Josh D. McDowell - How to Know God Exists: Solid Reasons to Believe in God, Discover Truth, and Find Meaning in Your Life

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How to Know God Exists: Solid Reasons to Believe in God, Discover Truth, and Find Meaning in Your Life

Copyright 2022 by Josh McDowell Ministry, a dba of Campus Crusade for Christ, Inc., and Thomas Williams. All rights reserved.

An earlier edition of this book was previously published in 2003 as In Search of Certainty by Tyndale House Publishers under ISBN 978-0-8423-7972-4.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4964-6122-3

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To Dr. Robert Saucy:

Your knowledge and insight helped me to know more about Gods existence and also his loving character.

Thank you so much.

JOSH D. M C DOWELL

To Greg and Heidi Hargis:

For your deep and cherished friendship, which has never failed to reflect the loving character of God.

THOMAS WILLIAMS

Where did I come from? What is the meaning of life? How can I know right from wrong? What will happen to me after I die? Does God exist? These questions are embedded within each one of us. Trending generational differences may have shifted the emphasis, and the growing dominance of a secular outlook has attempted to override them. Yet these primal concerns are still shared by everyone on the planet.

In the past few decades it has been fashionable to categorize how Americans think by analyzing the beliefs and attitudes of the generations in which they were born. As with any such categorization, there are differing opinions about how to sort the generations, and there will always be exceptions and overlap between groupings. Still, a brief overview can provide a point of reference for understanding how our values and beliefs have changed over time.

Lets start with the Silent Generation, born during the Great Depression and World War II. Members of this group are typically conservative, religious, and financially secure. Next are the Baby Boomers, born after the war, many of whom rebelled against social norms and instigated the countercultural protests of the 1960s. Members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, tend to be resistant to government and have liberal views on social issues. Millennials, born in 1981 and later, are usually better educated and more tech-savvy than earlier generations but less likely to endorse the norms of religion, race, sexuality, and politics of their predecessors. Members of Generation Z, which began with the year 1997, are commonly considered more independent, less social but more socially conscious, more inward-turned, and more technologically dependent.

We dont doubt that these characterizations of the general mindsets of the generations carry considerable weight. We can see the changes in the approach to life, beliefs, morals, and culture as we study the values adopted by each succeeding generationchanges affecting economics, communication, health, entertainment, government, education, and religion. The trend has been away from traditional values, religious belief, and social responsibility. It has moved toward hedonism, materialism, secularism, and self-sufficiency.

Yet those troublesome questions about origins, meaning, morality, eternity, and Gods existence remain.

You may be holding this book because you have reached a place in your life where these questions have risen up to confront you. You may have begun to feel that the faith you embraced in the past no longer has the answers you need. Perhaps the answers offered by secular culture seem as if they might better fit the realities you encounter. If this describes youor if you are concerned about someone who is facing these questionswe urge you to accompany us on a journey to discover the answers. This is no mere excursion into trivialities dressed in platitudes written in typical religious-book jargon. We will lead you to solid answers that we will demonstrate to be firmly rooted in reality. We will show you that truth is a firm reality you can know with certainty and that meaning is possible when you align yourself with that truth.

We will begin our journey in chapter one by exploring the misconceptions inherent in secularism that have blocked off the light of truth from modern culture. Then in part one of the book, we will consider how to find and rely on the bedrock truths that have underscored successful and satisfying lives throughout the past twenty centuries. We will show that God is no fantasy and demonstrate undeniable steps of reason that can lead you to certainty that he is real.

In part two we will examine the weaknesses of several secular and naturalistic props to atheism, especially those explaining ultimate origins. We will demonstrate through reason, scientific evidence, and the writings of prominent scientists how secular origin theories often contradict science, reason, and observable reality.

(By the way, when we use the terms naturalism or naturalistic, we mean the philosophy that asserts that nature is all that exists, that there is no supernatural realm, and that there is no transcendent God who exists outside or above nature. There may be shades of difference between naturalism, materialism, secularism, and atheism, but we will use naturalism as a convenient term to encompass these and similar beliefs that exclude God.)

In part three, we will turn a corner and focus on how belief in God provides the only viable foundation for meaning and embodies the truth that bathes the world in beauty and joy. In the final chapter, we will give you a brief overview of the essential foundations undergirding Christian beliefs and show that Christianity is not a fantasy but a demonstrable reality.

Lest you fear that we are about to bombard you with Bible verses and Scripture proof texts to support our claims, we assure you that we will not. In fact, you may find this to be one of the strangest Christian books youve ever read. Nowhere in these pages do we support our arguments with biblical references. We realize that biblical proofs would be meaningless if you are skeptical of religion. Instead, we make every attempt to rely solely on reason, observation, evidence, and common sense in supporting our propositions and reaching our conclusions.

This book began as an update of a previous work titled In Search of Certainty, written by the two of us in 2003. Perceiving a rising need to address the secular mindset that now dominates Western culture, we have added considerable new material and reframed much of the content. Essentially, we ended up with an altogether new book. As we tackle head-on the questions that people of all generations are beginning to ask, we trust that it will help you find stability in a society rapidly descending into chaos. More importantly, we believe that it will reassure you that God does indeed exist.

Josh McDowell

Thomas Williams

Can we thrive in the disenchanted world of postmodern secularism?