Why Not Atheism — VacantTomb

Atheists Who Examined the Evidence

The arguments in this Foundation are not hypothetical. They have been encountered, evaluated, and found persuasive by some of the most intellectually formidable atheists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their testimonies — reached at enormous personal cost, against the grain of their professional and social environments — are among the most significant pieces of evidence that the case for Christianity is more serious than its critics acknowledge.

Antony Flew: the world's most prominent atheist changes his mind

Antony Flew spent more than fifty years as the world's most prominent philosophical atheist. He was not a polemicist like Hitchens or a popular scientist like Dawkins — he was a rigorous analytical philosopher whose technical arguments against theism were among the most sophisticated in the 20th century. His paper "Theology and Falsification" (1950), which posed the challenge of what would falsify belief in God, became one of the most widely reprinted papers in the philosophy of religion. He participated in dozens of public debates and was regarded by his peers as the most intellectually serious advocate of atheism.

In 2004, at the age of 81, Flew announced that he had changed his mind. He had become a deist — a believer in a Creator God who brought the universe into existence — on the basis of scientific evidence.

The evidence that convinced him was not theological but scientific: the extraordinary informational complexity of DNA, which he concluded could not have arisen through unguided chemical processes. His book There Is a God (2007), written with Roy Abraham Varghese, documents his reasoning:

It was the evidence from science that changed my mind. The argument from the origin of life seemed to me to point strongly to a Creator. The complexity of DNA — the fact that it contains specific, functional information of extraordinary complexity — seemed to me to be best explained by an intelligence. I had to go where the evidence led, even when it led somewhere I did not want to go.
Antony FlewSecular historian— There Is a God, 2007

Flew also evaluated the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus, which he described as "better attested than the claimed miracles of any other religion." He did not become a Christian before his death in 2010, but his journey from leading atheist philosopher to believer in a Creator is one of the most significant intellectual conversions of the 20th century.

Alister McGrath: from Marxist atheist to Oxford theologian

Alister McGrath grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and adopted Marxism and atheism as a teenager, convinced that science had disproved religion. He studied at Oxford with the intention of pursuing a career in chemistry, confident that the scientific worldview left no room for God.

At Oxford, something unexpected happened. McGrath encountered the intellectual tradition of Christianity — not the Sunday-school version he had dismissed, but the sophisticated philosophical and theological tradition he had never actually engaged. He found, to his surprise, that the arguments for Christianity were stronger than the arguments for atheism — that his atheism had rested on assumptions about religion that were not warranted by serious examination.

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. Christianity offered a more coherent, more intellectually satisfying account of reality.
Alister McGrathChristian scholar— The Dawkins Delusion, 2007

McGrath converted to Christianity in 1971. He subsequently earned three Oxford doctorates — in molecular biophysics, historical theology, and intellectual history — and became one of the foremost scholars at the intersection of science and religion. He is the author of the most rigorous academic response to Dawkins (The Dawkins Delusion, 2007) and has written extensively on why the scientific evidence points toward rather than away from Christian theism.

Francis Collins: the Human Genome Project and the evidence for God

Francis Collins was a physician-geneticist at Yale and UNC who identified himself as an atheist in his early career. His conversion began not through philosophical argument but through patient encounters: dying patients who asked questions about meaning, suffering, and hope that science could not answer. These encounters unsettled his confident atheism and sent him searching for a more complete account of human experience.

He read C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. The argument that most struck him was Lewis's moral argument: the universal human conviction that some things are genuinely wrong pointed, Lewis argued, to a moral lawgiver above human preference. Collins, a rigorous scientist trained to follow evidence, found this argument compelling:

When I considered the evidence of the Moral Law, I found myself confronted with a force that went beyond mere evolutionary biology. The evidence pointed to a God who cares deeply about right and wrong and has instilled that caring in us. And working in genomics, studying the digital code of life, the very language of God, I found it increasingly difficult to maintain my atheism.
Francis CollinsChristian scholar— The Language of God, 2006

Collins went on to lead the Human Genome Project and serve as Director of the National Institutes of Health — one of the most significant scientific leadership positions in the world. His faith and his science are not in conflict. He regards the extraordinary informational complexity of the genome — 3 billion base pairs encoding the instructions for a human being — as evidence consistent with the existence of a Creator.

C.S. Lewis: the reluctant convert

C.S. Lewis's conversion is the most documented and most analyzed intellectual conversion to Christianity in the 20th century. He had been a committed atheist from his teenage years — an atheist by conviction, by philosophical inclination, and by temperament. He found the idea of God unwelcome: not merely unbelievable but personally objectionable, an intrusion on his independence.

His conversion came not through emotional experience but through philosophical argument — through the arguments from reason, from desire, and from the moral law that are examined throughout this Foundation and the Why Christianity Foundation. His description of the moment of capitulation is famous:

You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
C.S. LewisChristian scholar— Surprised by Joy, 1955

"The most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." Lewis's conversion was not a comfort-seeking retreat from hard questions. It was a philosopher following arguments he would have preferred not to follow to a conclusion he would have preferred not to reach. He went on to become the most influential Christian apologist of the 20th century — not because he started from faith but because he started from the same place the skeptic starts, and followed the evidence.

The pattern: evidence, not emotion

The cases above — Flew, McGrath, Collins, Lewis, Strobel, McDowell — share a common pattern. None of these conversions were driven by emotional crisis, family pressure, cultural convenience, or the desire for comfort. All of them were driven by evidence: the informational complexity of DNA, the force of the moral argument, the historical case for the resurrection, the philosophical inadequacy of atheism's account of consciousness, reason, and value.

The pattern is significant. The New Atheists present atheism as the position of those who simply follow evidence, and faith as the position of those who resist it. The conversions documented here — from atheism to Christianity, by rigorous thinkers who began as committed atheists — tell a different story. They suggest that a serious, evidence-based examination of the competing claims tends to point toward Christianity rather than away from it.

I grew up as an atheist and I was quite convinced that God was a myth. What changed my mind was evidence — the evidence from cosmology, from the informational complexity of biology, from the existence of objective moral values, and from the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Christianity turned out to be more intellectually satisfying than atheism.
Alister McGrathChristian scholar— Surprised by Joy, interview 2012

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Atheists Who Examined the Evidence

Antony Flew, Alister McGrath, Francis Collins, C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel — committed atheists who examined the evidence and changed their minds. None of these conversions were driven by emotional crisis or comfort-seeking. All were driven by evidence. The pattern suggests that serious intellectual examination of Christianity's claims tends to point toward rather than away from them.

Key claims

—Antony Flew: "the world's most notorious atheist" — changed his mind at 81 on DNA evidence; acknowledged resurrection evidence is strongest for any religion
—Alister McGrath: Marxist atheist → three Oxford doctorates → Christian apologist; "atheism rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis"
—Francis Collins: atheist geneticist → led Human Genome Project → "the complexity of DNA made it increasingly difficult to maintain my atheism"
—C.S. Lewis: "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England" — followed philosophical argument against his wishes
—Lee Strobel: atheist journalist set out to disprove Christianity; the evidence changed his mind
—Pattern: these conversions were driven by evidence, not emotion or social pressure

Scholars cited

Antony FlewFormer atheist philosopher
Alister McGrathFormer atheist / theologian
Francis CollinsGeneticist / former atheist
C.S. LewisFormer atheist
Lee StrobelFormer atheist journalist

Other foundations

Why Christianity

Why Not Islam

I'm Struggling

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