16 Reasons Why I Believe In God: (9) The Existence of Evil

On Sunday afternoon, April 29th, 2007, my wife and I went to a mall in Kansas City to shop at the Target store.  A few minutes later, we found ourselves running for our lives in terror, as semi-automatic gunfire echoed behind us.  A man came into the mall with a rifle and began shooting people at random.  At first, we didn't know what was happening.  Crowds of people ran by us in silence, with stunned looks on their faces.  Then we heard loud gun shots, and everyone panicked.  People were screaming and falling over each other to escape.  It felt like a scene from a movie.  When it was all over, 4 people were dead and several more injured.  My wife and I made it out safely.  But I suffered from insomnia, nightmares, and irrational paranoia for months after.  I had an undeniable encounter with evil.

From Buddhism To Christianity

I was greatly privileged to have Ellis Potter speak to my philosophy class a couple of weeks ago.  Ellis used to be a Buddhist monk.  Now he's a Christian pastor in Switzerland.  Ellis has a kindness, eloquence, and authority about him that bespeaks decades of experience dialoging with diverse people about life's biggest questions.  You can just feel it in his voice.  And he shows immense respect for people whose beliefs differ from his, even as he explains why he disagrees with them.  I really admire that.  Ellis spoke about his new book, 3 Theories of Everything.  It's a fascinating comparison of three major worldviews that offer starkly different answers to deeply human questions, such as:  What is reality?  What is the meaning of life?  Why do we suffer?  The answers may surprise you.

16 Reasons Why I Believe In God: (8) Laws of Logic

Reason works according to logic; yet most people are unfamiliar with what logic is.  Sure, they use the term "logical" to refer to things that make sense to them, and "illogical" to refer to things that don't.  But they may not realize that logic is a rich academic discipline, with laws and theories, just like science and math.  And similar to scientific laws, such as gravity, everyone feels the effects of the laws of logic, whether they realize it or not.  When we reflect on the kind of thing a law of logic must be, we see that it points to God's existence in at least two ways:  First, laws of logic show materialism is false by revealing that non-physical causes exist.  Second, laws of logic point to a rationality beyond the universe.

16 Reasons Why I Believe In God: (7) Reason

Reason is the mental ability to deduce facts about the world, or to make valid inferences from prior knowledge.  Humans do this with ease on a daily basis (other animals can't do it at all).  For example, when we calculate a waiter's tip, or figure out why the car is making that funny noise, or estimate the angle to hit a cue ball, or even predict the existence of the 'God Particle,' we're using reason.  Reason is the basis for virtually all our inferences and conclusions.  Every theory then, scientific or otherwise, not only utilizes reason, but assumes it is trustworthy.  If a particular theory were to somehow cast doubt on the validity of reason, if it were to make us think our inferences are dubious or invalid, then that theory would refute itself, since one needs reason to believe the theory in the first place.  It turns out materialism is such a theory.

16 Reasons Why I Believe In God: (6) Consciousness and Identity

If materialism is true, then your mind is nothing more than an emergent property of your brain, or it is one and the same thing as your brain.  In either case, there could never be a mind existing apart from a physical brain.  Hence, there could be no God (understood as an unembodied Mind).  However, if there were good reasons to believe that minds could exist in the absence of a functioning brain, or that minds constitute an irreducibly non-physical part of reality, then it would make God's existence more plausible.  As it turns out, there are such reasons.  In this post, I will discuss two of them - consciousness and identity.

16 Reasons Why I Believe In God: (5) The Origin of Biological Information

The discovery of the genetic code in the 1950s brought with it the realization that information is a real part of nature.  In other words, we didn't just discover DNA and how it works, we also discovered that organisms are comprised of a third substance in addition to matter and energy - namely, information.  This raised new questions about life's origin, questions like, "How did the information get there in the first place?"

When we reflect on what information is, we discover that it has fundamentally different properties from matter.  For instance, information doesn't have mass or weight (your smart phone weighs the same both before and after you download an app).  So, information is real, even though it's not physical.  But the most fascinating thing about it is that, in all our experiences, meaningful information always originates from a mind.

16 Reasons Why I Believe In God: (4) The Fine-Tuning of the Universe

The universe appears to be finely calibrated to support the existence of intelligent life and promote scientific discovery.  To understand what I mean, imagine you found yourself in a strange house.  To your astonishment, you discover that when struck or bumped into, parts of the house resonate with perfect musical pitch.  There are rooms where you can play chords by hitting several things at once, or perform a scale by tapping along the kitchen tile.  You might suspect the house was designed for musical inhabitants.  Suppose further that the feng shui of the house naturally leads people through its rooms in a way that creates a unique, captivating melody, when done right.  You might additionally suspect the designer of the house intended its inhabitants to discover this hidden melody.  As cheesy and flawed as this analogy might be, the musical house is similar in many ways to our universe.