QUOTATIONS FROM ATHEISTS WHO HAVE BECOME THEISTS (EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST TWO)

Albert Einstein (Perhaps a non-theist)

·       "The harmony of natural law . . . reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

Atheist Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick

·       “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to have been satisfied to get it going.” 

Former atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle:

·       "Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shuffling of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is insensibly different from zero." So, there must be "an intelligence, which designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carbonaceous life." (Norman Geisler is the source of these first quotations)

Former atheist and astronomer Alan Sandage

·       "As I said before, the world is too complicated in all of its parts to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. . . . The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some kind of organizing principle—an architect.

Frank Tipler, mathematical physicist and cosmologist, Tulane (‘The Physics Of Immortality.’)

·       “When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”

https://jamesbishopblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/former-atheists-speak-44-quotes/

-Antony Flew (‘There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.’)

·       “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”

·       “I now believe there is a God…I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.”

·       “…we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.”

-Francis Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.)

·       “The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful – and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them.” -Rick Oliver Ph.D. in Biology.  He is a member of the American Federation of Herpetoculturalists, the California Science Teachers Association, and the New York Academy of Science. (‘Designed to Kill in a Fallen World.’)

-Lee Strobel (‘Case For Christ: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity.’)

·       “It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian.”

-Warner Wallace (‘Jesus Is Evidence That God Exists.’)

·       “In the end, I came to the conclusion that the gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts that delivered accurate information about Jesus, including His crucifixion and Resurrection. But that created a problem for me. If Jesus really was who He said He was, then Jesus was God Himself. If Jesus truly did what the gospel eyewitnesses recorded, then Jesus is still God Himself. As someone who used to reject anything supernatural, I had to make a decision about my naturalistic presuppositions.“

-Alister McGrath, theologian, scientist, and a priest (‘Breaking the Science-Atheism Bond’)

·       “Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.”

-Sir William Ramsay  (1851 – 1939) was a Scottish archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament:

·       “Further study . . . showed that the book (Acts) could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world, and that it was written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement.'” .  (‘The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament.’)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008) was a Russian writer, and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature.

·       “Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” (‘Voice from the Gulag.’)

-Peter Hitchens has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God and The War We Never Fought. He also writes for Britain’s The Mail on Sunday newspaper and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. In his book The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith he tells us of his conversion from militant atheist to Christian theism.

·       “I thought this gesture [burning his Bible] was a way of showing that I had finally rejected all the things that I had been brought up to believe, and I went on to behave for the next 20 years of my life exactly as if I didn’t believe in him [God], and that’s how I discovered in the end that what I had rejected was right.” (‘The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith.’)

·       “The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity – the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. . . .The God they fight is the Christian God, because he is their own God. . . .God is the leftists’ chief rival.  Christian belief, by subjecting all men to divine authority and by asserting in the words ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ that the ideal society does not exist in this life, is the most coherent and potent obstacle to secular utopianism. . . . the Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power.”

·       “…when it comes to the millions of small and tedious good deeds that are needed for a society to function with charity, honesty, and kindness, a shortage of believing Christians will lead to that society’s decay.”

-Philip Vander Elst, a former atheist, is a freelance writer and lecturer who has spent nearly 30 years in politics and journalism, and now works with Areopagus Ministries.

 “So, confronted by all these facts and arguments – philosophical, scientific, and historical – I surrendered my sword of unbelief to God, and asked Jesus to forgive my sins and come into my life during the hot, dry summer of 1976. In the years that have followed, I have never regretted that decision, despite many ups and downs and trials of my faith.”

·       “My atheistic philosophy had allowed me to lose my compassion for others. I no longer had the ability to love anyone, not even myself. I had become apathetic to life itself. For years, I had been dead, but because I continued to walk and talk, I didn’t know it. But now, I was born again and the spirit that was in me, which had allowed me to understand spiritual things, connected with the glorious and perfect higher consciousness of Jesus Christ” (‘From Atheism to Christianity: a Personal Journey’)

-A.S.A Jones was a devout atheist for over 20 years before finally managing to see the biblical truths that had managed to elude him for so long.

·       “I thought that atheism was “smart.”  When my grandmother argued for a first cause, I replied by postulating an infinite regression of causes (my arrogance left me unaware that my response violated modern physics!)  Yet unknown to me, my father’s mother, sister, and the sister’s family were praying for our family.  When I was 13, reading Plato raised for me the question of life after death, but Plato’s answers did not seem adequate.  I began to realize that only an infinite Being could guarantee the hope of eternal life.  Yet if such a Being existed, there seemed no reason why that Being would care about me, even if that Being were perfectly loving enough to give life to some.  I was incurably selfish and undeserving of a loving Being’s attention; it seemed to me that if I pretended to love, it was only for the self-serving purpose of getting that Being’s attention.  Yet shortly before I turned 15, I began to secretly cry out, “God, if You are there—please show me.” (‘Testimony of A Former Atheist, A.S.A. Jones’)