Top 10 reasons I'll never go back to atheism

No way, no how, not ever

Halfway through my college experience, I dropped the atheism I was raised with and became a theist. Seven years later, as a grad student, I was baptized as a Christian.

My conversion was the culmination of a years-long process that involved a lot of study and contemplation. I finally realized Christianity was true and that I wanted to be part of it.

When I tell people this, I’m sometimes asked if there’s anything—in principle—that would ever cause me to go back to being an atheist. The answer is simple: No.

But it’s worth looking at the reasons why, which I’m putting into a top-10 list, because everyone loves top-10 lists. These are my personal reasons why I’ll never return to atheism, presented roughly in the order in which they occurred to me.

1. The universe is comprehensible. Einstein once said, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” There’s nothing in the laws of nature that make this necessary. So, why can we make sense of the world? Why can we observe it, study it, experiment on it? Why can we look at things as small as subatomic particles and as vast as superclusters of galaxies and understand what they are? Don’t tell me it has anything to do with survival. Life survived just fine before humans discovered and developed the tools for studying these things. Science has no explanation for why the world makes sense. It just does, and that’s what pushed me over the edge when I was wavering in my atheism. The fact that the universe operates by unchangeable laws, that everything about the Earth’s properties and location gives us a prime view of the universe, that light has a finite speed, that the elements all throughout the universe behave the same as they do on Earth—it’s all too much of a miracle to not be divine in nature.

2. The universe is not eternal. Something had to cause it to exist, and that something is either personal (God) or impersonal (super-nature or abstract objects). Abstract objects, like the number 7, have no causal power. If it’s impersonal super-nature, then it just does what it does automatically, so why would it produce universe a finite time ago and not an eternity ago? That doesn’t make sense. A personal cause that transcends the universe, and is therefore spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and immensely powerful—powerful enough to make an entire universe—sounds exactly like God. So, unless you can show me that the very best physics of the last one hundred years is dead wrong and the universe is eternal, then God is necessary.

3. I believe in good and evil. Like, in an objective way. Sorry, but all those dopey secular explanations for good and evil, like utilitarianism, are inadequate, and honestly most of them make my skin crawl. And I absolutely, categorically reject that good and evil are in any way subjective, like social constructs. This is something that really bothered me in my final days as an atheist, until I finally realized that, logically, the best source for objective good and evil is a Conscious Entity that created the universe and therefore defines what is good and evil.

4. Atheism sucks. I’m not saying every individual atheist sucks—I know some pretty cool ones—but the idea? the concept? the way it influences the world? SUCKS. Even when I was an atheist, I thought atheism sucked. Unless atheism somehow rebrands itself into a new unsucky version that divorces itself from weirdo politics and dreariness and misanthropy, this is stayin’ in my top-10.

5. The universe is too special. Life as we know—or can even imagine it—can only exist within an incomprehensibly small parameter space… sorry, let’s start over. Imagine you have a giant universe-generating machine that pops out universes with whatever parameters you want. You want a universe with only two physical dimensions? Dial the dimension knob to “2” and out pops a universe with only two dimensions. But life won’t develop in it. You want a universe that expands slightly faster than the one we live in? Dial the expansion knob to a faster expansion rate, and out pops that universe. But it will only contain a thin soup of hydrogen particles. No life. There are dozens to hundreds of such knobs on this hypothetical universe-generating machine, and in order to get a universe with life in it, each one has to be adjusted to an almost incomprehensible degree of fineness. The universe just happened to have all those parameters exactly right despite the overwhelming odds against this? It makes far more sense that God designed the universe the way it is.

6. I exist. In fact, I alone am proof (to myself) that God exists. Despite how nutty that sounds, it makes good sense. I’m the one thing I know without a doubt exists in the world. Think Descartes “I think, therefore I am.” Even if we go as far as the German philosopher Lichtenberg and limit ourselves to saying that the only thing we can prove is that thinking is occurring, that still means something exists—a mind to produce the thought. Realistically, I believe all of you exist, too, but there’s always the possibility, however slight, that I’m the sole inhabitant of the Matrix or I’m a brain in a vat hallucinating all of my experiences. If that’s true, then there’s still something that exists that is not its own explanation. Something with the power to create has to exist, therefore God exists.

Still not a good reason to be an atheist.

7. Jesus Christ is real. The historical evidence for His existence is just too strong to deny. Jesus says in the gospels that He is God. He’s either lying, delusional, or telling the truth. Given the evidence, the most rational explanation is that He’s telling the truth. Jesus is God. You’d have to convince me somehow that all this historical evidence is fake—and realistically the only way to do that is to convince me I’m hallucinating, in which case go back to #6.

The rest of the top-10 is presented in the context of reasons 1-6. In other words, I doubt I could force myself to hold on to Christianity if someone somehow proved to me that it’s false. But given that I have excellent, virtually unassailable, reasons to believe it’s true, here are some emotional reasons on top of the logical ones why I could never return to atheism.

8. I need hope. What hope is there for the future besides Jesus Christ? Atheism offers zero hope for the future. Jesus is our hope against a universe that will physically annihilate us someday. He is the reason we can have eternity. He is the one perfect solution to our desire to see justice done and to escape the consequences of what we’ve done. Of all the possible futures that any belief system offers, His is by far the most appealing.

9. I need to matter. In this world, I really, truly matter to only a handful of people (and a couple of cats—mostly because I feed them). Even if I mattered to most people in the world right now, what would that mean? Everyone who’s alive right now will be dead in a hundred years or less. Even if I was so influential that people remembered me for thousands of years, eventually all life in the universe will cease and it’ll be like I never existed. I don’t need to matter in an egotistical way, just in a way that I know I’m part of a plan, even if it’s a small part. It gives me great comfort knowing that God planned me, wanted me to exist, and then put me into the universe deliberately. I may be one of a hundred billion other people who ever lived, but Christianity assures me I’m here on purpose. Atheism doesn’t offer me that.

10. I need others to matter. I need everyone I care about to matter. I need everyone who has ever lived to matter. I detest the idea that the universe just randomly coughs up sentient collections of molecules that do nothing more than generate chemical reactions in other sentient collections of molecules, only for the universe to stretch itself to the point that nothing more can be made and all life ceases to exist. Life is too precious—people are too precious—for me to ever accept that. I want every one of you to matter. Unlike atheism, Christianity assures me that all of you are here on purpose, too.

So, there you have it. My top-10 reasons why I’ll never go back to atheism. Even if it turns out I’m in a brain in a vat.

Note to would-be critics in the comments: If you don’t agree with my points and you want to talk about it, let’s chat. If you have questions, ask away. But I have two basic rules: be civil and stick to the topic. Breaking these rules will land you and your comments in the intergalactic dumping grounds of Sakaar. See here.

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