Mike Novotny - How Do You Know That God Is Real?
How do you know that God is real? If you've never wrestled with that, I'm not sure if you've thought deeply about it, huh? Lots of us were raised just believing that there is a God but God is unique in the fact that he is spirit. Jesus said that in John, chapter 4: God is spirit. So you can't necessarily see him or talk to him. So what makes God different than all these other characters of fantasy? How do we know for sure? The Bible gives two, if not three, were really concrete answers to that question.
The first would be in the book of Romans. So Romans 1:20. It admits that God is invisible but it says this, So God would say look at the complex world that we live in and you would see evidence that God is real. Sometimes this is called the watchmaker theory. You know, if you're walking through the woods and you saw a watch laying there on the ground, you would not assume, "Huh, the winds just blew enough times over the right angles and dirt assembled and there's a watch". You'd say, "No, this is so complex, someone had to handcraft this".
And Paul's saying here in Romans 1, if you look at the world around us, if you get pregnant and you see how this child develops and how beautiful and complex it is, if you study the forces of the universe and gravitational pulls and constants and gravity, if you see that the world, like life existing, is this crazy miracle that should never happen, it's so complex that the only logical thing to think is someone must have made this. There must be something bigger than people just like me. There must be a God. And the Bible's second answer to that question actually comes on the next page in my Bible, Romans 2:14. It says that people who didn't grow up with the Bible, maybe they've never read it, they somehow know this difference between right and wrong, which is sometimes called the argument from moral standards or moral absolutes.
So if we would all agree that it is, it's wrong for me to walk up to someone here in the front row and punch them square in the face, the question would be, well, why would we all think that? Unless there was something wired in us by God himself? This is where people who don't believe in God get into all sorts of problems because they know that there's a difference between right and wrong. They'll call racism or the abuse of a child wrong but if there is no God, then that's not wrong.
That's just your, your opinion. But if there is a God, a God who created us, a God who loves what's good and he hates what's evil, then there would be this moral code embedded in our heart. So whether it's the argument from design in Romans 1:20, the argument from our conscience in Romans 2:14, or just the incredible things that God has done throughout history as in the story of Jesus 2,000 years ago, there's plenty proof that we're not dumb for believing there is something "more than just this world. There is a God who exists".