The typical atheist conversion story usually boils down to one (or a combination) of the same qualms—none of which actually engage the strongest arguments for God’s existence:

1. The Problem of Evil and the Epicurean Paradox

This is emotionally powerful but philosophically shallow once you’ve read any serious theodicy. Most people quoting it have never cracked open Plantinga, Swinburne, or even CS Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. They just repeat the meme version and think the question is unanswerable.

The atheist’s argument here is formally stated as follows:

(1) If God is all-powerful, He can prevent all evil.

(2) If God is all-loving, He wants to prevent all evil.

(3) But evil exists.

(4) Therefore, God (as traditionally defined) does not exist.

This argument is logically valid, but it is not sound because the free-will defense shows that premises (1) and (2) cannot both be true simultaneously in a world containing free creatures.

It is logically impossible to make someone freely choose the good on every occasion. Thus, God can be both omnipotent and perfectly good and yet permit certain evils for the sake of obtaining the greater goods that flow from genuine freedom (moral goodness, love, courage, and redemption).

Natural evil fails to present a defeater for Christian theism because it allows for soul-making and moral growth, which wouldn’t be possible in a world without suffering.

In a world with natural evil, people are able to develop virtues, moral maturity, and a genuine relationship with God that might not be possible in a world free from suffering and hardship​. Such a utopia would risk making people immature moral agents oblivious to God.

A fallen world with consistent natural laws will inevitably produce natural evils as byproducts. Nevertheless, God finds it better for His creatures to exist in such a stable, law-governed universe because it enables meaningful moral growth and freely chosen salvation.

God is not directly responsible for each specific instance of suffering, but views such evils as the natural outcome of the kind of world necessary for His greater objectives.

No one has ever shown that God has no morally sufficient reasons for permitting suffering. The atheist bears the burden of proving that such reasons do not exist, and that is an extraordinarily difficult (perhaps impossible) task.

2. “There is no evidence for God.”

Translation: “I personally have never seen a deductive proof of God printed on a billboard, and I’m only willing to accept evidence that looks like a lab experiment.”

This claim is astonishing when one considers the wealth of arguments available:

The contingency of the universe (the Leibnizian cosmological argument): Why does anything at all exist rather than nothing? The universe cannot explain its own existence. It requires a necessary, uncaused, timeless, immaterial, and personal cause.

The beginning of the universe (the kalām cosmological argument):

(1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

(2) The universe began to exist (as confirmed by the Big Bang and the second law of thermodynamics).

(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause—the aforementioned transcendent personal Creator.

The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life: The constants and quantities in nature fall into an extraordinarily narrow life-permitting range. The best explanation is design.

The objective reality of moral values and duties points to a transcendent moral lawgiver:

(1) If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

(2) Objective moral values do exist.

(3) Therefore, God exists.

The historical facts surrounding the fate of Jesus of Nazareth (His burial, the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, the origin of the disciples’ belief in His resurrection) are best explained by His literal resurrection from the dead, which serves as God’s vindication of Christ’s radical personal claims to divinity.

These arguments are cumulative. Taken together, they constitute a powerful case that God exists and has revealed Himself decisively in Jesus Christ.

3. Alleged Contradictions in the Bible

Most of the supposed contradictions evaporate after five minutes of honest exegesis.

For example, the differences in the resurrection narratives are precisely what one expects from independent eyewitness accounts, not from fabricated stories. The “two” creation accounts in Genesis are complementary, not contradictory.

Alleged discrepancies in numbers or chronology almost always admit of reasonable harmonizations once the ancient literary conventions are understood.

No one has ever produced a clear, undeniable contradiction that fully withstands scrutiny.

4. "God is a moral monster in the Old Testament."

"Why doesn't God rid the world of evil?" *God floods the Earth and commands Israel to wipe out evil* "No, not like that!"

Most critics apply 21st-century secular ethics to ancient Near Eastern warfare and slavery without context and then act shocked that a 3,000-year-old text doesn’t read like a modern UN declaration.

5. "Science has disproved God."

On the contrary, modern science has made the universe far more difficult to explain naturalistically than it was in the 19th century.

The origin of the universe, the exquisite fine-tuning of physics, the reducibility of chemistry to physics yet the irreducibility of mind to brain: All of these point toward theism rather than away from it.

Science describes natural processes; it does not, and cannot, answer the deeper question, “Why is there a universe at all, and why this kind of universe?”

6. Bad Experiences with the Church

I sympathize deeply with those who have been hurt by hypocritical believers. The misuse of Christianity by some, however, does not invalidate its truth any more than the misuse of science in the atomic bomb invalidates science.

We must distinguish between the truth of the Christian worldview and the failings of some of its adherents.

...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. - Romans 3:23

What’s striking is how rarely you see lay atheists engage with Craig's Reasonable Faith, Aquinas’ Five Ways, Gödel’s ontological argument, Alvin Plantinga’s proper basicality of belief in God, Swinburne’s Bayesian case, or even the moderate evidentialist arguments from people like Tim and Lydia McGrew.

Instead, it’s always the same amateur-level objections that were answered centuries ago. They aren’t rejecting theism's best arguments. They're rejecting the Sunday-school strawmen they adopted as adolescents and then stopped thinking about.

They’ve never actually met the God they don’t believe in.

In the end, atheism is not merely the absence of belief in God; it's the positive assertion that the universe and human life have no ultimate, transcendent, stance-independent meaning or purpose. That is a grim and desolate worldview.

Christianity, by contrast, tells us:

1. we are known and loved by the very ground of all reality,

2. our lives have eternal significance, and

3. even suffering and death have been conquered through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.