How To Prove God's Existence To An Atheist

Personally, I believe it is only the Holy Spirit that is capable of pointing an atheist to Jesus. He has a unique way of getting to the heart of humans.

Davy said:

I see brethren trying to use God's Word about Lord Jesus' death and resurrection to convert the atheist, and most often it doesn't work. Why?

Because the atheist claims to live in the world of science, of what can be proven knowledge. They don't consider God's Word as science. But they are very wrong...

Heb 11:1-3
11 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

2 For by it the elders obtained a good report.

3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
KJV


That above Hebrews 11:3 verse SCIENTIFICALLY proves... God's existence. It proves the existence of the TWO dimensions of existence also. How?

There's a law of thermodynamics in the physics branch of science that says material matter can neither be created, nor destroyed. It can only change its form (solid, liquid, gas, vapor).

Think about that for a moment. If material matter can't be created, nor destroyed, that has to also mean material matter did not... create itself.

Notice what that Hebrews 11:3 Scripture in bold states, that things which are seen, i.e., material matter of this world, were not made of things which do appear, i.e., again the things of this material world.

In other words, matter did not create matter.

So what did... create matter? And that covers the whole universe, and not just this earth.

Even that law of science points to something else other than material matter as the creator. It means something of a different... dimension than this earthly one. Those of Faith call that Creator GOD. And that other dimension of existence that is not... matter, is of Spirit.

In John 4:24, Jesus said God is a Spirit.

As long as the atheist then keeps defaulting to this material world as being how this world came into existence, by that they are trying to disprove that basic fixed natural law of physics that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

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You can't change an atheist, sadly. The Lord needs to draw them to Him Himself. That's the only way. All we can do is pray.

It's been done already...Rom 1:18-20! And the result? The horrible rest of Romans 1 tells us of their reaction to seeing the clear proof of HIS deity and power - they scorn, blaspheme and rebuke HIS proven revelation as lies because they love sin more than the truth.

That is why they are condemned already and must be banished to the outer darkness as soon as the last sinful elect is brought to holiness.

TedT said:

It's been done already...Rom 1:18-20! And the result? The horrible rest of Romans 1 tells us of their reaction to seeing the clear proof of HIS deity and power - they scorn, blaspheme and rebuke HIS proven revelation as lies because they love sin more than the truth.

That is why they are condemned already and must be banished to the outer darkness as soon as the last sinful elect is brought to holiness.

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I look at the Outer Darkness as a realm of self-inflicted torture by people who love sin and wordliness instead of God and their neighbor, who suffer progressively more as a result, like what CS Lewis depicted in his novella The Great Divorce.

The Liturgist said:

What makes you say that? The Orthodox church proselytized the Syrians, Copts, Armenians, Georgians, Ethiopians, Indians, Bulgarians, Serbians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarussians, Polish, Finns, Swedes, Czechs, Slovaks, Siberians, Tatars, Aleuts and other Native Alaskans, and lately has been growing enormously in Africa, Latin America, the Philipines, and Japan. Indeed, the Polish Orthodox Church has a large mission province in Brazil.

The thing is, the Orthodox don’t go door to door to proselytize because it annoys people. Rather, they build beautiful churches that attract visitors and have many divine services throughout the week, and these services and the mystical theology of the church attract people to come and see.

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First they need to know that those churches exist, and how can they know if no one tells them?

d taylor said:

You want to discuss this with me, then first you must prove sciences version of creation exist. Not from science, but from and in the Bible.

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I'd be equally keen to see you prove that the earth is flat from the Bible. I can't locate that Scripture anywhere. [/quote]

I found in my career that the Bible is of little help when you're working with complex electronics, and I'm compleely sold on the non-flat and far from stationary model or the cosmos that allows us such novelties as celestial navigation.

But you're right, it's very difficult to persuade atheists, or almost anyone else, to embrace the Christian Faith when your sales pitch requires them to accept ideas about God's creation that even the ancient Church didn't believe.

Not David said:

First they need to know that those churches exist, and how can they know if no one tells them?

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The Orthodox use architecture to attract the faithful in countries where they are free to do so, including the US, building dramatic and beautiful churches that are visually distinctive and appealing. These attract visitors and in some cases, like St. Sophia’s in Los Angeles, are the center of a neighborhood (the Latin-Byzantine District on Pico Blvd.)

There of course a philosophical problem. To suggest that existence is a quality that God must have, seems to suggest that existence is prior to God, whereas a proper understanding would require us to see that it is God who calls existence into being. God is before, beyond, and after existence. This was an avenue that Tillich sought to express with limited success.

In the beginning God already had a past tense.

Philip_B said:

There of course a philosophical problem. To suggest that existence is a quality that God must have, seems to suggest that existence is prior to God, whereas a proper understanding would require us to see that it is God who calls existence into being. God is before, beyond, and after existence. This was an avenue that Tillich sought to express with limited success.

In the beginning God already had a past tense.

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Indeed. Plato further proved you cannot prove your first principle, which is another impediment to knowledge of God without faith.

