Most people believe in God because divine attributes like eternity and perfection are woven into the fabric of our thinking. We reason with categories absent from this universe, yet they seem to exist only in God.
God is called eternal, though nothing in daily life lasts forever. Nothing in the universe is timeless or everlasting—yet we possess the idea of such a thing. Where did it come from? It couldn’t have arisen from the temporal world.
God is described as immutable, though everything we encounter changes. Nothing we’ve ever experienced is unchanging or permanent. How, then, did this notion of immutability enter our thought? It clearly didn’t emerge from the flux we inhabit.
God is conceived as infinite, yet nothing around us is without limit. Still, we can imagine the unlimited, the infinite, the boundless. But where did this idea come from? Everywhere we look, we see boundaries and ends.
God is said to be perfect, yet nothing in our experience is flawless. We strive for perfection but have never encountered the perfect or the complete. Nevertheless, we possess a clear conception of it. Again, where did it come from?
God is affirmed as absolute, yet everything in our world is contingent; each part exists through its relation to others. We think of the absolute, the self-existent, the necessary—though all that we know is contingent, dependent, relative, and conditional. So where did such a notion arise?
Perhaps these ideas correspond to nothing real. Yet that seems unlikely—concepts so universal and coherent rarely spring from nowhere. Far more plausible is that they correspond to God, built into our cognitive structure since the dawn of consciousness.
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