Does God Really Exist?

These people are not ignorant about what can be known of God, because He has shown it to them with great clarity.  From the beginning, creation in its magnificence enlightens us to His nature. Creation itself makes His undying power and divine identity clear, even though they are invisible; and it voids the excuses and ignorant claims of these people. (Romans 1:19-20 The Voice, italics included)

As a Christian, I have struggled with doubt.  I believe in a Spirit world that is not physical. I can't see it, hear it, touch it, or smell it. My education steeped me in science and cause and effect and research design and replication. My faith is about a fantastically impossible story. Yet I believe. There is an enormous amount of historical fact to back up the events of Christ's life, for example, but even so, one is left with the interpretation of those facts.

Although I have struggled with doubt at times about the Gospel, I have never doubted that the world and people were created. The idea that the world we have was initiated by randomness and chance until it moved along far enough that evolutionary forces (such as survival of the fittest) came into play, seems absurd. This is a grounding reality for me, and once I have reminded myself, I follow it back to the creator.

I also come at it from what "is".  I see the complex order in both micro and macro science.  Googling "patterns in nature" reveals a rich study in itself. When reading and hearing how "natural selection has created these patterns" I feel like the emperor has no clothes. How do you even get there without a designer of principles that makes all these things happen in order? By chance?

I look at the most simple things in my life, and cannot comprehend that they originated by chance. Music and the way it moves us as humans, in any culture for example. How did that come to be? How did natural selection craft that? Now many things can be explained retrospectively: music brings people together, provides community, communities are safer and those who stayed together survived, and so on. It is a stretch to  believe that natural selection yielded the ability to compose, produce and appreciate music. And music was just the first thing that popped into my mind. So many things in our world are like that: Even people as designing and creating creatures point to a creator that built that into us.

Patterns have always intrigued me. I have noted in the past that our lives are dominated by creating order, restoring order, relocating order, observing order and so on. So it is interesting to read that the reason for patterns in living things is: Patterns in living things are explained by the biological processes of natural selection and sexual selection. OK. Then how do we explain patterns in non-living things like sand, wind, crystals. Natural patterns include symmetries, trees, spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tessellations, cracks and stripes, says Wikipedia. These can be represented mathematically as well. Did math evolve? How did natural selection create the infinitely intricate way the universe is put together and can be observed and described by mathematical models, equations, and descriptors?

A google image search for patterns in nature points me back to the verse at the beginning of this blog. It draws out of me a deep awe of the majesty and wonder of God. Smarter people than me may be able to explain how this all occurred naturally, but to me it seems like there needs to be an agenda that includes not wanting God to exist. For me, the amazing intricacies of the natural world and the universe point a finger directly to God as the creator--He has shown it to me with great clarity.