(Psalm 14:1) of saying there is no God. The Christian has not only the obligation to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you... (I Peter 3:15), but an obligation to carry the Gospel message to a lost and dying world (Mark 16:15-16, et al.). There will be times when carrying the Gospel message to the world will entail setting forth the case for the existence of God. In addition, we need to remember that Christians are not agnostics. The agnostic is the person who says that God's existence is unknowable. As difficult as it is to believe, some Christians take that same stance in regard to God's existence. They assert that they believe there is a God, but that they cannot know it. They state that God's existence cannot be proved. `This is false!' God's existence is both `knowable' and `provable.' Acceptance of God's existence is not some blind leap into the dark as so many have erroneously asserted. The Christian's faith is not a purely emotional, subjective leap, but instead is a `firm conviction' regarding facts based upon reasonable evidence. God's existence can be proved to any fair-minded person. Granted, we do not mean by the word proved that God's existence can be scientifically demonstrated to human senses as one might, for example, prove that a sack of potatoes weighs ten pounds. But we need to be reminded (especially in our day of scientific intimidation) that empirical evidence (that based solely upon experiment and/or observation) is not the only basis for establishing a provable case. Legal authorities recognize the validity of a `prima facie' case. Such a case exists when adequate evidence is available to establish the presumption of a fact which, unless such can be refuted, `legally stands as a fact'. Inferential proof (the culmination of many lines of evidence into only one possible conclusion) is an invaluable part of a `prima facie' case which simply cannot be refuted. But an important question which serves as a preface to the case for God's existence is this: From whence has come the idea of God in man's mind? The inclination to be religious is universally and peculiarly a human trait. As one writer observed, even today the evidence indicates that no race or tribe of men, however degraded and apparently atheistic, lacks that spark of religious capacity which may be fanned and fed into a mighty flame. If, therefore, man is incurably religious--and has the idea of God in his mind--and if we assume that the world is rational, it is impossible that a phenomenon so universal as religion could be founded upon illusion. The question is highly appropriate therefore: what is the source of this religious tendency within man? Alexander Campbell, in his celebrated debate April 13-23, 1829 in Cincinnati, Ohio with Robert Owen, provided the answer to this question in a very positive fashion. He asked Owen from whence the idea of God had come in man's mind. Owen (and all skeptics) had (have) stated that the idea of God has not come from reason (skeptics hold, of course, that the concept is unreasonable), and that it has not come from revelation. Campbell pressed Owen to tell him from whence the idea of God `had' come. Owen retorted, by imagination. Campbell then quoted both John Locke and David Hume, two philosophers who are highly respected in the secular community. Hume stated that the creative power of the mind amounts to nothing more than the faculty of combining, transposing, augmenting and diminishing the materials afforded to us by sense and experience. The imagination, it turns out, has `no creative power'. Neither reason nor imagination create. Reason, like a carpenter's yardstick, is a measure, not an originator. Imagination works only on those items already in the mind; it does not create anything new. [Sigmund Freud, German psychoanalyst of the first part of the 20th century, attempted to explain God's existence by stating that man had indeed formed the heavenly father f

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5833
Approximate Pages = 23 (250 words per page double spaced)