"The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 14:1). Yet many of the most thoughtful people in history have wrestled honestly with whether God exists, and some of the sharpest questions about faith have come from atheists themselves.
These nine stories about atheism and belief in God, retold in our own words, range from a philosopher's parable and a famous conversion to a couple of jokes that have been told from pulpits for years. Some are true stories, some are parables, and we say which is which. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- The Madman: Nietzsche's Parable of a World Without God
- An Atheist Changes His Mind: Antony Flew
- The Atheist Professor and the Grizzly Bear
- "No Need of That Hypothesis": Laplace and Napoleon
- Dr Karl and the God Who Finds Parking Spaces
- Get Your Own Dirt: The Scientist Who Challenged God
- Galileo's Telescope and Our Place in the Universe
- Gabrielle Carey: From Puberty Blues to Faith
- Can We Believe in Miracles? David Hume's Challenge
The Madman: Nietzsche's Parable of a World Without God
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for the words "God is dead". They first appear in a parable in his book The Gay Science (1882), in section 125. Nietzsche was not celebrating. His madman speaks of the tragedy of a world that has lost its belief in God but has found nothing worthy to take God's place, leaving humanity orphaned in the universe.
Here is the parable, retold in our own words.
One bright morning a madman lit a lantern, as if it were the middle of the night, and ran into the marketplace crying out again and again, "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!"
Many of the people standing around did not believe in God, and they burst out laughing. "Has he got lost?" one asked. "Did he wander off like a child?" asked another. "Maybe he is hiding. Is he scared of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?" They shouted and laughed at him.
The madman jumped into the middle of the crowd and stared at them with piercing eyes. "Where has God gone?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers."
Then he poured out a stream of questions. How could we have done such a thing? How could we drink up the whole sea? Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Where is it moving now, and where are we moving? Are we falling endlessly, backward, sideways, forward, in every direction? Is there still an up or a down? Are we not wandering through an infinite nothing? Can we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not grown colder? Is night not closing in on us, more and more? Must we not light lanterns in the morning?
Do we not yet hear the gravediggers burying God, he asked. Do we not yet smell God's decay? For even gods decay. "God is dead," he cried. "God remains dead. And we have killed him."
How, he asked, shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest thing the world had ever possessed had bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe the blood from us? What water could ever make us clean? What rituals of atonement, what sacred games would we have to invent? Was not this deed too great for us? Would we not have to become gods ourselves just to seem worthy of it? There had never been a greater deed, he said, and whoever was born after it would belong to a higher history than any before.
Then the madman fell silent and looked at his listeners again. They were silent too, staring at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground. It broke into pieces and went out.
"I have come too early," he said. "My time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way. It has not yet reached people's ears. Lightning and thunder need time. The light of the stars needs time. Deeds, even once they are done, need time before they are seen and heard. This deed is still further from them than the most distant stars, and yet they have done it themselves."
It is said that later that same day the madman forced his way into several churches and began to sing a requiem, a mass for the dead, for God. When he was led out and asked to explain himself, he would only answer: what are these churches now, if not the tombs and monuments of God?
Takeaway: Nietzsche saw more clearly than many believers what is lost when God is pushed out of a culture: meaning, morality, direction, hope. His madman asks the right question. If God is gone, what will take his place? The Christian answer is that God is not dead, and that in Jesus, who was dead and is alive for ever (Revelation 1:18), the lantern has not gone out.
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887), section 125. Paraphrased in our own words.
An Atheist Changes His Mind: Antony Flew
In 1950, as the story is told, a group of Oxford students gathered for a weekly debate between atheists and Christians. The meeting was the Oxford Socratic Club, a society founded to discuss arguments for and against Christianity, and its president was C. S. Lewis.
That evening a young philosopher named Antony Flew presented a short paper making the case for atheism. It was called "Theology and Falsification". The title does not sound exciting, but the paper has often been described as one of the most widely reprinted philosophical essays of the twentieth century. Flew went on to become one of the most influential atheist philosophers of his generation. In the preface to Flew's later book, the writer Roy Abraham Varghese claimed that no mainstream philosopher in the last hundred years had produced a body of atheist thought as systematic, comprehensive and influential as Flew's fifty years of writing.
Then, in 2004, Flew dropped a bombshell. He announced that he had changed his mind. He now believed in God.
He had not had a dramatic conversion experience. He had not had a vision or a personal encounter with God. He said he had simply followed the evidence, and that arguments from science and philosophy, especially the complexity of life, now pointed toward a creator. As he had always said a philosopher should, he had "followed the argument where it led". In the book There Is a God (2007), written with Varghese, Flew described the God he had come to accept as a self-existent, unchanging, immaterial, all-powerful and all-knowing Being.
It is worth being precise about how far Flew went. According to his Wikipedia biography, he described himself as a deist: he believed in a creator but did not accept the Christian faith or life after death. There has also been debate about how much of There Is a God he wrote himself; he acknowledged that Varghese did most of the writing but said the book reflected his views. Flew died in 2010.
Takeaway: Honest thinking does not have to lead away from God. "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands" (Psalm 19:1). Following the evidence wherever it leads is something believers can welcome, not fear.
