An atheist is someone who believes there is no God (basically). An agnostic is someone who believes we can’t know if there is a God or not (basically).
Being either one takes a lot of faith!
To be an atheist, you have to believe that your brain is the biggest brain in the universe and that nothing exists outside your brain. If an atheist doesn’t believe in God, it means that his belief is based on everything within the realm of his own mind—discrediting anything beyond it. To know there’s no God is to claim to know everything, which is impossible. So, there aren’t really any atheists. Most atheists are actually agnostic—they claim that no one can know if there is a God or not, and they personally choose not to believe (or answer to) God.
But agnostics have a lot of faith too! They have to face mountains of evidence and choose to either believe or ignore it.
Remember that article Pastor read around Christmas? The one about the probability of the earth existing… Mathematically, even the earth’s existence has a chance less than zero. We shouldn’t even exist—statistically speaking. Or what about the probability of the prophecies of Christ? Remember that? To ignore chances of 1 x 1017 (the probability of one man fulfilling only 8 Messianic prophecies) is pretty crazy, in my opinion. It takes a lot of faith to believe that Jesus Christ was not God.
Christianity isn’t a blind faith. It’s reasoned and reasonable. In fact, it is the only reasonable option for life, because it is the only truth in life. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” There’s no other option but Jesus Christ.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that another atheist changed his stance and he now believes in God. A book by Ray Comfort called You Can Lead an Atheist To Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think originally included a foreword by an atheist. This atheist provided his perspective on God and then the book went on to provide evidence for the existence of God. Now that this atheist believes in God, Ray Comfort said that he needs to go find another atheist to write another foreword. When asked why the atheist changed his mind, Ray Comfort just responded, “I guess he read the book!”
Here’s another article on the topic:
According to the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, a group from the University of Helsinki (Finland) connected a small number of atheists to a lie detector and had them read aloud statements like, “I dare God to make me die of cancer.” The study reported that each of them broke into a sweat that was picked up by the lie detector.
Years ago we used a lie detector in one of our TV programs, and through it I learned something interesting. The machines are incorrectly referred to as “lie detectors.” They don’t detect lies. They detect the voice of the human conscience–that God-given, society-shaped knowledge of right and wrong. When a lie is told, the conscience produces an involuntary sense of dread, and that raises the heart rate, producing detectable sweat on the skin’s surface.
The researchers concluded, “The results imply that atheists’ attitudes toward God are ambivalent in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response.”
In other words, the detector declared that they are lying when they claim they have no evidence for the existence of God. So never believe it when atheists use their carefully constructed confession of faith: “I have no belief in any gods.” We know from Scripture that they know the Creator exists:
Romans 1:20 “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:”
You need not convince atheists of God’s existence. They already know that. You need rather to convince them of their mortal danger.
-Bro. Ryan (951) 719-7191