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The guns of skepticism have been so vigorously trained upon the idea of creation, because the skeptic understands this that if he can do away with the rational concept of divine creation, then the whole structure of Christian faith collapses.

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In the first chapter of Romans, the Apostle Paul tells us that we know God exists because creation exists. But philosophers through the ages have disagreed. They have said that we can never rationally know that God exists. Well, today on Renewing youg Mind, RC Sproul will take another approach, and believe it or not, he'll prove God's existence with one shoe and simple logic. But before we hear that message, don't forget to request this week's Apologetics Resource bundle that includes this series, Objections Answered and and another series from Dr. Sproul, Defending youg Faith, when you give a donation in support of Renewing youg mind@renewingyourmind.org so how do you prove the existence of God? With a shoe? Here's Dr. Sproul.

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As we continue our study. Now with the most common objections raised against Christian truth claims, we recall that in our last program we looked at the crisis brought to the Church by this mass critique of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. Which critique was made by the philosopher Immanuel Kant? And if I may review it for you, or if you've missed that particular program, you will notice that Kant argued that reason cannot move through the use of cause and effect from the physical universe that we perceive to the conclusion that above and beyond this physical universe there is a non physical reality named God. And we see a collision course here between the teaching of the Apostle Paul and the teaching of Immanuel Kant. And I just want us to understand this at the outset that if Kant is correct that you cannot know the invisible God from visible objects in this world, if Kant is correct, then manifestly Paul is wrong when he says that the invisible things of God are known through the things that are made. On the other hand, if the Apostle Paul is correct, then Kant must be wrong. The great scandal of modern Christianity is that the Church today seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. They want to affirm the truth of what Paul is teaching and yet roll over and play dead before the feet of Immanuel Kant. And so we've seen in the last 200 years or so a vast dec in the Church's attempts to prove the existence of God, surrendering to the skepticism that says it can't be done. And there are different kinds of skepticism at this point. One argues that even if we could prove the existence of God. The only God that we could prove would be a nameless, faceless, uncaused cause, some ultimate being who has the power of creation within himself. And that wouldn't necessarily correspond to the Christian God whose name is Yahweh, who reveals himself in history and who redeems us in Jesus Christ, and so on. And so that all we could get to through our rational argumentation would be this sterile, empty, vapid concept of an Aristotelian unmoved mover. And certainly God is much more than a first cause. He's the Father, he's the Redeemer, he's all these things that we're concerned about in biblical revelation. Well, I'm sensitive to that concern, and yet I want to caution my friends who come to that conclusion and say, just keep this in mind that one of the primary tasks of apologetics, as we saw in our first session, is to give an answer to the hope that is within us. And it has always been the Church's responsibility to give a reasonable reply to the skeptic. And the guns of skepticism have been aimed for the last 200 years at one basic concept that is absolutely essential to Christianity, and that is the idea of creation. Whatever else God is, He is the Creator. And the guns of skepticism have been so vigorously trained upon the idea of creation, because the skeptic understands this, that if he can do away with the rational concept of divine creation, then the whole structure of Christian faith collapses because Christianity is married to the assertion in the beginning, God, and that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now, I don't go to church to worship Aristotle's unmoved mover. I go to church to worship the. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. I don't go to church to worship an abstract philosophical principle, but I do go to church to worship a God who, among everything else that he does, also happens to be creator. And it's very important for us to show the necessity of. Of a Creator, because even though that doesn't prove the full nature of God, what it does answer is the objection that is leveled at this most critical point. Now, how do we then endeavor to do this? I once had a discussion with a philosopher, a professional philosopher. He made his living teaching philosophy, and he said, how can you suppose to argue cogently for the existence of God? Give me some proof, some real proof that God exists. And I said, okay. And I had a pair of loafers on my feet, and I took off one loafer and one shoe. And I held up the shoe and I showed him my shoe and I