Does God exist? A question baffling human since their beginning in time and space. New Age atheism and its stellar proponents like Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet and their tribe have their rebuttals of theism rooted in a concept, which states that ‘God is a being or an entity that is within or alongside the universe’. They launch their vitriolic against this supreme being, while Thomas Aquinas makes a decisive point that God is not a highest being, which in Latin is ‘ens summum’, but rather God is ‘ipsum esse subsistens’ translated as ‘the sheer act to be itself’.

New age atheists are attacking a straw man when they falsely believe that God is a thing in the world or is the sum total of the genus ‘being’. In reality, Judeo-Christian teaching postulates that ‘God is the simple, non-composite, unconditioned and uncaused first cause of a conditioned universe that holds it together and sustains it’. Nothing best expounds this ontological truth than Acts of the Apostles, 17:28, “In Him, we live and move and have our being”. An appropriate analogy is that of the universe as a fish existing in an ocean of God’s being. Thus, modern atheism is making a category error when they declare that advancements in science nullify God hypothesis through their favorite phrase “God of the Gaps”. Science studies phenomena and physical processes within the universe, through action and application, tests and results and forming axiomatic conclusions. But how does science study and research into a being who is the creator of the universe, outside the purview of space and time? Can the existence of God be disproven by similar methodology as that of a laboratory experiment?

Aristotle said, “There is nothing in the intellect that was not before in the senses". This is the main impediment in knowing God. We are dependent for our knowledge on sense perception and ideas we form are derived from experience of creatures. Language is formed to express these ideas that come under the purview of our sense experience and only have meaning within our sphere of experience. Thus, we cannot have a priori knowledge (through the idea) of God because our intellect/reason starts with phenomenal sense experiences and ends with sensible objects but in proofs of God's existence, it proceeds to an Object infinitely transcending all sensible objects. In so far as the material objects reveal the character of the Transcendent, the intellect can know something of its nature, but it will never be perfect knowledge because no sense object in the universe can reveal adequately the nature of the Transcendent. This is the reason atheists in all ages pound the desk of theists, screaming "show us God". The existence of God is not a scientific question but rather a metaphysical one.

God’s existence can only be proved, a posteriori, through the examination of God's effects. We cannot see electricity, magnetic fields, cosmic background wave radiation, dark matter and dark energy, but only measure their effects. On a mundane level, two lovers irrevocably engulfed in the overflowing reality of love cannot perceive it with the five senses, but experience the effects of its mystery and beauty in their persona and lives. Even though such experiences are subjective, they are real, meaningful and valuable. Higgs Bosons (so called God Particle), Pi Mesons and Vector Bosons, all considered as the primary building blocks of matter are all virtual particles, spontaneously popping into existence before vanishing. Hebrews 11:3 affirms, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen is not made out of what was visible”.

There is a significant lack of accounting of objective morality for atheists. If human beings are the result of the same impersonal forces that produced rats and rodents, then how come we have moral obligations and have intrinsic worth according to atheistic philosophy founded on naturalism? Why are there prisons, law and retributive justice for violating the sanctity of life? Did a combination of chance and matter together with time create the human brain? How can a rational mind conceive the possibility, that a group of monkeys, transformed themselves into poets, philosophers and geniuses? Can something as embodied and limited as a human intellect pronounce judgment on at least the philosophical possibility of the absolute?

Most atheists are moral objectivists too and subscribe to the evolutionary theory and scientific naturalism. They know that to rape or murder is wrong as it is an affront to human dignity and destroys the social fabric. But the issue here is a difference between epistemology and being. Knowledge about universal human rights, intrinsic human dignity, moral obligation and moral responsibility is one thing and grounding the morality in a reasonable world view is another. Scientists are not able to theoretically verify Darwinian principles of "natural selection" and "random variations" accounting for complexity in life forms in its evolutionary journey! Are there examples of genetic mutation or evolutionary process increasing information in the genome structure? Even if the physical universe is reduced to its lowest denomination, does that physical entity have the cause of its own existence? According to the theory of contingency, the cause for its existence lies outside of it and therefore can never be self-caused implying that the first-cause has to be necessarily non-physical.

All evidence reiterates the fact that the Universe in itself is not the un-caused first cause. Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding from a singularity event we now know as the Big Bang. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the universe will have an eventual death as the degree of disorder (entropy) increases with time which defies an eternally existent universe. Penzias and Wilson discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background Wave (CMB) radiation, pointing to still lingering remnant heat from the Big Bang. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity showed space-time and matter are co-relative, sprung into existence simultaneously and therefore had a beginning. Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem rules out eternal universes when they formulated an elegant proof to a boundary to all past time for cosmology since the Hubble’s Constant - which measures the rate of expansion in our inflationary universe- to be greater than zero. Universal constants (mathematical values that sustain the universe) are fine-tuned to extremely precise values at the beginning of the Big Bang, that allow for the creation of galaxies and stars, life and love, executed into perfection by an Intelligent Designer with an inscrutable will and an infinite mind.

The Japanese built Fugaku is a petascale supercomputer that has a staggering computing speed of 1015 floating point operations per second. To put things into perspective, the cosmological constant (the expansion speed of the universe) is fine-tuned 10 to the power of 120. The strong nuclear force is exactly 10 to the power of 40 as that of gravity. Nobel laureate physicist, Roger Penrose of Oxford university has calculated the low entropy condition (highly ordered) at the beginning of the universe occurring by chance to 10 to the power of 10 (123). This value is beyond human comprehension. The blatant irony is that atheism has no qualms in crediting Fugaku supercomputer as the product of an intelligent mind and will of a dominant species on planet earth but they cannot rationally conclude that such precise fine-tuning of the fundamental constants (numbering 26) that makes our known universe possible as the work of an intelligent designer. This teleological argument for proof of God’s existence is often met with naïve response from New Age atheists whose defense is that universe just popped into existence. Who should be accused for magical thinking? Atheists or theists? The universe was never a chance event.

By the same faculty of reason and quest for inquiry which gave birth to science, we can deduce that if there is a Creator of the universe, then he has to be an immaterial, space less and timeless being who fashioned our universe to existence from another dimension. Against the vastness of time and immensity of the universe, how can, then a human being know God or deny God with his limited, weak and embodied intellect? If God wants to make Him known to man, then He, as from time immemorial, communicates his mysteries to the restless and wonder-eyed seeker through Revelation. Therefore, experience is the paramount and inevitable part of knowing God as much as the scriptures and logic are indispensable for knowing about Him. Intimacy of knowledge defeats conception. The more He reveals Himself, the more the mystery unfolds and more the mystery remains...