Humans seem to be fundamentally religious. Belief in God or gods plays a significant role in every culture throughout history. Even so-called secular societies define themselves (often quite intentionally) by what they are against: no supernatural causes, no nonphysical reality, nothing sacred or divine. Today in the West, the bastion of secularism, religions flourish. In fact, sociologists tell us we now live in a postsecular age. Religion and belief in God are not waning. Rather, religion will likely play a significant role in the twenty-first century.1
Atheists have noticed this unwelcome state of affairs and have responded with vigor: “Belief in God is delusional.” “Religion poisons everything.” “We must break the spell of the religious.”2 With planes flying into buildings in the name of Allah and many other horrors perpetrated in the name of God, it is not hard to see their point. However, these so-called New Atheists do not offer much in terms of new reasons to doubt God’s existence. Rather, the rhetoric is novel. It is angry, loud, accusative, and impatient: for them, belief in God is dangerous, delusional, and destructive.3 The debate over God’s existence and nature shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Given its fundamental importance to all of life, it is doubtful this controversy will ever cease this side of eternity (or, for those thus inclined, until humanity passes into oblivion).
The fact remains: the human is a worshiping animal. There is a universal longing to render praise to that which absorbs our hearts and captures our imagination. Two questions press for explanation. First, in this world of objects, what are we? Each day the sun rises and sets. The earth turns on its axis. The universe continues its expansion. People are born. People die. Lives change. Lives continue as before. The story of the world goes on, and it does so without our permission. We are not the author of the story of the world, let alone of every aspect of our lives. But neither are we merely a member of the audience. We are participants. We’ve got skin in the game. We, one and all, look for a story to enter into and to help us find meaning, value, and purpose. This leads to a second pressing question: In this world of objects, is that which we worship as ultimate worthy of our devotion? In short, is the object of our worship, well, God? These two questions, as John Calvin pointed out many years ago, are related: in understanding the truth about God’s existence and nature, we come to understand ourselves too.4 In this chapter we shall explore the question of God’s existence.
Does God Exist?
The question of God’s existence is a big deal. On the one hand, if God exists then our search for happiness, love, beauty, goodness, truth, justice, and significance leads us, if we allow it, to a fitting object of our longings.5 If, on the other hand, God does not exist, then we must seek for each of these things within a godless universe. We must scratch our itch in another way. Some try to re-create the beauty and splendor of the God-bathed picture of reality within a godless world. Others shrug their shoulders and grab a beer. Many take Prozac.6 This issue, the question of God’s existence, is as basic as questions get. And the trajectory of our lives is set by the answer we give.
We think that there are good reasons for believing in God and that it is rational to believe God exists. Moreover, there are signs or clues of his existence everywhere. As the psalmist proclaims, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps. 19:1 NIV). In the New Testament, the apostle Paul affirms that the knowledge of God is available to all: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20 NIV).
These signs are, as the philosopher Stephen Evans notes, widely available yet easily resistible.7 They are widely available because God desires humans to love and serve him, and thus he has provided evidence of his existence for all. They are easily resistible because God desires our love and service to be freely given. As the great philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62) summarizes: “Thus wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not.”8
The evidence for God is available, especially for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear (cf. Matt. 13:16). When Christians develop arguments for God’s existence, the goal is partly to help others see how the evidence functions to point to God. The arguments also help us to think about what God is like. Given that, as the Christian claims, the evidence for God is ubiquitous, we might expect a wide variety of arguments for God’s existence. In fact, this is the case. Christian philosophers have developed arguments for God from the existence of the universe itself, from the fine-tuning of the universe for life, and from freedom, consciousness, knowledge, numbers, logic, morality, and more.9 We shall briefly consider four of the traditional arguments for God, three in this chapter and one, the moral argument, in chapter 16. In the next chapter we shall consider arguments against God’s existence that begin with the realities of pain, suffering, and the hiddenness of God.
The Ontological Argument
One famous line of thinking on the topic of God’s existence begins with our idea of God. According to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), God is “something than which nothing greater can be thought.”10 To get at what Anselm means, consider a slightly exaggerated and canned example of the kind of discussion in which I found myself as a teenager:
ME: Michael Jordan is a basketball player than which nothing greater can be thought.
