God's Crime SceneSample

How Strong is the Case for God's Existence?

Along the way, you may have noticed something about the explanations offered for the evidence we’ve examined in the universe. The explanations from “inside the room” are varied and contradictory. Cosmological models conflict with one another, and scientists argue against one another vigorously. Explanations for the origin of life are even more diverse and conflicting, as are the theories related to consciousness, free will, and moral truth.

The best philosophers and scientists cannot agree on how to explain these phenomena from “inside the room”; each believes the other’s proposal is inadequate or incorrect.

I’ve seen something similar in my criminal trials. Defense arguments sometimes encourage jurors to consider a variety of alternative possibilities. These alternatives seldom agree with one another, but they do offer jurors alternatives to the case presented by the prosecution. The varied defense explanations typically cannot explain the evidence as thoroughly (nor as completely) as the defendant, however. His involvement accounts for the evidence in a unified and compelling manner.

In a similar way, the external “suspect” we’ve offered from “outside the room” of the universe addresses the evidence we see “inside the room” in a unified, thorough, and compelling manner.

Scientists and physicists have been searching for a “Theory of Everything” for decades. They’d like to unify theories of quantum mechanics (explaining physical interactions at the quantum level) and the theory of general relativity (explaining physical interactions at the macro level). They’re looking for a single theory, a single explanation. It turns out there is a unified explanation for everything we see (and don’t see) in our universe. It’s not an impersonal set of physical properties or laws, however. It’s a personal, all-powerful Divine Being.

Like other scenes I’ve investigated, we can determine something about the nature of our external suspect from the evidence in the “crime scene.” The cosmological, biological, mental, and moral evidence “inside the room” points to a particular kind of external suspect who possesses specific characteristics.

The evidence we’ve identified in the universe is best explained by an external suspect, and given the nature of this evidence, our suspect is clearly nonspatial, atemporal, nonmaterial, and uncaused. Our suspect is also powerful enough to create everything we see in the universe and purposeful enough to produce a universe fine-tuned for life.

Our suspect is intelligent and communicative, creative and resourceful. As a conscious Mind, our suspect is the personal source of moral truth and obligation and the standard for goodness. Only one Being can be described in this way; only one suspect can reasonably explain the evidence in our “crime” scene: this is God’s “crime" scene.

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