Views: 2
[Note: This MS is available in larger font on our Brief Articles 2 page.]
We live in a cause-effect universe—every effect must have a cause, yea, an adequate or sufficient cause, to explain it. A wristwatch implies a watchmaker. A house implies a designer and builder. The computer on which these words are being written required great wisdom and skill to conceive, design, and build.
If I said that a monkey built my watch, a two-year-old child designed and built his parents’ house, or my computer resulted from a huge explosion (“Big Bang”), you would immediately know that I was being facetious or that I was delusional. I would be suggesting causes, but not causes that are adequate or sufficient to explain these respective effects.
This cause-effect principle is axiomatic, admitted by all observant and rational people. It is so self-evident it needs no further proof. Those who deny the existence of God—as the Bible reveals and describes Him—must explain how a universe, incomparably more complicated than anything men can invent, design, and build, came into being. Their glib explanation, that blind, unintelligent forces/matter coincided without design or planning, and “it just happened,” is not only woefully inadequate—it is unworthy of rational, intelligent men.
We and our universe are either (1) eternal (i.e., we have always existed) or (2) in some way and at some time, we and the universe had a beginning. Evidence abounds proving that the physical universe (of which we are a part) is depleting, decaying, and wearing out, but that which is eternal is necessarily self-existent and cannot change or decay. We and all other physical things thus had a beginning point—and a cause of beginning, which implies “something” or “someone” which/who had no beginning, but has always existed.
We (1) created ourselves, (2) began by some cosmic accident/chance, or (3) an adequate Cause designed and created us. If we made ourselves, we had to exist before we existed. Only fools would so argue. Did we just “happen” by some inexplicable “accident”? Accident is not an adequate cause for the lowly paper clip, yet atheists and evolutionists have nothing better to offer for the existence of the universe. Objective, rational minds understand that our vast physical universe demands the existence of an adequate Cause.
The Bible sets forth the only adequate Cause in God—the eternal (having no beginning), self-existent, omniwise, omniscient, and omnipotent One. “For every house is builded by some one; but he that built all things is God” (Heb. 3:4). “In the beginning God created…” (Gen. 1:1).
[Note: This article was written for and published in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Denton, TX, March 14, 2014.]
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator.
