Does God Really Exist?
Let’s face these questions! Is it rational to believe in God? Is
God a myth — an invention of an ignorant, superstitious past? Many have asked
these questions.
An atheist wrote and asked: “We have the
history of many religions, and many gods. Which one of these gods do you claim
for your God— and how do you know that He exists?
That is a good question and it deserves an
answer!
Yes, I have a God.
These gods of some nations have been carved by
men’s hands out of wood, stone, or other existing material. The gods of some
religions and individuals have been carved out of human imaginations and faulty
human reasoning's. Some have worshipped the sun, or other inanimate objects of
nature. All these gods are merely the created—most of them formed a fashioned by
man, therefore inferior to man.
But He who did the creating—He who brought
everything that exists into existence, including all else falsely called God—He
who created all matter, force and energy, who created all natural laws and set
them in motion who created LIFE and endowed some of it with intelligence—He is
GOD! He is superior to all else that is called “GOD!” He, alone, is GOD!
Creation is the proof of God!
But during the past two centuries especially,
there has developed among God-rejecting men in the occidental world the mental
disease of theophobia. Two hundred years ago it appeared under the popular catch
phrase “deism” and “rationalism.” Then it masqueraded itself under the appealing
name ‘higher criticism.” This pseudo scholarship employed, as it advanced, such
attractive titles as “progress,” “development,” and “evolution.” It has appealed
to the intellectual vanity of a world groping in spiritual darkness in an era of
widespread diffusion of knowledge.
The theory of evolution was therefore invented
to provide the atheist an explanation of a creation without a Creator.
But this misguided “rationalism” failed
utterly to account for the origins of things and of life; and today the more
candid among geologists and biologists confess that they do not know how the
development from single-celled “amoebae” to man took place. Lamark’s theory of
“use and disuse,” Darwin’s “natural selection,” and other theories have now
fallen by the wayside, and “mutations” explain only the presence of varieties
less fit to survive.
Amazing New Knowledge
Of Science
Now suppose we confine ourselves to facts!
What, then, has Science actually determined?
The discovery of radioactivity in the past
half century has proved that there has been no past eternity of matter!
Radioactivity is described as a process of disintegration. The atomic age is
opening up new fields to explore. Until about 60 years ago, it was supposed that
the smallest particle of matter was the hydrogen atom. But since the discovery
of radioactivity about 1896, the facts brought to light reveal a much smaller
unit than the hydrogen atom — one only about 1/1845 its mass — actually a small
particle of negative electricity, called an electron. Soon after Mme, Curie
discovered the element radium, and the other radioactive elements as we know
now, are continually giving off radiations at an enormous rate.
Has Matter Always Existed?
Now notice carefully what this newly disclosed FACT of Science means:
Uranium is a radioactive element heavier than radium. It has an atomic weight of
238.5. In decomposing, it gives off a helium atom, weight 4, repeated three
times, and then the substance left is radium, atomic weight 226.4. Radium, then,
is simply the end product of uranium after it has lost three helium atoms. Then
the disintegration continues in radium. And the final product of this process of
radioactive disintegration is the element lead! Now of course this process
requires great periods of time. The calculated “half-life” of radium is 1590
years — uranium much longer.
People have seen it in the darkroom of X-ray
laboratories. A tiny portion of radium was placed on a mirror at the far end of
a hollow tube, and they have looked into this tube through a magnifying glass at
the other end. Under this magnification what they saw appeared as a large, vast
dark sky, with thousands of shooting stars falling toward them from all
directions. Actually what they saw were the emanations of tiny particles begin
emitted by the radium, greatly magnified.
We know, therefore, that there has been no
past eternity of matter!
The radioactive elements in existence today
have not yet been in existence long enough to have run their course, and
disintegrated into lead. To have ALWAYS existed, without any definite time of
starting in the past, this “life” period of radioactive elements long ago would
have run its course. All radioactive elements would have long ago disintegrated
into lead. Since these elements exist only for a definite span of years, and all
the uranium, radium, thorium, and other radioactive elements in the world today
have not yet existed that many years, there was a time, prior to the duration of
this span in the past, when these elements DID NOT EXIST!
Here we have definite scientific proof that
MATTER HAS NOT ALWAYS EXISTED. Here we have definite specific elements which
once, in the long ago, did not yet exist. Then there was a time, later, when
these elements CAME INTO EXISTENCE.
