Why Believe in God?

Hey, boy, this way. I'd like to think that God is real. I don't believe in God because the idea that an omniscient, loving being would judge me, who is mortal and ignorant, based on a few years' experience, I find to be rather a cruel thought. All the power that God has, he, she, it, has given to me. So we're definitely one. I hope there's something else out there. It'd be fun to experience either that or a world just devolved apes. I was raised atheist. I don't believe in a higher power. But I also don't claim to know everything about the world. I don't know. I don't know if there is one. I just pretend, I guess, and hope that there's something else out there.

Well, my name's René, another one of the pastors at Twin Lakes if you came in after the announcements. And welcome to week two of Explore God. I'm so excited about this series, about the top questions that people have about God, about faith, about life-like. What's the meaning of life? Is there a God? If there is, why is there so much suffering? Why should I trust the Bible? Why should I believe in Jesus Christ? And so many more. And each week builds on the previous week. And so, for example, if you missed our first week on what's the meaning of life, this kind of builds on that. And so I'd encourage you to go back to TLC.org, our website. Or you can go to YouTube or a lot of the social media platforms. And our messages are always posted there as well.

And what I'm really stoked about is we're doing this series with now over 175 churches and groups from all across the Bay Area. Very thrilled about that. What I love about this is this is across denominations. This is across languages. This is across ethnicities. We've got groups doing this in Spanish and Portuguese and Tagalog and Eritrean and all sorts of other languages and all kinds of different skin colors and worship styles from, as I said last week, the Frozen Chose into the Holy Rollers. It's super exciting why we are all unifying because we are hearing people ask these questions. And so as pastors and friends, we want to help people literally explore God.

We're sharing content ideas. Just this week, I was either on phone calls or Zoom calls or emails or text messages with probably eight different pastors from around the Bay Area who are doing the series together. I don't think one of us was in the same denomination. And we're all just sharing ideas. How are you going to tackle this? We're praying for each other. All those churches have small groups and classes kind of exploring these things like today's question, why believe in God? And let me start with a story.

One day, I get a call right across the way here at my office here at the church. And it is, at the time, terrifying to me, if I'm honest. It's a call from a philosophy teacher over here at Cabrillo College, which is right next door. And he says, hey, Pastor René, I'd love for you to come and address my philosophy class because, as is typical for a college, they're hearing a lot about atheism and some anti-religious stuff. So I just kind of figure I'll give somebody some equal time. Why don't you come over and address why you are not an atheist? You have an hour. And it's tomorrow.

Next day, my heart is pounding as I walk across this parking lot and into a class over there full of students with folded arms and sneers and slumped down into their chairs. Maybe two in the whole class was a full class. Maybe two were smiling. And those were my children. No, just kidding. But they were kids, I recognize, from Twin Lakes Church. And the rest, it seemed like to me, were either angry that they had to listen to some fool talk about God, or they were looking at me with kind of pity, like, oh, this poor guy talking about this anachronistic belief.

So I want you to imagine you walking into that somewhat hostile classroom. You have 60 minutes to talk about why you believe in God. What would you say? And here's why I want you to think about it, because you will be in that classroom. And you will get that phone call or text message or face-to-face question from a friend or a child or a grandchild or a coworker or a relative, maybe while you're on the commute or maybe while you're at some party together or maybe while you're working together somewhere. Hey, why do you believe in God? Explain to me, what is it that you believe after all? What will you say?

Well, I took one look and left. No, just kidding. But I did see this. I told the class, I am not going to stand up in front of you and tell you that there is an absolute proof for God. I'm not going to offer you proof. And some of the students kind of smiled at that, sounded like I was conceding defeat. But I said, what I will give you are clues. And perhaps one clue could be argued against, but you've got to triangulate here. These clues all accumulate and they point to something. So let's be detectives and look at the clues.

Now, as I also told them, I'm not some brilliant philosopher, but I am kind of a walking Reader's Digest. If you remember, Reader's Digest magazines. I just read a lot. And so does my wife. And we both talk about exactly this kind of stuff. And it just kind of sticks into my brain. And so I just learn from people way smarter than me. And I'd love to share with you what I've learned.

Fast forward one hour. Class time is over. And every single student stays after class, which has got to be some kind of minor miracle. They keep asking questions. They keep wanting to talk about it until the next teacher gets genuinely angry with us and kicks us out. I've got to start another class here. Get out. Stop talking about God. You know, it's like, we're here to teach you, but it's got to fit into our box. Stop talking about it. Stop being so interested in what you're being taught.

