Firstly, let me just say that it is a mouthful but I deliberately avoided God because in common usage he is defined within a religion and my intention is to talk about God outside religious constructs.
This came out of my little article yesterday about making life choices even though there is no certainty about the hereafter.
In our education, certainty is derived from scientific research but scientific research is in the physical, necessarily so because it studies cause and effect. There is no certainty about the hereafter because the path to the hereafter is death and researchers cannot return from the dead. However, there are those who then seek to explore the other end of the spectrum, the beginning of the universe and life.
I am no great scientist or thinker but in my small little corner I do have some thoughts about this.
Cause and Effect
This is where the question sometimes asked is derived: If there is God, then who created God? In mathematics, nothing cannot become something. In any understanding of a world of cause and effect, logic tells us that there must be a first cause, one that exists in the beginning. If there is nothing in the beginning, then there remains nothing. If the first cause is the cause of all existence, then that first cause must be supreme.
Entropy
One of the major laws of physics makes this observation: the path of change naturally leads to simplicity and not the reverse. It simply means that for something to change from simple to complex there has to be an external agent of change. Death is where, without effort, we end. Without an external agent of change, you cannot bring life out of death. For life to exist and progress towards complexity, there must be a cause, and, looking at the life in our day, that cause must be intelligent. Survival of the fittest, the mantra of evolutionists, in fact argues for the existence of God because life, awareness of self and the desire to overcome the law of death is a force to overcome the natural order rather than the result of chance as dictated by the natural order.
Complexity
Life over the centuries have become increasingly complex. That complexity, however, is not because of our being driven to survive. We have come to accept that life is much more than survival. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs depicts this. We are not animals even though we share life with them. The instinctual acknowledgement of good, of beauty and of the worth of living in service of ideals demonstrates that we are not mere byproducts of the forces of physics but rather reflecting the distinctive personality of the first cause.
May I say that the Biblical narrative fits the above arguments well. Beyond these arguments is the question of why we need to acknowledge and work with this Supreme Intelligence although logic would dictate that the better we understand our reason for existence the more meaningful life would be. And there is the matter of life after death and whether it matters for us.
But that has to be concerns for another day. Thanks for reading.