If that question doesn’t make you laugh, you haven’t thought about it enough. I listened to a podcast the other day on the cosmological argument. Simply, it is a philosophical argument for God’s existence that everything that comes to exist has a cause, that there must have been a first cause for all the things that exist, and that this first cause must itself be uncaused. The logic is unassailable, even though otherwise intelligent people claim that something can somehow come from nothing. That would have to be the case if matter and the universe were eternal, but Einstein, the Big Bang, and the second law of thermodynamics kind of put the kibosh on the Aristotelian notion of an eternal universe (also known as the Steady State theory).
One of my “strategies” with my children as they were growing up was to slyly mock the pretensions of the atheist worldview. Now that all three are technically grown up, I still do it! Why atheism? What about other worldviews? There really are only three broad ways to view the big picture of reality: theism, atheism, and pantheism. The latter isn’t as much of a threat as the secularism informed by a materialism (matter is all that exists) that requires atheism. Even if most people are not philosophical atheists (and more than 95% are not), most live like practical atheists, as if God doesn’t much matter to their everyday lives. The objective is to make atheism, to us and our children, unthinkable, implausible, and impossible, because it is!
Let’s take the cosmological argument. If it isn’t true, then everything had to come from nothing for no reason at all. First, let’s think about nothing. I’m not even talking about stuff existing before life came about, like a primordial soup and such. A recent interview I heard at Breakpoint with Dr. James Tour makes it clear how impossible even that is. Even if you assume biological life on earth, going from that to the infinite complexity and diversity of everything by some “natural” process is clearly impossible as well. But take all that off the table and start with nothing. Can you even conceive of such a thing? Is the concept of nothing in any way comprehensible? Even if it were, could something come from it? Imagine a vacuum of nothingness, complete non-stuff, non-existence, just non. It’s not possible because we live in a universe of something, lots of it.
Let’s say, though, if we could conceive of something we can’t conceive of, nothing, how exactly could something possibly come from it? Only the most obdurate individual (and hardcore atheists are nothing if not obdurate in the extreme) would insist such a thing is even possible, but most just dismiss the question out of hand. There is stuff, they say, and it doesn’t matter where it came from, just deal with it! They can’t be bothered with metaphysical questions. For them, the material world is a brute fact that requires no explanation.
To the average thinking person, however, life and everything that exists does require some explanation, whether you use the cosmological argument, or just common sense. The latter is something children get, even from the youngest age. They intuit without explanation that everything had to come from something, or it wouldn’t exist. My favorite “argument” with my kids has always been the design inference. At this moment I’m looking at a pen on a pad of paper on a scanner. Without thought I know each of these things had to be created by intelligent beings, we call them people. They don’t just exist and come from nothing. Things much more complex, like human beings, or flowers, or apples or the sun, or take your pick, these too can’t just exist without any cause. Yet if we’re to believe the materialist/atheist that’s exactly what we have to believe.
Given these obvious facts of existence, it shouldn’t be difficult for us to persuade our children that God exists, that the atheist/materialist view of reality is ridiculous, and inoculate them from even thinking such thoughts. As theism becomes the default position in their minds and imagination, and ours, then teaching them about the God of the Bible, who has revealed himself in such a magnificent creation, in the Bible, and ultimately in Jesus Christ, flows naturally. As C.S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
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