Evolution postulates that all things have
always come about GRADUALLY, through the slow-moving natural processes of the
present. Try to imagine, if you can, something coming into existence out of
nothing GRADUALLY! Can your mind entertain the idea?
I think not. No, I think if you are rational
you will have to accept the fact of a special and necessarily instantaneous
CREATION. And SOME POWER OR SOME ONE had of necessity to do the creating. There
is a cause for every effect.
And in accepting that inevitable FACT, proved
by the findings of Science, of the existence of that GREAT FIRST CAUSE, you have
accepted the FACT of the existence and pre-existence of the Creator — God!
Where Did LIFE Come From?
But how about the presence of life? How did life get here? Science has learned
some things about that, too.
The wisest of the ancients did not know what
Science makes available today. Thus it is demonstrated today that LIFE COMES
ONLY FROM LIFE, and that each kind reproduces only after its kind. (Genesis
1:25).
The works of Tyndall and Louis Pasteur, in the field of bacteria and protozoa,
have finally demonstrated scientifically once and for all in these more minute
fields what Redi first demonstrated with larger organisms.
All the advances of recent medical and surgical science in the treatment and
prevention of germ diseases are based upon this great truth of the law of
Biogenesis — that LIFE can come only from pre-existing LIFE.
No fact of science stands more conclusively
proved today. Life CANNOT come from dead matter. THERE IS NOT ONE SHRED OF TRUTH
FROM SCIENCE TO ACCOUNT FOR THE PRESENCE OF LIFE UPON THE EARTH BY ANY MEANS
OTHER THAN A SPECIAL CREATION BY THE GREAT ORIGINAL FIRST CAUSE — GOD— WHO IS
LIFE AND THE FOUNTAIN SOURCE OF ALL LIFE! It is now absolutely certain,
according to all that can be KNOWN from Science — according to all that is
rational — that is required A REAL CREATION to produce life from the not-living
- organic from inorganic matter.
One cannot rationally deny the existence of
God, unless he can account for the origin of LIFE without a Creator who,
Himself, is Life! The Creator, therefore, begins to be revealed, by Science and
by reason, as a LIVING GOD — a God in whom is LIFE, and who alone has imparted
life to all that have it!
Some would go further, and show you that what
Science has discovered about energy and its origin and the laws of conservation
of energy, also proves conclusively that “the works were finished from the
foundation of the world” (Hebrews 4:3), that the material Creation is a
completed work, which is not now going on!
Next, then, let’s examine whether the Great
First Cause is a Being of intelligence, or merely some blind, dumb,
unintelligent FORCE.
Is Anything Superior to Your Mind?
Look about you. You admit that the transmission of knowledge to your mind is
limited to the channels of your five senses.
So now ask yourself, do you know of anything
that is superior to your mind?
Look at the planets coursing through the sky. Behold, in all its splendor, the
entire cosmic universe, with its suns, its nebulae and galaxies.
Yet they are inanimate. They have no mind, no
intelligence. They cannot do what you can do — think, reason, plan, and carry
out plans according to private volition and will.
The human mind can know, think, reason, plan,
and carry out its plans to execution. It can invent and produce instruments by
which it may acquire knowledge of the vast universe, or of the minutest
particle. Through radar, man has now been able to send a signal to the moon and
cause it to return. He can harness waterfalls and make them serve his needs,
cause rivers to run backward, turn the forces of nature to serving human needs.
And now he has learned how to bread down the atom, and utilize a power so vast
that man is able at last to annihilate all life from off the earth.
But there remains one thing no man ever has
been or ever will be able to do. He cannot build, make, produce, or create
anything that is superior to himself!
A man can take existing materials and out of
them build a house. But it requires intelligence and power superior to the house
to produce the house. An automobile is almost a living thing, but the
intelligence and powers required to invent and produce it are superior to the
thing produced.
The Supreme Intelligence
To suggest to you, my doubting friend, that anything you could invent, make,
build, or bring into being could be superior in intelligence and ability to you
and your mind would certainly insult your intelligence!
Now let me ask you candidly, do you honestly believe that any power or force of
less intelligence than your mind produced YOU?
If you do not believe in my God, then you have
only the alternative of believing that something less than your intelligence
produced you — that dumb, purposeless UNINTELLIGENCE brought into being your
intelligence! The only rational possibility is to acknowledge that the very
presence of the human mind is PROOF that the Great First Cause is also the
SUPREME INTELLIGENCE, infinitely superior to the abilities of mortal man!
