Iโve been sharing miracle stories since the beginning of October, and one important lesson has become clear: Atheism is undeniably false.
The sheer number of miracle occurrences is insane.
And Iโm not talking about miracle claims. Anyone can claim they experienced a miracle. Iโm talking about actual verified miracles with multiple witnesses, doctor testimonies, and empirical proof, like X-rays, to back them up.
Christ Jesus is alive and active through his Spirit in this world.
So far, weโve read on the timeline the stories of:
A man in Suriname whose paralyzed arm flew up in the air at the mention of the name of Jesus
Vittorio Micheli whose leg eaten away by cancer fully reconstructed after a dip in the healing waters at Lourdes
Bruce Van Natta whose internal organs reconstructed (his small intestine doubling to 9 feet) via prayer after he was crushed in half by a massive logging truck
And Christ Gunderson who healed from an incurable stomach disease after being prayed over by Van Natta himself 5 years later and was written about in medical journal
Anyone looking for truth would have to look at these four cases and admit something otherworldly is going on.
So why do atheists resist?
My usual answer is they arenโt really after evidence for God, and thatโs true. But I think we need to go deeper.
Why donโt they want evidence for God? Here are 4 reasons that get to the heart of why atheism rebels against reality.
Before you go on, Allegiant Faith Network is a reader-supported community. Become a paid subscriber to help us keep up the good fight for Christ for ages to come and get:
Courageous Chrisโs โ30-Day Evangelist: How to Share, Defend, and Live Your Christian Faith in a Secular Worldโ
A digital copy of Courageous Chrisโs The Atheist Conversion Manual: 17 Cases that Destroy Secular Religion, Prove God, and Show You the Way to Eternal Life.
A bi-weekly โDefenders of the Faithโ book club.
Copies of all future published works.
Access to our full archive of articles.
An exclusive subscriber chat.
2 articles every week.
Your support means the world to us and helps us continue to grow online.
Click below and upgrade!
1. Happines Quest
Frank Turek rightly asks many atheists who step up to open mics to ask questions after his presentations: โIf Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?โ
And the answer is predominantly โNo.โ
Why?
Because most atheists donโt want God to be real, and they most certainly donโt want Him to be Christ Jesus because then they would be accountable to someone other than themselves and wouldnโt get to do whatever they want. And they want whatever makes them happy in the temporal, not what makes them holy in the eternal.
To acknowledge the supernatural would be tantamount to giving up in the face of battle.
Thatโs what going on, of course. They are at war against their Creator, whom they cannot escape, whether or not atheists belive that to be the case.
Unfortunately for atheists, accountability cannot be escaped either. In this world, you will be accountable to someone or something because dependence is built into existence, and if you think otherwise, youโre deluded. What I call in The Atheist Conversion Manual the Delusion of Autonomy.
The only control you have is over the choices you make with the cards youโre dealt. Period. Beyond that, you are subject to other forces and beings in some way, shape, or form. Total independence is fantasy. Thinking and acting otherwise is what results in catastrophe since every decision we make has a ripple effect of consequences.
Atheists donโt want the above to be true because they want to think they are the masters and orchestrators of right and wrong and accountable to no one but whatever whims and fancies come their way. Thatโs why the only evidence theyโll accept is whatever doesnโt confirm a supernatural world and instead affirms their own biases toward a material-only universe.
A universe in which they set the โmoralโ terms and define whatever makes them happy.
2. The โProblem of Evilโ
In a strange twist, the same atheists who think they are the masters and definers of reality have this bizarre idea that they know the mind of the perfect God and how He should behave.
They look at travesties in the world like rape, slavery, murder, environmental disasters, and so on and so forth, and claim that a perfect God never wouldโve let any of it happen. Ever. He would create the perfect world of obedient robots (human slaves?) and ensure no evil could enter. So the fact that there is evil in the world means God and the supernatural donโt exist and miracles therefore canโt happen.
