Witnessing to Atheists

It may be a surprise to many of you that at one dark point in my young adult life, I considered myself an atheist.  Of course, I didn't admit this to anyone, but it was true.  I no longer believed there was a God.  I looked at Christianity as a religion of tradition and the Bible as an ancient book of stories and nothing more.  But things changed for me in 1999 when I was at the age of twenty-four.  That's when I came to believe in Jesus Christ and I committed my life to knowing Him and His Word better, as well as serving Him.  Though it embarrasses me to talk about what I once believed or didn't believe, I have found that it helps those who are trying to witness to those who call themselves atheists, like I once was.  A member of our Church recently asked for my advice because they had been challenged by an atheist to give proof that there was a God.  Since I get asked that kind of thing from time to time, I decided to post the advice that I gave to this person, beginning with the personal motivation behind becoming an atheist.

The main reason why most people become atheists is because if there is no God, there is no moral standard other than one that we make for ourselves.  That is the reason why I became an atheist.  It was later that evolution and other so-called "sciences" provided what seemed like logical reasons for me to think that way.  It took God showing me the difference that He could make in my personal life to convince me that I was wrong about His existence.  When it comes down to it, if God is not real, believing in Him could not change my life in the way that it has been changed.  For me, my life is the greatest evidence that God is real.  Now, the atheists that you witness to may not admit that they have rejected the existence of God for personal, moral reasons, rather than reasonable, logical reasons, but that is probably the motivation behind it.  Most of the time, this is something that they will have to come to realize on their own.  Pointing it out to them, will probably only end the conversation before it has truly begun.

One of the keys to getting an atheist thinking about the existence of God is to point that person to science.  Science has been able to come up with many theories to explain the existence of matter and the existence of life, but it cannot explain the ultimate cause.  Many scientists, though not all, say that "the Big Bang" caused matter to expand and form stars, planets, and all the things in the universe, but they cannot explain where the matter came from that supposedly expanded in the first place.  It is a law of nature that something cannot come from nothing, but the universe requires a beginning, a cause to have started it all.  The only way something can come from nothing is through supernatural means rather than natural, which is what the Bible describes in Hebrews 11:3, saying that "...the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible."  In other words, God made everything from nothing.  That's the only explanation for where matter came from, regardless of whether you argue the Big Bang with him or not.  I like the old saying that "God spoke and 'Bang!' it happened!"

Also, when speaking with atheists, the theory of evolution is a subject that will come up.  Evolutionists believe that they have evidence that creatures can mutate into other species over time (what they call macro-evolution), but there is actually no hard evidence of that.  They try to use adaptation (which they call micro-evolution) as an example of how evolution happens, but the problem is that no matter how much a species adapts to its environment, it is still that same species.  The biggest flaw to be found in Darwin's theory is that at the cellular level, he expected that science would find that things are much more simple, but the technology of his day did not permit him to test that part of his theory.  But we can now and what scientists have found is that life is much more complicated on the cellular level than Darwin ever imagined.  For example, every cell contains the DNA of that creature, which is essentially the schematics and the instructions for how every part of that creature operates.  It is essentially programming.  Programming does not happen at random, it requires a programmer who knows what they are doing to make things work.  DNA is essentially hundreds of thousands of pages worth of information that is extremely precise to make life function.  That is why many micro-biologists who still do not believe in the God of the Bible say that there is evidence for an intelligent designer in every cell of our bodies.  Christians believe that designer is the Creator God who is revealed to us in the Bible.

Evolutionists also often say that the many similarities between species proves that we all have a common ancestor, such as the similarities between apes and humans, but that only reinforces the idea that we have the same designer in common.  To say that life, even in its simplest form, came into being by sheer chance through evolution, is like saying that a tornado could tear through a junkyard, assemble a 747 airplane, paint United Airlines on the side, and have it ready to fly.  There is much more evidence for the Creator than there is for evolution.

This is just the tip of the iceberg concerning what you can say to atheists.  Don't be too disappointed if atheists don't want to listen to anything you have to say.  Though they may have challenged you, they don't really want to be challenged back.  But I am confident that you can plant some seeds to get an atheist thinking.  That person wouldn't be the first atheist to challenge Christianity and then later become a Christian  (C.S. Lewis was one of them, along with Lee Strobel the author of "The Case for Christ").  Make sure to pray that the same thing will happen to that person as well and then watch what God can do.

The Bible says in Psalm 14:1 that "the fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"  I was once a fool, but praise God because He still saves and changes the minds of fools like me!