How can we know that God exists when we cannot see Him? Scripture answers that question by pointing us to what He has made, the conscience He has given us, and what He has revealed about Himself through Jesus Christ. I think we can explain those reasons clearly while also taking time to understand why the person asking is struggling to believe.
What Do We Mean by Proof?
The Bible begins with the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Before it tells us about the first people or anything they did, it tells us where their world came from. God was already there, and everything He created depended on Him. That includes the people who would eventually ask whether He exists and the minds they would use to consider the question.
Because He made us, we are accountable to Him. But saying that does not relieve me of the responsibility to answer someone who has a question. If someone tells me he cannot believe in God, I want to understand what he means. Perhaps he has heard an objection that no one has answered, or perhaps he cannot reconcile God’s goodness with a loss he has suffered. He may also understand that acknowledging God would require a response he does not want to make. I cannot know which of those things is happening simply because he asked.
Giving a reasoned defense of the faith is often called apologetics. It involves explaining why we believe and answering objections honestly, and Scripture gives us plenty to consider. It speaks about the world around us and the moral awareness within us, and it also tells us what God has done in history. Those things lead us to Christ and His bodily resurrection. I want my explanation to help someone understand who He is and why he needs Him.
Before we begin, though, it helps to think about what kind of proof we are asking for. When we want to know whether something happened in the past, we examine testimony and whatever evidence remains of the event. We do not expect to establish it in exactly the same way we work through a mathematical equation. In much the same way, we can recognize that cruelty is wrong even though we cannot place that judgment on a scale and weigh it. The fact that something cannot be measured by one particular method does not mean there is no way to know it.
Scripture speaks of God making Himself known through creation and conscience. Christians often call this general revelation because it is a witness available to humanity generally. It tells us something true about our Maker, but it does not tell us everything we need to know about salvation. Looking at the stars will not tell someone the name of Jesus or explain how His blood provides forgiveness. Psalm 19 begins with the heavens declaring God’s glory, and then it goes on to speak about His written instruction. We need that instruction to understand His promises, and we need the Savior those promises reveal.
What Creation Tells Us About Its Maker
David describes the heavens as though they are continually speaking. They do not use words as we do, but what they display gives us something to recognize about the One who made them.
The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge.
The firmament is the expanse God made above the earth. David directs us to what we can see overhead, and then he tells us how continually that witness is given. One day follows another, and another night comes, but the heavens continue to display God’s work. We did not put them there, and their existence does not depend on whether we acknowledge Him. David sees the world around him as a reason to give glory to its Creator.
Learning how that world works gives us more to understand about what God has made. We can study how rain forms, how gravity operates, or how a plant uses light, and those explanations describe processes within creation. They do not answer every question about why there is an ordered creation in the first place. Scientific investigation itself depends on there being patterns we can examine and minds that are capable of recognizing them.
I do not think we should speak of God as though He is only needed wherever our scientific knowledge runs out. If we learn more about how a seed grows, we have learned more about the world He created. We have not explained Him away. The question is still why this world exists with the order that allows us to study it.
We already recognize in ordinary life that something can tell us about the cause that produced it. If we come across a house, we understand that someone built it, even if we have never met the builder. If we read a book, the meaning in its words gives us reason to recognize someone who intended to communicate. Hebrews uses that familiar observation about a house.
For every house is built by someone, but He who built all things is God.
The surrounding passage is comparing Moses with Christ. Moses, who led Israel out of Egypt, faithfully served among God’s people. Hebrews calls those people God’s house, and verse 6 includes believers in that house. Christ is the Son over it, and the builder receives greater honor than the house itself. I want to keep that context in view because the verse is part of an explanation of Christ’s greatness. It is also drawing on something the reader understands: a house does not bring itself into existence.
A comparison between a house and the universe does not settle every philosophical question about creation. It does, however, help us ask whether an explanation accounts for what is actually there. We have matter, but we also have an ordered world with living beings who can understand something about it. Describing the materials alone does not explain all of that. Scripture identifies a personal, eternal God whose power and wisdom account for what He made.
If impersonal matter is treated as the final answer, I still have questions about the people who reason, recognize beauty, and understand that they have moral obligations. Those things are part of the world an explanation needs to account for. I find that the biblical account of a personal Creator helps us understand why there are persons who can recognize meaning in His creation.