And then we kind of gather outside the class and talk. And one student says some words that impacted me so much that I immediately excused myself and walked back across the parking lot over here to my office. And I wrote down what he said word for word because I wanted to get his sentence just right. I didn't want to exaggerate what he said in any way. So I wrote it down. And I want to read to you what he said at the end of this message. After I share with you what I told those students in that hour.

Warning, we are going deep today. We are going to class. This is college level. Are you ready for that? Are you really ready for that today? All right, so when I ask, are you still with me? I want you to say, yes, even if you're not. Because it's just going to encourage me today. So are you still with me? Great.

As I told those students, I set a couple of ground rules for myself for this talk. First, the Bible says, always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. In our world today, gentleness and respect seem lost, don't they? In fact, some religious people act like anyone who doesn't share my belief is a total immoral idiot. And first of all, that's just not true. And secondly, it's not helpful. Be gentle and respectful at all times.

Second ground rule I set for myself, I worry that if people just hear some pastor say, yes, there is a God, they'll think, well, of course, you say that. You're kind of a God salesman. But all the scientists disagree. So besides Bible verses, of course, I will quote only scientists and scholars today. And not just scientists and scholars, but mostly former atheists who are now believers. Now, of course, not all are what you would call conventional Christians. Some are. But all of them have left atheism behind.

And not just former atheist scientists and scholars, I will quote only world-class scientists and scholars who are former atheists, now believers. And I'm talking about people from Cambridge and Oxford and MIT and Stanford and Cal Berkeley and so on. Now, by quoting them, I'm not trying to imply that all scientists agree with these scientists. But I am showing here that logic and reason and science do not need to be obstacles to faith, because they're self-evidently not.

And the reason I want to bring this up is because we've all heard this many times. Science and faith are incompatible. Raise your hand if you've ever heard that sort of a thing. And people say, well, you can't have both. I want to show you how that is just not true. So are you ready for this? Are you still with me? All right.

In 2004, the Associated Press ran this headline, Famous Atheist Now Believes in God? One of the world's leading atheists now believes in God, more or less, based on scientific evidence, talking about Antony Flew for years, the leading atheist writer and debater in the world, Oxford professor, cheerful fellow. What I love about this picture of him, which was typical, is that you could tell this is not a man who suffers fools lightly. Like, if you come up with some stupid argument, he is gonna tear you to pieces right in front of his Oxford classroom, right?

Wrote many influential books about atheism, and his argument always was, we must follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it means there is no God. Sorry about that, but that's where the evidence leads. And after five decades of leading debates that were pro-atheism, his position, he switched sides. And people kept saying, oh, how could you change your mind? He said, well, I can't really change my mind. He said this, when I finally came to recognize the existence of a God, it wasn't a paradigm shift, because my paradigm remains. We must follow the argument wherever it leads. And for him, after five decades of atheism, it actually led to God. Isn't that amazing?

So what kind of evidence led him to God? Well, he wrote two books about what changed his mind, and he started with the first of our four clues today, the clue of design. The clue of design. You know, the Bible suggests all these clues, and it talks about this one a lot, like in Romans 1:20, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power, his divine nature, has been clearly seen being understood from what has been made, what has been made.

Lots of scientists have seen this like George Washington Carver, an inventor. A scientist at Time Magazine called him a genius on the level of Leonardo da Vinci. And he became a strong Christian. Why? Well, he said, I'm more and more convinced, as I search for truth, that no ardent student of nature can behold the lilies of the field, or study even the microscopic wonders of a stagnant pool of water, and honestly declare himself to be an unbeliever. Why? Because of all the evidence of design, and since he said that decades ago, the evidence has just piled up.

There's a man named Dr. Paul Davies. He's one of the pioneers of quantum physics. Now that's a specialty. He is also one of the world's leading astronomers. He's head of the astronomy department now at Arizona State University. He's from Cambridge. He once said, science has an explanation for everything. He now says, the laws of physics themselves seem to be the product of increasingly ingenious design. There is, for me, powerful evidence that there's something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's chambers to make the universe. The impression of design is overwhelming.

Now he is talking about all the way down to the level of physics. The way he explains it is there are about 15 constants when it comes to actually the physical laws that govern the universe, and if anyone were any different, the universe itself would not exist, like the speed of light, or the strength of the electromagnetic force, or gravity. If any one of these were either a little bit stronger, a little bit less, no stars, no planets, no life would be possible. And many, many physicists have pointed this out.

