AA: In this age of modern technology and ample of scientific evidence, why do you believe that God exists? In this regard, how do you define ‘God’?
Dr. Tim McGrew: I would define “God” as “a conscious, personal being without a body who is eternal, free, all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good, and the creator of all other things.”
The idea that modern scientific evidence undermines belief in God is a curious one. I think it must be connected to the idea that those who believe in God do so because they attribute every gap in their understanding of the universe to the direct agency of God. But does anyone really do this? Science is good at closing some gaps (say, in molecular biology, where the problems are very difficult but some of them are tractable) and not so good at closing others (for example, the problem of the relation between matter and consciousness). So yes, it can be reasonable to entertain the idea that the existence of God may be the best explanation for something, and doing so does not commit one to invoking direct divine action to answer every unsolved problem in every field.
I believe in the existence of God because I think that the existence of God is, on the whole, the best explanation for all of our evidence, scientific, historical, and experiential. As you might imagine, unpacking that case gets one into a great deal of detail very quickly!
AA: What do you have to say about God and the existence of Universe? What do you think relationship between the proper name ‘God’ and the definite description ‘The cause of the universe’ is?
Dr. Tim McGrew: I should describe the universe as the totality of all physical reality, and as you might infer from my definition, I think that God created the universe and may therefore properly be described as its cause.
AA: “If God does not exist, then there is no prudential reason to behave morally.” What do you think of this statement?
Dr. Tim McGrew: That is difficult to say, because I would need to know what “prudential” means. Even Machiavelli saw that it is useful to a “Prince” if people think that he is merciful, faithful, humane, and religious—though of course his point is that one need not actually be that way. I think that even someone who did not believe in God’s existence might act in a relatively decent fashion simply in order to avoid the disapprobation of his peers. So that might be a prudential motive to behave morally.
Whether that is ultimately a satisfactory ground for morality, whether it makes certain actions moral, is another question altogether. I am quite sure that it does not. Real, objective morality requires some other ground than the desire to have one’s neighbors and friends think well of one.
AA: If God exists, why won’t he heal amputees?
Dr. Tim McGrew: Because he’s too busy raising the dead.
Seriously, the point of the question is supposed to be that modern day miracle claims are for things that are not dramatically, incontestably miraculous even to the casual gaze, like the restoration of a lost limb would be.
For one thing, I’m not at all sure this is true; I haven’t yet had a chance to read through Craig Keener’s two-volume “footnote” on miracles, but it would not completely surprise me if he has some such cases documented there.
Second, this quip has always struck me as a rhetorical variant on Herod Antipas’s objection from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar:
“Prove to me that you’re no fool; Walk across my swimming pool!”
There are many things that God could do today for me and for others that we would recognize as indisputable evidence of His intervention, but He doesn’t. And that’s okay. If the evidence we do have is sufficient, we are not entitled to complain because it is not the particular kind of evidence we wish we had.
So the complaint is really misplaced; it is a rhetorically clever attempt to focus attention on a sort of evidence that we (perhaps) do not have for miracles today rather than grappling with the evidence we actually do have for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is the make-or-break event for Christianity.
AA: Is God imaginary? If not, what is the evidence of God’s existence?
Dr. Tim McGrew: Some people may have a concept of what they call “God” that doesn’t correspond to anything real. But I certainly believe that God exists and is not imaginary.
There are many different lines of evidence for the existence of God. Here are five: the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, the origin of morality, and the origin of Christianity.
AA: A popular skeptical question is, “Who made God?” What would you say in response?
Dr. Tim McGrew: No one made God. God never began to exist, so there is no causal question about his being made.
The physical universe, on the other hand, has not been around forever; our best physical science tells us that it began to exist a finite time ago. So for the universe, unlike for God, the question of why it came into existence is rather urgent. Professor Krauss’s attempt to answer this question in his recent book A Universe from Nothing shows a spectacular failure to engage with the actual question, as Krauss himself admits that what he is offering is an account of how the material world as we know it came about from a quantum vacuum with nonzero energy. That’s not a universe from Nothing.
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