From time to time I encounter atheists who absolutely believe there is no God and ridicule anyone who does. It can be very frustrating to try to discuss this rationally with an atheist since they seem to have left their rational minds in order to justify being willful sinners. To believers, atheist justifications for rejecting God are so transparently the same justifications of the lost; we try to pierce their delusion of moral and intellectual superiority to show them why they need Jesus.
Yet, to those who don’t ever really think about God, Jesus and the Bible, they blindly accept what atheists claim as Christian’s use of faith as their only proof God is real. They then smear the experience of faith as the foundation of belief to try to prove God does not exist. It is a weak argument but has been effective. The truth is, there is more real proof God exists than what atheists offer as proof He doesn’t.
Because atheists cannot disprove God’s existence and offer no real argument to support this belief, more often than not they resort to name-calling and try to disparage belief in God by attacking Christians, Jesus and especially the Bible. They think that leveling hateful comments is an argument, when it is just an attempt to deflect attention away from the fact they cannot prove there is no God.
By contrast, Christians have proof there is a God. We can point to the Bible as a book of supernatural origin; how the prophecies contained in it communicates what God wants humanity to know about what the future holds, so that we can know He exists. In fact, He tells us this himself:
“Remember this, and be assured; recall it to mind, you transgressors.
Remember the former things long past, For I am God, and there is no other, I am God, and there is no one like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure” (Isaiah 46:8-10, emphasis added).
“Declaring the end from the beginning” means He tells us what will happen before it does. This is one method God uses to prove He exists. About one third of the Bible contains prophecies and many have been fulfilled, are being fulfilled or are yet to be fulfilled, in their proper time and order. Thus far, the accuracy of fulfilled prophecy is 100 percent. God doesn’t lie.
The Bible is also a remarkable book in that it revealed much about the nature of God’s creation centuries before it was discovered and more commonly known. For example, how could “bronze age nomads” have known the earth was round rather than flat, according to the belief held by the rest of the then-educated world? (Isaiah 40:22; Job 26:10) Or that the earth hangs suspended in space with no visible support? (Job 26:7).
God also tells us the universe is expanding (Isaiah 40:22). The Bible shows us from God’s perspective what modern science understands as foundational physics, and revealed long before what Einstein figured out about the nature of energy and mass in his famous equation E=MC²:
There is also a conservation principle of mass. Mass is the property of an object to resist a change in its motion. Things that possess a lot of mass are very heavy; things with little mass are light. We can move mass from place to place, and transform one kind of mass into another (by a chemical reaction for example), but, just like energy, mass cannot be created nor destroyed. So both mass and energy are conserved. …Conservation of mass-energy is exactly what we would expect on the basis of Scripture. First, the Bible indicates that no new material can come into existence.
John 1:3 states that all things were made by God, and nothing has come into existence apart from Him. Furthermore, God ended His work of creation by the seventh day of the creation week, according to Genesis 2:2. Since only God can bring new things into existence from nothing, and since God ended His work of creation by the seventh day, no new material will come into existence today. [1]
Most convincing of all, the Bible contains thousands of authentication codes which prove human beings could not have constructed it on their own. These codes also prove God wants us to know He is communicating to us through the pages of the Bible. Jewish scholars have known for centuries about the code, yet it was Ivan Panin, an agnostic Russian scholar turned Christian, who made it his life’s work to uncover and catalogue the hidden heptadic structure within the Bible.
Heptadic means “seven.” Hidden within the Bible’s pages in its original languages are hidden structures of “sevens.” These are so numerous and so intriguing, their sheer number, scope and statistical improbability absolutely prove the supernatural origin of the Bible. Human beings may have been the scribes God used to write it all down, but it was God’s Holy Spirit who dictated the contents. [2]
But it doesn’t stop there. The fact that God’s authentication code is decipherable using mathematic, also demonstrates God wants us ALL to find Him within the pages of the Bible. Of course He encourages us to dig deeper into the Word to uncover the treasures contained there, yet using math to prove He exists (with simple, testable and measurable means to do it) isn’t the first proof that comes to mind for most believers.
Panin used math to demonstrate God’s existence and that He is the author of the Bible, which proves it is of supernatural origin. This is a very effective counter argument to atheism, because it appeals to those who believe secular science is superior to religious faith. God never ceases to amaze me, in that He provides for each of us the exact path we need and meets us at our level of understanding. God hides things in His book which ask us to come looking for Him, and left hints to tell us as much (Proverbs 25:2). Astounding!
The very fact that God used a hidden code to communicate to us that He exists and wants us to discover Him, also demonstrates He desires communication. He even provides so many levels of experience and ways to reach each of us as individuals in order to communicate, this too, confirms He exists and is real.
Finally, atheists have nothing to offer in evidence except a belief God doesn’t exist, with no “proof” other than what their five senses tell them. Our senses are limited and can be easily fooled. And if we limit our human experience based only on our senses, how do you account for the rich and deep emotional experiences of human existence as expressed through love, poetry, or the spiritual dimensions of child birth, for example?
Reduced to only our senses and base instincts, atheists rob human beings of their 3-fold construction: body, mind and spirit, made in God’s image. God’s Word reflects all the ways He wants to reach each and every one of us through body, mind and spiritual knowledge.
It takes much more “faith” to believe there is no God, than all the real proof Christians have knowing He does exist.
Endnotes
[1] https://answersingenesis.org/answers/books/taking-back-astronomy/the-universe-confirms-the-bible/