Two minutes on a bus. That was the challenge a radio host once put to Alycia Wood: he sits down beside her, he has until his stop, and she has to prove God exists. She declined the terms and said she would rather give the question the time it deserves. This guide takes that slower route. It asks how you can reason toward God’s existence with a real person in a real conversation, using the method Wood describes in her Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields. You gather the clues, test every rival explanation against all of them, and see which one leaves nothing unaccounted for.
You can work through it alone with a notebook. It goes better with a small group and about an hour, because the exercises need more than one person weighing the evidence. If a clue seems weak to you at any point, say so and give your reason.
Open the case file
Wood studied criminal justice as an undergraduate. She says of that background, “I love to look and see, look and see where the clues lead.” Her illustration comes straight from that training, so begin there.
She describes a friend she knew was in a violent marriage, a friend who called her regularly. One week the call does not come. Wood goes to check on her. The door pops open when she touches the handle. Inside she sees blood on the walls and the house in disorder. She calls out and hears nothing. Then she asks, “is it irrational for me to conclude that something happened here?”
Watch what she does next. She raises a rival explanation against her own conclusion: a wild animal might have broken in. Then she tests it. As she puts it, “well, that may explain the blood on the walls, that may explain the disheveled house, but it doesn’t explain the fact that she didn’t call me.” Nothing rules the animal out as a possibility. Its trouble is the clue it cannot reach.
For whoever leads the group: this illustration involves domestic violence, and someone in the room may know that situation from the inside. Introduce it as Wood’s hypothetical and keep the discussion on the reasoning, not on details of violence. If the story touches something real for anyone, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
First observation
Have each person write down every clue in Wood’s story. You will likely find about four: the missed call, the door that opened, the blood, the disordered house. Some will add a fifth, which is what Wood already knew about the marriage. Ask whether any single clue would justify calling the police. Then ask whether the clues together would. Keep the two answers side by side, since the rest of the guide depends on the difference between them.
Exhibit work: gather the clues yourself
Wood names several features of the world that, in her view, point toward God. She sketches them quickly in the conversation, so treat what follows as her starting points. Your group will have to supply the fuller arguments, and the skeptic’s replies, yourselves.
- Morality. Wood observes that people struggle to decide what is right, yet react to the abuse of children by calling it wrong, as a fact about the act and more than a feeling. In her words, “we have this sense that there is a right and a wrong in this world, this sense of morality.”
- Origins. She notes that we look at an astonishing world and wonder how we came to be here at all. Her claim is brief: “This origin of the universe, I think is answered by the existence of God.” Why anything exists, and why it began, is the question this clue asks.
- Fine-tuning. Wood points to a universe that seems set with great precision. She describes it as “so precisely designed and fine-tuned, not just for life to exist, or not just for the world to exist,” and goes on to say it fits humans and animals actually existing in it. The clue concerns how narrow the conditions for life appear to be.
- Meaning. People want their lives to count. Wood says “we wanna know that it matters what we do, it matters what we say.” The clue is the desire itself, and whether it corresponds to anything real.
- Jesus. Wood notes that Jesus has been the most influential man in history, and she argues that “the existence of the Christian God is the best explanation for the life of Jesus, period.” She asserts this clue more than she develops it here, which is worth noticing.
The exhibit practice
Write each clue on its own card. Assign one card to each person or pair. For your clue, answer three things in writing:
- State the clue as a plain observation a skeptic could also accept. For example: people in many places condemn the abuse of children as wrong, not merely as unpleasant.
- Write the strongest explanation of that clue that does not involve God. Make it as good as a thoughtful atheist would make it.
- Rate how much weight the clue carries on its own: none, some, or a lot. Give one sentence of reasoning.
Spend real time on step two. If your group cannot state the alternative well, you are not yet in a position to say it fails. Wood herself calls these clues hints, and she does not claim any one of them settles the question alone.
Test the rival explanations against every clue
Bring the cards together on a table or wall. Now do with the God question what Wood did in the house. She states the test this way: “Let’s look at all of these different clues, these different hints, and what is the best possible explanation that answers every single one of them?”
Take each rival explanation your group wrote in step two and hold it against all five cards, not only the one it was written for. For each card, ask whether the explanation accounts for the clue, merely allows it, or leaves it as a brute fact. Then run the same test on the explanation Wood offers, a personal Creator.
Two cautions keep the test honest. Convergence only adds strength when the clues are reasonably independent, so if one clue turns out to be fully explained by another, count them once. And a clue rated “none” in your exhibit work drops out. Several zeros do not add up to a positive number. The method asks whether several limited pieces of evidence, each with some weight, lean the same way.
