Thoughts and ideas to grapple with the hard questions, refute the atheist claim, and promote the truth of God.
It's a familiar question, but what do we mean by God? Here are some important questions to get you started. Which God? Is this a God that exists inside of you, or outside of you? If solely inside of you, perhaps what you really believe is that you are your own God. Does this God judge you? If not, who does judge you? If you are the only one who has authority to judge you, again, perhaps what you really believe is that you are your own God. If you say you do not believe in any God, you must then accept the notion that everything in existence came from nothing. Can you think of any single thing in this world which you believe has no direct cause? Why then would you believe that existence itself - space, matter, and time - has no cause?
Some define belief as behaving as though something is true, not simply uttering the words which represent the concept. This is the difference between saying you have "accepted Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior" versus actually truly accepting Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior - the two are clearly not the same, one is the meaning and one is simply the symbol that points to the meaning. But then, even if you do truly believe in God, is that enough? Satan also believes in God - he simply doesn't love, trust, respect, or obey Him.
To reject God while embracing a concept of morality is akin to sitting in God's lap to slap His face. Without God you can make an argument that you know THAT something is good or evil, but there is no objective WHY it is good or evil, you are only making arguments from a place of logical practicality or asserting your own thoughts/feelings. What you are doing is making yourself the standard and claiming it is objective morality.
If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian? If not, then you are not on a quest for truth, but are instead on a quest for happiness. The mistake of this atheist mindset is the notion that God will somehow get in the way of your happiness. Ironically, if you search for truth you may find truth and comfort, but if you search for comfort you will find neither. As some atheists plainly state, it's not just that they don't believe in God, it's that they don't want there to be a God. Putting yourself at odds with the nature of reality in the most fundamental way is not a recipe for happiness or any form of inner peace.
Is there such a thing as objective truth? Or is your truth different from my truth and different still from another's truth, yet all are still true? To say there is no objective truth is itself a claim of an objective truth. Truth, indeed, is singular - it's versions are mistruths.
The scientific theory of macro evolution does not disprove Christianity or the existence of a God who created the universe. Some suggest the possibility that God could have created different variations of organisms over time. Alternatively, if the theory of evolution is true in its claims of the processes that drive these gradual changes over time, God is still the creator of these processes and the mechanisms that drive them. He is also still the creator of matter, space and time. He is still the creator of the four fundamental natural forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If I throw a ball in an arc toward a hoop on a set trajectory and then walk off the court with the ball mid-air, is the basket scored attributable to me? Do we instead credit gravity, the mass of the ball, kinetic energy, wind, the dynamics of air restistence, and other similar factors?
How is it possible for us to have free will if God is omnipotent? The concept of God having a plan and of His will to see the end result of said plain realized can coexist with the concept of free will among mankind. This is one of many scenarios where the parent-child analogy, through which God seems to want us to understand our relationship with Him, can be helpful. If you take a family trip to another town, is there only one way to get there? Could not your child, or multiple children, appeal to you to include other stops or sights in your route, and could you not accommodate multiple of these requests while still fulfilling your original and ultimate plan to reach a predestined location? Much the same, we can freely make choices and even pray to effect a change in God's course without negating either the free will of others nor the will of God Himself. Similarly, God can know what will happen in the future without negating your free will - knowledge does not equate to causality. If you are in a helicopter watching two cars in a city approaching an intersection about to collide, you can predict the collision even though the drivers cannot see each other through the buildings, but this does not impact their free will and does not make you the cause of the inevitable crash. Now try to imagine God's experience of existing outside of time. Let's say a you tape a sports game while you are away so you can watch it later, and then as you go to watch it a friend tells you the final score. This has no impact on the decisions made by each of the players or on their free will, despite the fact that you know what will inevitably come to pass. Another way to conceptualize this is to think about predictive AI/ML software systems that depend on billions of data points and analysis of patterns in past sequences of events. As God knows not only the world He created but also each of us so deeply and completely, far better than we understand the world or than we know ourselves, this abundance of limitless information coupled with His utterly unfathomable intelligence and wisdom may afford Him the insight to simply accurately predict what our choices will be without us needing to try to wrrap our minds around the concept of God's existence outside of time. Either way, God simply has an incredible vantage point, but this does not mean He has not given us free will.
Many of the Biblical accounts are nothing short of extraordinary. The creation story, a talking snake, the flood, the plagues, pillars of fire, parting the sea, mana falling from the sky, calming storms, multiplying bread and fish, fasting for over a month, walking on water, healing the sick, raising the dead - the list is incredible. What are we to make of all this, and how can these things be possible? If you can believe that God is all-powerful insofar as he could create the universe itself, you should be able to easily accept any other events recorded in the Bible, as any of these examples provided are far more trivial in comparison by any measure or logic. However, even if certain stories are meant to be interpreted as allegories or parables, as Jesus often used to teach, it still misses the mark to allow this to sow doubt within you about the validity of the Bible. Ask yourself: if the story is from God, either directly or indirectly, through revelation or inspiration, what does He want you to learn from it? For example, WHAT the serpent says and WHY seems far more important than whether there actually WAS a serpent which could speak. Have you ever read a great work of pure fiction which revealed profound truths about human nature that resonated with you in a deep and undeniable manner? Truly, an abstract truth can emerge from a text which contains no literal truths at all.