• The Relativist: For me personally, there’s a God, but for other people, there may not be a God.
It’s all relative.
Hold on. Either there is a God who actually exists (whether we believe in him or not), or there is no God and never will be (no matter how much I want him to exist). When Christians say there is a God, we mean that this God actually exists―we’re talking about reality. Either God exists for everybody and some don’t realize it, or God doesn’t exist for anybody, and some are deluded into thinking God does exist.
• The Atheist: There is no God. Period.
But to know that God doesn’t exist, you'd have to be God:
1. You’d have to be everywhere at the same time (omnipresent) in order to know that
there is no God anywhere.
2. You’d have to know absolutely everything (omniscience) to be sure there is no God.
3. You’d have to be all-powerful (omnipotent), since someone might otherwise have the power to hide God from you.
An omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent being is the definition of God.
To know God doesn’t exist, you must be God.
Your being God proves God exists.
• The Agnostic: We simply cannot know whether God exists.
How convenient. All the perks of atheism with none of the need for proof. But the same problem arises. In order to know that for sure, you’d have to be omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Agnosticism assumes that God doesn’t exist, since if God did exist, he would (by definition) have the power to make himself known.
None of these 3 approaches even seeks to prove itself. In fact, there are very few things we can actually prove. Think about proof. There are all kinds of things we believe without proof. We take things on faith all the time. Historians tell us that George Washington crossed the Delaware River. But can you prove that? Were you there? Do you have videotape of the event?
Or, for that matter, how do know that 1967 ever actually existed? Can you prove it? How do you know that the world didn’t start in 1972? Can you prove that the pre-1972 world isn’t just a really big sham? Imagine implanted memories, doctored textbooks, and more. Proof is hard to come by. We take so much on faith, but God has made sure that his existence (at least) is obvious to people willing to think things through.
There's lot's of evidence for the existence of God, but there is also proof. In fact, anything can function as proof for God’s existence. EVEN A SHOE CAN PROVIDE ABSOLUTE PROOF FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD.
Think about It.
There are only four options, given the fact that you see a shoe (or anything else in the large category of “stuff”). Considering the options leaves one no alternative but to conclude that God, in fact, must exist.
Option 1: The universe as an illusion
But what if other people from different cultures all see the shoe? You see the shoe. Smell it. Listen to it and feel it. Taste it, if you dare. Run a battery of tests on the shoe―it can be demonstrated to exist. Or if you want to suggest that the shoe is an illusion, we’ll see if you flinch when I throw it at you. Or try something bigger than a shoe, like a ready-mix cement truck. If you see such a truck barreling down the road at you, do you sit back and say, “I see an illusion of a truck?” If you get out of the way on a consistent basis, then (like it or not) you trust your own sense data. You base your life on the assumption that the material world does actually exist.
Option 2: The self-created universe, a.k.a. "The universe was created by chance"
This is the most impossible of all the options, even though it seems to be the most popular among skeptics. The universe could not have created itself; that’s absurd. The problem is that the universe would have had to exist before it existed. The universe would have had to been in existence first in order to exercise the power of creation on itself. It would have to be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. This is a flagrant violation of the law of non-contradiction.
Other people re-phrase this option by saying that “chance” created the universe. But (to borrow an argument from R.C. Sproul) chance is not a thing. Chance is nothing. Chance has never caused anything to happen. Flip a coin. Is it heads or is it tails? Let’s say it’s heads. What force did chance exercise upon that coin to cause it to come up heads? None at all. The force of the toss, the vector at which it was flipped, the gravity of the earth, wind currents, landing point, and whether you turned it over or not at the end―all of these factors exerted an influence. Chance is just a term we use to describe mathematical probability. Chance is not a thing and therefore cannot “create” anything. Chance doesn't exist. It is not a thing. It is nothing.
Before the universe existed, nothing existed (apart from God, given he exists). Nothing really means no thing. Nothing is not just a big black void; you can imagine a black void. A black void is something. But nothing is nothing. There would have been nothing in existence before everything came into existence, and nothing cannot do something. Nothing especially can’t create the universe. The classic Latin phrase is ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing can do nothing.
Option 4: The eternal universe
The second law of thermodynamics leaves little doubt that this is an impossible option. This principle, known as entropy, observes that the universe in which we live moves constantly from order to disorder. Everything naturally gets less organized as time goes on. The fact that we’re not now at a point of maximum disorder proves that there must have been a beginning, a point at which the move to disorder began. (If the universe has existed infinitely (always), the universe would have reached a point of infinite disorder―but we’re far from that degree of disorder.) Similarly, the fact of an expanding universe (and the consequent big bang theory, for what it’s worth) leaves the option of an eternal universe with few modern supporters.
But before modern astronomy came to our aid on this point, Christians had to argue against this notion of an eternal universe. The medieval Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274AD) pointed out that, even if the universe were eternal (and we now know it isn’t), God must still exist. Thomas pointed to the fact of intelligence within the world. The basic elements of our universe cannot organize themselves intelligently. To put it more philosophically, matter does not contain within itself an organizing principle.
If you broke the whole universe down into its basic elements (the periodic table... or even more basically, the materials comprising the tiniest particles), you will see that matter does not possess intelligence in itself. Yet the universe shows signs of intelligence at every level, great and small. Chameleons change colors, protons revolve around nuclei, plants bend toward sunlight, and people design shoes. Matter has been acted upon intelligently, so a God with intelligence greater than all the intelligence in the universe must actually exist to account for it. There must be something with intelligence (and therefore personal) outside of the world of matter to account for the intelligence in matter.
Option 3: The universe as created by God
The material world (stuff, including the elements that make up the shoe) was created by a being greater than all the power in the universe and containing intelligence greater than all the intelligence in the universe. This is the only option left. God created the universe. Like it or not, the shoe provides absolute proof for the existence of God.