FRIEND: Oh, you mean Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever to play the game—better than Wilt Chamberlain or Magic Johnson or Bill Russell?
ME (with slight exaggeration): No, I’m not saying just that Jordan is the best player alive or the best player who ever has or ever will play basketball. I’m saying that Michael Jordan is the greatest imaginable basketball player. You can’t even conceive of one who is better!
Now, if I really were claiming that Michael Jordan is a basketball player than which nothing greater can be thought, the claim would clearly be false. We can quite easily imagine a better basketball player: a player who never misses; a player who wins seven instead of six NBA championships; a player who blocks his opponent every time. But when it comes to God, Anselm claims, it is impossible to think of a being that is greater. Beginning with this exalted conception of God, Anselm quickly proceeds to the conclusion that God must actually exist, for, he reasons, it is greater to exist in reality than in the understanding alone. Thus God, the greatest conceivable being, must exist in reality and not just in our minds. Therefore, God exists.
It is easy to feel as if one has been tricked even if it is not easy to point out how. Gaunilo (an eleventh-century Benedictine monk) thought Anselm’s reasoning could be used to argue for a most perfect island that does not actually exist. Just because we can conceive of such an island, Gaunilo argued, it does not follow that the island actually exists.11 But Gaunilo’s response misses its mark. Anselm’s point is that we can reason from an idea to reality only when considering the greatest conceivable being whatsoever, not the greatest conceivable being of one kind (such as an island). Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) objection that existence is not a predicate does, however, provide a serious problem for the ontological argument.12 Kant’s point is that asserting the existence of a thing does not add new content to the concept of a thing and thus is not a real predicate. Existence is not some property a thing possesses or fails to possess. Rather, to exist is to possess the properties predicated of a thing. A lion, for example, if it exists, possesses the property being a lion (among other properties). God, if he exists, possesses the property being divine (among other properties) but does not, according to Kant, possess the property of existence. Thus it is false to claim that existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind alone; existence adds nothing to the concept of a thing.
Still, the ontological argument continues to fascinate philosophers. More recently the ontological argument has been given a tune-up in the hands of the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga.13 Using the tools of contemporary modal logic, Plantinga hopes to avoid Kant’s charge that existence isn’t a real property. The central premise of the more sophisticated argument hinges on the possibility of a being that has “maximal greatness”—a being that is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect in every possible world. If one thinks such a being possible, then we have found a good argument for God’s existence.
But how so? How is it that modal logic helps us make ontological arguments stronger? And what do we mean by modal ontological arguments? The term “modal” refers to a particular way of reasoning that hinges on different kinds (or modes) of existence. For example, some things have “necessary” existence. Things with necessary existence must exist: they cannot not exist. One way philosophers like to talk about necessary existence is in terms of possible worlds: maximal ways or stories about how things could go. On this way of speaking, a necessarily existing being is a being that exists in every possible world. Other things have mere possible existence. The term “possible” in this case refers to a thing that exists but does not have to exist. Or put another way, it exists in some worlds but not in every possible world. Finally, some “things” have impossible existence. We can articulate them with our language, but on reflection we find such things could never exist in this world or in any possible world. For example, it is impossible for “a stick with one end” to exist. So what do these modal terms do for our considerations about God’s existence? In short, some philosophers believe it is possible to employ these terms to reframe the ontological argument. Such arguments might go something like this:
How does this argument work? Premise 1 is rather straightforward and has been affirmed by both theists and atheists: many think necessary existence is just part of what it means to be God. Premise 2 is key. If it is possible that God exists, given the meaning of the modal term “possible,” then that means there is a possible world where God exists. But if God exists in some possible world, then God exists there as a necessary being. And as we saw above, a necessary being is one that exists in every possible world. Therefore, premise 3: God exists necessarily.
