aristotle's writings were later used by the Moslem philosopher Averroes in the Middle Ages, then HIS work was picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas and used in his books Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, still amongst the greatest philosophical works ever written.

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm

Aristotle was simply proving that God EXISTED... nothing more. He wasn't proving Christianity, (he lived 300 years before Jesus was born) but he did use logic and reason to show that a Creator God HAD to be real, that there was NO logical alternative to the existence of God.

Aquinas took this ball and ran with it. He used logic and reason to prove the beliefs of Christianity.

http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/JLesher/PHIL...

There are other proofs as well. One of them is the Ontological Proof. It started with St. Anselm in the early Middle Ages, but has been revised by such great minds as Descartes, and Leibniz. (Note: if you haven't had a Philosophy course you may not recognize these names, but they are amongst the biggest in Western Philosophy. Google them.

This is Leibniz's proof s of the existence of God. http://www.angelhaunt.net/leibniz/god.html (He also uses Aristotle's Cosmological Argument as well as the Ontological one).

The proof was later taken up by Kurt Godel, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th Century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_ontologi...

Now personally I'm not a big fan of the Ontological Proof, but Kurt Godel is a lot smarter and better educated than I'll ever be, so I'm not arguing. I like the Teleological Proof best. The teleological proof argues that the universe's order and complexity are best explained by reference to a creator God. It starts with the idea that the world works so well and is so orderly that this is proof of a design. (Take for example the mind bending complexity of DNA, or quantum physics, or relativity: or how plants "exhale" oxygen and "inhale" CO2, while animals exhale CO2 and inhale O2.) This argument has two versions: One based on the analogy of design and designer, the other arguing that goals can only occur in minds.

Probably the best way to explain the teleological proof is through an analogy. Lets say you are driving across Kansas, and you hear the tornado sirens go off. You look for a place to hide, and see an abandoned junkyard. You drive in, park your car behind the garage, and run inside. The tornado rushes through the junkyard, and after it passes you come outside. Then you notice that parked on the other side of the garage is a beautiful 1967 Mustang, in perfect mint condition(!) What's more, the keys are in it. You get in and try it, and it runs!

Now which is the more logical assumption... that the tornado rushing through the junkyard just happened to blow all the required parts together in just the right order so that random chance created the mint condition 67 Mustang, or that it was designed and made by someone?

The Universe is a lot more complex than any car. The human body is a lot more complex than any car. Following the analogy which is more logical... that Humans and the Universe "just happened?" or that they were designed and created by someone?

Some may say "well if you have an infinite amount of time, sooner or later these things (life, DNA, the spontaneous generation of classic cars by windstorms) will happen by chance". That's true, if the universe was INFINITELY old, but the Universe is NOT infinitely old, It's only between 13.5 billion and 14 billion years old. That's a long time, but NOT infinite.

That's the Teleological argument. As you saw above there are more.

There are many arguments for the existence of God that extend beyond the Scriptures.

The most common is the "Watchmaker" argument, which goes... if you found a *working* pocket-watch in the desert, would you assume that someone had dropped the watch or that it "evolved there"? The object implies the existance of a Creator.

Considering that the average human consists of over 1 Trillion cells, a few hundred cogs and hunks of metal are far more likely to have "evolved" than mankind.

It's interesting that you say you -believe- in Evolution, which is of course the correct manner to describe adherence to this theory because:

Evolution can not be proven scientifically until it is

i) Observed

ii) Experimentally repeatable

iii) Independently validated

Since evolution works (theoretically) on time scales in the millions of years, observing evolution is next to impossible. Interestingly enough if we are all evolving (all living things) - its strange that there are no "half-creatures";

e.g. if dinosaurs evolved into birds, as is one popular theory, where are the half dino-half bird creatures? Surely one or two colonies of these intermediate forms would have survived somewhere in the world?

The explanation outside the Church or the Bible is easy... we can turn to science for this answer:

1-Science says there was a BIG BANG... this in itself is impossible, as particles simply do not collide without something initiating movement, especially in space where we know there is no gravitational force, this would mean that all particles would go outward until something stopped the particles. However, if there was nothing else but the BIG BANG, then there would be nothing to stop the planets from moving on, and on, and on...

2-We can see that great Philosophers also believed in GOD with absolutel certainty. You can read up on the following:

Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Fichte, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kiekergaard, Maritain, Wittgenstein, Weil

3-Laws of Cause and Effect. - As far as science knows, natural laws have no exceptions. This is definitely true of the law of cause and effect, which is the most universal and most certain of all laws. The law of cause and effect states that every material effect must have an adequate cause that existed before the effect. --- This is GOD.

I have my own personal experiences and nothing that can be backed up with empirical observation. Then again, I don't really feel I need more than that. I don't actually try to argue people into believing the way I do. My faith is my faith, and it doesn't have to be anyone else's.

I do believe in evolution, natural selection, the big bang, ect. I don't think that believing these things is counter to the Bible. The Bible isn't a scientific text and was never meant to be.

I believe and love God because God Loved me first and this is not just words ; this is what I actually and vividly have experienced in the personal relationship that by His Faithfulness has come to exist and continues to exist between us.

Regarding evolution, I have enough education in science, in the history of science and in the definition of the main branches of science to know that science in not in the truth business ; science is a formidable tool (by human standards) which is very practical in what it proposes and has little or no patience for the quest of Spiritual or Absolute Truth. So when I read about the various flavors of evolution it does not disturb me ; I take it for what it is: a theoretical model based on a fictitious universe where the principle of entropy would be missing. This model is useful to science and so, as a tool, I do not object to it ; not anymore than I object to complex numbers which also have little to do with our universe but are quite useful. As a dogma however, I forcefully and unequivocally condemn evolution in all its forms ; leave dogmas to the Church and the Church will leave science alone.

The Bible claims to be the revealed word of God. That is, it contains truth that God has imparted to us that we could not know otherwise - for example about creaiton.

Actually creation is a good example of proof that God exists (asife from the Bible). The idea that everything came from nothing is ridiculous!

I don't believe in evolution because it is clearly false - both from what God tells us in the bible and from science.

Perhaps you are confusing Natural Selection and variation with evolution. Noone doubts that the former occur. Evolution is quite another matter. It is easily refuted.

http://creation.com/refuting-evolution-2-index

Isn't that like asking a physicist to have arguments for relativity that don't stem from a physics text or from experiments?

I also believe in evolution and natural selection, but I further believe in things that cannot be revealed to science ... because the scientific method limits exploration to what can be recorded for everyone to observe. I do not mean this as a criticism of science -- but it is a limitation.

I believe in God's existence through my faith in His existence. All religions have a holy book(s) that they follow, they go hand-in-hand. I can't fathom there not being a higher power, an energy, a God/god that created the universe versus that trillions of years ago two tiny protons in this vastness of space slammed into each other and started it all. I also believe that God could have created the "Big Bang" to get the universe started.

I tried to rebel from my fait for 15 yrs and I was brought back to it.