DENNIS PRAGER
NATIONAL RADIO SHOW HOST, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST, ORCHESTRAL CONDUCTOR
Tens of millions of people around the world have watched Dennis Prager’s videos, and millions more listen to his national radio show. He has written ten bestselling books, and lectured internationally, including in Russian in Russia and in Hebrew in Israel. In 2011, he co-founded Prager University (PragerU), which has received over five billion views, in more than a hundred countries.
The third volume of The Rational Bible, his five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible, was published in the fall of 2022. The Rational Bible is the best-selling Bible commentary in America today.
An orchestral conductor by avocation, he most recently conducted a Haydn symphony with the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Dennis Prager was a lecturer in Russian and Jewish history at Brooklyn College; a Fellow at the Columbia University School of International Affairs, where he did his graduate work at the Russian and Middle East Institutes; and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
He has engaged in interfaith dialogue with Catholics at the Vatican, Muslims in the Persian Gulf, Hindus in India, and Protestants at Christian seminaries throughout America. For ten years, he conducted a weekly interfaith dialogue on radio with representatives of virtually every religion in the world.
For 20 years, he has been writing a syndicated weekly column (Creators Syndicate). His writings have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Jewish Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. The American Jewish Press Association awarded Prager its First Prize for Excellence in Commentary for his Jewish writings.a
No Proof — Just Overwhelming Evidence
DENNIS PRAGER
There is no proof that God exists. But this means nothing. None of the most important things in life can be proven to exist. We cannot prove that good, evil, beauty, love, the conscience, or even the mind exists. Why? Because only the existence of the physical can be proven. Therefore, the existence of God, who by definition is not physical, cannot be proven.
What we have is overwhelming evidence that God exists, just as we have overwhelming evidence that love, good, evil, beauty, and thought exist. The analogy is precise. How do we know that love exists? We know by the way it is manifested. When we see a parent love a child, we know love exists. And when we read about the torture of innocent people, we know that evil exists. So, too, we know that an intelligible world means an Intelligence exists. Given that nothing creates itself, the idea that everything came about by itself is impossible.
When I read about the almost infinite and irreducible complexity of the brain or the eye or, for that matter, of a mere unicellular creature, I have no doubt that a Creator was involved. And just as the idea that the world came about by itself is absurd, so, too, is the idea that life came from non-life or that consciousness came from non-consciousness.
In short, belief in a Creator is the most rational conclusion one can draw from existence. The one rational argument that atheists offer is the existence of unjust suffering: If a good God exists, why is there unjust suffering? There is no perfect answer to this question, but there are at least two compelling responses, one focusing on human- caused suffering and one on that stemming from nature. The unjust suffering that humans cause — what we call “evil” — is largely the result of human free will. Presumably, the Creator could have created human-like beings who could do no evil. But that would render life as we know it meaningless, as those beings would be robots, not human beings.
With regard to the problem of the suffering that nature causes — disease, earthquakes, etc. – I offer the compelling response that an American rabbi, Milton Steinberg, articulated: The believer has to account for the existence of one thing – unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else.
Finally, there is one other reason why I am convinced that there is a God: the consequences of atheism. When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. This truism is attributed to the English writer, G.K. Chesterton. It isn’t religious people, for example, who believe that men give birth; it is secular people who believe this inversion of reality. And the idea originated in the most secular institution in the Western world – the university. Consider too, that it was godless regimes and ideologies that committed nearly every genocide of the twentieth century. The order of the natural world argues for God’s existence, and so does the moral and intellectual disorder of the godless world.