Yet intuitions about ontological arguments waiver. It is not clear to all that such a being is possible.14 We think such a being is possible, and so we think the argument is sound. But, it is reasonable to ask, are there any good reasons to think God exists that proceed from empirical premises and not just from our idea of God? To explore that question, we now turn to the cosmological argument.
The Cosmological Argument
The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (1224–75) thought God’s existence “must be demonstrated through what is more evident to us, . . . through God’s effects.”15 Thus his arguments begin not from our conception of God but from some empirical premise. The idea is rather simple. Look around. Pick some phenomenon of the world. Any will do since, as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”16 Take that phenomenon and plug it into a premise of a philosophical argument. Search for the best explanation of the phenomenon in question. The result? A theological conclusion. This is a rough but accurate characterization of Aquinas’s approach. He picked five aspects of our world—the reality of motion, efficient causes, contingent beings, morality, and design—plugged each into a philosophical argument as evidence, and generated a theological conclusion; each of his “Five Ways” ends with the phrase “and this all understand to be God.”17
Cosmological arguments seek to demonstrate that there is a First Cause (i.e., the Kalam cosmological argument), or Sufficient Reason (i.e., the Leibnizian cosmological argument), or Ground of Being of the universe (i.e., the Thomist cosmological argument).18 Each of these basic types of arguments has been advanced in our own day with increasing rigor and strength. As we learn more about our world, the evidence for God mounts. For example, in Aquinas’s day it was an open question whether the universe was eternal. Today the scientific evidence suggests that the universe began to exist a finite time ago. At the moment of the Big Bang, all matter, energy, time, and space came into being out of nothing. The obvious question is, How? What best explains the origin of the universe? If there is no God, then the beginning of the universe is utterly inexplicable. But if God exists, we have a ready explanation for the beginning of the universe: a personal agent of immense power and intellect brought the universe into being in virtue of his willing it so.
The above reasoning can be formalized as follows:
This argument, called the Kalam cosmological argument—originally articulated and defended by early Christian theologians and subsequently by medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian theologians—has been given new life in the hands of the contemporary Christian philosopher William Lane Craig.19 The argument is deductively valid: if the premises are true, the conclusion inescapably follows. Moreover, there are good reasons to think that the premises are true (or minimally, more plausible than their denials).
Consider premise 1. This premise, as Craig notes, is “rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come into being from nothing.”20 To argue that anything—Twinkies or computers or universes—can pop into existence out of nothing is absurd. The claim made by some, such as the scientist Lawrence Krauss, that quantum physics provides a counterexample to premise 1 is false.21 So-called virtual particles do not, as Krauss claims, come into being out of literally nothing. Rather, the “nothing” of which virtual particles come from is the quantum vacuum, a “something” characterized as a “sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws.”22 Additionally, the truth of premise 1 is supported by everyday experience, an experience that undergirds the foundation of science itself: our confidence that every effect has a cause sustains scientific investigation.
Premise 2 is supported by philosophical argument and scientific evidence. First, Craig argues that an actual infinite, as opposed to a potentially infinite, series of temporal events is impossible, and an eternal universe would constitute an actually infinite series of temporal events. Second, Craig points to (a) the expansion of the universe (noted above) and (b) the Second Law of Thermodynamics as evidence that the universe began a finite time ago. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the amount of usable energy decreases over time in a closed system. The universe, understood as the totality of all physical reality, is a closed system. Given that there is still usable energy in the universe, it follows that the universe cannot be eternal, for if it were eternal, the universe would have reached “heat death” an infinite time ago. While debate over the truth of premise 2 will undoubtedly continue, it is reasonable to conclude that the universe began to exist. If so, the conclusion necessarily follows: there is a cause to the universe.
