Do You Believe in God?

A common question, but one that often results in frustration and confusion and arguments! Consider an entirely different approach to the matter!

This does not matter whether a person has any "deep understanding" or any understanding whatever regarding the precise text of Genesis, or of any religious subjects! This approach is "non-religious" completely.

It is a "challenge!"

It involves a sequence of logical exercises, and YOUR logic and YOUR interpretation of any and all facts.

  1. I first give you an assignment to compose a simple one-page "history of sports". I give you the names of 14 common and popular sports: Baseball, football, soccer, tennis, golf, basketball, rugby, cricket, field hockey, ice hockey, archery, gymnastics, track and field, and wrestling. You are to write a brief history where the beginnings of those sports are put in the correct historical order. Easy? Prove it! Prove to me that you can generate a correct sequence of the 14 sports on a piece of paper, WITHOUT any usage of any textbooks, encyclopedias or other resources.

  2. Now we can examine the statistics involved to see how likely it was that you succeeded in accomplishing that goal.

    Which sport do you think was first? You start out with 14 choices to pick from. Then, which was second? You have 13 left to pick from, so you already have 182 different possible storylines for just the first two sports!

    It turns out that you have a total of 14!, what is called 14-factorial possible sequences to choose from. That number happens to be 87,178,291,200 possible sequences. So you have quite a chore ahead of you, and you must realize that, without the added help of a computer or an encyclopedia, the chance that you get the sequence exactly right is not likely to be much better than one in 80 billion!

  3. We now notice that Genesis 1 in the Bible MENTIONS a number of events, IN A PARTICULAR SEQUENCE. The English translations of the Bible slightly affect this matter, but in my examination of the Ancient Hebrew wording, I find a total of 14 specific events mentioned. Light was first. Mankind (Adam) was last.

  4. Consider applying what you learned from the sports experiment to those events. A person living 3,300 years ago did NOT have access to computers or encyclopedias or any other such resources. Actually, even written language had not quite yet been invented (around 200 years later).

    So reflect on how likely it was that any person of 3,300 years ago, would have or could have listed those 14 events in the SEQUENCE in which they actually occurred. Light first? Hilarious, right? Mankind last? Equally unbelievable. Would any person of 3,300 years ago have even dared to claim either of those statements?

    How about that person also claiming that plants existed before any animals, and then fish being the first animals? And then land animals? Wild speculation? It would almost have to be.

  5. Now research the fact that within just the past one hundred years, science has developed dating methods for each of those events. Feel free to locate those dates and put them next to your entries in your sequence listing.

  6. The sequence that science has RECENTLY found happens to be amazingly identical to the sequence that was historically presented in Genesis 1, 3300 years ago.

    It would appear that Genesis 1 somehow beat the odds of at least 40 billion to one!

  7. Explain how that is possible.

    (A Christian would say that there is only one explanation, that God must have existed, and that He provided the necessary data.)


Notice that there is NO "religious content" in that reasoning whatever. The ONLY reference to anything religious happens to be that the very well known text of the Hebrew Bible includes a historically accepted sequence of events.

And THAT is the whole point. It does NOT allow any Atheists to ever focus on God or any issues that they are well familiar with. It FORCES them to have to explain HOW a specific sequence of historical text could have been written, so very long ago. Explain how any writer could beat such astronomical odds!

Note that this approach does NOT require you or anyone else to have any deep understanding of science or anything else!

In fact, it very specifically NEVER addresses religious issues at all. Even if someone would try to claim any (English translation) day/night or any other issue, they certainly have to agree that LIGHT was first and MAN was last of the events mentioned. That alone, even if everything in between was wrong, would require beating odds of 14:1 times 13:1 or 182:1. If you concede that plants were before fishes and them before land animals, (and light and mankind) and everything else was assumed wrong, that still is STATISTICALLY around 220,000:1 odds.

LET ANYONE try to argue over things like day/night! And without even arguing, what if I concede that they might be right. And then point out that they have reduced the odds from 87 billion to one down to around 6 billion to one. Big deal.

In other words, LET the skeptic use ANY Bible they happen to find and MAKE THEIR OWN LIST of events. Then THEY find out when science thinks those events occurred. Without having to accept anything I or anyone else says. And since I show them how to calculate the odds, do it. Yes, an Atheist might feel that he can get the odds down to 10 million to one by selectively interpreting the phrases in (the English translation of) Genesis 1. Does 10 million to one mean that they "win"? Not at all. In fact THEY will have proven that they have been wrong! And THAT is the idea.

They will NOT need to believe or accept anything that any Christian might try to say, or anything that I might say as a Minister. But if THEY examine the text and write down their own listing and check ANY science books they wish, they are certain to come up with extremely large odds. Then they wind up having to EXPLAIN IT.

The REASON this approach has such value is that it allows skeptics to use their own methods and ANY interpretations they wish! A Christian would not convince a diehard Atheist of any argument for the Existence of God, But THEY would. By their own rules!

Notice that "logic and reasoning" is all that is used in those seven points above?

Sadly, the REASON why there are so many Agnostics and Atheists seems to be BECAUSE of many Christian Churches! Most modern Christians DO seem to assume that science is "evil" and so they are willing to believe any words that their own Minister says, over all books in the world. And when that Minister tells them that scientists believe that a dog suddenly becomes a horse, they never consider questioning such a statement. If their Minister said it, it IS true. So logic and facts are of no value and no importance at all to most Christians. Sad.

It is understandable that thoughtful people in such a Church would see such a Church to be total silliness. And the Minister impressively ignorant. So anyone who is aware of the rigid methods used by the Scientific Method, and sees that the claims that science makes are usually extremely well based in facts and solid logic, how could it seem odd if Members of such a Church might decide to dis-believe EVERYTHING of Christianity and become Atheists?

But it is not because Christianity or the Bible was wrong! Instead, it was because that Minister was so arrogant in his belief of "knowing all, perfectly", that he insists that all of that Church's Members simply accept his statements as unchallengeable. As though he was as smart as God is! He happens to be wrong about that!


This presentation was first placed on the Internet in Sept 2009.



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C Johnson, Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of Chicago