Agreement is not required. Two careful people can weigh the same card differently. Aim for something more modest: everyone able to say precisely where they differ and why.
The clue that names which God
Suppose your group concludes that something beyond nature probably exists. A skeptic will fairly ask which God that is. A first cause and a designer could be a distant power that never speaks. Wood answers by moving from the general clues to a specific one.
She does not think any single piece of evidence, apart from the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, could conclusively prove the Christian God exists. Her reasoning about the resurrection is direct: “we all know that people don’t usually rise from the dead, and so if this person does, maybe we should listen to him.” She also points to what Jesus claimed about himself. “He claimed to be the truth and to be divine, be God Himself.”
Here an investigator has to be strict. Wood’s confidence that the resurrection evidence is overwhelming is her assessment, stated in a conversation that does not lay the evidence out. This guide does not lay it out either. So write a fresh card: The resurrection: evidence not yet examined. Decide as a group how you will examine it, whether through a careful book on the historical case or a close study of the earliest New Testament accounts. Wood’s advice about sources applies: “I wouldn’t recommend just one because I think it’s good to gather a lot of information, and I don’t think one book just answers everything.”
What can you responsibly tell a skeptic at this stage? If the general clues hold, a claimed resurrection becomes a historical question that deserves examination. Whether it happened is the part of the case that carries the most weight, and it has to be tested on its own terms.
Scripture on the witness stand
Wood rejects the idea that Christian faith means accepting a book because someone handed it to you. She points first to the command Jesus called the first: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment” (Mark 12:30). Her main example is Thomas. Read John 20:24-31 aloud before anyone comments.
John is writing narrative, so read it first for what happened. List what Thomas required in verse 25. Then look at how Jesus responds: “Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27). Thomas answers, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Ask how much further that conclusion goes than “he is alive.”
From this scene Wood concludes that “God never demands uninformed acceptance of him.” Test that against the hardest verse in the passage: “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29). A skeptic could read that as praise for believing without evidence.
Let the group try an answer before reading on. Then read verse 31: “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name” (John 20:31). The people blessed in verse 29 have not seen with their own eyes, yet John hands them a written account to believe on. Discuss whether the contrast in the passage runs between evidence and no evidence, or between eyewitness sight and trust in testimony. Some readers will still feel a tension, and the group can leave it named.
Who carries a burden of proof?
Wood describes asking atheists a simple question: “Look, I can give you a lot of evidences for Christianity. What is your evidence for atheism?” When some reply that they need not prove anything, her answer is, “somebody is following blindly, but I don’t think it’s me.”
Weigh this carefully. One person says, I am not convinced God exists. That person reports a state of mind and carries a light burden. Another says, God does not exist, or offers an account of morality and the universe without God. That person is defending an explanation and owes reasons, as the believer does. Wood’s point lands against the second. Aimed at the first, it can sound like an attack on honest uncertainty.
Practice the distinction. One person states an unconvinced position. Another states a denial. A third says, in a sentence or two, what each owes the conversation. Then switch roles.
Questions for the group
- In your exhibit work, which clue did your group find easiest to explain without God, and did that explanation also handle the other four clues?
- Wood calls these clues “hints.” What would make a clue carry no weight at all, and did any of the five reach that point for you?
- Are the five clues independent of one another, or do some rise and fall together? How does your answer change the strength of the case?
- What would a fair skeptic need to see to accept the resurrection as historical, and what would a fair believer need to see to doubt it?
- Read John 20:29 and 20:31 side by side again. Does the passage support Wood’s claim about uninformed acceptance, complicate it, or both?
- Wood says plainly, “I absolutely have doubted Christianity.” How might an investigator’s habit of holding conclusions open to evidence shape the way you handle your own doubts?
Take the case into a real conversation
Sooner or later you will meet your own version of the bus challenge. Practice a slower response. In pairs, one person plays a friend who asks, sincerely, whether there is any reason to think God is real. The other resists delivering all five clues. Ask instead which features of the world your friend already finds hard to explain. Pick one clue together, state the rival explanations fairly, and agree on what you would need to look at next. Then trade places, and notice whether either conversation ended with a shared next step.
Wood describes her own response to doubt in four words: “Let’s go find the answer.” Before you leave, each person writes down one clue to examine more closely this month and one source to read in testing it. She gives the reason the work is worth doing: “I don’t have to forsake my mind in order to believe.”