But where do they get these ideas of โevil,โโperfection,โ โshould,โ โshouldnโtโ? From the world?
If the material is all there is, the universe is one big accident, and we evolved from space rocks inside waters that somehow formed on their own when random chemicals decided to get hitched and liquify and then got struck by lightning or something and one cell went from dead to alive, death wouldโve preceded life and is itself part of the program. In fact, everything is part of the program (the random chaotic program that is ordered for no reason whatsoever?), so it all would be perfect by unclever design and nothing is ultimately evil.
Right? Or is it wrong? Or is it right and wrong? Who can tell?
The truth is such a universe is brute, hopeless, amoral, and doomed to extinction with no higher mode of existence to look forward to, and atheists know it. But because they want the delusion of total autonomy and control to enact fleeting feelings of happiness for themselves in their short time upon this earth, they spew outrage about fictional evil to gaslight themselves into accepting a pseudo-reality void of God.
And theyโll keep at it unless they get a God who will dance for them, not one who ignores them, allows free will, and permits evil for a time.
3. God-in-a-box
For those who are so opposed to slavery, atheists sure want to dictate God. โDo this.โ โDo thatโ โOpe, God didnโt answer my prayer, so He doesnโt exist.โ
Such is how the story goes.
We already hit on this phenomenon a little bit in the last section, but since itโs the real underlying motive behind their emphasis on the so-called โproblem of evilโ (which we just saw isnโt even a problem in their worldview), we must dwell on it a bit more.
Modern humanity has created this caricature of God as a genie in a bottle or a jack-in-the-box that must give humans whatever they want. Think Oprah giving away cars like candy. โYou get a miracle, you get a miracle, YOU get a miracle.โ Thatโs what many think about God. That Heโs their candy slave.
And when God suddenly doesnโt deliver as expected...they throw their hands up and say, โEvilโ or โGod doesnโt exist.โ
A recent objection to the miracle story I shared about my wife is a case in point. I shared on both Substack and X (if you missed it, I linked right below this paragraph).
An atheist in the comment section on X said sarcastically, (paraphrase) โOh, sure. God spares your wife but lets my wife get plowed into by another driver. Some God.โ
The Old Man in the sky (atheistsโ favorite false description of the eternal God) acted in one instance but didnโt act in another, so He doesnโt exist. Never mind that the very notion of action requires an Actor, and the person in the story (my wife) had an experience of action.
The same atheist went on to state that my wife's and my personal experience doesnโt constitute evidence, but I immediately pointed out he is holding up his own wifeโs experiences as evidence of Godโs absence. So, which is it? Is personal experience valid evidence, or is it not? If it is, then we have one experience of some personal force protecting a woman from danger and not another woman, and the prior experience must trump the latter since an Actor must exist in order to act, and we are to conclude logically that the Actor simply chose not to act in the second scenario. Why? No idea. But that has no bearing on the existence or nonexistence of the Actor.
If personal experience isnโt valid evidence, then lots of questions begin to arise because literally everything established in the corpus of human knowledge was personally experienced by humans. Everything in history, in fact. And all would become unreliable, not just the experiences of two separate women in their cars on separate evenings on separate roads. Such would be the demand of logical consistency. And if we ultimately donโt know anything, then how do atheists know God didnโt protect my wife that evening in the car?
To be clear, Iโm not suggesting we accept what every human says at face value. That would be foolish.
But itโs equally foolish to suggest miracles never happened because only humans can witness them and personal experience is unreliable evidence. Or because God didnโt dance as you wanted Him to.
An eternal transcendent God is subject to no other authority because He is above and before all and the necessary origin of reality. You live in His cosmos, not the other way around.
Yet itโs easy for others to hate that arrangement when Godโs own children act like bullies...
4. Church Hurt
Well-meaning or otherwise, many have been driven away from faith in Christ based on the poor behavior of someone who claimed to be Christian.
