How can we know God exists?

I am excited to launch a new series that tackles some of the most common and pressing questions people have about the Christian faith today. We will look at them honestly and carefully. We will not dodge the difficult ones.

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 says it is not just one religious option among many, but the actual truth about God, reality, and the human condition. If that claim is legitimate, honest questions, even the sharpest ones, are not a threat. They are an opportunity.

That is exactly what this “Got Questions?” series is about. We are putting the jewel on the table, turning on the lights, and examining it together. I hope you will discover the Christian faith does not shrink from investigation. It welcomes it, and it offers thoughtful, satisfying answers to those who are willing to listen with an open mind and weigh the evidence fairly.

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

This is not just a philosophical puzzle. It is a deeply personal question. 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. If you are asking this question, 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. The Bible’s point is that denying God isn’t a sign of superior thinking but of a heart condition all of us naturally share until God opens our eyes. In Scripture, “the fool” is not someone mentally slow, but someone who denies what is plain and obvious.

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, not believing in God is not just one respectable option among many. It 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. This isn’t about intelligence or sincerity, but about the spiritual condition we all share until God opens our eyes. That should not make Christians proud or harsh, but humble, 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 that writes the instructions for every cell in your body. Even the fine balance of our own planet points to this. The sun is about 93 million miles away from the earth. If our planet were significantly closer, life would burn away. If it were much farther, the earth would freeze. Critics say we only think this is remarkable because we’re the ones who survived to notice it. But that doesn’t explain why the universe permits life at all, or why its fundamental constants are set with such precision that even tiny variations would make chemistry itself impossible. The odds against a life-permitting universe are staggeringly high.

Now, some will say, “But couldn’t evolution explain apparent design without a Designer?” Here’s the thing: even if evolution describes how life develops, it doesn’t explain why there’s a universe capable of evolution in the first place, or why it’s governed by rational laws our minds can understand. You still need a Lawgiver behind the laws of nature.

Many thoughtful scientists have been struck by this kind of design. Dr. Ming Wang, a Harvard and MIT trained eye surgeon, spent decades as an atheist. After performing over 55,000 eye surgeries, he concluded that the staggering complexity of the human eye could not be explained by blind chance. A professor’s simple question shattered his atheism: “If a pile of random metal cannot assemble itself into a car, how could the far more complex human eye arise by pure randomness?” Dr. Wang now tells young people they do not have to choose between science and faith, but can embrace both under the Lordship of Christ. 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. That is more than social conditioning. It is God’s law pressing on our consciences. Our thirst for justice, our outrage at evil, and our longing for ultimate meaning are not random feelings. They are signposts that 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 don’t just have different preferences. We act as if real moral truth exists that applies to both of us. That only makes sense if there’s a Moral Lawgiver beyond us both.

Here’s why this matters so urgently: that inner sense of right and wrong isn’t just informing you that God exists. It’s warning you that you’ll one day answer to Him. Every one of us has violated that law written on our hearts. The bad news is we’re accountable. The good news is that God has provided a way of escape 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 and backed that claim with His sinless life, His public miracles, His sacrificial death, and His bodily resurrection on the third day. 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 isn’t just well-attested. It 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 where women (whose testimony wasn’t valued in that culture) were the first witnesses? Why did the movement explode in the very city where Jesus was executed, where His body could have been produced to stop Christianity before it started? The apostles were willing to suffer and die rather than deny what they had seen and heard. 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 not merely about winning a debate. It 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 You are there, please show Yourself to me.” 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 whom 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.

Famous Atheists & Their Last Words

1. CAESAR BORGIA—Italian nobleman, politician, and cardinal: “While I lived, I provided for everything but death; now I must die, and am unprepared to die.”

2. THOMAS HOBBS—Political philosopher: “I say again, if I had the whole world at my disposal, I would give it to live one day. I am about to take a leap into the dark.”

3. THOMAS PAYNE—The leading atheistic writer in American colonies: “Stay with me, for God’s sake; I cannot bear to be left alone, O Lord, help me! O God, what have I done to suffer so much? What will become of me hereafter? I would give worlds if I had them, that The Age of Reason had never been published. 0 Lord, help me! Christ, help me! No, don’t leave; stay with me! Send even a child to stay with me; for I am on the edge of hell here alone. If ever the Devil had an agent, I have been that one.”

4. SIR THOMAS SCOTT—Chancellor of England: “Until this moment I thought there was neither a God nor a hell. Now I know and feel that there are both, and I am doomed to perdition by the just judgment of the Almighty.”

5. VOLTAIRE—famous anti-christian atheist: “I have swallowed nothing but smoke. I have intoxicated myself with the incense that turned my head. I am abandoned by God and man.” He said to his physician, Dr. Fochin: “I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months of life.” When he was told this was not possible, he said “Then I shall die and go to hell!” His nurse said: “For all the money in Europe I wouldn’t want to see another unbeliever die! All night long he cried for forgiveness.”

6. ROBERT INGERSOLL—American writer and orator during the Golden Age of Free Thought: “O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul!” Some say it was said this way: “Oh God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul, from hell, if there be a hell!

7. DAVID HUME—Atheist philosopher famous for his philosophy of empiricism and skepticism of religion: He cried loud on his death bed “I am in flames!” It is said his desperation was a horrible scene.

8. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE—French emperor who, like Adolf Hitler, brought death to millions to satisfy his greedy, power-mad, selfish ambitions for world conquest: “I die before my time, and my body will be given back to the earth. Such is the fate of him who has been called the great Napoleon. What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal kingdom of Christ!”

