For the Searching Heart
"Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing."
John 20:27
This page is not written to win an argument. If you are an atheist, you have almost certainly been argued at by Christians, and you probably found the experience irritating rather than persuasive — a series of answers to questions you had not asked, delivered by somebody who had already decided what was wrong with you.
So here is the undertaking. Every objection below will be stated as strongly as I can state it, before a word of reply. Where the reply is weak, I will say so. Where there is no good answer, I will admit it rather than manufacture one. And nowhere will you be told that you only disbelieve because you want to sin — an accusation that is both unprovable and, in most cases, simply untrue.
If at the end you remain unconvinced, you will at least not have been insulted.
It is worth knowing at the outset that the Bible is a strikingly unembarrassed book about doubt.
It contains a man who told God to His face that He had made a mess of running the world, and the book named after him is in the canon. It contains prophets who accused God of deceiving them. It contains a psalm that ends in darkness with no resolution. It contains men who asked how long, and were not answered.
And it contains a disciple who refused point blank to believe the central claim of the entire religion on the testimony of every friend he had.
"But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe." (John 20:25)
What was done with that man is the subject of the last section of this page. For now, note only this: the objection you are about to raise has almost certainly been raised inside the book itself, by someone God did not strike down for raising it.
State it at full strength, because it deserves that.
It is not an abstract puzzle. It is a child dying slowly of something with a long name while her parents pray and nothing happens. It is an earthquake that kills forty thousand people in ninety seconds, most of them asleep. It is the specific, unshareable suffering that some person is enduring at the moment you read this sentence, which no explanation will make acceptable to them.
And the standard Christian replies are, taken alone, inadequate. Free will covers the murderer but not the tumour. God is teaching you something is obscene at a graveside. It will make sense one day is a promissory note, not an answer.
So let me say what I actually think can be said.
First, the argument cuts in a direction people rarely notice. To call the suffering of a child evil, rather than merely unpleasant, is to appeal to a standard. If the universe is matter in motion and nothing else, a child dying of cancer is not a tragedy — it is a rearrangement of atoms, no more wrong than erosion. Our fury at suffering is one of the strongest intuitions we have that the world is not as it ought to be. But ought is a strange word to find in a purely material account of things.
Second, Christianity does not explain suffering away. It says God entered it. Whatever else the cross is, it is not the act of a deity insulated from pain. The claim is that God took a human body precisely so that He could be exhausted, betrayed, tortured and killed. He does not answer the problem of pain from a distance; He answers it from inside.
Third — and this is the honest part — Scripture does not give the explanation you want. The book of Job is the Bible's long treatment of an innocent man's suffering, and when God finally speaks, He does not explain. He asks Job a series of questions about the created order and never once tells him why. Any Christian who claims to have the explanation has gone further than his own Scriptures.
What Scripture offers is not a reason but a Person, and a promise that this is not the end of the story. You may find that insufficient. I would not blame you. But do not mistake it for an evasion — it is what the book actually says, and it has been said honestly.
The strongest form: if my eternal destiny depends on believing something, and the evidence is genuinely ambiguous enough that sincere, intelligent, honest people examine it and conclude there is no God, then either the evidence is insufficient or the stakes are unjust. A God who wanted to be known could end the debate in an afternoon.
That is a serious objection and it deserves better than the usual reply.
What Scripture claims is not that God is hidden but that He has given a particular kind of evidence — the created order, the moral sense, the historical record — and not another kind.
"Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse." (Romans 1:19-20)
You may judge that evidence inadequate. Many do. But note what kind of evidence it is not: it is not coercive. A God who wrote His name across the sky in letters no one could deny would have compelled assent without winning anybody. He would have produced subjects, not sons.
There is an analogy, imperfect as all analogies are. A man may make a woman afraid of him in an afternoon. He cannot make her love him in an afternoon, and if he tries to compel it he destroys the very thing he wanted. The kind of knowledge God is said to want is of the second sort, and it cannot be produced by overwhelming force.
That will not satisfy everyone, and I am not going to pretend it settles the matter.
This is the objection where the Christian has the least room to manoeuvre, and the honest response is largely agreement.
The crusades happened. The inquisition happened. Slavery was defended from pulpits with chapter and verse. Children were abused by clergy across denominations and continents, and the institutions moved the men rather than the men to prison. Pogroms were launched from Easter sermons. Wars were blessed by chaplains on both sides.
None of that is exaggerated by atheists. If anything it is understated, because most of it was never recorded.
Two things can be said, and neither is a defence of any of it.
The first is that the sharpest condemnation of religious abusers in all literature is in the New Testament, from the mouth of Christ Himself. He called the religious leadership of His day whited sepulchres, blind guides, a generation of vipers. He said it would be better for a man to be drowned with a millstone about his neck than to harm one of the little ones. That is not a religion embarrassed by its abusers; it is a religion whose founder attacked them more fiercely than any modern critic has.
