"Turn around and go back!"

Steven began to argue with himself as he stopped and started on that parking lot Dallas calls Central Expressway. "You've sure got nerve! Who do you think you are? Can anybody convince a man like Bill that God exists? He owns and operates his own business. He's read a great deal in psychology and science. Besides, he has already thought this thing through."

Steve was scared.

The slow traffic game him time to look at the drivers in the cars around him. He was sure none of them faced the threatening situation he did. "What lucky people," he thought. "I'm sure none of them are going any place where they'll have to prove God exists."

Once he finally left the expressway, finding Bill's office was easy. Too easy. Actually, Steve was hoping he would not be able to find it. If he could just get lose, he would have a good excuse to put off talking with Bill. But, no such luck. Or should I say, no such sovereignty of God. Anyway, there he was, knocking on the door of Bill's office.

Bill met him with a friendly smile and a firm handshake. Steve was quaking inside as he sat down. They had met the previous Monday night at a home discussion about life and God. It had seemed so easy to strike up a conversation afterward and ask for this appointment.

But now that he was here sitting across the desk from his new acquaintance, Steve felt like he was on stage. He would have preferred to face an audience of a thousand people as long as they could not ask questions. Could he show God to Bill? Jesus said, "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you" (John 14:27), but right then it did not seem the southeast part of Dallas was included.

Bill's office was obviously that of a busy man, cluttered with papers and projects his manufacturing company was working on. The two men reviewed their discussion of the past Monday night. "I don't believe in a personal God," Bill repeated. "It seems more reasonable to believe that things evolved over a long period of time."

At that point, Steve had to choose between two routes. One would be to discuss evolution and argue that anyone who believed in it could not possibly believe in the Bible. But Jesus said that the seed (the Word of God) would develop best on softened soil (Mark 4:20). With some people evolution is an appropriate subject for discussion; but with Bill, it would only thicken the wall between them.

The other alternative was to find a way to scale the wall and see what it looked like from Bill's side. They needed to find an area of agreement to build on. His convictions about evolution gave Steve a narrow opening through which to get over to Bill's side. He was "interested" in believing whatever was most "reasonable."

"For a started, let's come to terms with our purpose," Steve said.

"Well," Bill interjected, "isn't the purpose to prove God exists?"

"Of course," Steve concurred, "and that we agree that the underlying assumption we'll have in every judgment we make will be that it must be reasonable--right?"

"Oh--yeah--right!"

"Since we are attempting to prove God exists, we need to first talk about the words 'to prove' and then the words 'God exists.' "

"Sounds good to me," Bill said, settling back in his chair and lighting a cigarette.

Steve ventured a bold statement. "You know, Bill, if anybody can tell me what his standard of proof is, I can prove 'God exists' using that standard."

"What if I say I only believe what I can see?" Bill responded.

"Oh, come on, Bill," Steve almost interrupted him. "Don't you believe in some things you can't see--like electricity? Love? Hate? Would it be reasonable to use two standards, one for proof of God and another for everything else?"

Bill took a long draw on his cigarette and nodded thoughtfully. As he reflected on that, he admitted he could not specify exactly what he was using as a basis for proof.

Steve suggested, "The reason we believe in the proof of the existence of electricity, love, and hate is not because we can see them, but because we can see their effects. Would you agree that every effect requires a cause?"

"Yes, of course," Bill responded. "That's a basic assumption of all science."

"Then could we say that's the reason we believe in electricity? What I mean is: it's more reasonable to believe in it than not to believe in it as an explanation of why the lights go on when you flip the switch on the wall. Isn't the same thing true of love and hate? We can't see them, but we can see the kindnesses of love and the travesties of hatred."

Bill nodded cautiously. Then he added, "But to tell you the truth, I need to see if that's really appropriate for the existence of God."

Steve aimed his cause-and-effect reasoning at three targets: the natural universe, the personalities in the universe, and the design of the universe.

"If I told you this building got here by the wind blowing it up off the Texas prairie and the squirrels putting it together, you wouldn't believe me, would you, Bill?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"Because that's impossible."

"But what you really mean is that the wind and the squirrels aren't a sufficient cause to produce this building as an effect. Right?"

"Of course."

Steve went on, "The universe is also an effect, but there is no observable cause sufficient to produce it."