Given the nature of the case, what can we learn about this cause of the universe? For starters, the cause of the universe must be transcendent to the universe. As Dallas Willard puts it, the universe is “ontologically haunted.”23 There is something beyond the universe that is responsible for the universe. Moreover, this cause must be immaterial (since prior to the Big Bang there was no matter, energy, time, or space). Importantly, this cause must be personal. This is because there are only two kinds of causes: event causation and agent causation.24 Event causation relates a prior event to a subsequent event as an effect (e.g., the event of my hitting the white ball with a pool cue causes the event of the black ball going into the corner pocket). However, at the moment of the Big Bang—the creation event—there is no prior physical state. The universe comes into being out of nothing. The only kind of cause that can bring about the initial state of the universe is an agent cause. This cause is also, arguably, one (since causes should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary), necessary, eternal (since, otherwise, the cause of the universe would itself need a cause), immensely powerful (if not omnipotent), and incredibly knowledgeable (if not omniscient). In sum, this deceptively simple argument rules out naturalism and nontheistic religions by establishing a transcendent, personal, immaterial, necessary, and eternal singular cause of the universe. While this conception of God is admittedly not as full and rich as the biblical conception of God, importantly, it is consistent with the God of the Bible and thus plays a key role in a cumulative case argument for the God of Christianity.
The Teleological Argument
In Aquinas’s Fifth Way we find a classic statement of the teleological argument. Aquinas observes that some things within nature are ordered toward a valuable end—acorns become oaks, human fetuses become adults, and so on. This “beneficial order” cries out for explanation.25 “But,” Aquinas continues, “those things that lack knowledge do not tend toward an end except under the direction of something with knowledge and intelligence, as is the case of an arrow from an archer.”26 Therefore, there is an intelligence that is responsible for the beneficial order found in nature, and, argues Aquinas, this intelligence is God.
As the scientific revolution progressed through the Enlightenment era, the evidence of apparent design continued to mount. William Paley (1743–1805) famously argued that if someone were hiking through a forest and stumbled on a watch, it would be absurd to suggest that there was no explanation for the watch’s existence. The complexity, order, and purpose found in watches are marks of intelligence, suggestive of design. Similarly, when considering the universe, it too shares marks of intelligence—complexity, order, and purpose—and it is reasonable to think that the universe (and things within the universe, such as organisms and eyes) also is the product of an intelligent designer.27
Paley’s design argument is widely thought to have been refuted first by David Hume (1711–76) and finally by Charles Darwin (1809–82).28 According to Hume (who actually wrote before Paley), the concept of deity entailed by the design argument is religiously inadequate.29 Since the effects in nature are finite and imperfect, all that can be inferred about the cause is that it too is finite and imperfect. Moreover, we cannot infer there was a single designer (for all we know there was a committee of designers), nor does the argument require that the designer be the first cause of all reality (like the watchmaker, the designer[s] of the universe could be working with preexisting material). In reply, defenders of the design argument could concede Hume’s objection, arguing that the design argument on its own, at least in its analogical form, does not entail a religiously adequate conception of deity. However, as part of a cumulative case argument, the design argument does provide key insight regarding the existence and nature of God. Cosmological arguments show that there is a transcendent personal cause to the universe, and teleological arguments build on this foundation by showing that the personal cause of the universe is also intelligent.
With the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, design arguments quickly fell out of vogue. Darwin’s theory of evolution provided a naturalistic mechanism (natural selection) sufficient to explain apparent design found in nature. It was no longer necessary to postulate an intelligent cause. As Richard Dawkins puts it, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”30 The defenders of the design argument are not without reply, however. Some have argued that the theory of evolution is replete with scientific and philosophical problems and thus is not capable of providing a complete explanation of all biological life and complexity.31 Others have argued that even if the evolutionary story is substantially correct, the theory, shorn of its naturalistic baggage, is compatible with theism and even requires theism.32 Nevertheless, the design argument suffered a serious setback due to the attacks of Hume and Darwin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, teleological arguments have been given new life in our own day, owing to new scientific discoveries regarding the fine-tuning of the universe and empirical markers of intelligent design. While space prohibits a detailed look at contemporary intelligent-design arguments, we shall look briefly at the fine-tuning argument.33
New scientific discoveries over the past century have revealed that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of conscious embodied agents. The evidence for the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, the constants of nature, and the initial conditions of the universe are overwhelming, pointing to a divine creation. Robin Collins, a leading defender of the fine-tuning argument, provides the following examples of fine-tuning: (1) “If the strength of gravity were smaller or larger by an estimated one part in 1060 of its current value, the universe would have either exploded too quickly for galaxies and stars to form, or collapsed back on itself too quickly for life to evolve”;34 (2) the cosmological constant, which governs the expansion of the universe, is fine-tuned for life to around one part in 10120;35 and (3) the low entropy state of the initial universe falls into an exceedingly narrow range for complex life to evolve, and the odds of such conditions arising by chance are about one part in 1010^123.36 We could add to this list the spiral shape of the Milky Way galaxy, the position of the earth from the sun, the tilt of the earth, the speed of the earth’s spin, the moon’s effect on the oceans of the earth, the relative size of the neutron and proton, and more.