Look at this, Charles Townes was a legend professor at Columbia and MIT, and he taught at UC Berkeley until his death in 2015. He invented the microwave. He invented the laser. He invented the maser. I don't even know what that is, but he invented it, and it's important. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and he said the more he learned about the universe, he says intelligence must have been involved in the laws of the universe, and in fact, he became a devout Christian.

So we're talking about design in the laws of physics, which is already persuading a lot of people, but listen, that's before we even get to DNA. Now follow me here, because this is very, very persuasive. Think of DNA as a software program that's in the nucleus of the cells of every living being. DNA, as you might recall from school, is made of four chemicals. They're abbreviated as A, T, G, and C, and the way they work is they're a code, kind of like the ones and zeros in computer code. Only these four letters are arranged in the human cell in long strings like this, and you'll see it's not the same four letters in the same order all the time. The order that they're arranged in is a code. It's actually software that instructs the cells' actions.

So do you remember that stern-looking atheist, Anthony Flew? He said DNA was the final piece that convinced him. He said this, oh, by the way, the code in your body is three billion letters long. So it's a huge piece of software that's in your body. So Anthony Flew said DNA, that's the argument breaker. He says I gotta follow the evidence. As he put it, quote, how can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with code? He said here we're dealing with an entirely different category of problem because these genetic instructions have specific meaning that is effective only in an environment capable of interpreting the code. So the only satisfactory explanation is an infinitely intelligent mind.

Does that make sense to you? Like software code wouldn't make sense unless there is a computer capable of interpreting the software code. He said how could that possibly happen randomly? Think of it this way. Let's say you walk up to Seacliff Beach and you look down and you see written in the sand I love you, I heart you, three characters. I mean who would assume that the waves randomly picked up a pebble and carved these words that make sense in that order? You know, if it said heart you I, that wouldn't make any sense. It would have to be in this order to make sense. Nobody would think that was random.

Now what if it wasn't three letters but four letters? In a three billion letter sequence, and they have to be in a precise pattern. Not just three letters are long, three billion letters long in order to make sense. Now you'd know for sure it wasn't random. And that's what we're facing in the clue of design. And we haven't even gotten to the human mind. Rosalind Picard is the founder of the artificial intelligence department at MIT. She's one of the world's leading experts on AI, specifically wearable tech AI. And she says this, I grew up believing that people who were religious had basically thrown their brains out the window.

So she's now a Christian, what changed? Well, she met some Christians who were intelligent people and they challenged her to actually read the Bible, which she'd never done before. And she said, I started to realize there was a lot of wisdom and intelligence in the Bible. So she was like, how can I decide whether or not to have faith in all this? And here's the way she put it, I decided to run it as a scientific experiment. If it's really stupid, it won't make any difference. It doesn't really matter. But if it makes a difference, wouldn't it be better to have the mind of the whole universe who knows everything as Lord of my life? And that's what she eventually did. She kind of backed into Christian faith as a scientific experiment. And she's since become a devout Christian and her research in AI only has deepened her faith.

She says, the more I learn about how the human mind works, I'm just in awe, I'm in awe about how fearfully and wonderfully we're made and it inspires me. The complexity of life shows the mark of intervention and a much greater mind, a much greater scientist, a much greater engineer behind whom we are. That is the clue of design. Now, we've talked about the laws of physics. We've talked about DNA. We've talked about the mind. That was a lot. So are you still with me? Are you really still with me? Okay. I promise you the next three will be much faster.

We got number two, the clue of health, which is this people just seem wired for faith. We humans are just healthier when we believe. And this is another clue in the Bible. It says, praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his, what? Benefits. What are the benefits of praising the Lord to your life? Well, I mean, there's so much piles of information we could look at here. For example, evidence from over 1200 studies shows an association, a correlation, between faith and positive health benefits.

For example, people who attend church regularly and say they have a personal relationship with God live on average 12.7 years longer than the average person. Now, obviously this is generally speaking. There's always exceptions to this. But look at this, this is science now. They live 21.7 years longer than the average atheist, which is not a put down of atheists. It's just, let's look at where the clues lead. That's a lot of extra. You're extending your lifespan just by being here this morning. Isn't that awesome?

So check this out. Believers, according to these studies, report much higher levels of happiness. And statistically, they have lower suicide rates, less substance abuse, higher marital satisfaction, lower blood pressure, shorter hospital stays, and on and on and on. Humans just run better on faith. Now imagine for a second that there was a pill that had all of these positive health outcomes. People would be lining up to get it. You wouldn't be able to keep it in stock. But there isn't a pill that even comes close.

