Quick and Easy Proof that God Exists

In our desperation to imagine that current human opinions have supreme authority about things like correct vs. incorrect, right vs. wrong, real vs. imaginary, good vs. evil, and so on..., people often make the issue of whether God exists so much harder and more complicated than it needs to be.

Here's a very basic proof that God exists:

1. Consider that if you can read this sentence, you can probably also think of yourself as existing in some form (like as a human being). Consider also that there's a universe out there around you, consisting of many things you can perceive with your senses, which also exists. As a minimum, these things exist in the sense that you can perceive them and think about them.
2. Consider that (unless you believe you created the universe from your own personal power) something else outside your own conscious self caused these things to come into existence.
3. Now, give a name for that thing in part 2 above. For the purpose of this web page, let's choose the three letter word "God" for this.
4. If we agree that our reality, as we experience it, does exist — then whatever caused it to exist (i.e. God) must also exist.

QED. (QED is an abbreviation of a fancy Latin phrase meaning that "thus it has been demonstrated".)

This is a basic and minimal proof, which is a good way to begin with things like this. So far the proof as given above has covered the first verse in the Holy Bible, which is known as Genesis 1:1.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

This verse tells us that "God" is what created the heavens and the Earth. It does not attempt to say anything much else about God. Just that we shall refer to that which caused our reality to come into existence by the name "God". So, God is what created the heavens and the Earth. It's really not that hard to understand, yet people seem to manage to make it so complicated. I should know because I was one of those people for most of my life.

What would you call the animal in this photograph? If we were speaking in English, I would call it an elephant. Photo by sasint.

What would you call the animal in the picture above? In English, I'd call it an elephant. You are perfectly free to call it whatever you wish to. Perhaps you might prefer to call it a collection of atoms and cells that was assembled according to rules/laws/theories which humans discovered and understood over the last few hundred years. Perhaps you could make up a completely new word for it which means "elephant" but, being a different word, has subtle differences in meaning that you feel are important in this modern age, where it's important to update things leftover from the outdated days of old. Or you could just call it by an ordinary everyday word that everyone understands, and which has been in common usage for a long time.

Or perhaps it's the word "created" that you object to in Genesis 1:1, even more than the word "God". Perhaps because you're able to see back in time, and therefore you know for sure that the heavens and the Earth were made in a completely different way to the way that the meaning which you assign to the word "created" would imply.

There's no limit of different ways that we can add more complexity to things, including this issue. But no matter how you look at things — assuming you believe the reality that you can perceive does in some sense exist, and assuming that you can perceive the passing of time, and that some events which occurred in the past led in some way to the formation of the reality which you can experience right now, and that something caused those events to happen — if you want to talk about that as a concept, you need to call it something. There's an infinite number of combinations of letters and words you could potentially use to name it. One of them that's understood by many people, and has been in use for a long time, is the three-letter word "God".

The following 31,101 verses of the Bible go on to explain a lot more about God. To what extent you believe or disbelieve those verses is another question. But at least, please consider that the very first verse in the Bible does indeed state a simple and easily proven fact — that something caused "the heavens and the earth" to exist, and that is what we call "God".

See also: The Two Types of Science