God Exists Because...

Before I was a Christian, I philosophised with some of my fellow teenage smoking buddies that there must be a Creator of the universe.  Sharing a Marlboro on a random playground some time during a warm summer night, we reasoned it out very simply.  If things have causes, then there must be something that is the first cause.  That first cause that made time and space is outside of both, and is not bound by either of them to have a beginning moment or a beginning place.

Developing that further, if we (very reasonably) take the currently expanding universe as something that has a beginning, we have to wonder how that beginning came about.  It is more reasonable to think that a creative force did it than to think that it was caused by a mindless force.  A mindless force cannot be a first cause because it will just sit there mindlessly with no reason to do anything as wonderful as start a universe.  Complicating the argument with multiple universes and other rubbish ideas just shifts the first cause.  I say rubbish because they miss the point and just mess up the clarity of something simple, beautiful, and easy on the eye when you look at it under the correct conditions of mind.

Some Irony

I heard a student in one of my classes today say this:

“You need to treat me with respect.  I’m a human being for G*d’s sake!”

I’d just like to point out the irony in this statement.  

This student was demanding respect because of his innate humanity.  But where does that “specialness” that makes us human come from?  If there is no God then we have no right to demand any respect or to put ourselves in a higher place than anything else in the universe.  This is because our “right” to respect as humans comes from the “specialness” of being made in the image of God:

Genesis 1:26-28  Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."  (27)  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  (28)  And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Taking things one step further, though only a small step really, it is therefore worship of our Creator if we treat other human beings that He has made with respect and dignity.  We are effectively honouring the image that He has created of Himself.

Now this is where the irony is driven home.  This student was indirectly demanding that God be properly worshipped through respecting him as a human being who was made in His image; yet in the same breath he was blaspheming God’s name by using it without the worshipful respect that is due to Him.