That the universe is fine-tuned for life is well established. The question is, What best explains fine-tuning? Many see fine-tuning as powerful evidence for an intelligent creator. For example, one of the leading atheist philosophers of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, converted to theism because of the evidence of fine-tuning.37 The argument from fine-tuning to God can be formalized as follows:
In support of premise 1, consider the following. As a being worthy of worship, God in the thought of theists is perfectly rational, free, and good. If a perfectly rational, free, and good God creates at all, we would expect him to bring into being a reality that positively manifests both moral and aesthetic values.39 The creation of a world suitable for embodied conscious (moral) agents is such a world. Thus, on theism’s view, the existence of a fine-tuned universe is not surprising. Regarding premise 2, given the extremely small quantifiable range of possibilities in order for the universe to be able to support life, it is reasonable to think that a fine-tuned universe would be enormously surprising on naturalism’s view. Thus, given the likelihood principle—a kind of epistemic probability that “can be thought of as a measure of rational degrees of expectation”40—the existence of a fine-tuned universe offers support for theism over naturalism.
One prominent objection to the fine-tuning argument is the “multiverse hypothesis.” The idea is that there are either infinite universes (unrestricted version) or an extremely large number of universes (restricted version) that exist parallel to our own with different laws, constants, and initial conditions.41 If there were multiple universes, it would not be surprising for one of them to be conducive to life. Thus the atheist could argue that premise 2, supplemented by the multiverse hypothesis, is false. In reply, theists have argued that in its unrestricted version (i.e., all possible worlds exist in reality causally inaccessible to one another), there is no empirical evidence for its truth, and in its restricted version (there are many but not infinite universes), the physical process needed to generate the universes must itself be designed. Either way, the multiverse hypothesis does not help the atheist. If so, the fine-tuning argument should be considered a powerful argument for God’s existence.
The Moral Argument
A final traditional argument for God’s existence begins with the reality of moral obligations. A detailed analysis of the moral argument for God is explored in chapter 16. Here in this chapter it is sufficient to observe that if we live in a moral universe and there is something beyond the universe that is the source of morality, then we have reason to be uneasy. There is a moral law, and none of us live up to it. This moment of self-realization points us beyond mere theism. It prompts us to hope for further divine disclosure and action on our behalf. In short, it points us to the Triune God of Christianity, who has revealed himself not only through that which he has made but also in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
We have considered four traditional arguments for God’s existence. The ontological argument begins with our intuition that any being deserving the title “God” must be worthy of worship, a greatest conceivable being. The cosmological argument teaches us that there is a personal transcendent cause of the universe. The teleological argument tells us there is a cosmic intelligence. The moral argument points us toward a cosmic morality. Considered together, the traditional arguments for God suggest that God is personal, good (if not all-good), immensely knowledgeable (if not all-knowing), immensely powerful (if not all-powerful), necessary, eternal, and the creator and sustainer of all distinct reality. In the chapters that follow, we shall test this exalted conception of God as we explore the problems of evil, hiddenness, and hell and as we wrestle with the question of divine providence.
1. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, “Postsecular American: A New Context for Higher Education,” in The American University in a Postsecular Age, ed. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10.
2. See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette, 2007); and Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006).
3. Thanks to Greg Koukl for this description of New Atheism’s rhetoric. For a good overview of New Atheism, see his talk “The New Atheists: Old Arguments, New Attitudes,” Apologetics Canada, Aug. 28, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWBPTuZq2xU.