We can also look more closely at living things. The National Human Genome Research Institute describes DNA as the molecule that carries genetic information used in an organism’s development and functioning. The order of its chemical bases encodes biological information, including instructions for making proteins or RNA. Those instructions are involved in the processes through which living cells function, grow, and reproduce.
Think about what happens when we read a recipe. The ingredients matter, but their names alone do not tell us what to do with them. The instructions tell us how they are to be used to produce a result. I see a reason to recognize intelligence in the way living cells use biological information as well. That is the conclusion I draw from what we observe. A cell is not a recipe written by a person, and making the comparison does not replace the work of carefully studying its biology.
What that study gives me is more reason to appreciate how much is involved in the life God has given us. David expresses his gratitude to the One who formed him.
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.
David is praising God for making him; he is not attempting to write a laboratory description of human development. We can examine the processes through which a body develops while also asking why life exists and who deserves our thanks for it. Scripture answers that by directing us to the God who created life and continues to sustain it.
Who Created God?
Once we say that the world needs an explanation, the next question is understandable: who created God? If I had said that absolutely everything must have been made by someone else, that question would expose a problem in my reasoning. I would need a creator for God, and then another creator for that creator, without ever reaching an answer.
But Scripture does not describe God as something that began to exist. It distinguishes Him from the things He brought into existence.
Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.
The mountains had a beginning, and so did the earth in which they stand. God existed before either of them, and the psalm says that He is God from everlasting to everlasting. When we call Him self-existent, we mean that His existence does not depend on something outside Himself. He was not assembled from materials that were already there, and He is not simply the first object that appeared somewhere within the universe.
A being made by someone else would be a creature, however powerful that being might be. That is why asking who made the eternal God treats Him as something different from the God Scripture describes. He is the One on whom created things depend, while He Himself has no beginning.
It also helps to be clear about what we mean by nothing. Absolute nothingness is not an unseen material that has laws, energy, or the potential to become a universe. If any of those things are present, we are already talking about something. Nothing has no power with which to produce anything. The biblical explanation is that God created the world, not that the world caused itself to exist before it existed. Calling matter the ultimate reality still leaves the question of why it exists and why it has the order we observe.
Why We Recognize Truth and Moral Responsibility
There is another part of creation we should consider, and that is ourselves. We can remember what we did yesterday, imagine something we hope to do tomorrow, and explain those thoughts to another person. We form relationships, and when someone we love dies, we grieve the loss of that person. We can also look back at something we did and recognize that we ought to have acted differently.
Genesis helps us understand those things by explaining our relationship to the God who made us.
Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
God is spirit, so His image does not mean that our bodies are physical copies of Him. He made human beings who could know Him, communicate, exercise responsibility, and live in relationships. He also gave them authority within creation, but that authority remained under His own. Adam and Eve were responsible to the One who gave it to them.
Sin has damaged the way we live, but it has not erased the fact that human beings bear God’s image. Our dignity therefore belongs to us because He made us human. It is not something we earn by demonstrating enough intelligence or independence. That gives us a reason to value people from the womb through the end of their earthly lives, as I explain further in the study on the sanctity of life.
Our ability to think about truth also deserves consideration. A scientist can measure physical activity in a brain, but that measurement alone does not tell us whether the thought being considered is true. We can see the same distinction with speech. Measuring the sound waves of a spoken sentence tells us something about how it reaches our ears, but we still have to consider what the sentence means and whether we should believe it.
I understand our ability to recognize truth in light of the God whose image we bear. He knows what is true, He communicates, and He made embodied people who can understand what He says. Examining the physical processes involved in thinking is useful, but it does not remove the questions of meaning and truth that we are thinking about.
Our conscience raises a related question. When I say it is wrong to betray someone who trusted me, I mean more than that I personally dislike betrayal. I mean that a person ought not to do it, even if doing it would benefit him and his friends would approve. People disagree about moral questions, and they sometimes justify terrible conduct, but even those disagreements show that they are appealing to what they believe ought to be done.
Paul explains how this moral awareness bears witness within people who did not receive the Law God gave to Israel.
for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them
The Gentiles Paul is describing were not Jews and had not received the Law God gave Israel through Moses, yet their thoughts could still accuse them of wrongdoing or offer a defense of what they had done. Their conscience testified that they were morally responsible. Meanwhile, the Jews who had received the Law were responsible to obey what they had heard. Possessing it did not make disobedience innocent.