9. SIR FRANCIS NEWPORT—Head of an English Atheist club, to those gathered around his deathbed: “You need not tell me there is no God, for I know there is one, and that I am in his presence! You need not tell me there is no hell. I feel myself already slipping. Wretches, cease your idle talk about there being hope for me! I know I am lost forever! Oh, that fire! Oh, the insufferable pangs of hell! Oh, that I could lie for a thousand years upon the fire that is never quenched, to purchase the favor of God and be united to Him again. But it is a fruitless wish. Millions and millions of years will bring me no nearer the end of my torments than one poor hour. Oh, eternity, eternity forever and forever! Oh, the insufferable pangs of Hell!”

10. CHARLES IX—the French king. Urged on by his mother, he gave the order for the massacre of the French Huguenots, in which 15,000 souls were slaughtered in Paris alone and 100,000 in other sections of France, for no other reason than that they loved Christ. The guilty king suffered miserably for years after that event. He finally died, bathed in blood bursting from his veins. To his physicians, he said in his last hours: “Asleep or awake, I see the mangled forms of the Huguenots passing before me. They drop with blood. They point at their open wounds. Oh! That I had spared at least the little infants at the bosom! What blood! I know not where I am. How will all this end? What shall I do? I am lost forever! I know it. Oh, I have done wrong.”

11. DAVID STRAUSS—Leading representative of German rationalism, after spending a lifetime erasing belief in God from the minds of others: “My philosophy leaves me utterly forlorn! I feel like one caught in the merciless jaws of an automatic machine, not knowing at what time one of its great hammers may crush me!”

12. ANTON LEVEY—Author of the Satanic Bible and high priest of the religion dedicated to the worship of Satan. One of his famous quotes was: “There is a beast in man that needs to be exercised, not exorcised”. His dying words were: “Oh my, oh my, what have I done, there is something very wrong. . . there is something very wrong.”

13. GANDHI—at his death said, “For the first time in 50 years, I find myself in the slough of despond. All about me is darkness… I am praying for light.”

Is There a God?

Article by Sinclair Ferguson (original source here)

Answer the question “Is there a God?” in around 775 words? Is this perhaps the easiest assignment Tabletalk has ever commissioned, since the answer is so clear? There are no consistent atheists, only people hiding from God. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). God is the inescapable given who undergirds all things.

Or, is this the hardest assignment Tabletalk has ever commissioned? A comprehensive answer might fill an entire library. What follows, then, is only a stray fragment from one chapter in a book in that library.

➝ 1 God the Creator is the only solution to Gottfried Leibniz’s and Martin Heidegger’s ultimate riddle: “Why is there something there, and not nothing?”

Ex nihilo nihil fit—“Nothing comes from nothing.” Let us note that nothing is not a “pre-something”; it is not “something reduced to a minimum.” Nothing is NO thing, no THING. Nothing—a concept impossible for the mind to comprehend precisely because nothing lacks “reality” in the first place. To transform Rene Descartes’; famous dictum Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) we can say, Quod cogito, non cogito de nihilo (Because I am, I cannot conceive of nothing).

That leads to another Descartes-esque thought: Quod cogito, ergo non possibile Deus non est (Because I think, therefore it is impossible that God does not exist). The cosmos, my existence, and my ability to reason all depend on the fact that life did not and could not come from nothing, but requires a reasonable and reasoning origin. The contrary (time + chance = reality) is impossible. Neither time nor chance is a pre-cosmic phenomenon.

➝ 2 This God must be the biblical God, for two reasons. The first is that only such a God adequately grounds the physical coherence of the cosmos as we know it.

Second, His existence is the only coherent basis, whether acknowledged or otherwise, for rational thought and communication. Consequently, the nonbeliever of necessity must draw on, borrow from, indeed intellectually steal from a biblical foundation in order to think coherently and to live sanely. Thus, the secular humanist who argues that there are no ultimates must borrow from biblical premises in order to assess anything as in itself right or wrong.

I have recently tried a simple but unnerving experiment, directing my mind to think its way into the assumption that there is no God, and then to explore the implications. I strongly discourage performing this mind experiment. It leads inexorably to a dark place, a mental abyss where nothing in life makes sense, indeed, where there is no possibility of ultimate “sense.”

Here, all that we think of as good, true, rational, intelligible, and beautiful has no substructure to give these concepts coherence. Thus, the nature of everything I am and experience becomes radically deconstructed and disconnected from my consciousness of them. That “consciousness” that seems intelligible is then an unjustifiable fabrication of my own imagination. And then that imagination ceases to have coherence in itself.

In essence, then, my highly complex consciousness becomes merely an inexplicable series of intricate chemical reactions grounded in no rationality and having no inherent meaning. “Meaning” itself in any genuinely transcendent sense is itself a meaningless concept.

As experimenters in the pilgrimage of consistent atheism, we will then conclude that it is the “atheists” who are driven to despair, as they yield to the unbearable conclusions of their premises, who are the only consistent atheistic thinkers with the courage of their convictions. Those who calmly claim to be atheists are unmasked as in fact refusing the conclusion of their professed convictions, repressing what they know deep down to be true (that God is)—the very point Paul makes in Romans 1:18–25.

The novelist Martin Amis recounted a question that the Russian writer Yevgeni Yevtushenko asked Sir Kingsley Amis: “Is it true that you are an atheist?” Amis replied, “Yes. But it’s more than that. You see, I hate Him.” Far from being able to deny the existence of God, he confessed both God’s existence and his own antagonism toward Him.

Amis was not alone. Neither a knight of the Realm, nor any of us, can escape being the imago Dei (however mutilated). We can therefore never deny the Deus of whom we are the imago. For God has placed a burden on us: “He has put eternity into a man’s heart” (Eccl. 3:11). As Augustine said, our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Him.

Why then does the Bible not ask the question, “Is there a God?” Because its first sentence answers it: “In the beginning, God… .”