I was talking to a group of college students this morning and one of them told me that their psychology professor said that they could not prove the God exists. The point was that since you cannot apply the scientific method and prove God, He doesn't exist. The students responded that God exists and they know this because of their faith and what their eyes tell them. However, they were unsure how to deal with these types of situations in the future. I offered the following:
Ask the professor to prove the "lift" actually allows planes to fly. You can deduce "lift" but you cannot prove it. You take it as an article of faith (belief in the principles of aerodynamics) that lift exists and the plane will fly given sufficient speed.
God is like this. You can deduce God because of the world around us as we Christians take it as an article of Faith that He exists.
Further I encouraged the students to point out that every scientific "fact" starts from a base assumption of some kind. This base assumption is the same as the Faith of Christians. We start from a premise that God exists.
I believe we Christians must become more skilled in expsoing logical flaws in the worldview that God cannot exist because he cannot be proven and the world could not have been created by God as the Bible says. God like lift cannot be proven scientifically but both God and lift can be seen to exist based on evidence.
The apparent conflict between evolution and creation becomes trivial once you accept that God exists and accept that He is all powerful. There is evidence that man-like creatures existed before us and it is possible that we evolved from those creatures under the direction of God. It is possible that Adam and Eve did not look exactly like us. When God said let us make man in our image, He did not mean physical image, rather He meant for us to be like Him in Spirit.
I cannot prove that last statement without having an underlying premise of Faith and in the power of God. Once I have that, then anything is possible and without that underlying premise of faith, nothing is possible.
So, the next time someone asks you to prove that God exists and then points out that your beliefs are based on Faith and therefore cannot be factual; ask them to prove how an airplane flys without having faith in the principle of lift.
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