If someone claims to own a rare and priceless jewel, the best way to prove it is simple: invite people to examine it closely, hold it to the light, test it, and ask tough questions. A real jewel can take the scrutiny. Christianity makes an even bolder claim. It claims to be the actual truth about God, reality, and the human condition. If that claim is true, honest questions, even the sharpest ones, do it no harm. They give the jewel a chance to shine.

That is what this “Got Questions?” series is about. In the weeks ahead we will take up some of the most common and pressing questions people ask about the Christian faith, and we will not dodge the difficult ones. We are putting the jewel on the table, turning on the lights, and examining it together. I hope you will discover that the Christian faith does not shrink from investigation. It welcomes it.

Here is the first question: “How can we know God exists?”

If there is no God, then we are alone in a silent universe, left to invent our own meaning. If there is a God, everything changes. So this question could hardly be more personal. If you are asking it, you are not alone, and the Bible does not tell you to shut off your mind. Scripture teaches that God has not left us in the dark about His existence. He has given clear pointers in the world around us, in our own hearts, and supremely in His Son, Jesus Christ.

The first thing to notice is this: the Bible does not begin with formal philosophical arguments for God’s existence. From the very first verse, “In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1:1), His reality is simply assumed. There is no opening chapter of arguments, only the declaration that God is, and that He is the Creator of all things. The Bible also says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1). Now, nobody likes being called a fool, and I’m not using this verse to insult anyone’s intelligence. In Scripture, “the fool” is the person who denies what is plain and obvious, whatever his IQ. The Bible’s point is that denying God flows from a heart condition all of us naturally share until God opens our eyes.

Romans 1 says that people “suppress the truth” about God. The idea is to hold down what keeps pushing up, like pressing a beach ball underwater. Paul writes that God’s eternal power and divine nature “have been clearly perceived … so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). In other words, unbelief is a moral response to truth we know deep down, even as we push it away. Many honest atheists would say, “I’m not suppressing anything. I genuinely don’t see the evidence.” The Bible’s answer is that sin’s distorting effect runs deeper than we realize, affecting even what seems obvious to us. That is a statement about the spiritual condition we all share, and it should make Christians humble rather than proud, because all of us by nature resist the God who has made Himself known to us.

First, we see evidence of God in creation itself. Whether you look through a telescope at the vastness of space or through a microscope at the intricate machinery of a single cell, you are not looking at an accident. Consider DNA: a four-letter information system carrying the genetic instructions for the development and functioning of your body. Or consider the universe itself. Many of its fundamental features fall within narrow ranges that permit complex chemistry and life. Even relatively small changes to some of them would produce a universe radically unlike our own, without the stable structures life requires. Critics say we only find this remarkable because we are the ones who survived to notice it. But that does not explain why the universe permits life at all, or why its fundamental structure is so finely ordered.

Now, some will say, “But couldn’t evolution explain apparent design without a Designer?” Here’s the thing: even if evolution describes how living things change and diversify over time, it doesn’t explain why there’s a universe capable of sustaining life in the first place, or why it’s governed by rational laws our minds can understand. A skeptic may reply that scientific laws merely describe what nature does. Fair enough, but that only sharpens the question: why is nature so ordered, stable, and intelligible that it can be described at all? The rational order of creation reflects the mind of its Creator.

Many thoughtful scientists have been struck by the order and complexity of the world. Dr. Ming Wang, a Harvard- and MIT-trained eye surgeon who has performed more than 55,000 procedures, came to the United States as a non-Christian after growing up in China. As he studied science, he found that it answered less than he had expected. A respected professor once asked him whether a random collection of scrap metal could assemble itself into a car, and then pressed the comparison with the far greater complexity of the human brain. Wang says that conversation opened the door for him to explore Christianity. He has also said it was the study of the human eye at Harvard Medical School that put his atheist worldview in crisis: an organ so intricate, and yet forming nearly perfectly, time after time. Over time he became a Christian. His story does not prove Christianity, but it is a striking example of a scientist whose study of the world opened rather than closed the door to faith. The Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). Just as a painting points to a painter, the finely tuned, intelligible world we live in points to an intelligent, powerful Creator. It is reasonable to believe that a personal God stands behind a world filled with design, order, and beauty.

Second, we sense God’s reality in our own consciences. Across cultures and throughout history, people have had an inner sense that some things are truly right and wrong, and that our choices matter. The Bible explains that God has written His law on our hearts (Romans 2:15). Even when we do something wrong in secret, we often feel that inner sting: God’s law pressing on the conscience, something far deeper than social conditioning. Our thirst for justice, our outrage at evil, and our longing for ultimate meaning all point beyond ourselves to a moral Lawgiver, One who cares about good and evil and will one day set all things right.

C.S. Lewis pointed out that when two people argue, they almost always appeal to some standard of fairness they expect the other person to recognize. We behave as if real moral truth exists that applies to both of us. Christianity explains why: the moral law reflects the character of a Moral Lawgiver beyond us both.

Here’s why this matters so urgently: that inner sense of right and wrong carries a warning. You will one day answer to the God whose law it is. Every one of us has violated that law written on our hearts. The bad news is that we are accountable. The good news is that God has provided forgiveness and reconciliation through Jesus Christ.

Third, God has made Himself known in history through Jesus Christ. The claim of Christianity is not that we discovered God by our own efforts, but that God came to us. Jesus did not only teach about God. He claimed to be God in human flesh. His sinless life and public miracles displayed His identity, His sacrificial death accomplished redemption, and His bodily resurrection on the third day vindicated His claims. The New Testament does not present the resurrection as a vague spiritual idea, but as a real historical event. The tomb was empty. The risen Christ appeared to many witnesses. The resurrection also explains things that otherwise make no sense. Why would the disciples, terrified and scattered after the crucifixion, suddenly become bold enough to face torture and death? Why would they invent a story in which women, who were not ordinarily accepted as formal legal witnesses in that setting, were the first to discover the empty tomb? Why did the movement explode in the very city where Jesus was executed, where the claim could be investigated and challenged by people closest to the events? The apostles continued proclaiming what they said they had seen and heard despite persecution, imprisonment, and, for some, death. None of these considerations proves the resurrection by itself. Taken together, they form a historical case that demands an explanation, and no explanation accounts for the evidence like the one the apostles gave: Christ is risen. On that basis, they proclaimed that God has made Jesus “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36), and that He “will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31).

Ultimately, the question of God’s existence is an invitation. The God who made you calls you to know Him, to be forgiven through Jesus’ death on the cross, and to receive new life by His resurrection. If you are wrestling with this, here is a good next step: pray honestly, “God, if I have been blind to what You have shown, please open my eyes and lead me into the truth.” Then begin reading the Gospel of John with an open Bible and an open mind. Christians are not better than anyone else. We are sinners whose eyes God has graciously opened to the truth we once resisted. If you sense that you have been pushing this truth away, you are not alone. All of us, by nature, do the same until God, in His kindness, opens our eyes. If you want to go deeper on this, consider reading Tim Keller’s The Reason for God or R. C. Sproul’s If There’s a God, Why Are There Atheists?, and we would be glad to talk with you in person at King’s Church.