The second is a question of what the argument actually proves. That Christians have behaved appallingly proves that Christians behave appallingly — which Christianity itself predicts, since its central claim about human beings is that they are corrupt, including the religious ones. It does not establish whether Christ rose from the dead. Those are separate questions, and only the second determines whether the thing is true.
You are entitled to say the record makes you unwilling to consider the claim. That is a human response and I understand it. But it is a reason for revulsion, not a disproof.
Stated properly, the objection is not that a test tube disproved God. It is that religion has historically been the explanation of last resort for whatever was not yet understood — lightning, disease, the origin of species — and every time the science arrived, the god retreated. Why expect the remaining gaps to behave differently?
That is a fair description of a real pattern, and Christians who build their case on gaps deserve what happens to them.
But notice what science is and is not equipped to do. It answers questions of mechanism magnificently: what happened, in what order, by what process. It is silent by construction on questions of agency and purpose — why is there anything at all, and does any of it mean something.
A complete physical account of how a cathedral was built tells you nothing about whether anyone intended it. The mechanism and the intention are different questions, and finding one does not eliminate the other. When someone says science has disproved God, ask which experiment. There isn't one, because it is not the kind of claim that a laboratory is built to test.
And it is worth saying plainly that the supposed war between them is largely a modern story. The men who built the scientific method were, in overwhelming proportion, believers who expected the universe to be orderly because they thought it had been ordered.
Full strength: it was written across centuries by dozens of hands in three languages, copied by scribes who made mistakes, translated repeatedly, assembled into a canon by committees with politics of their own, and now contains passages its own defenders are embarrassed by.
Most of the factual content of that sentence is true, and any Christian who denies the copying and the committees is not worth listening to.
What is worth knowing is how the manuscript question actually stands. We possess thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, some within a couple of generations of the events. That is why we can see the variants — not despite the evidence but because of its abundance. A document copied once and preserved in a vault would show no variants at all and would be far less checkable. And of the variants that exist, the overwhelming majority are spelling and word order; the small number that touch anything of substance are known, catalogued, and openly printed in the margins of ordinary Bibles.
The honest position is not that the text descended untouched from heaven in leather binding. It is that we can see what was written with a confidence unmatched for any other document of that age — and that you are free to check it yourself rather than take anyone's word, which is exactly what the New Testament commends people for doing.
"These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." (Acts 17:11)
The objection deserves its full force: eternal conscious torment as punishment for a finite life, for the crime of not believing something on evidence the accused found unpersuasive, is disproportionate to the point of monstrosity — and no decent human being would do it to anyone.
This is, for many, the real objection underneath the others. Let me say what can be said without softening the doctrine, because softening it would be dishonest.
Scripture does not present hell as a penalty for a failed exam in metaphysics. It presents it as the final ratification of a settled refusal — a person getting, permanently, the separation from God that he insisted on. C. S. Lewis put it in a sentence: the doors of hell are locked on the inside. Whether you find that adequate is another matter, but it is not the caricature of a deity punishing honest error.
Second, if God is the source of every good thing a human being has ever enjoyed, then being finally without Him is not an arbitrary punishment bolted on afterwards. It is what the absence of the source amounts to.
Third — and here I will not pretend the difficulty dissolves — the duration troubles me too. Christians differ on it, honestly and within orthodoxy. What I will not do is soften what the Lord Jesus Christ said about it, because He is the one who said the most about it, and He is not describable as a harsh God who needed restraining by a gentler Son.
If hell is the reason you have walked away, I would rather you said so plainly than pretended the objection was intellectual. It is a moral objection, it is honestly held, and it should be taken to God Himself rather than to a website.
The strong form: you believe what you believe because of where you were born. Had you been born elsewhere you would be defending a different book with equal conviction. That is a fact about geography, not about truth.
The observation is correct and the conclusion does not follow. Where you were born also determines which language you speak and which arithmetic you were taught, and that has no bearing on whether two and two make four. The origin of a belief and its truth are separate questions. Applied consistently, the argument would dissolve the atheism of a person raised in a secular home just as fast.
What can be said is that the claims are not all of one kind. Most religions are systems of teaching that could survive the death of their founder, because the teaching is the point. Christianity made a claim that is unusual in being a matter of historical fact: that a specific man, executed publicly under a named Roman governor, was seen alive afterwards by named people, most of whom were still living and could be questioned when the claim was first written down.
"And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (1 Corinthians 15:14)
That is the apostle Paul supplying the disproof of his own religion. He is telling you the exact condition under which the whole thing collapses. Very few belief systems hand you that.
So the question is narrower than which of a thousand religions. It is: did that happen? And that is a question you can actually investigate.
Honesty requires a section of concessions, and this one is not a rhetorical device.