"Why couldn't the universe be its own cause?" Bill asked, raising his eyebrows. (He had a habit of doing that when making a point he had thought about a lot.) Then he took a drink out of a huge glass of ice water and continued. "It seems just as reasonable to me to assume the universe made itself as to say God made it."

"The problem is," Steve reasoned, "the universe has never been observed doing that. It has never made something out of nothing."

"OK," Bill agreed, "but if God is the cause of the universe, don't we then need something else to make God? After all, God would be an effect which requires a cause."

"Yes. But God is different from the universe in one very significant way. Whereas the universe is not eternal, God is. Something somewhere has to be eternal, and cause-and-effect requires that something to be a someone--a personal God. Since God is eternal, we don't need to ask about His cause. How could anything eternal have a cause? By the way, the God describe in the Bible is that kind of God."

"Couldn't we just consider God to be nature?" asked Bill.

"Oh, sure," Steve agreed. "You can use the word 'nature' instead of the word 'God,' but this nature-God must be a person."

"Why?" Bill asked. The studious expression on his face told Steve he was hoping for a definition of God that would somehow marry a belief in God with atheism.

"Well," Steve continued, "the universe we have contains people with personalities. By that I mean they have intellect, emotion, and will. And something impersonal like the universe has never been observed producing anything personal like people. Even statues and paintings that only depict personalities come from people who are at least personal. The impersonal marble never carves a statue, and the impersonal canvas never paints a painting. In the same way, if God wasn't at least a person, He would not be a sufficient cause to produce you and me."

"I guess I always thought that was the most reasonable," Bill admitted. "But I'm glad we could think it through."

"Design is the third effect that requires a cause," Steve ventured. "Can we talk about that a minute?"

"Sure." Bill's ashtray was filled with cigarette butts now, and the big glass of water was gone, leaving only some ice cubes on the bottom. He put one in his mouth. As his tongue wrestled with the ice, he mumbled, "What do you mean by design?"

"Just that no chance happening has ever produced anything comparable to a snowflake, a flower, or a living cell. We might as well ask, 'How long would you have to shake a box of radio parts before it assembled itself into a radio?' It never would, of course. All you'd get is a bunch of broken radio parts. In the natural universe, things always go from order to disorder, not the other way around. Does your office tend to get more or less orderly if you leave it alone?"

"But," Bill insisted, "they have done experiments where amino acids have formed which make up DNA and then protein. Isn't that the production of order and design?"

"Yes, but that's just the point. It took the intelligence of the experimenter setting up the experimental conditions just so and controlling it carefully. If they poured it all in a mud puddle out in the street or in a Mississippi swamp, it would never produce anything, no matter how long they watched it. The 'order' required the intelligence of man. All the observations we've ever made show that design comes from intelligent beings with a purpose. It's only reasonable that the universe isn't the only exception to the rule."

Steve reached over to a piece of paper on Bill's desk and drew a circle with his pen. "Let's suppose this circle represents everything there is to know about everything. If you were to draw a circle within that circle that represents what you know, how big would it be?"

"Just a dot," Bill readily admitted. He immediately understood. If we deny the existence of God, then we are also saying we know everything there is to know. Since we do not know everything there is to know, God could be found outside of what we know. It is, therefore, not reasonable to claim we know god does not exist.

After a review of all the facts of this discussion, Bill concluded that they had proved God exists. Helping him examine his own position resulted in a softening of his heart that resulted in an openness to Steve--and eventually to God.

Let us recap the stages that helped Bill move from atheism to agnosticism to belief in a personal God. There are many apologetic approaches to the existence of God. The discussion used here borrows from several, particularly those based on cause-and-effect reasoning. Here are four point to notice:

To establish what is mean by "proof" is crucial because, although evidence is objective, proof is subjective. It is important to establish what the particular person you are reasoning with considers proof to be. That is as important for him as it is for you, because people usually do not know what their own standards are.

I recall a discussion I had with a man involved in one of the major cults. His cult believed Jesus was the Messiah but did not believe the Messiah was God. He told me if I could "prove" to him form the Bible that the Messiah was God, he would receive Him and reject the cult. "But I must first know how many verses constitute proof,' I said, "else I could just keep giving you verses, and you could keep saying that it's not enough for proof." He decided on three. I showed him three verses that said the Messiah was God (Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 9:6, and Matthew 1:23, as I recall), and after another half hour of reasoning, he prayed with me to receive Jesus Christ as his God.