Just up the road, Tanya Lerman, who's a professor at Stanford, says, research has repeatedly shown people of faith feeling better, being healthier. She says, one of the most striking findings in social epidemiology is this. Religious involvement is just better for your body in terms of immune function, reducing loneliness, and on and on. If you want to follow the science, if you want to follow the evidence, you really have to follow it where it leads. And that's the clue of health. Are you still with me? - Yes.

Two more clues. On June 18th, 2012, well-known popular atheistic blogger, Leah Libresco, put out a blog post titled, This is my last post for the Pythaos Atheist Portal. She said she was no longer writing for the Atheist Portal because she's no longer an atheist, and in fact had become a Christian. What happened? Well, she was convinced by our next clue, the clue of morality. Morality, this is the one that convinced C.S. Lewis too, by the way, to go from being an atheist to Oxford to being a Christian.

And here's the way this runs. Every human being everywhere has an idea that there's a right, there's a wrong. There's such a thing as fairness and justice and unfairness and injustice. Now, of course, we don't all exactly agree on what is right and what is wrong and what is fair and what is unfair, but we all have these categories in our heads. Where do they come from? One answer is what we call morality is really just sort of survival of the fittest. Like we care for the children, and we care for the widows because if the children and the widows survive, then our tribe survives, and that kind of makes sense on that level.

So it's all that we call charity and altruism, it's all just Darwinian. But if that explanation is true, then why do we honor as the highest examples of morality, behavior from people like Oskar Schindler, who actually risked his life to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish factory workers from the Nazis working against his own tribe, his own dominating tribe, which was winning the survival of the fittest at the moment? Why don't we instinctively see him as a traitor instead of a hero?

Why do we honor Mother Teresa, whose ministry was just to pick dying people off the streets of Calcutta to give them a more dignified death? Why would that matter to us if our instincts are purely self-serving and are winning, while she's wasting resources on those evidently not fit to survive? Or put it this way, if it all came through just nature, well look at nature, whales kill other whales so that their kind of whale can survive, and lions kill lions of rival pride so the DNA of their pride can survive, but we would see humans who tried that as abjectly evil. Why?

Well, this is what Leah Libresco said convinced her, quote, my conversion to theism was actually similar to any other scientific theory in that it had more explanatory power. Where does morality, uniquely human morality come from? She says I've heard some explanations that try to bake morality into the natural world by reaching for evolutionary psychology, but these don't work for me. I'm really sure that morality is objective, human-independent, something we uncover, like archeologists, not something that we build, like architects.

And this is also a clue that's suggested in the Bible many times. Like in Romans 2, Paul says, even the Gentiles who don't have God's written law show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it without having heard it. They demonstrate that God's law's written in their hearts for their own conscience and thoughts, either accuse them or tell them that they're doing right. This is the clue of morality.

So look at what we got so far. Clues in design, clues in health, clues in just the existence of morality, that's a lot, are you still with me? Good. There are so many more of these. There's books written about each one, and I've just given each one eight minutes this morning. And some of those books are in our book nook, we're just made them available at cost for you to kind of be resourced up if you'd like to investigate this more, but we have time for just one more, the clue of beauty.

When you see beauty in the redwood forest, or you hear it in music, or you see it in the way a baby's ear is made, or maybe you even taste it in something you're drinking or eating, and you just kind of close your eyes and you have that sense of transcendence, and you want to be grateful to someone for it. The Bible offers this as a clue too, it says the heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

My son David and I felt this when we visited Yosemite once, and we were just so stunned by the beauty, but not just the beauty of Yosemite, the beauty beyond the beauty, you want to reach through it to the creator. And the other day, the beauty, when I was hiking at Wilder Ranch during sunset was just so astonishing, it was transcendent. I wanted to just fall down on my knees and worship, but I was afraid I would slide down the cliff, so I stayed standing with my eyes open, but it was amazing, and I'll tell you, you've probably felt this too, right?

When I start to talk about this, I find that most people, even people who would say they don't believe in God, tell me, yes, yes, I've had that experience too, but I didn't want to tell anybody, because I was afraid that some of my friends would kind of think I was crazy, but you're not crazy. Even Einstein said this, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man. We see the universe marvelously arranged.

Now watch this, the fanatical atheists are like slaves, who in their grudge against traditional religion cannot hear the music of the spheres. I love that phrase, the music of the spheres, the beauty of nature, the artistry that points to the artist. Now, let's put all these clues together, and one more clue that's not found in your notes, you could call it the clue of Jesus.

