Lot’s of people ask me about how to share Christ with their friends who are philosophically minded. Obviously such a venture is very nuanced and takes a lot of prayer and time and we must journey with people, but, practically speaking while there are many reasons that belief in God (theism) makes more sense than it’s opposite (atheism), here are three starting points to get the conversation rolling.

The beginning of universe – mind always precedes matter, not the other way around. The big bang needs something which is not matter or time or space to exist before it, and to actually cause it to take place.

Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist (15 billion years ago), therefore the universe has to have a cause.

The mathematical improbability of a universe like ours ever coming into existence and staying in existence, with all the hundreds of precise variables needing to be in play (gravitational pull, the rate of the universe’s expansion, the average distance between stars, etc.) – astrophysicists tell us that there were actually about 122 constants that would have had to be lined up in precise values to the million millionths in order for our universe to come into existence. Picture 122 dials, each having to be tuned into the right channel to the million millionths to actually give the universe an opportunity to expand and explode and begin to exist. The chances of that happening, they say, are one chance in 10 to the 138th power. In other words: mathematically impossible.

The other problem is that these dials would actually already need to exist before the big bang happened because if they don’t then everything just collapses into a nothing. A reality which is still a mystery to scientists so much so that the celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins admits that we don’t know how this happened but ‘one day computer science will figure it out. Admittedly we don’t know, because, he says, ‘cosmology has not yet had its Darwin’ (a theory to explain first causes). Which is why I have to conclude that I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist!

The existence of a Moral Law – The Moral Law is the idea that the reason people believe in right and wrong at all in our world is because an objective moral law is wired within our psyche. The origins of this wiring are debated of course, but it makes the most sense that these convictions come from a transcendent person.

Objective Moral values necessitate an objective moral value giver. Objective moral values exist, therefore the moral value giver exists.

The reason people are so dogmatic and moralistic about issues on the internet for instance – debating everything from sex-changes, to the environment to gun control, is because we all believe in an actual right and wrong; an objective truth, not a relativistic one which shifts and moves depending on which culture you happen to live in, which is what an evolutionary wiring of moral ideas would have produced. We all know, dropping napalm on babies is wrong, rape is wrong, eating people is wrong. That’s because God wired that within us. If there is no objective moral law then all of these things are just a matter of preference, which we cannot push on other people or cultures – because that would be wrong (oops, that put us back where we started!).

Having a moral law within us is not just a pointer to the existence of God in general but is something far more. Scientist Francis Collins has said “After twenty eight years as a believer, the Moral Law still stands out for me as the strongest signpost to God. More than that, it points to a God who cares about human beings, and a God who is infinitely good and holy.” The idea that God is loving and caring and wants what’s best for us should cause us to stir in our souls to want to know him. This is the God who made us and who came into our world in the person of Jesus to save us.