1. Atheists often times consider themselves to be the intellectual elite:
A. Their attitude is that they have looked at the world through the cold, hard, eyes of reason, and have come to the obvious conclusion that there is no God.
B. The rest of us are intellectual peasants who are weak and need an emotional crutch. If we would just use our minds we would come to the same conclusion as they.
2. The truth is that it is atheism that is always the emotional belief:
A. If we ask the atheist how he knows there is no God, his usual response will be to ask us how we know there is a God. This, of course, is not a very good answer.
B. If there is a God, he can reveal himself to us, but how can one know that there is no God?
C. There is no revelation that one can have to know that there is no God, and there is no way to reason to it.
D. Each one of us is devoid of most of the knowledge in the universe, in fact, so is mankind as a whole. The only way to know that there is no God is to be omniscient and not have God as a part of one’s omniscience.
E. If we are lacking just one bit of knowledge, that could be the knowledge of God and we are simply unaware of it.
3. These days some atheists will say that they don’t know absolutely and for sure that there is no God. They usually give the odds of God’s existence to be about 2%:
A. No one has ever been able to show the math as to how they arrived at that number, or any other number for that matter.
4. Most atheists can usually be put in one of five categories:
A. Some have experienced a tragedy in their life, such as the death of a loved one, which they could not square with their understanding of a loving God. They usually get angry with God first, and then out of anger turn away and deny him.
B. Others grew up in the Church and were very idealistic, and then at some point became aware of hypocrites in their Church.They became so disgusted and disillusioned that they in effect said, “If this is what Christianity is, then I don’t want it” and turned away from God.
C. Still others are very intelligent and become very prideful in their intelligence. They are able to shoot down the arguments of their religious friends, who are not good at defending their faith, and so begin to look down on them and their religion as foolish. They often end up not believing in God at all as a result.
D. Then there are the rebellious ones. Normally they have grown up in some sort of home where there were strict rules and discipline without love or relationship. They end up rebelling against all authority. This is especially the case with God who they view as an authoritarian figure waiting to strike them down if they do one thing wrong. Nobody would want that sort of God so they turn away from him.
E. The converse of this are those who grow up without discipline or consequences for their actions, and who therefore do not respect any authority including God’s. As a result, they don’t believe that God is serious when he says that there will be consequences for our actions in this life. This disrespect will in many, if not most cases, lead to a rejection of God.
5. Whatever it was that initially drew the atheist to atheism, ultimately the atheist is not an atheist because he knows that there is no God. That is impossible information to obtain:
A.The atheist doesn’t want there to be a God.
B. Why doesn’t he want there to be a God? Because he doesn’t want to do what God says to do.
C. Everything else is an excuse.