If you do not know what definition of proof you are aiming at, your chances of hitting it are quite slim. In this case, Bill thought his standard was what he could see. So Steve had to point to electricity, love, and hate as examples of things he believed in that he could not see.

Epistemology, the study of knowing, asks questions like, "How do we know that what we think we know is real?" But for most people, it all boils down to simple cause-and-effect. If there is a house (an effect), then we can "know" there was someone who built it (a cause). Furthermore, we know that wind, rain, dirt, trees, and stones around it are not a sufficiently complex cause to explain the house as an effect. In other words, someone could prove to us how the house got there only if his reasoning was consistent with cause-and-effect. So we can generally establish cause-and-effect as the basic way people determine proof.

We can then proceed to the third point, which is that of determining that cause-and-effect shows it is more reasonable to say it was produced by a God who could create than to suppose it came from nothing or made itself. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, but we don't conclude that the Mona Lisa painted itself. Rather, the existence of the Mona Lisa has never been observed painting anything. Neither has the universe ever been observed making something from nothing.

Furthermore, it makes more sense that there is an eternal God who always existed than to suppose the universe itself has always existed, because nothing in the universe is eternal. Since no part of it lasts forever, then it is only reasonable that all its parts put together were not there forever either.

Concerning personality, it is more true to cause-and-effect reasoning to say that humans, having personality, came from a personal God than to suppose they came from an impersonal universe. Everything reflecting personality comes from a personal being. Take the painting we mentioned above. Paintings often depict intelligence, emotion, or willful acts of people. Those are reflections of the personality of the painter. Because the works of art exist, we know the artist exists. So also the artist himself is a work of art reflecting the existence of personality in his Maker. So God must be at least personal.

When we consider the designs in the universe, we can see it is more consistent to assume they came from a God with a purpose for creating than to suppose they are chance happenings. Experience teaches us that things always go from order to disorder, unless an intelligent personality purposefully reverses the process. Radio, TV, and cars, as well as our houses and nearly everything in them, reflect the purposes of their designers. Besides that, they need to be maintained. Left to themselves, they break down and quit--which is true of our bodies, too. The universe is full of beauty and design, and our consistent observation is that beauty and design never happen by chance.

Steve and Bill agreed that it is not reasonable to say God could not exist. That followed from the argument that you would have to know everything there is to know in order to be sure that God could not exist. If you knew only a part, God might be known form another part.

All that led to the conclusion that the most "reasonable" decision is that a personal God does exist.

It is common to find people who believe in the word "God." It is also increasingly common to find that many--probably most--of those same people who believe in something called "God" do not believe in a personal God. What I mean is: they do not believe in the existence of a real live person who created the universe and remains in sovereign control of it.

Hebrews 11:6 reads, "And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him" (italics added). In other words, the first step in coming to God is to understand that there is a real, personal, ultimately sovereign being to come to.

If we define an atheist as someone who does not believe in God as the Bible describes God, we would find most people are indeed atheists. Eastern mysticism, evolution, situation ethics, and the existential playboy philosophies all have contributed to a redefinition of the word "God."

When Thomas Altizer and others in the 1960s said that, "God is dead," they did not mean the God of the Bible had died. They meant that the word "God' is out-of-date. The word "God" died, or at least they believed it ought to. God as defined in the Bible, according to them, had never been alive.

In reality, the word "God" did not die. Instead, people kept on using it with new definitions. Those new definitions deny the existence of the sovereign creator the Bible describes. In other words, they describe a straw god to be burned at the discretion of the definer.

What should we do when we meet someone like Bill? Cross the street and walk by on the other side? The Corinthians evidently thought so. Paul told them, "I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters; for then you would have to go out of the world" (1 Corinthians 5:9-10).

Yet, what do we say to people like Bill? Tell them what the Bible says? That is often a good first step. Even people who do not believe the Bible can be convicted by it if they are willing to hear what is says (Isaiah 55:11). But that would not work with Bill. The Holy Spirit had not yet brought him to the place where he was ready to accept the Bible as God's Word or receive Jesus as God. That does not mean the Holy Spirit was not working on him. Bill was open to considering truth as long as he did not have to presuppose that God existed or that the Bible was right.

At the time of this writing, Bill and Steve are still meeting. After they had been getting together every week for one year and two months, Bill received Jesus Christ as his own God and Savior. They are now studying the Bible together. The same soil softening that brought him to a belief in God led him to a saving knowledge of God's Son and into a growing relationship with Him.