The Existence of God (part 1)

Being the sort of person I am, I often come across people who ask me, "Why do you believe in a God? What basis do you have for your beliefs?" This is a most excellent question, and I shall proceed to undertake an explanation as to why I personally believe in the existence of God. So if you are one of those people who wonders just why I believe in some distant, fairy-like, sky being, such will be the post for you.

I derive most of what I am about to say from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and take zero credit for it. I would write down a direct quote, but unfortunately that would be a bit long, so I am sticking with summarizing the important points. Forgive me if you've read this material before; this post is geared more towards my non-Christian friends who have most likely not read Mere Christianity.

Moral law

Man has the desire to do what he sees as 'right'. What man sees as 'right' is many times devastating to the person who would perform that 'right' action. For example, say you are walking along the bank of a river, and out in the middle of the river, you see something splashing. After a couple seconds, you realize that there's a child drowning in the river. No one will deny that in this instance he would have an impulse to go help that child. This is the moral law of right and wrong at work.

Now, the most common explanation of this 'moral law' is the idea that this is simply our 'herd' instinct at work; our instinct of wanting to keep alive organisms of our kind. Yes, we do have such a 'herd' instinct. However, what I refer to as the moral law is separate from this instinct. The moral law is unique; it prompts us to act a certain way whether we want to or not. This is unlike the instincts to eat or sleep, or the instinct of motherly love, which all simply give us a desire to act a certain way.

So, going back to the example of the drowning child, you will probably have two impulses. One to help the child due to you herd instinct, and one to run away from the spot due to your instinct of self-preservation. However, on top of these two impulses, you will find a third thing that tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help and to suppress the impulse to run away. This is the moral law.

How can we know that this third thing is not one of the two initial instincts at work? The thing that judges between the two impulses cannot be one of those impulses itself. Look at it this way. If the only factors in doing an action for a man were the two conflicting instincts, the man would necessarily always end up doing that which gave a stronger impulse. However, looking back on the drowning example, you will almost definitely *want* to stay safe much more than you *want* to help the drowning child, yet you still feel a strong prompting to save the child's life in spite of the great risk for your own life involved, and will often end up doing just that. This shows that there is some factor beyond the initial two impulses.

Ok. Maybe 'moral law' isn't our herd instinct at work. Perhaps it is merely a standard of behavior placed into our heads and taught to us by our parents and teachers. Well, this makes the faulty assumption that since something is taught to us by humans, it is a human invention. Looking at the multiplication table, one will find that if a child grew up on a desert island, he will by no means know it; he will need to be educated in order to know it. It certainly does not follow that the logistics of the multiplication table are a human invention.

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To keep me from writing too much in one post and so that I can get back to school, I shall break this topic into several posts and continue another day.