That is where Paul’s argument is going. Both groups are accountable to God, and by Romans 3 he has shown that everyone has sinned and needs justification through Christ. Conscience helps explain our accountability; it does not provide a way to save ourselves.
An unbeliever can recognize kindness and condemn abuse because denying God does not remove every trace of the moral awareness He gave us. At the same time, our conscience is not an infallible guide. It can be misinformed, hardened through repeated sin, or wounded, which is why it needs to be corrected by God’s Word. Feeling innocent does not always mean we have acted rightly.
If right and wrong meant only what a particular group preferred, we could describe the group’s choices, but we would have no firm standard by which to say those choices were themselves evil. Scripture gives us that standard in God’s character, and it explains the worth of the people being harmed through His image. A crowd’s approval cannot make cruelty right before Him.
Why Evidence Does Not Always Lead to Belief
Knowing that God has given a witness to Himself does not mean that supplying more information will resolve every person’s unbelief. Paul explains that there is also a moral response to what God has made known.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.
To suppress something is to hold it down. Paul is describing people resisting truth that places an obligation on them. If God made us, then we owe Him worship and obedience, so acknowledging Him reaches beyond agreeing with an idea. It brings us face to face with His authority over our lives.
I take that warning seriously, but it does not give me the ability to see everything happening in another person’s mind. Someone may have been badly taught, seen hypocrisy in people who claimed to represent God, or experienced a loss he cannot understand. I should hear what he is saying instead of assuming that he has examined every argument and is simply lying about his conclusion. Listening carefully does not remove his accountability to God, and recognizing that accountability does not excuse careless accusations from me.
Paul goes on to explain why humanity is accountable.
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
God’s power and divine nature are made known through the things He created. People are without excuse because He has given them a witness to Himself, yet they turn from the Creator to worship created things. The world should direct our gratitude toward the One who made it. Idolatry takes what belongs to Him and gives it elsewhere.
That witness shows why we need to respond to God, but it still does not give us salvation apart from the gospel. Someone needs to hear who Christ is and what He has done. I should answer an honest question about creation, and I should also recognize that the person asking needs God’s grace and conviction.
A request for more information can be sincere. It can also become a way of postponing a response to something already understood. I cannot always tell which is happening, so I need to answer truthfully and call people to repentance without pretending to know motives they have not expressed. The answer concerns their relationship with the God who made them.
The Creator Has Made Himself Known in Christ
John helps us see why this discussion cannot stop with a general belief that some creator must exist. He identifies the eternal Word through whom everything was made.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.
Notice that John places the Word with God in the beginning, and he also says that the Word was God. Then he says that everything that was made came into existence through Him. The Word therefore does not belong among the things that were created. He is their Maker.
As John continues, he tells us that the Word became flesh. This is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son who entered His own creation and became fully man without ceasing to be fully God. Paul describes the extent of His creative work in Colossians.
For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.
Everything visible and invisible was created through Christ, and it was also created for Him. The next verse says that all things continue to hold together in Him. That means the world we examine and the minds with which we examine it belong to Him. We are discussing a personal Creator who has made Himself known, and Scripture tells us that history is moving toward His judgment and kingdom.
We can see how Paul explained that connection to people in Athens in Acts 17:16–34. He found a city filled with idols, and as he spoke about Jesus and the resurrection, philosophers brought him to address the Areopagus, an Athenian council, so they could hear more. These people needed to understand how the God Paul proclaimed differed from the objects they worshiped.
Paul began with the God who made the world and everything in it. Because He gives people life and breath, He does not depend on their temples or their service to keep Him alive. Every nation owes its existence to Him. Paul even referred to words from their own poets as he explained why God’s nature could not be represented by gold, silver, or stone that a person had shaped into an idol.
Having explained who their Creator was, Paul told them that God commanded them to repent. Their response mattered because He had appointed a day when He would judge the world.
because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.
God had given assurance of that coming judgment by raising Christ from the dead. Some of Paul’s hearers mocked when he spoke about the resurrection, while others wanted to hear more, and some believed. The account shows Paul reasoning with his hearers, but it also shows where his reasoning led. They needed to respond to the risen Christ.
