A conversation with an Atheist

I was eating a bowl of cereal in my room on Wednesday night, when my friend Josh (name changed), walked in. He collapsed on my bed and started to talk about a test we had during the week. Whilst he was talking, I interrupted and said an audible prayer. He looked at me as if to say, “Why are you praying? The test has already been taken.” I saw the look and answered that God works in mysterious ways. That was the statement needed to start the conversation that followed.

“God!” He said with a punctuated taunt, embellishing his voice. He continued by saying that God does not exist. That was when my attention was fully drawn. I switched off the TV that I had earlier switched on to calm my nerves. I asked him if he was atheist or agnostic. He replied that he was an atheist. I asked whether he knew God didn’t exist, or if he just believed so. He replied again that he knew that God didn’t exist, and atheists had no beliefs. I found some faults in that statement, and I decided to challenge it. I asked again, if he knew everything that was there to know in the universe – a question to which he reluctantly replied in the negative. I followed his response by asking him if he could then conclude that God does not exist since he does not know everything. I also went on to elucidate that the existence of God could be one of the things that he didn’t know.

“There is no evidence for God,” he said. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” I reminded him. “What do you mean by no evidence for God?” I asked. He paused and then asked me if I had ever seen, heard, felt, tasted or even smelled God. A question to which I replied in a confident “No.” He then asked me to explain how I could believe in something I never experienced. I paused and looked around; I walked up to a socket, removed the plug of the laptop charger, and summoned Josh to put his hand into the socket. He looked at me as if I had gone completely insane because the command was totally out of context and outrageous. I asked him why he was reluctant to put his hand inside the socket. He said that he would get electrocuted if he did it. I told him that it wasn’t possible, and I got a further look of amazement. He explained, with all the physics jargon, voltage and current, and how it could electrocute someone. I laughed then said “So you believe in voltage even when you haven’t seen, heard, tasted, felt or smelled it? Yet you find it difficult to believe in God. If you believe in only what your five senses tell you, go to the top of Mt. Everest and jump down. Then when you are about to crash to your death, I know you would believe in gravitational force.” I could tell he got my point because of the silence that followed.

He asked immediately, “Are you saying that we should believe in something that our five senses can’t comprehend? If I tell you about a flying spaghetti monster, would you believe it?”
I replied, “No.”
He asked, ‘Then why should anyone believe in God?”
“Relax,” I urged. “I would not believe in the monster story, but not because I can’t see it. The fact that I can’t see it, does not exclude the possibility that it exists. I would not believe it because there is no evidence for your claims.”
‘‘Are you saying that there is proof of God?” he asked.
I paused. “I cannot prove that God exists, after all, I do not know everything in the world. But I can show you reasonable evidence for His existence. That’s where faith comes in,” I responded.
“Faith..hmph,” he taunted. “I knew you were going to get to that. Faith is just a blind leap into the dark,” he retorted.
I took a sip of milk from my cup, and wiped off the milk from my upper lip. “Faith is not a blind leap into the dark, it is actually, in my opinion, an optimistic step, guided by overwhelmingly compelling evidence of something into a marvelous light and more knowledge of that thing. After all, God compels us to love Him with our mind, and he summons us to reason together with him.”

“What is the evidence of God? I don’t want you to say, ‘The Bible says He exists.’ That is circular reasoning.” He said with a certain glint in his eyes.
I smiled again and said, “I don’t know why atheists spend years of their life fighting against something they are so sure does not exist. Anyway, the evidence for the wind is in the things it does, likewise with God. We can see God in the works of His hand. We can see the fine tuning of the universe, the complexity of the seemingly simplest form of life- ask a cosmologist, and he can tell you that a higher form of intelligence is likely to be behind the complexity of what we see. The next evidence is the Bible. Now take this task, go to a community, pick ten people from the same culture, language and in the same generation, and ask them to write about a subject like life. You will notice the vast difference in their perspectives. But look at the Bible, it was written by 40 different authors, over a period of 1500 years, by people of different cultures, languages and education, and it spoke about many subjects, and their writings are a unity. This cannot be explained by coincidence or mere collusion. Many people have also tried to destroy the Book, over the years. People like princes of Babylon and Egypt. Monarchs and Emperors have tried to destroy the Book to no avail. Who do you think protected it? I believe it is God.”

“The Bible also defines some clearly scientific principles that were not known until later periods. For example, Air has weight- this was stated in Job 28:25, and was discovered by Torricelli. The Universe and Time had a beginning, Isaiah 42:5, 2Timothy 1:9. The universe was created from the invisible Hebrew 11:3. The earth is spherical, Job 26:10. The universe is expanding, Isaiah 45:12. This was just observed by Hubble’s telescope. When Einstein found out that the universe was expanding based on his own calculations, he tried to include a fudge constant in an attempt to prove that the universe had no beginning necessitating a beginner. He, however, realized his mistake calling it the biggest mistake of his life. I admit the Bible is not a science textbook and we should not look for E=mc^2 in it, but my point is that for some nomadic men who grew up tending sheep to know these things, without any help is highly unlikely.

“What of Prophecy? Amongst many is the fulfillment of the coming back together of the state of Israel in 1948 as prophesied in the bible. How do you explain that away?”

It was getting dark now and I was about to round up the conversation. “The last evidence for God is the man Jesus Christ. Arguably the most important man that ever walked the surface of the earth. He was the image of the invisible God. He showed us God as a loving and caring Being,” I said.
“But some people do not believe that Jesus even existed.”
I laughed and said, “Excluding the biblical authors; secular historians like Flavius Josephus, the Talmud, Cornelius, Pliny, Suetonius, Hadrian, Trajan, Lucian amongst others; and even excluding biblical prophecies, I wonder what the Jews have to say. They were his biggest enemies, and could have killed Christianity right from the cradle, by stating that Jesus did not exist. What of his followers, who died brutal deaths? Would they die for a lie? I won’t, would you? That leaves that assumption as outrageous.”

I had driven my point home, and I had given my evidence, it was left for him to accept it. As I was still basking in the euphoria of sharing my faith with an atheist, I heard Josh say “If a loving God exists, why do we have so much evil around us. We must then conclude that God created evil since we say that He created everything. If we say that He did not create evil, then we must conclude that He is not powerful enough to get rid of it.” I looked into his eyes, and contemplated on how to answer this question. I said a quick silent prayer and asked for wisdom. This is going to be a long evening. (to be continued….)

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