Mik’la asks..
Message: I will never understand why there are atheists around. There IS evidence that God exists. Just look at the change in a person’s life after becoming a christian. They are billions of people who’s lives has been changed completely. There was this man who was taking angel dust from before he was in high school. He was kicked out of his parent’s house when he was 20 because he was always getting in trouble. He smoked marijuana from age 20 to 30. From age 30 to 40 he smoked cocaine. From 40 to 50 he smoked heroin. After attending dozens of rehabs (all of which failed ), his father persuaded him to go to a christian rehab. There he went from atheist to agnostic to christian. He finally quit this horrendous addiction to drugs after years of trying. He decided that he wanted to help other people like himself and became a counsellor for those addicted to drugs. That is amazing evidence for the existence of God. Look at what He did with that man. Why are there still atheists around? Is it because no one has ever told them the truth or is it just that they are lying?
Hi Mik’la. Thanks for this question. I’ll do my best to answer it questions for you.
First of all. Before we evaluate any claim. The first thing that we need to do is define the type of claim. In the case of theism the claim is that a god exists. This is a claim of existence. The next thing we do is we look for a criteria, or in other words a method, with which we can evaluate the claim. When it comes to existence, the only valid criteria is the objective one. For a claim to be objective, it must produce the same results every time. For example if I hold out a rubber ball to you and say to you, “This is a rubber ball” and you understand that a rubber ball is a spherical object made out of rubber, you will naturally accept my claim. Then, you can turn to another and do the same, and so on, and so forth. You can do this over and over and each person will say “That is a rubber ball”. However if I were to approach you with my empty hand held out and told you that “This is a rubber ball” you would see that not only is there nothing in my hand, but that the nothing is neither rubber, nor a spherical object, and it becomes easy to dismiss my claim because it can not be objectively evaluated. We use this criteria every day to determine what exists and what doesn’t exist. It’s how we know when someone has a mental illness and claims that they see elves or pixies or tall 6 foot invisible rabbit named “Harvey”.
Keep in mind that there is not one thing that you know to exist, that doesn’t fall in to this already established criteria. Not a single thing.
So now we know how to tell if something exists or not. The next step is to evaluate the claims around its supposed existence. Most theists like to point at change that people make in their lives as proof of their gods existence. They will claim that because a person prayed to a particular god, and that because they felt that their prayer was answered, that this proves that their god exists. The problem with this is that it doesn’t actually prove which god is the real one? For every story that you hear of someone having their lives changed by Jesus, you can find other correlating stories of how someones life was changed by Allah, Vishnu, Elohim, Zeus, and so on. At this point you the believer are stuck with two choices. You can either claim that there are many gods, and that each person was just as right as you are for your claim of Jesus, or you have to say that all of those other gods are false and that only yours is right. Wait though! What happens if they make that same claim? Now you have thousands of different god beliefs, with their miracles and their scriptures all making near identical claims. How do you decide which one is right if all of them are claiming the same type of subjective evidence for their gods existence?
This only become a problem if we accept subjective evidence as valid towards a claim of existence, and it’s precisely why we don’t. The moment you accept subjective evidence as a valid claim of existence, then there becomes little to no difference in your claim that a god exists, and the claim of a schizophrenic who says that he see’s goblins.
So no. It isn’t that atheists are lying or that no one has ever told them. It’s that the evidence that theists produce for their gods, isn’t really evidence. There’s a great quote that sums it up perfectly…
“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” — Stephen F Roberts
I hope that helps you to understand. Thanks again for the question!