This past week a Facebook ‘friend’ posted a clip about Atheism.  It defined Atheism as “The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs.”  A somewhat cynical postscript added, “Makes perfect sense!”

I’ve often used a somewhat different approach to show the foolishness of the atheistic view of the origins of human life.  There’s the well-known story of the princess who kissed a frog and the frog turned into a handsome prince.  The time it takes for that to happen is instantaneous.  We call that a fairy tale.   If we understand that the frog is an amphibian and that the prince belongs to the species homo-sapiens then all we need to do is change the time factor from instantaneous to several billion years and we no longer call it a fairy tale but we call it science.  In other words a frog can turn into a prince if we wait long enough.

The sad thing of course is that to believe in an ever-existing God who made this world from nothing makes just as much sense to some people as the atheistic view does to us.

The reality is that the sinful human heart is hostile to God.  We see that particularly in today’s aggressive atheists.  As someone wrote recently, “There are two things we can say about today’s aggressive atheists: first, they say there is no God, second, they hate him with a passion.  I pointed out to someone this past week that I believe there is no Santa Clause but I don’t waste time trying to convince people of that.  I don’t hold seminars on the non-existence of Santa and I haven’t joined an anti-Santa movement.  If God does not exist why do so many atheists spend so much time talking about him?  The classic example of that is Phillip Adams, a public affairs commentator who is forever talking about God even though he claims that there is no God.

On this Pentecost Sunday we remember that God poured out His Holy Spirit and in one day three thousand people came to faith.  That number grew in leaps and bounds until there are now more than a billion Christians on planet earth.  However – and this is the point – it is only the Holy Spirit who can convict people of the truth.  Sure, God uses our words to communicate the reality that there not only is a God but that this God was so filled with compassion for lost humanity that He sent His own Son to take on humanity and pay the penalty for our rebellion against our Creator.  But those words of ours will fall on deaf ears unless God’s Spirit convicts people through those words that we use.

There is no doubt about it that atheism has become much more popular in our day and age – thanks to the aggressive promotion of atheism by people such as Richard Dawkins.  More than ever we need to stand up and speak out about the fallacies of the atheist position.  But on this Pentecost Sunday we need to remember that we cannot do the work of the Holy Spirit.  We need to speak with our friends and workmates about these things but we need to do that in humble reliance on God’s Spirit who alone can soften hard hearts to the truth that we learn from His Word.  May God’s Spirit change many lives today.

John Westendorp