Part I dealt with the reality of universal law — or universal morality, or whatever you want to call it. Part II will attempt to deal with the fact that everyone breaks this law or morality. To some, it may seem obvious that everyone breaks this law; to others, it may seem that people just obey different laws.

Having made the point that everyone has basically the same law in mind, let me clarify a couple of major elements of all laws:

• Lying is bad — Although some people manage to justify some lies in their mind, any child, who has the basic understanding of morality without the learned ability to circumvent it, will be upset with a liar.
• Selfishness is bad — No one likes a person who is entirely self-centered. People don’t often hold themselves to this standard, but that’s just more evidence that people break their own laws.
• Theft is bad — Nobody appreciates things being stolen from them. They might like to steal from others, but they would quickly judge theft as evil when they themselves are robbed.

So we know that we all hold at least this standard — and if not, at least a part of it. So now we must ask ourselves, do we really obey our own standard? I think most of us have been selfish most of our lives. We’ve all lied; no one is innocent of this one. We’ve probably all stolen something at one time or another, whether we thought it was really a big deal or not.

We are apparently not innocent by our own standards, if we are really honest with ourselves. Scripture confirms this in Psalm 14:3 when it says that, “there is none who does good, not even one.” [1]

The thought
struck me that I can derive several proofs of the existence of God from just
about any picture. As if that wasn’t good enough, I realized that the following
picture fit the ticket for the proofs and as a bonus was rather amusing to look
at:

Cosmological Argument

Looking at this picture, you
probably don’t notice the usual things about it. You notice, of course, that
I’m upside-down; but that’s really irrelevant to the point I want to make
(although, in a sense, everything is relevant to the point I want to make).
What you don’t notice is that there is contrast – light and darkness –
throughout the picture, but there is no discernable source of light or
darkness. Without assuming that the sun is somewhere outside the edges of the
picture, you would have to say that the light and darkness are simply there,
with no source or reason for being there. But think about it: you did assume that the sun was somewhere
outside the picture, didn’t you? Isn’t it natural to assume that?

Now look at the world around you.
It’s a bit harder to glance casually at the whole of existence than to look at
the picture above, but let’s say you could actually do that. Now in the case of
the picture, we saw light and shadow and automatically assumed that the sun was
outside the picture causing it – a natural assumption to make. Looking at the
universe, you might notice that it does in fact exist. It’s there, and you see
it every time you look at it. Why?

Just as we assumed an external
cause of light in the photograph, we might also assume an external cause for
the whole of the universe. There’s no discernable cause in the picture for what
we’re seeing, so obviously the cause is outside the picture. What’s the only
term we know for the ultimate cause?

God.

Ontological
Argument

Now look again at the picture.
Recall that you didn’t just see light and darkness, but you saw contrast as
well. Notice also that no part of the picture as bright or as dark as it could
be. Surely you’ve looked at bright lights that are brighter than the white in
this picture, and it’s certainly darker in lightless rooms at night than the
darkest places in this picture.

How is contrast evidence of God?
Well, if you think about the white in the picture, you can only describe it in
relation to another shade. It’s lighter than dark, or it’s darker than a
flashlight being shined in your eyes. No part of the picture is perfectly
white. I can say that because I’ve seen things that are much more white than
the so called white in that picture.

In our thoughts about things, we
compare all things to each other, but primarily we compare them to the absolute
concepts we have in our minds. Let’s look the same way at the issue of
morality. Of course everyone has an idea in mind of what correct morality is,
but no one really embodies that perfect morality. How is it that we have this
concept of perfect morality, then? It’s obviously one of the absolute concepts
we have.

So now we must see the significance
of absolute concepts. We can’t conceive of things that don’t exist in some way.
You can’t conceive of a white that is brighter than the brightest white you’ve
actually seen, can you? Your conception of light is limited to your experience.
Likewise, your conception of morality is somehow related to your experience –
somehow related to reality and what you know.

You know that there is such a thing
as absolute goodness. It’s natural to have that concept, just as it’s natural
to have a concept of what you see as absolute brightness. We get our frames of
reference from experience and the world around us. Thus, we must conclude that
absolute goodness does actually exist in some form. What do we call absolute
goodness?

God.