Suppose YOU Were Creator?
Suppose that you could add to your powers of reasoning, planning, designing, the
actual CREATIVE POWER, so that you could project your will anywhere to produce
and bring into being whatever your mind should plan and desire. Then, suppose
you undertake the designing, creating, fashioning, shaping, and setting in
motion a limitless cosmic universe — with suns and nebulae and galaxies in all
their splendor, each of these vast units being of such intricate and complex
construction as the existing universe. On some of these planets you would plan
and produce all the forms of life that exist on this planet — and I do not mean
re-produce, for there would be no present universe to copy. There would be
worlds within a world, down to the minutest infinitesimal particles of matter
and chemical action such as we know by the aid of microscopes have been produced
in this earth.
Do you think your mind would be equal to the task?
Just stop and think.
Is it rational, then, to believe that any
power or force lacking even human intelligence could have planned, designed,
created, formed, fashioned, shaped, put together and set in motion the awesome
universe we behold?
The First Great Cause who created matter, then, stands revealed as the SUPREME
INTELLIGENCE AND ARCHITECT OF THE UNIVERSE!
The Miracle of Living Food
But again I say, look about you! Here are human beings on this earth, composed
of 16 elements of matter — living, organic matter. These 16 living elements must
be supplied and replenished through food, water and air.
No man with all his ingenuity and science and laboratory facilities CAN PRODUCE
FOOD! That is, he cannot take plain inorganic matter and turn it into the living
substance we call food. But some Power, Force, Intelligence, or Being did in
some way, at some time, start the process going — a process far too wonderful
for any man to devise or produce.
And so it is that out of the ground grows
grass, and green leafy vegetables, and all other vegetables, and vines, and
trees yielding fruit—each with its seed in itself, each through this seed
reproducing after its kind — and it is very good!
But when a marvelous little grain of wheat is
planted in the ground, a plant develops and sprouts above the ground, and in
some manner too wonderful for any human mind to understand or imitate, the
elements drunk in through the roots from the ground are utilized by the life
germ in the seed of wheat, and new grains of wheat appear.
During this process, the inorganic iron and
other elements dissolved in the ground, drunk into the roots and carried up into
the new grain of wheat, have been actually converted into organic matter which
can be assimilated as food.
And this same marvelous process takes place in
the growth out the ground of all grains, vegetables, fruits, and foods. When we
eat animal meat we are merely consuming, secondhand, the vegetation which the
animal ate.
MAN, with all his vaunted science, his technical laboratory facilities, with all
his inventive genius, lacks the intelligence and the powers to produce a grain
of wheat, or to convert inorganic matter into food. Then it is rational to say
that forces or powers exist, of no intelligence than man design, create, and
supply man with all of this?
Man’s Intelligence Versus God’s
But now let’s compare the wisdom and intelligence of man with that of God who
brought these marvels into being, and keeps them functioning.
The grain of wheat God causes to grow out of
the ground is a perfect food. But, like other perfect gifts from God, man fails
to value the priceless perfection of the All-wise God, and, undertaking to
improve on God’s handiwork perverts, pollutes, and defiles it! Every bit of
God’s perfection man’s hand has ever touched, it would seem, he has besmirched,
spoiled and polluted!
And the poor, defenseless grain of wheat is no
exception! Into flour mills of human devising go the millions of bushels of
healthful wheat. And there the supposedly intelligent human takes it apart,
removes the 12 alkaline-reacting mineral elements, and at huge profits to greedy
millers, turns out for human consumption sacks of white flour composed of the
four acid-reacting carbohydrate elements — with poison bleach added!
Out of this, the human population makes white bread, biscuits, doughnuts,
pastries, puddings, macaroni, spaghetti, gravies, etc., etc., often mixing flour
with white “refined” sugar and greases or fats — a combination guaranteed to
wreck any stomach in time! Yes, the sugar refiners do the same thing to sugar;
and nearly all foods on the market for human consumption today, have gone
through man’s factories and suffered from man’s processes until they have been
devitalized, depleted of their health-giving requirements, and turned from foods
into slow acting poisons!
And these foodless foods with which man has
tampered in lust for profits have produced in human bodies a whole series of
diseases our forefathers of a few generations ago never heard of!