The One appointed to judge is also the Savior who gave Himself for sinners. Jesus was born of a virgin and lived without sin, and He willingly offered Himself to be slain as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Wicked men tortured and crucified Him. He shed His innocent blood and died for us, completing His sacrificial offering through His blood and death before His burial and bodily resurrection.
The Father did not punish, curse, abandon, strike, bruise, or pour wrath on Jesus. Father and Son were united in providing our redemption. When I explain why I believe in God, this is the God I am speaking about: the Creator who has made a way for guilty people to be forgiven through His Son.
Answering Difficult Questions Without Losing Sight of the Person
Someone may still have questions after hearing these things, and asking them does not threaten the truth. We may need to spend more time explaining why a natural process does not settle the question of its ultimate cause, or why the eternal God differs from a creature. Other questions concern a particular passage and need an answer that takes its details seriously. The study on who Cain’s wife was is one example of that kind of examination.
A question about suffering may require us to listen for quite a while before we begin explaining anything. Someone who has just lost a loved one may be asking how he can trust God in his grief. If I immediately begin a lecture about the philosophical problem of evil, I may answer something he was not asking. Job and the Psalms give us words of lament, and Jesus Himself wept when His friend Lazarus had died and He saw the grief of the people mourning him (John 11:33–35). Scripture gives us room to acknowledge sorrow.
We should also be careful about the explanations we offer for another person’s suffering. A particular illness or disaster does not prove that the person affected committed some particular sin. If God has not told me why He permitted a loss, I should not claim to know.
There is still a real question about evil that we can discuss honestly. When we call cruelty objectively wrong, we are saying more than that we happen to dislike it. I believe God’s holy character gives us the foundation for that judgment. Evil violates the good order of the One who made us, and Scripture traces it to creaturely rebellion, including humanity’s fall and the work of the devil. God remains in authority without becoming the author of their sin.
Removing God from the explanation does not remove the suffering. I also do not see how it gives us a firmer basis for condemning the evil that caused it. God knows every wrong, including those that human courts never discover, and His judgment means that they will not escape His notice. The cross shows us something further about His response to the world in which we suffer. His sinless Son endured betrayal and crucifixion at the hands of wicked men, and through His willing sacrifice God provided mercy for sinners. Their actions remained evil even though God accomplished redemption through what Christ endured.
I cannot tell a grieving person why God allowed a particular death at that particular time. I can tell him that God has acted against sin and death, that Christ rose bodily, and that He has promised resurrection and righteous judgment. The devil will be defeated, and God will put right what we cannot put right ourselves. Those promises give us hope while allowing us to acknowledge how painful the present loss is.
Peter’s instruction in 1 Peter 3:15 belongs in every conversation like this. We are to be ready to explain the hope we have, and we are to do it with meekness and fear, approaching the person gently and speaking with reverence for God. If I humiliate someone for asking a question, I have failed to follow that instruction even if part of my answer was correct. I can speak plainly without being cruel, and I can be patient without avoiding the truth.
That also means admitting when I have not examined something closely enough to answer it. Pretending to know will not serve the person or honor the truth. I would rather acknowledge what I still need to understand than give someone an answer I cannot support.
Throughout the conversation, I need to remember what the person ultimately needs. Accepting that a Creator exists does not by itself reconcile someone to God. Christ died for the whole world, and God’s offer of salvation is genuine, although people can resist and reject Him. The person who repents and believes in Christ is forgiven and born again. The Holy Spirit indwells and seals that believer, whose eternal life is secure in Him. I explain this more fully in the study of salvation.
Because new life comes from God, I should be praying for the person as well as speaking to him. I can ask God to open his eyes, grant repentance, and work through His Word while I do my part to explain it faithfully. His salvation does not rest on how impressive I can make my argument sound.
My Final Thoughts
God has given us reasons to acknowledge Him. The creation displays His power, our conscience bears witness to our responsibility, and Scripture explains who made us and why we answer to Him. Those reasons reach into our own lives because we are part of the creation we have been discussing. We depend on the God whose existence we are considering.
Through Jesus Christ, that Creator has also made Himself known as the Savior who gave His blood for sinners and rose bodily from the dead. I therefore cannot treat this as a question whose only purpose is to win an argument. I need His forgiveness myself, and the person speaking with me needs to hear about the same mercy. I want to explain the truth clearly, listen patiently when someone is struggling, and trust God to work through His Word as I point that person to Christ.