Sarah and I have spent the weekend in the small village of Åsele in northern Sweden, doing evangelism with the pancake church at a big market fair. We’ve had the opportunity to talk to, pray with and love hundreds of people, mostly youths. One girl received salvation there and then after she was healed in her neck, many others received Bibles and were very interested in getting to know God more.

On Saturday evening I hung a paper plate around my neck that said “Evidence for God in 2 minutes”. Needless to say it caught lot of attention, and I got to have apologetic and evangelistic discussions with at least 25 people. I illustrated my points using my phone, which was very effective and increased the attention rate of my listeners even more.

“This phone is very unique”, I said, “because it has no cause for its existence. It popped into being out if nothing without a cause, and now I use it to call people and take photos. Do you believe me?” Nobody said yes, some looked at me as if I was a madman and others just laughed out loud. Then I explained that of course this is not the case, everything that begins to exist must have a cause. “So what do you think is the cause for the big bang and the origin of the universe?”

By now the expression of my listeners’ faces changed. They realised that it would be just as absurd to claim that the universe came from nothing or that it caused itself as if one claims that this is how my phone originated. I then explained that the cause of the universe must be immaterial, outside of time and space, and very powerful in order to construct such a complex entity as the universe. “This is what we mean when we say that God created the universe”, I said.

I then went on to the teleological argument: “OK, this phone didn’t pop into being for no reason. But how do you think it was produced? Was it carefully designed by engineers and manufactured in a factory with high precision for it to function properly, or is it a result of random chance where different minerals and metals happened to melt together in a volcano?” When they acknowledged that its complexity requires design, I talked about the fine-tuning of the universe and how the creation that surrounds us carries all the characteristics of intelligent design.

Finally, I claimed that my phone was evil and had treated me very badly, so I will drag it into court. When they once again agreed that my claim was absurd, I talked about how we on naturalism are just a bunch of blind atoms bumping around without any souls or objective morality. Nothing is ontologically good or evil in an atheist universe, but that’s obviously not the universe we’re living in since everyone knows that some things are objectively wrong. Hence, God exists.