4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1.1.1.
5. Compare C. S. Lewis’s discussion of his childhood experience of a kind of intense longing, a longing aroused when he came into contact with inanimate nature and marvelous literature, which ultimately led him to God:
It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience. . . . The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof. (The Pilgrim’s Regress [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002], 204–5)
6. In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusion (New York: Norton, 2011), chap. 12, the atheist philosopher Alex Rosenberg suggests that we should take antidepressants if we are struggling with the truth of atheism.
7. C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12–17.
8. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 118, quoted in Evans, Natural Signs, 16.
9. For a nice survey of many of these phenomena and how they figure into arguments for God, see Alvin Plantinga, “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. Deane-Peter Baker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 203–27.
10. Anselm, Proslogion, in Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 81.
11. Gaunilo, “In Behalf of the Fool,” in Anselm, Basic Writings, 99–103.
12. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 578–86.
13. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), chap. 10.
14. Plantinga’s own conclusion is as follows: “The only question of interest, it seems to me, is whether its main premiss—that indeed unsurpassable greatness is possibly exemplified, that there is an essence entailing unsurpassable greatness—is true [in our simplified version, this idea is captured in premise 2]. I think this premiss is indeed true. Accordingly, I think this version of the Ontological Argument is sound.” Nature of Necessity, 216–17. More recently, on further reflection, Plantinga has stated that the ontological argument is “just as satisfactory as most serious arguments philosophers give for important conclusions.” “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 71.
15. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.2.1, in The Treatise on the Divine Nature, trans. Brian J. Shanley, OP (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 19.
16. “God’s Grandeur,” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 66.
17. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.21.
18. William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), 101.
19. William Lane Craig’s first major work on an updated Kalam cosmological argument is found in The Kalam Cosmological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1979). More accessible discussions of the argument are found in Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), chap. 3; and Craig, On Guard (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2010), chap. 4. For a recent defense of the Kalam argument that addresses the latest science, see Craig and Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument.”
20. Craig and Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” 182.
21. Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York: Atria, 2012).
22. Craig and Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” 183.
23. Dallas Willard, “The Three-Stage Argument for the Existence of God,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology, ed. R. Douglas Geivett and Brendan Sweetman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 216.
24. Or so we say. For a discussion of agent causation, see chap. 10 above.
25. Evans, Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God, chap. 3.
26. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.2.1, in Treatise on the Divine Nature, 24.
27. William Paley, Natural Theology: Or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (London: C. Knight, 1845), especially chaps. 1–3.
28. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779; repr., London: Penguin, 1990); and Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).
29. Evans, Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God, 79.
30. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: Norton, 1996), 6, quoted in Evans, Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God, 84.
31. See, e.g., Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MA: Adler & Adler, 1985); Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996); and Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free Press, 2007).
32. See, e.g., Francis S. Collins, The Language of God (New York: Free Press, 2006); Karl W. Giberson, Saving Darwin (New York: HarperOne, 2008); and Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).
33. For an important recent version of intelligent-design arguments, see William Dembski, Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999); Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell (New York: HarperOne, 2009); and the two books by Behe listed in footnote 30 above.
34. Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument,” in Craig and Moreland, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, 215.
35. Robin Collins, “The Anthropic Teleological Argument,” in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, ed. Michael Peterson et al., 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 189.
36. Collins, “Teleological Argument,” 220.
37. Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperOne, 2007). Flew converted to a kind of Aristotelian theism, not Christian theism, largely because he thinks miracles are impossible. For more, see also Antony Flew and Gary R. Habermas, “My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: A Discussion between Antony Flew and Gary R. Habermas,” Philosophia Christi 6, no. 2 (2004): 197–211.
38. The argument presented here is a slight modification of a version of the fine-tuning argument advanced by Robin Collins. See Collins, “Teleological Argument,” 191.
39. Collins, “Teleological Argument,” 254.
40. Collins, “Teleological Argument,” 191.
41. For an excellent overview of the various multiverse hypotheses, including critiques of the unrestricted and restricted versions, see Collins, “Teleological Argument,” 256–72.