Iโm not talking about a Christian who was brutally honest about right and wrong and refused to affirm blatant sin. Weโre commanded as followers of Christ to judge wisely and make no peace with evil. To fail that command turns the church from a hospital for sinners into funhouse for demons.
But some holier-than-thous within the church have acted like Pharisees and scoffed at the newcomer as if he or she is a parasite to be driven out instead of a soul longing for the Savior.
Others have gone the opposite extreme and scared newcomers away by expecting God to always act miracles and provide on a dime and subjecting them to experiences of โfailedโ interventions, which creates the atheists who would rather God didnโt exist than a God who doesnโt always fix the problem (no matter how illogical that path may be).
Whatever of the above cases one chooses, God and the supernatural are made to seem tasteless or absent to the unfamiliar mind. Because such mind has not grasped that Christians are mere sinners too who are only good inasmuch as God is good and lives among them through Christ. Which causes them (the mind) to blame Christ based on the behavior of those who imitate Him poorly.
Unfortunately, the bad apples wonโt be going away. So thereโs not much the church can do other than confront said apples whenever they behave as bullies or overzealous freaks.
And atheists must understand that their reaction to hurt in the church is emotional, not logical. It has no bearing on the existence or nonexistence of miracles whatsoever. To think so is to make a false equivocation between feeling and reality.
Christ is Alive and Active in this World
The only way to discount supernatural involvement is to outright dismiss the supernatural as an option from the start even though the supernatural cannot be discounted logically.
As C. S. Lewis put it:
โNo, of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely โuniform experienceโ against miracles, in other words, they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately, we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we know all the reports are false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.โ
Atheists who do so walk on unsubstantiated assumptions that the material is all that exists and refuse to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary, despite an abundance of it. Because theyโve either been hurt by the church and come despise it and Christ, havenโt had their desires fulfilled by God through prayer on demand, canโt understand how God doesnโt snap His finger and stop all evil in a split second, or desire total control, autonomy, and power, which is a delusion even in their own worldview. Most often they rebel against God for a mixed combination of these reasons.
Regardless of which ones or combo thereof, the reasoning is irrational, driven by emotion, not logic.
Atheists refuse to accept the supernatural because they are in rebellion againt their Creator.
Yet, miracles happen, and people witness them all time. In many cases, there are upwards of 10-30 witnesses or more. And many also have empirical evidence to back them up, like X-rays, CAT scans, and other medical tests that show before and after transformations without any material explanations.
Christ Jesus is alive and active in this world and will not be denied. One day, every knee will bow and every tongue confess Him as eternal Lord.
We love writing for you and for our Lord Jesus Christ. All to Him we owe. And you can help keep us in the good fight.
For just $0.26 a day, you can get additional bonuses:
Courageous Chrisโs e-guide, โ30-Day Evangelist: How to Share, Defend, and Live Your Christian Faith in a Secular World,โ soon to be a full course with video lessons and outlines ($50 value).
A digital copy of Chrisโs The Atheist Conversion Manual: 17 Cases that Destroy Secular Religion, Prove God, and Show You the Way to Eternal Life ($20 value).
Access to all future publications.
Access to our full vault of resources that will help you defend the Truth of Jesus Christ.
A bi-weekly โDefenders of the Faithโ book club where we read and study apologetics books of your choosing together (comes with outlines and study notes).
Exclusive lessons every Wednesday explaining why you can believe in God with conviction and/or how to live for him with courage, OR deeper dives into Scripture, theology, or apologetics.
An exclusive subscriber chat to get real-time fellowship with Courageous Chris and other like-minded Christians and discuss doubts, evidence for God, and much more.
The humble feeling of knowing you are supporting a growing marketplace ministry with a mission to spread the good news of Christ to a dying generation.
Click and upgrade!
Well their understanding has been darkened through this life through victim hood, guilt and cynicism.. resulting in a hardened heart. Their hearts are so hardened they canโt think straight.. there is no light or illumination going on for them to SEE