By Vic Kohring
"The heavens are telling of the glory of God." ~ Psalm 19:1
I've never once doubted God's existence and have always had a strong sense of His presence as far back as I can remember. It's in my conscience. An instinctive, deep down sense. It's also the result of my own personal experience witnessing God's good works.
Moreover, I've concluded that life is simply too complex to have evolved on its own and without an origination point of man's existence. It's preposterous to think humans grew into a complex organism from a single cell or amoeba eons ago through evolution. A supreme being has to have been present to create everything. The question is, who is this Supreme Being? Is it the God of the Bible or something else?
I'm convinced that "God" is indeed the God of the Bible. Not of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or Sikhism. Individuals representing the world's major religions over time identified themselves as prophets or teachers. But only Jesus claimed to be equal to God which separates him apart from all others. And it was Jesus, as God's son, who performed miracles by healing people from their infirmities including raising the dead, is a documented fact. He was tried, convicted and put to death on the cross for simply confessing that he was sent here by God.
Christianity is a proven and reliable doctrine and the Bible is an accurate source of information and truth. This includes the fact that Jesus is the son of God, that heaven exists and that those who believe in Him are afforded salvation. Even non-Christian writers from long ago confirm these teachings and events of the New Testament including Roman historians, Suetonius and Tacitus, and Romano-Jewish scholar, Josephus. All three present significant detail on Christianity and the life of Jesus.
Another Biblical researcher and respected author, Dr. Gary Habermas, wrote that "We should realize that it is quite extraordinary that we could provide a broad outline of major facts of Jesus' life from secular history alone." This further confirms the historical accuracy of the Bible. From a scientific perspective, look at DNA. DNA is like a computer program that writes code to instruct your cells to do certain functions. Programmers develop code to instruct a computer to do certain things. Likewise, the code in DNA instructs your cells to perform functions. Microsoft founder Bill Gates observed that "DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we've ever devised."
No evidence exists suggesting that natural, biological causes are involved with this process as you simply cannot find such instruction without someone intentionally creating it. The fact that DNA is mathematically perfect is further evidence that an intelligent designer has coded DNA for a specific purpose. Such precise instructions behind the complex DNA code can only be intentionally programmed.
I'm no Biblical scholar or scientist, but it doesn't take a genius or a Ph.D. in biological sciences or astrophysics to recognize that God exists. The evidence is all around us. The earth is perfectly situated given its size, gravity, atmosphere, rotation and proximity to the sun. The odds are infinitesimal that this could happen by chance.
When you consider that the universe is so orderly and reliable and that the laws of nature never change, it further underscores God's existence as there's no logical reason for our universe to follow a strict set of rules on its own. The conditions should be unpredictable, but are not. Nobel Prize winner for quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman, said, "The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle."
God's existence has been enormously helpful to me personally. I've relied on Him during trying times with my legal battles as I fought off hostile government authority figures determined to destroy me. I leaned on God as a legislator when facing intense political opposition that even included an occasional death threat from people who hated my Christian, conservative principals.
And thanks to my faith in God, I've survived the trauma of losing loved ones in recent years. Without Him, I probably would have succumbed to the stress of it all. I can't imagine how people without faith cope with such life's challenges on their own.
Even with direct evidence aside, one can rely on instinct to know God's there. Each of us has that gnawing feeling deep down that something superior exists, something that created all life. One only needs to consider the complexity of the human body to know intelligent design has been at work. Or something as simple as snowflake, which upon close examination, is wondrous with its beautifully intricate patterns.