Israel’s God is Real. How Do I Know?

The dialogue goes something like this:

Atheist: How do you know that God created the world?

Theist: God told us in the Bible. (Genesis 1:1, 2:4; Isaiah 45:12).

Atheist: How do you know that those Bible references are true?

Theist: Not only do I believe in the accuracy of the Genesis creation account but scientific findings increasingly support that account.

The skeptic asks:

“Of the innumerable deities worshiped by humans over the ages, why should we believe that yours is the one that really exists? Why believe in Y-H-V-H rather than Zeus, Odin, Marduk, Ishtar, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Madame Pele, Ahura-Mazda, among the myriads of other deities?”

The answer to the skeptic is that most ancient pagan myths saw the existence of death and conflict of preexistent creatures as the basis of the creative act (the killing of the giant Ymir in Norse myth in order to create the world, or the slaying of the dragon Tiamat by Marduk to make the Earth). These myths are totally in disharmony with all the scientific facts.

As for Christianity, one of many egregious errors is the doctrine of the virgin birth (Matthew 1:23). Christian apologists attempt to legitimatize it by mistranslating the Hebrew word almah (“young woman”) as virgin and misrepresenting why the Septuagint interpretative text renders this word as virgin. The fact is that Christianity used these fraudulent arguments to pander to idol worshipers who believed in myths of a child born to a human virgin impregnated by a god (see, Gerald Sigal, The Virgin Birth: The Misconception of Jesus, Xlibris, Bloomington, IN. 2013).

As for Islam, any religion that believes that Jesus was born of a virgin and that he is a prophet cannot be true (see, Qur’an, Sura 19: Maryam [Mary]).

An objective examination of actual scientific findings supports the Genesis creation narrative. Only the Jewish Bible’s description of universe creation, origin of life, and evolution leading to modern humans parallels the findings of non-speculative modern science. All we can do is follow the biblical and scientific evidence, and it points to the supernatural creation of the universe and life. We have to evaluate the biblical claim with the modern scientific evidence we have. The correlation between the Genesis creation narrative and actual scientific findings supplement each other. In return, atheism can offer very little other than speculation and contemptuous dismissal.

The universe seems to some a self-generating “accident,” the product of impersonal natural forces not planned by God. Nevertheless, we can deduce that there was an intelligent input directing the formation and ordering of the universe. This is especially apparent concerning the origin of life followed by the evolutionary development of species.

To maintain their denial of God in the wake of evidence that the universe was created by an outside intelligent entity, some atheists take the approach of saying, “We can’t say for sure there wasn’t a Higher Intelligence who created the universe and then moved on, but we see no proof of it.” This crafty, skeptic, disengenous, Creationist/Intelligent Design argument in the end does not hide their true intention of denying the reality of Y-H-V-H, the biblical God.

The evolutionary mechanism established by God for all species development (including humans) is such that they are all products of natural selection (except with the infusion of neshamah to created modern humans). The “chance” aspect of natural selection involves the presence of variants that are a reaction to a given environment or other stimuli. But what occurs is within the context of a divinely established physical process. Further, the selective process itself is not random, instead it results from selective advantage within a specific environment.

Follow the biblical evidence presented and compare it to the scientific findings. Whose holy writings parallels what modern science knows of the universe’s creation as well as the biblical creation narrative does? For example:

Non-created timeless First Cause jumped started creation (Genesis 1:1)
Universal beginning of time, space, energy and matter from physical nothingness (Genesis 1:1)
Light in the universe without our sun or any stars (Genesis 1:3)
The existence of water, not only on Earth but throughout the universe (Genesis 1:6)
Earth fully covered by water early in its development (Genesis 1:9)
Waters gathered into one place leaving one supercontinent (Genesis 1:9)
Origin of life from inorganic minerals in the ground (Genesis 2:7)
The vast array of ocean fauna during the Cambrian period (Genesis 1:20)
Animals appearing before modern humans (Genesis 1:24-26)
Stages in the evolution of humanity leading to modern humans (Genesis 2:7)
Modern humans spread throughout the world replenishing the void left by extinct archaic Homo sapiens (Genesis 1:28)