There are some people who say that going to church to worship God is a waste of time because there is no God and it’s silly to believe in one.  If someone asked me, “Do you believe in God?” I should say, “Yes, certainly”.  If the person went on to ask me, “Why do you believe?”, my reply would be, “Because I find it so much more difficult not to believe”.

In fact there are very good reasons which make it easier to believe that there is a God than to disbelieve.

General consent

All over the world people have always believed that there is a Being far greater than ourselves whom we call God.  Everywhere you will find some sort of belief, though many of the ideas are non-Christian and may seem strange to us.

You’ve probably heard of Stonehenge – it’s in the south of England, on Salisbury Plain.  There you can see the remains of a circle of great blocks of stone called Stonehenge.  Long ago the ancient Britons used to gather at Stonehenge to worship the sun at a great service on Midsummer’s Day, the longest day of the year.  They saw how the sun makes things grow when the winter is over, and so they thought the sun must be God.

The ancient Greeks believed in many gods, and used to think that they all lived together in a fine palace on top of a mountain called Mount Olympus.

In some parts of the world today, people make figures of wood or stone which they worship.  From time to time they hold festivals after nightfall, dancing in the firelight in honour of their god or gods.

So all over the world, whether in great cathedrals like St Paul’s in London or in clearings in the rain forests, people show their belief in some sort of god.  They differ in the ideas they have about God but they all agree that there is a God.  But this isn’t a good enough reason why we should believe too.  There are much better reasons.

The Universe as a long series of causes

Everything we see is the effect of a previous cause; and every cause is itself the effect of an earlier cause.  So one can think of the Universe as being a long series of causes.  Christians believe that God is the first cause who set the series going and who is himself uncaused.  If there were no God, it would mean this series of cause and effect would stretch back into the past without any beginning.