For those of you who have been following my devotions for a while or have read my testimony in my “About Curt” section of my website, you know that I was once an atheist who has no use for God. I, like many atheists, when pressed for good reasons why I didn’t believe in God could at best come up with weak arguments like “how can you believe in someone you can’t see,” and “the Bible is just a big book of fiction.” When asked why I believed in Darwinian evolution and not the creation account found in the Bible, again I had very few compelling arguments – I just believed because my peers mostly believed in evolution.
Sadly, I was an expert on why you shouldn’t read the Bible, yet I never read the Bible for myself. My logic was flawed and being an atheist left me with no meaning in life and certainly no hope of an afterlife. Fortunately, one day a friend of mine gave me a copy of the New Testament and told me to read it. I did read it and slowly but surely I saw that my reasons for being an atheist started to crumble as the weight of the truth of the Scriptures began to penetrate my mind and heart. I never would have dreamed that forty years after becoming a Christian that I would be defending the faith that I had so callously ignored – without ever examining the evidence for God and the Bible.
Below are five men who once were atheists too, until they, like me, had their hearts open by God. These men, like many other atheists, when presented with the evidence for the God of the Bible, have surrendered their lives to Jesus. I have found that the two key ingredients in the conversion of atheists to Christ are an open heart and prayer for their conversion. The following five examples, of men who were atheists before accepting a Christian worldview, all come from the following website.1
Frank Tipler (b. 1947), mathematical physicist, cosmologist, joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at Tulane University:
“When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”
Alister McGrath (b. 1953), theologian, scientist, and Anglican priest:
“Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.”
“Christianity offers a worldview that leads to the generation of moral values and ideals that are able to give moral meaning and dignity to our existence.”
Lee Strobel (b. 1952), a former militant atheist and employee at the Chicago Tribune:
“It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian.”
“To be honest, I didn’t want to believe that Christianity could radically transform someone’s character and values. It was much easier to raise doubts and manufacture outrageous objections that to consider the possibility that God actually could trigger a revolutionary turn-around in such a depraved and degenerate life.”
“…the scientific data point powerfully toward the existence of a Creator and that the historical evidence for the resurrection establishes convincingly that Jesus is divine.”
Rick Oliver, member California Science Teachers Association and New York Academy of Science:
“I remember how frustrated I became when, as a young atheist, I examined specimens under the microscope. I would often walk away and try to convince myself that I was not seeing examples of extraordinary design, but merely the product of some random, unexplained mutations.”
C.S. Lewis (d. 1963), former atheist and widely read Christian apologetic author today, and mind behind Narnia series:
“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so, I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.”
1 50 Quotes From Former Atheists – Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy (jamesbishopblog.com)