said, here, this shoe proves conclusively that God exists. And he laughed. He said, all that proves to me is that you have a shoe in your hand. And it suggests, doesn't necessarily prove it, RC but it's suggesting that the one who's holding the shoe is not all there. How in the world can you say that that shoe proves the existence of God? And I said, well, I'll back off for a second and I'll take a retreat. You've laughed me to scorn. I said, okay, let me just ask you, first of all, do you agree with me that I was holding a shoe? He said, yeah, I'll give you that. And would you agree that the shoe is something? He said, yes, it's not nothing. I said, because if that shoe exists, if my shoe exists, then I can only think of four possible explanations for this shoe. One is that it's an illusion. A Fig Newton of my imagination and of yours. But we had already gotten past that because he suggested that he agreed with me that there really was something there that I wasn't in the tender grasp of nothing. He said, this is something, a shoe. I said, we agree that the shoe is not an illusion. And even if it were an illusion, we're not stopped there. Because if my friend would have said, I don't even believe in your shoe, not to mention your God, I don't believe that you're holding a shoe in your hand, I think that's an illusion. I'd say, okay, it's an illusion. Now what's having the illusion? Is the illusion real? And he said, well, I guess we have to say that if there's an illusion, something's having an illusion. Because you can't have an illusion of an illusion without having something having the illusion. He agreed with that. I said, okay, that really boils it down now to three possible explanations for this shoe. And they are, this shoe that he agreed exists is not an illusion, is either self existent and eternal. That is that this shoe that I have on my foot is an eternal shoe. It wasn't made, it wasn't manufactured, it didn't grow, it wasn't born. But as long as there's been anything or time, even before time, this shoe exists. When I take it to the shoemaker, he says, how long have you had these shoes, R.C. he said, you should have been in here longer time ago. They're so damaged. He may think that my shoe's been on my foot forever, but I have never found a shoemaker yet who believes in eternal shoes. But I said, let's allow that as a possibility that the shoe is self existent and eternal. The other possibility is that the shoe created itself out of nothing. One day I was walking down the street barefooted and poof. Suddenly, magically, mysteriously, a shoe popped out of thin air, went on my foot. It's possibility number two that that object created itself. And the third possibility is that the shoe has been made by someone or something other than that shoe itself. So we really have three options now. An eternal shoe, a shoe that creates itself, or a shoe that is created by something else. And I've talked about this before philosophers, before scientists, and I keep asking for other alternatives. And every alternative that's ever been suggested to their agreement has always been able to be subsumed under one of these three categories. So now we're down to three categories. A self existent eternal shoe, a self created shoe, or a created shoe. Now, what we can do by logic alone, without any microscopes, without any telescopes, without any empirical investigation, but by the sheer power of of logic and rationality, is eliminate one of those three options. And I have to say in parentheses that it is the option most frequently presented by those who deny a creator. And that is the idea of self creation. This shoe cannot create itself because, ladies and gentlemen, nothing can create itself. That is a logical, rational impossibility. Why? Because the idea of self creation violates the most basic law, not only of philosophy, but the most basic law of science, which is the law of non contradiction. And the law of non contradiction teaches that something cannot be A and non a at the same time and in the same relationship. A thing cannot be what it is and not be what it is at the same time and in the same way. Now how does that relate to my self created shoe? Well, you see, it's simple. For a shoe to create itself, what would it have to do? It would have to be before what before it was. For the shoe to do the job of creating the shoe, it would first have to be a shoe before it was even a shoe. It would have to be a shoe and not be a shoe at the same time in the same relationship. If I'm giving you a headache, that's good. Consider yourself fortunate that you're still within sanity. You understand that something cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. Now, most people who argue against the idea of a creation do not do so in such crass, silly categories as saying the shoe creates itself by itself. Rather, it becomes more sophisticated. We'll say that the universe, for example, was created by chance. How many times have you heard that? I talked to a professor at Harvard University who looked me straight in the eye and said he believed that the universe was created by chance. And he wasn't talking here about the collision of present molecules in some kind of pattern that was undiscernable but followed somewhat vague mathematical