Reason Blog.

Last week I concluded my article by saying that we can't make decisions of belief purely on the basis of emotion and feelings. It is very important that we look at the evidence there is for any belief system that we have, and this is certainly true for the existence of God. In this article it would be impossible to do justice to all the evidence that there is for belief in God, so I'm going to outline the basics for just four lines of argument with some resources for further reading or viewing. Do I have proof that my wife loves me? Do I have proof that the holocaust took place? No, what I have is very good evidence. But I could still choose to ignore it and interpret the data differently if I wanted.  This is exactly what God has laid out before us. There is very good evidence of God’s existence. His fingerprints are all over the world that we inhabit, but he has done it in such a way that we can choose to ignore him if we so wish.

This is an argument which is often misunderstood, and can sound very offensive if you get the wrong end of the stick, so let me start by saying what this argument is not about!  This argument is not saying that you are a better person if you believe in God. There are often many very moral people who are atheists and agnostics. So if you're reading this and you are in one of those two camps then please hear me right. I'm not saying i'm a better person than you because I believe in God. So what is the point then? This argument is not saying that you are a better person if you believe in God, but it is about how we best account for the existence of moral duties in the first place. The point is that although lots of people are very moral people, the existence of moral values and duties can't be adequately grounded in an atheistic or agnostic framework.

Ever since evidence was conclusively found supporting the Big Bang theory in the late 1920's, it has shown that there was a start to the universe that inhabit. We are then left with two basic conclusions; either the universe was created by nothing ( but nothing has no properties, so how could it create something?), or it was done by something or somebody. The cosmological argument sets out to logically infer the existence of God based upon the knowledge that the Universe had a beginning. A form of the argument recently made popular by the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig is known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument. This can be stated simply in just a few steps: 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

I expect many of you have enjoyed watching some of Derren Brown's programs over the years, some of which engage directly with certain forms of Christianity. There is one program where Brown uses some of his skills to convince a group of atheists that they have had a form of religious experience, only for them to discover that it was just his skills of psychological manipulation all along. Is that all that Christians experience on a Sunday? Some preacher or musician conning them into an ‘interaction with God’? It might be that you’re a sceptic and this is exactly what you think. Christianity is just some form of wish fulfilment or psychological crutch. Is there any mileage in these arguments? Let’s have a look. God as wish fulfilment   Back in 2003, I remember first studying Sigmund Freud as a young fresh-faced Psychology undergraduate. I found Freud's hypothesis interesting, people who believe in God are looking for a 'supernatural Daddy' figure in their life in the big bad, difficult world and they chose this belief as some kind of comfort blanket.