Result: today every eighth person drops dead before his time with heart failure,
another eighth with cancer; annually 400,000 innocent little children dig their
own graves with their little spoons through being fed polluted foods; the
population suffers rheumatism, arthritis, diabetes, kidney diseases, anemia,
colds, fevers, pneumonia, and thousands of other diseases. We respond to the
toothbrush and toothpaste ads and frantically brush our teeth, but our teeth
keep decaying and we lose them beginning at an early age because of lack of
calcium and fluorine in our diet.
Today Americans are undernourished overeaters.
We cram down too much bulk, yet starve our bodies of essential minerals and
vitamins. It would seem man is not very intelligent after all!
Then, too, the God who created this earth and
all vegetation told us to let our land lie idle every seventh year. But man is
too greedy to do that. And so our land is worn out and depleted, and such
natural good foods as carrots, beets, and turnips are lacking in the necessary
mineral elements and vitamins! And drug companies get rich selling vitamin
pills!
WHOSE INTELLIGENCE IS HIGHER — that of the God
who provided every perfect need for every living thing or that of greedy,
gullible, God-rejecting humans who in the interests of bigger profits and more
luxuries for themselves have robbed the very foods God created and gave us, of
their health and body-building values?
“There Was No Watchmaker”
I needed an accurate watch with a very plain dial for timing broadcasts. The
only kind that filled the need was a railroad watch. I have one — the very
finest railroad watch made, a 23-jewel watch.
But it does not keep perfect time.
Once or twice a week I have to adjust it a
second or two, if I want to be sure it is accurate to the second. I set it by
the master clock of my city, or any city, which is always found at the Western
Union But even this clock, does not keep perfect time. Once or twice a week it
must be adjusted a second or two by the master clock of the nation by telegraph
from the Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C. There at the Naval Observatory is
the Master Clock of the U.S.A. But this great master clock of the nation is not
perfect, either. It, too, must be adjusted and corrected occasionally.
Yes, it is corrected by the MASTER CLOCK OF
THE UNIVERSE — up in the skies — by astronomers! Up there in the heavens is the
great Master Clock that NEVER makes a mistake — is always on time — never off a
fraction of a second — the heavenly bodies coursing through the skies!
Now, my doubting friend, if you were shown a
fine Hamilton-built, Ball-factory precisioned 23-jewel railroad watch and you
were told that it was not made in these factories after all — in fact, it was
not designed, planned, put together, by any watchmaker at all — that it just
sort of HAPPENED — that the iron ores just brought themselves up out of the
ground, refined themselves, formed and shaped themselves into the delicate
little cogs and wheels and other pieces; the silicon just came of its own accord
out of the earth and turned itself into the glass crystal; the gold case just
refined itself, shaped itself; the cogs and wheels and scores of little parts
just assembled themselves together in that case, wound themselves up, and
started themselves to running and keeping almost perfect time — well, if someone
would try to tell you anything like that, you’d tell them that they are crazy or
are a fool, would you not?
Certainly! You know that the presence of that
watch is RATIONAL AND POSITIVE PROOF of the existence of a watchmaker, or
watchmakers, who thought it all out, planned it, formed it, shaped it, put it
together, and started it running.
But then, you look up into the great vast sky
at that MASTER CLOCK of the universe, which never misses a second — the perfect
watch by which we must constantly set all our imperfect man-made watches — and
you tell me, “That all just HAPPENED! There was no Great Watchmaker! No Master
MIND thought out and planned that vast universe, brought it into being, set each
star and planet in its own exact place, and started the myriad heavenly bodies
coursing through space, each in its prescribed orbit, in its orderly precision.
No, it just fashioned itself, put itself together, wound itself up, and started
itself running, There was no Intelligence — no planning — NO CREATION — NO GOD!”
Do you say that?
If you can, the answer given would be that
your intelligence would not be respected. And God would probably reply, “None
but the fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God’!”
If you can look about you, and observe how
intelligently PLANNED and executed everything in nature is, and in plant and
animal life — everything we see except the bungling, botching, polluting of
God’s beautiful handiwork by the clumsy hand of God-ignoring and rejecting MAN —
and then say you doubt the existence of an All-wise, All-knowing, All-powerful
Creator God, then, not much faith would be either in your rational process or
your sincerity as a seeker of the TRUTH!