possibilities. What he was talking about was that once there was nothing, and then, boom, there's something. And the agent that brings something out of nothing is chance. And I reminded this professor that chance is not a thing. Chance is a word. We use a perfectly good word, a valid word to describe mathematical possibilities. Poker players are very familiar with it. People at the racetrack understand odds and probabilities and chances. They understand all of that. And when they say that the horse runs at 8 to 1, they don't mean that the odds makes the horse run. They're just talking about not knowing who's going to be running the fastest on that day. They make bets on the basis of the odds. I talked about the flipping of a coin. I said, I'll flip a coin here. What are the odds if it doesn't stand on its edge, that this coin comes up heads or tails and everybody says, 50. 50. I said, I tricked you. The odds are that it'll come up heads or tails, 100%. What are the odds that it comes up heads? 50%. Now, do the odds make the coin come up heads or tails? No. Chance has no influence on the actual event because chance has no power to influence anything. The reason it has no power to influence anything, beloved, is because chance has no power. Being for something to do something, it must first be something. For something to exercise power or force or energy, it must first be. And chance is not a thing. Chance is not an entity. It has no matter. It has no energy. It has no being. It is nothing. So when someone says to you the universe was created by chance, in this sense, what they are saying fundamentally is what Stephen Hawking finally said, that the universe comes from nothing by itself. Now we have the second fundamental law of science violated with a vengeance. And that law is, is stated in Latin, ex nihil lo nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Nothing cannot produce something. Because again, to weary you, nothing is not anything. And nothing can't do something. It can't produce anything because it is nothing. Now, I want you to think about this. I don't have time in these short lectures to go into a complex discussion of all of the salient points here. But the fundamental point I want you to understand is this. Try to imagine, if you will, that there once was a time when nothing was absolute nothingness. Not just no trees, no planets, no gas, no energy, nothing, no God, no point of singularity, absolute nothing. Now, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to answer this question. If there ever was a time when there was nothing, what could there possibly be now? Absolutely nothing. And so that's why I said to my friend, if you grant the reality of my shoe, then you must admit there has never been a time where there was nothing. There has always had to be something, or nothing could be. Now, some people call this the cosmological argument rather than the ontological argument, but it's basically an argument from being. If something is now, something, somehow, somewhere, must have the power to make whatever is here be here. In shorthand terms, again, something must have the power of being. And that which does not have the power of being is nothing. Nothing has no power to be itself, let alone to make anything else be. So what I'm saying is that reason doesn't just suggest or hint or bear witness of. What I'm saying is that reason absolutely demonstratively demands that it is impossible that if something exists now, that there ever could have been a time when there was absolutely nothing. And self creation of the universe presupposes that the universe came into being out of nothing, by nothing, through the power of nothing. And that is manifest nonsense, unworthy not only of theology, it's unworthy of philosophy, and most emphatically it's unworthy of any serious science. But still, we haven't proven the existence of God. All we've shown so far is that with respect to my shoe, if it's not an illusion, the one thing we know for absolute sure is that that shoe did not create itself. Nothing can create itself. But we're still left with two options. One is that it was made by something other than itself, or that it is eternal. Let me say to you that many of you may not ever think about these things and may even think that such discussions are a waste of time. And why don't we just take the matter of God by faith and not worry about people who are trying to argue against the existence of God? Beloved, again, what is the difference between nothing and the eternal God of the universe? There is nothing more important to the Christian than the bold affirmation and assurance of the eternal being of God himself. There's nothing more basic, more foundational to our faith than that There is one school of apologetics called presuppositionalism that does assert this primary truth, namely that the existence of God is so important that it is the supreme article of that defines every bit of truth we ever seek to understand. And they're right about that. It's absolutely foundational to everything that we believe. And that foundational assertion, the first assertion of Sacred Scripture, is not something that we want to take lightly. So I hope you'll bear with me and look carefully at these questions as we continue in our next session.