But suppose scientists in India discovered the uncreated energies of God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, under a microscope?

They would, one reckon, suppose that it was part of Brahma, or Vishnu, or Shiva, that they had discovered, and thus assume it was part of a Pantheist God of which they were a part.

Unless of course they were Christians, the second largest religious minority in India after Islam and ahead of Sikhism and Jainism (and in India since 53 AD, ten centuries longer than Islam and fourteen centuries longer than Sikhism, and also about eight or nine centuries longer than the Zoroastrian Parsi immigrants from Iran, such as the Mittal Brothers; only Hinduism, Judaism* Buddhism and Jainism have been there longer), and Christians face discrimination except in Malankara, but even there incidents of violence against them have occurred, and the Hindu Nationalist BJP is no friend of the Church.

Jipsah said:

I'd be equally keen to see you prove that the earth is flat from the Bible. I can't locate that Scripture anywhere.

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I found in my career that the Bible is of little help when you're working with complex electronics, and I'm compleely sold on the non-flat and far from stationary model or the cosmos that allows us such novelties as celestial navigation.

But you're right, it's very difficult to persuade atheists, or almost anyone else, to embrace the Christian Faith when your sales pitch requires them to accept ideas about God's creation that even the ancient Church didn't believe.

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I am fairly sure i have has this discussion with you before. So i try and not repeat past discussions which end up as wasted writing.

Davy said:

I agree that we as God's servants can only plant seeds, and that only God can make them grow. The example of Hebrews 11:3 will lead to doing exactly that. Furthermore, rightly understanding how that law of thermodynamics exists that scientifically proves this material universe didn't create itself, leads to knowing that God exists.

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Well said. You're exactly right.

Davy said:

I get that one's life in Christ Jesus is one of the best witnesses. But my post is more about the scientific fact which God's Word shows in Hebrews 11:3 that proves God's existence and that He created this material world. There's Christian brethren that still doubt that have not been taught that Biblical proof.

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The problem is that science ignores God's word. No one can "prove" that God spoke the universe into existence. Hebrews says that we know by faith. Science rejects faith as proof.

Science is defined as
"The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."

There is no room for faith in that definition.

Davy said:

I'm a Christian that well knows the Genesis 1 description is actually a scientific blow by blow proof of God having originally created the heavens and the earth at verse 1, and then having ended that old... world with a flood of waters, which is shown at verse 2 with the earth sitting in waters in a wasted state. The "without form, and void" phrase in the Hebrew actually means 'a waste and an indistinguishable ruin'.

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1. Genesis is not a scientific text, but something far more profound, a divine revelation.
2. Your interpretation of Genesis 1:2 is unique and at odds with any other I have seen; I will not write it off as eisegesis because it does make a valid Antiochene-Literalist approach at intertextual exegesis, but without any Patristic backing I can’t accept it as a possibility.

So the Genesis 1 account is science,

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Wrong, science is developing a testable, falsifiable hypothesis and then developing and repeatedly using repeatable experiments as a means of determining if the hypothesis corresponds with the data, and then validated hypotheses become the building blocks of scientific theories which can reliably explain phenomena.

it's just that most Christian denominations are still stuck on man's pseudo-science theories that Genesis 1:2 is about a gaseous 'nothingness' floating in ether space, when it's actually about the earth in a wasted state because of Satan's original rebellion in wanting to be GOD.

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I have never heard clergy or read liturgical or catechetical material from any denomination talk about Genesis 1:2 referring to a gaseous nothing floating in the ether, which, by the way, would be highly enriched psuedoscientific bovine-processed plant fertilizer of the highest quality, on an industrial scale suitable for the largest corn and wheat farms in the Midwest.

And it's important to note, that 'energy' (or even E=MC2) is still... a manifestation of this 'material' universe. It's of this 'earthly' dimension. God is not a ball of energy, He is a Spirit like Jesus said (John 4:24).

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Yes, quite. The different forms of energy, such as mechanical, thermal, photonic, potential and kinetic, like time and space and matter and gravity and relativity , are created things, and actually energy comprises the largest part of God’s creation that is known to us. It would be heresy to say God is a ball of energy, because God in His divine essence is unknowable, uncircumscribed, unbounded, distinct from yet omnipresent within creation, omniscient, omnipotent, and, to quote Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky’s classic Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, translated from Russian into English by the great penitent, scholar and abbot Fr. Seraphim Rose, because of God’s inscrutability and existence above and distinct from all of Creation,

“...one may speak only of the attributes of God, but not of the very Essence of God. The Fathers express themselves only indirectly concerning the Nature of the Divinity, saying that the Essence of God is “one, simple, incomplex.” But this simplicity is not something without distinguishing characteristics or content; it contains within itself the fullness of the qualities of existence. “God is a sea of being, immeasurable and limitless” (St. Gregory the Theologian); “God is the fullness of all qualities and perfections in their highest and infinite form” (St. Basil the Great); “God is simple and incomplex; He is entirely feeling, entirely spirit, entirely thought, entirely mind, entirely source of all good things” (St. Irenaeus of Lyons).”