Courtney asked:
Hi JS Park! I have a question for you.
I came across this blog searching for people who used to be atheists, but are now Christians.
I’m in a bit of a blunder. Every time I feel like I’m firm in my beliefs and my faith, some atheist comes along and completely shreds me to pieces (spiritually, of course). I don’t try to debate them, but just simply hearing one say “Gods not real. Prove He is real,” makes me start to doubt like crazy. I hate this. I can’t stand knowing I’m so weak in my faith. Any advice? Thanks!

Can I let you in on a little secret? Pretend I’m now speaking in the voice of Dr. House.

Every Christian doubts.

While I won’t comprehensively dismantle doubts or atheism, let’s declare three truths right out in the open.

1) Doubt is not the same as unbelief. Unbelief is characterized by acting as if there is no God. Doubts are sincere questions seeking truth.

2) The inability to “prove God” doesn’t do anything to God. Disproving a faulty version of god isn’t even talking about God.

3) Doubts can either push us toward more doubts or a deeper faith. Those are your two options.

When an atheist comes storming out the gate with flesh-centered reasoning, pseudo-confident arguments, “thought”-provoking questions, and a box of flea market morals, of course we Christians will be shaken. Any time a worldview is challenged, even at the most basic level, we become disoriented. And I mean physically disoriented. It’s a psychological side effect that can be marked by nausea, vertigo, morbid introspection, and depression. I’m not kidding.

So again, you have two options here. Allow the doubt to become unbelief, or allow the doubt to push you to more serious faith.

It never hurts to study up on your theology. Christianity has, after all, satisfied some of the greatest minds for millennia. There is plenty of academia to go around. Even if you don’t memorize it for a debate (which is dumb to think we can “win” at apologetics anyway), it’s certainly enough to get you thinking critically and keeping up the roof when it shakes.

Atheists are great at preprogrammed, hack-made, automatic defenses. I knew all the right buttons to get a Christian to cry. “The Bible is misogynistic and outdated and contradicts itself and *insert legit-sounding scientific jargon.*” But that never answered my own doubts about my doubts.

I’ve found cracks very quickly in my former atheist position. I was asking for unreasonable evidence in the face of reasonable evidence. “Prove there’s a God.” At a possible crime scene, I could say, “Prove there’s a perpetrator.” That’s an unreasonable request, totally biased to prove there is no cause, and any half-good detective will tell you that you’re making the wrong case. It’s a child’s whining to demand proof at a moment’s glance that God exists or does not exist. We follow clues for a reasonable conclusion.

The actual evidence — design, morality, aesthetics, Jesus, to name a few — is sort of overwhelming. At the very least you’d have to explain any number of weird phenomena during Jesus’ lifetime. Take even the explosive growth of Christianity: an implausible expansion, surrounded by other fake messiahs who had also died but were forgotten, in a time of hundreds of other competing religions, when Jews who worshiped on Saturdays for thousands of years switched to Sunday, when intense persecution against the first Christians should have dispersed them easily, and these uneducated morons became the most influential dudes in the history of the world. A serious investigator of truth would at least look at the tomb of Jesus to see what was up with all that.

Some atheists ask for God to grow back amputated limbs or write a name in the sky. But again, we’re requesting a bizarre threshold to satisfy my three pound brain. I think a name written in the sky is less miraculous than the amount of order we already have, such as complex DNA strands, photosynthesis, stable properties, and circular patterns in freaking everything.

I already know atheists are laughing at this (I did too) because honestly, most of them are never quite satisfied. “That was evolution” or “That can happen without God” or “I’d believe it if God wrote my name in the sky!” Sure you would, buddy. Because most atheists are known to be so humble and so darn teachable.

If non-Christians were honest with themselves, they’d admit that atheism is easier than holiness. Aldous Huxley pretty much admitted he gave up on God because he wanted to have mindless sex. He got lazy for truth because his loins got the burning (and perhaps the dirty skank got an actual burning; don’t quote me on that).

No one can tell me that atheism is purely chosen for “logical reasons.” It’s always emotional. Nearly every atheist I know had hurtful fundie parents, a missing father, violent/sexual abuse, or a young party life that led to extended adolescence. I myself was a hate-filled, God-mocking, scumbag jerk, even though I was convinced I was better than the average Christian.

Believe me when I say atheists also experience doubts, both real and existential, that shake their own worldviews. They get the disoriented nausea, but ignore it better. Any atheist who says otherwise is arrogant or in denial; the same with Christians who say they never doubt, either. In the atheist’s case though, they would have to hate a false version of god that isn’t really God — “If God is real, why doesn’t he stop A and B and C?” — or viciously fight to disprove God by attacking church, Christians, religious traditions, sensational news stories about “Christians,” and conservative moralism. I smell straw men.

I could say more but a last word: I ultimately found atheism untenable and disingenuous. To say there are no absolute standards while holding to definitions of fairness and the “greater good” became more unlikely to hold in tension. There is a rising minority of atheists who claim absolute morals while believing in no-God, but that’s really trying to eat at both sides of the table. I couldn’t keep attacking theists out of a sense of “rightness” if I could adjust my own rules of rightness based on arbitrary, self-referential agenda. It lacked integrity and a spine.

I was an atheist who claimed to be a “nice guy with more morals than a Christian” — so what? Seriously, so freaking what? Nice and moral according to me? Big deal. It felt all around dishonest and absurd. And if I’m attacked here for “misrepresenting” the atheist, then they would have to prove on what grounds I’m doing so. Which is funny and exhausting to watch them try.

Study, pray, believe, and expect the supernatural. Atheists are not beyond the reach of God, and I’m proof.