Why do people believe God exists? Or, as a corollary, that He created the world? For me, I would believe it with or without the Bible. This world is far and away too beautiful and complex to have come about by mere chance. This would be true even if it were possible that matter always existed.
I don’t believe matter has always existed because in this world everything has a cause. You can trace things back as far as you want, and that is just how it works. Even in the most random coincidence-type events, there is always an event or sequence of events leading up to it, with matter or energy acting on other matter or energy. Within the universe these cannot be created nor destroyed (the first law of thermodynamics). There is nothing we have observed within the universe to suggest it could have broken this rule to create itself or broken the second law (entropy) to always exist. In all the study of it through science and other means of observation we have never observed spontaneous creation of either matter or life. Let alone out of nothing. And yet in the universe both matter and life exist.
The most reasonable conclusion is that something else outside of itself must have created this. Something else, and yet not some “thing”- if only because there were no “things”. The house is not greater than the one who built it, so it has to be something so far much greater than what we can see or imagine here. We as people build things (using matter); the creator who created out of nothing and created matter – and life! – is higher than us. I don’t see how it could be just a force – how could the impersonal create the personal? People are higher than things – it has to be at least a person, someone – Someone, capitalized, for lack of a better term. For something to be a first cause it has to have always existed. We will always be left with that paradox, but I believe it makes more sense for the Creator to have always existed than for creation.
And then we come back to the amazingness of creation, the vast improbabilities of even just specific created things happening simply from random chance. How is it thinkable that from pure randomness could arise any sort of order. And such order! Think of the laws of physics, the movement of planets. And not just order, but life, self-awareness and even the concepts of intelligence and purpose, the instinct of self-preservation, etc. And that in so many different varieties and species of life. It is clear that even Coke bottles don’t just happen; they are created, and they serve a purpose.
Believing in God does take an act of faith since we can’t physically see Him. (Both to believe He exists, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, Heb 11:6) However I’d say it is a much bigger leap of faith to be an atheist or to believe that blind evolution alone could be responsible for life. To prove something exists, you need only to (search until you) find it; to prove it doesn’t, you must search everywhere it could possibly be. Rules of logic apply of course, but can only take us as far as our finite brains will allow, and are known to apply only to the observable universe, which God is outside of, though in some way involved in.
Whatever your views on creation, it still amounts to believing something about an historical event that we cannot empirically see or prove. (Though there will be perhaps no end to study and discovery, which is a wonderful and sobering thing.) Being agnostic about God can be honest perhaps at least on some level, and indeed there are very many things we don’t know. But the existence of God should not be a hard thing to be convinced of; it is only that man stands in his own way.
