By William Fox on SpinningEarthComics.com

INTRO: This is an excerpt from a back-and-forth discussion I had with a freind several years back who was questioning the existence of God. There’s obviously much more to be said on this subject, but I decided to leave the excerpt mostly the same as it was in the original conversation.

For a long while, I looked at the world as nothing more than dust. To be honest, I never really doubted that there was a being who claimed to be God, but I just figured that He was another part of that dust, so not really a god at all. When I really began to contemplate my existence, though, that is when I began to think that maybe I was incorrect. Really, if my existence was nothing more than dust pushing around other dust, then what was the point? In my heart, I knew that there was more to me than that.

Since that time, the clearest evidence to me of God is the existence of love. If there is no God, then there is no such thing as love. The best that you can argue for is the random mishap attraction of dust to other dust, but love itself is a fallacy.

And yet, I know love to be true. I’m not talking about the type of emotional swooning that you see in fairy tales where a handsome prince sweeps a beautiful princess off of her feet and rides her off into a sunset of happily ever after. No, I’m talking about utter true love, the ultimate love, self-sacrifice.

How do I know if someone is good? Well, I could easily argue that people who seem to do good for other people are doing that to gain attention for themselves so that they can parade themselves in front of others. In fact, I think that this happens quite often. Why is it that celebrities so often give away millions to some charitable cause and receive loads of recognition from it? Is it truly because they care? Or is it because they want the attention for themselves?

On the contrary, though, I find it difficult to argue that if someone is willing to give their life for the betterment of someone else, that it is selfish. Likewise, if someone is willing to give their life for someone who betrayed them, how much more is that self-sacrificing? How much more is that true love? Take, for example, a father jumping in front of a bullet for his son who just spent all of the family’s money on drugs.

If we are just dust, then when we do sacrifice ourselves, we are just dust falling over for dust, nothing more. If, however, there is a God who gave us souls and declared that there is more to our existence than just being dust, then there really is such thing as true love. Then there really is such thing as self-sacrifice. Then we actually do have a purpose.

I believe that God created us so that we can consistently truly love each other, so that we can always be ready to completely self-sacrifice ourselves for each other with no expectation of something in return. Does that mean that we always do that? By no means. I also believe that God gave us the freedom of choice to decide to truly love or not truly love.

On a different note, science has never seemed contrary to God to me. Rather, I see science as the study of what God created. Here’s a scenario. If I were on a beach and I found a brilliant looking ticking pocket-watch, would I look at it and say, “Wow! What an amazing thing that randomly formed!” Of course I wouldn’t. In fact, if I were to take that same pocket-watch and show it to my friends and claim that it formed by random natural causes, they would claim I was insane. Likewise, the universe works like clockwork. It is extremely organized. Heck, the whole purpose of science is to study how the surrounding universe works in an organized clockwork-like pattern. Or if I were to walk into a car factory, I could never claim that it was created through happenstance. Yet any single living cell is far more advanced and efficient than any factory that exists today.

Organization doesn’t just happen. I could shake the already designed parts of a pocket-watch in my hands for a trillion years and they are never going to land in a ticking pocket-watch formation. It is only when I cognitively assemble the pieces that I could expect true organization.

These are just two of many reasons as to why I believe God exists. The intricacies of the universe are far more organized than the most elaborate clock that the most brilliant human could ever create, thus pointing to a far more brilliant creator. And because true self-sacrificial love does exist; we are far more valuable than just meaningless dust. You are far more valuable than just meaningless dust.