I cannot tell you why God permitted a particular thing that happened to you or to someone you love. I do not know, and any Christian who says he does is speaking beyond his commission.
I cannot show you God. Nobody can. What I can point to is evidence you must weigh yourself, and I am aware that a person may weigh it honestly and conclude differently.
I cannot explain why prayer is answered in one case and not in another that seems identical, and I am not going to pretend the pattern is obvious. It is not.
I cannot make the church's history acceptable, and I am not going to try.
And I cannot argue anyone into believing. Argument can remove an obstacle. It has never once produced faith, in anybody, in the history of the world.
Which brings us back to Thomas, and it is worth seeing exactly what happened, because it is not what most people assume.
Thomas had spent three years with the man. Every friend he had told him they had seen Him alive. And he refused — not politely, not with an open mind, but with a list of physical conditions he would require before he would accept a word of it. He would have to see the wounds. He would have to put his finger in them.
Eight days later the Lord Jesus Christ came and stood among them, and turned to him.
"Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing." (John 20:27)
Read what is not there. No rebuke for asking. No lecture about the superiority of unquestioning belief. He does not tell Thomas that demanding evidence is a sin.
He gives him exactly the evidence he asked for, in the exact terms he specified. He had heard the conditions — Thomas had set them in a room He was not visibly in — and He met them.
And Thomas, who had been the hardest man in the room, made the highest confession of deity in the four Gospels:
"And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God." (John 20:28)
The doubter went furthest. That is not an accident of the narrative, and it should tell an honest sceptic something about how his questions are regarded.
Here is a concrete proposal, and it asks nothing dishonest of you.
Do not try to believe. You cannot will belief, and attempting it produces only self-deception, which is worth less than your present honest unbelief.
Instead, do what an investigator does. Read one of the Gospels straight through — John or Luke — as a document, not a devotion. Not in fragments on a calendar; in one or two sittings, as you would read any historical account you were assessing. Ask the ordinary questions. Does this read as legend or as testimony? Would a fabricator have included these details — the women as first witnesses, in a culture where their testimony was not accepted; the disciples portrayed as slow, cowardly and wrong; the founder crying out that He was forsaken?
And if you are willing, add one thing that costs you nothing. Say aloud, roughly: God, I do not know that You are there. If You are, I am willing to be shown.
That is not a prayer of faith and it does not pretend to be. It is a statement of willingness, which is the one thing no argument can supply on your behalf. Scripture puts the same condition the other way round — that those who seek God with the whole heart will find Him — and it is worth noticing that the offer is made to seekers, not to the already convinced.
If nothing comes of it, you have lost a couple of evenings and a sentence spoken into an empty room. If something comes of it, you have found the thing everything else was pointing at.
So that nothing is hidden behind the arguments, here is the claim in plain terms — not as something you must accept today, but so you know precisely what is on the table.
"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)
"For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)
"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)
Note what is not required. Not that you first become good. Not that you resolve every question. Not that you feel certain. The condition stated is trust in a Person, and it is offered to people while they are still in the wrong.
If you have read this far as an unbeliever, you have given more honest attention to the question than most people who call themselves Christians ever have, and that is worth saying.
Nothing here has asked you to stop thinking, and nothing here has told you that your doubts are wickedness. They are not. Thomas is in the Bible, with his conditions and his refusal recorded in full, and the risen Christ walked into the room and offered him His hands.
He was not angry with the man who wanted evidence. There is no reason to suppose He is angry with you.
"And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God."John 20:28
Our gracious heavenly Father, we come before Thy throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Thy presence.
We thank Thee for Thy beloved Son, and for meeting Thomas in his unbelief and giving him the very evidence he demanded. We praise Thee for Thy preserved Word, which declareth **"Be not faithless, but believing"** (John 20:27), and which cannot be broken.
We confess before Thee that we have often answered honest questions with impatience instead of with **Thy Word**. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for Thou art faithful and just to forgive us our sins.
We beseech Thee for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Thy Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Thy Son before this day is done.
Strengthen Thy people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to reach the sceptic who reads it, and answer the questions he has never dared to ask aloud, for Thy glory and not for ours.
We pray all of this to Thee, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?
You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin — but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.
If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words — but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:
Dear Holy and Almighty God, I come to Thee just as I am. I confess that I am a sinner. I have broken Thy law, I have gone my own way, and I deserve the judgment and the everlasting fire that my sin has earned. I cannot save myself, and I bring Thee nothing.
I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is Thy Son; that He loved me and died on the cross in my place, shedding His precious blood for my sins; that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day.
Here and now I turn from my sin, and I trust Him alone — not my works, not my religion, not my goodness — to save me. Lord Jesus, come into my heart, forgive my sin, and be my Saviour from this moment and for ever.
In the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.
1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).
2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).
3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.
4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved — you already are — but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.
5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).