How to Know God Exists by Josh D. McDowell & Thomas Williams

Author:Josh D. McDowell & Thomas Williams [McDowell, Josh D. & Williams, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Living / Spiritual Growth, RELIGION / Christian Theology / Apologetics
ISBN: 9781496461247
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2022-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Why Nature Cannot Originate Anything

The cold, hard fact that undermines naturalism is that the laws of nature cannot account for origins. This we know to be true because the laws of nature never cause anything to happen. They merely describe what happens after an event is caused or set in motion.

To explain this fact, C. S. Lewis supposes a set of billiard balls resting on a table in a seagoing ship. A lurch in the ship sets a ball in motion, causing it to strike a second ball. He explains that the lurch in the ship that set the original ball in motion was caused by a wave, which was set in motion by other waves, which were set in motion by natural phenomena such as winds and tides.

Then Lewis points out that all these movements, once set in motion, could be described by the rigid laws of nature—their direction, their speed, their momentum, and the momentum lost and gained by the collision of the balls. None of these measurable facts, however, were caused by the laws of nature. Then he gives us this startling but inevitable conclusion: “In the whole history of the universe, the laws of Nature have never produced a single event. They are the pattern to which every event must conform, provided only that it can be induced to happen. But how do you get it to do that? . . . The laws of Nature can give you no help there” (italics in the original).[18]

The point: looking to the laws of nature as the cause of anything is futile. The laws of nature never cause anything. All causes must be fed into the system of nature. Trace the causes that moved the billiard ball back through all the stages—the lurch of the ship, the wave, the wind, the motion of the earth, the gravity of the moon, the energy from the sun, the forces that formed the sun—and eventually you get to the beginning of the universe where all causes had to originate. Could the laws of nature have originated the universe? No, nature itself was originated at the beginning of the universe. Nature and its laws were the result of origination, not its cause. Whatever existed prior to nature originated the matter and energy that became nature, but that prenatural cause had to be outside nature, and thus it is what we call supernatural. Once nature was created and energy was fed into it, the laws of nature could be used to describe the resulting movements but not their origins.

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