When I taught Sunday school for high schoolers, I asked students at the beginning of the year to write down the questions they would like to talk about. The most frequently-asked question was "how do we know there's a God?"
Over the centuries, lots of purely logical arguments have been made about the existence of God. But logical arguments without sufficient facts can be like bricks without straw.
As I note in another posting, if you look outside at dawn, you will naturally assume that the sun is rising in the sky. That's the logical conclusion; it was universally accepted for thousands of years. It's also dead wrong.
For similar reasons, there are some people whom logic alone won't convince that there's a God: because logic doesn't always do it.
So let's see if we can look at facts more than logic. We certainly know a lot more facts about the universe than we did in those prior centuries.
Some of the cosmological facts we've learned in the past 100 years are, to say the least, consistent with the existence of God. Many people, I among them, would argue they are strongly suggestive of it; my own faith is bolstered significantly by those facts.
It's been about 13+ billion years since the Big Bang. We now have a pretty good idea that during that time, an interacting set of incredibly complicated natural processes has been operating. Those processes produced the first generation of stars. From the ashes of those first stars, a set of second-generation stars and planets was formed -- likely including our own.
These creation processes also produced us. And on the whole -- certainly not always -- we humans have contributed to the increasing orderliness and goodness of our corner of the universe. We seem to be active participants in the continuing processes of creation described above. One Lutheran theologian has referred to the human race as "created co-creators."
We've found some pretty amazing "cosmic coincidences" in these creation processes. Those coincidences are sometimes referred to as the Anthropic Principle. See, e.g., here for a summary of some of these coincidences.
Scientists, even skeptical ones, have taken note. For example:
- "The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications." --Prof. Stephen Hawking, quoted in Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, p. 58 (2000)
- "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." --Sir Fred Hoyle (astronomer & atheist) (1982)
- "The simultaneous occurrence of many independent improbable features appears wildly improbable. … [T]his fine-tuning could be taken as an argument for the existence of a designer, perhaps a God with an interest in conscious life." --Prof. Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion p. 58 (2000) (emphasis original)
- "The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." --Prof. Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979) p. 250
- “My claim would be that theism has a more profound and comprehensive understanding to offer than that afforded by atheism. Atheists are not stupid, but they explain less.” -- Rev. Dr. Sir John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS
All this calls to mind the opening verses of Psalm 19:
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.