In our small group this week, one of our members, Maurice, who's a computer scientist from Holland, told us that he was raised in a nominally religious family, but by the time he was a teenager, he had concluded that really that was irrelevant and probably wasn't a God. And a few years ago he began attending church here with his wife who was a believer, and he's a believer now too, and we were talking about this in our small group, and he said, here's why I believe, I'll tell you, one word, Jesus.

And he started to get emotional, and he said, when I began to learn about Jesus, he was such a compelling figure, what he said and what he did. And I began to believe in Jesus, and it was after I believed in Jesus that Jesus was real and it existed and said what he said that then I began to believe in God. And this clue's also in the Bible, isn't it? In John 1, nobody has ever seen God, but the one and only son who is himself God and is at the Father's side has made him known.

To Maurice, Jesus made the love and the wisdom and the compassion and the grace of God known. He started with Jesus, and he said, he started to tear up as he said, now to me the love of Jesus is more real even than two plus two equals four. And this is a computer scientist talking. So let's bring this in for a landing. Is there anybody who kind of put all these clues together to come to faith? Well, I think of Dr. Francis Collins. He was the director of the Human Genome Project. He just retired as director of the National Institutes of Health. He's one of the world's leading scientists with doctoral degrees, not only in quantum physics, but also in medicine.

He says, I went to Yale, got a PhD in quantum mechanics, became an atheist and a fairly obnoxious one at that. He says, but then I went to med school and I began to see patients with personal faith and how that comforted them and gave them peace. And I was puzzled by that. And I realized as a scientist, I'd actually never taken the time to look at the evidence for and against belief. And I was surprised to discover that faith and reason were not actually separate.

And then I read the Bible and encountered the person of Jesus Christ, this remarkable figure who clearly was different than any other figure in history. So he's starting to put together the clues. And what was the last clue again? The clue of beauty, right? He says, my moment of commitment came one autumn day when I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains. It was a beautiful afternoon. The remarkable beauty of creation was overwhelming. I could no longer resist. I fell on my knees and asked Christ to be my savior. My days of willful blindness towards God were gone. The search was over.

So what do you do with the clues? Let me suggest something that we could all do, whether you're a believer, a skeptic, a seeker, or somewhere in between. And by the way, wherever you're at, you're welcome here because we're all at different phases. But wherever you're at, let me suggest this. It's very simple. Anybody can do this. My own mom in the later stages of Alzheimer's still loved to go outside and walk and observe the beauty of creation. And she still loved to sing hymns of praise to God, she could still do that. But she could only speak three short phrases. Beautiful, thank you. And I love you. That's it. That's all she was left with at the end of her life.

And in the end, not a bad three tools to have left in your toolbox, right? Beautiful, thank you. I love you. Well, it occurred to me this week that is a great way to walk closer to God. Maybe for you just as an experiment like Rosalind Picard. Keep your eyes open for the clues. And when you see them, say to God, beautiful, thank you. And maybe even I love you. You know, Jesus said, seek and you will find. God will give you clues if your eyes are seeking.

Now you might ask, now wait a minute. Let's have got questions here. If there is a God and all this is true, then why is there still so much suffering? That is a great question. I would say probably the most common question about faith. And I'm going to tackle that next weekend. But for now, I promise you what that one student at Cabrillo said that I would tell you at the end of this message what it was. And I wanted to remember it word for word. So I walked over to the office and wrote it down and here's what he said.

I came into class today thinking there is no real logical reason to believe in God. And I'm leaving thinking there's no real logical reason not to believe. I mean, that's what he thought about the clues. What do you think? Follow the evidence wherever it leads. Let's pray together. Would you bow your head with me?

Heavenly Father, for those who haven't yet come to a place of trust in you, I just pray that they would pray right now. Lord, show me, you promised if you seek, you'll find. So I'm seeking with a spirit of openness. And Lord, we want to pray. I would love for us to pray those three last phrases of my mom to you right now. First, beautiful. You are beautiful. Your creation is beautiful. Everyone around us made in your image is beautiful, including us, me. And so help us to treat one another as beautiful image bearers of God, including those who don't believe exactly as we do.

So beautiful, and thank you. Thank you for creation. Thank you for life. Thank you that when we went astray, you sent your only son into the world to seek and save us. Beautiful, thank you, and I love you. I don't just believe I love you because you first loved us. And we pray this in the name of your loving son, our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, amen.