Source: Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God (2007). Biographical details checked against Wikipedia.
The Atheist Professor and the Grizzly Bear
This is a joke, not a true story. It has been told in sermons and speeches for many years, and its origin is unknown.
There was once a biology professor who was a committed atheist. Every year he began his lectures on evolution by asking whether any of his students were religious. When a few hands went up, he would smile and promise them that by the end of his course they would all know evolution was the truth, and they would all be atheists. Over the years, more than a few students lost their faith in his classes.
One day the professor was walking alone through a forest, marvelling at the wonderful world that evolution had produced. Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by a deep, loud growl. He turned around and saw a huge, hungry and very bad-tempered grizzly bear charging straight at him.
The professor ran for his life, but it was no use. The bear was much too fast. He tripped over a root and fell, and the next thing he knew the grizzly was standing over him, one heavy foot on his chest, its paw raised to strike. With terror in his eyes, the professor realised he was about to experience the survival of the fittest first-hand.
At that moment he cried out, "God, help me!"
Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest fell completely silent. A brilliant light shone down on the professor, and a voice boomed from the heavens. "For all these years you have denied that I exist. You have taught others that I do not exist. You have even credited my creation to a cosmic accident. And now you expect me to help you? Am I to count you as a believer?"
The professor squinted up into the light. "It would be hypocritical of me to ask you to treat me as a Christian now," he said. "But perhaps you could make the bear a Christian?"
"Very well," said the voice.
The light went out. The sounds of the forest returned. And the bear slowly lowered its paw, brought both paws together, bowed its head, and said: "Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful."
Takeaway: Behind the laughter is a serious point. Many people who live as if God does not exist still cry out to him in a crisis. And being "Christian" in name, even for a bear, is not the same as a changed heart.
Source: Traditional joke, origin unknown.
"No Need of That Hypothesis": Laplace and Napoleon
In the time of Napoleon there lived a brilliant French mathematician and astronomer named Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace believed that the universe worked like a vast machine, and that if we knew enough about it, we could in principle predict everything that would ever happen.
He set out his ideas about the system of the universe in a large book and presented a copy to Napoleon. (The original illustration names his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, but most versions of the story connect it with his great works on astronomy.) Napoleon, so the story goes, said to him: "Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe and have never even mentioned its Creator."
Laplace is said to have replied: "I had no need of that hypothesis."
The line became one of the most quoted in the history of science and religion, and it is often used to suggest that science has made God unnecessary. But historians are cautious. The only eyewitness account of the meeting, in the diary of the astronomer William Herschel, does not include the famous words, and several scholars have argued that, if Laplace said something like it, he meant only that he did not need God to step in and correct the orbits of the planets, as Newton had suggested, not that God does not exist. Even Stephen Hawking said he did not think Laplace was claiming that God does not exist.
Takeaway: Explaining how the universe works is not the same as explaining why there is a universe at all. Christians believe God is not a gap-filler for what science has not yet explained, but the one in whom "all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17).
Source: Story and citation in Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present, and Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion. Historical caveats from Wikipedia.
Dr Karl and the God Who Finds Parking Spaces
Karl Kruszelnicki, known to Australians simply as "Dr Karl", is famous as a master of the weird and wonderful in science. Through decades of radio and television, and dozens of books, he has explained things like why maggots can be good for you and why belly-button fluff tends to be blue.
But there is a serious side to Dr Karl. His parents were both survivors of the Nazi era. His mother, who was Jewish, escaped from Auschwitz, and his father was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for helping smuggle Jews out of Poland. As a child, Karl was told his mother was a Swedish Lutheran; the full story came out only later, and it affected him deeply.
After the family emigrated to Australia, Karl grew up in Wollongong, New South Wales, a migrant child in a very Anglo-Australian town. He has described his childhood as hard, including bullying. In the original illustration he remembers walking to primary school in the rain. Few families had cars in those days, but the parents who did formed a car pool to drive the children to school on wet days. Karl was the only one left out. He did not share the sporting passions of the mainstream culture, and he felt like an outsider.
According to Karl, these experiences shaped what he believes about God. In a magazine interview he said that he found it difficult to believe in a God who was in any way concerned about us, though he was prepared to believe in a God who simply did not care. He told of visiting Salt Lake City, where a sweet sixteen-year-old tour guide told him she believed in God because God did things for her all the time. Only the other day, she said, she had needed a parking spot on the way to work, and God had given her one. Karl remembered thinking of the millions of children in poor countries dying of AIDS. Why did God not help them?
In those few words Dr Karl expresses the problem of evil. Why does God not fix the world's suffering? And he raises a question Christians face whenever we talk about a God who is personally involved in our lives: what makes us think God would find us a parking space while children die?
Takeaway: There are no easy answers here, and Christians should not pretend there are. But part of the answer may be that God has chosen to make himself known through human beings, who are meant to be his image on earth. When we wonder why God does not help the suffering, God may be asking the same question of us (Matthew 25:35–40).
Source: Scott Higgins, citing an interview with Karl Kruszelnicki in Sunday Life magazine, Sun-Herald, 10 June 2001. Family background checked against Wikipedia.
Get Your Own Dirt: The Scientist Who Challenged God
This is a joke, not a true story, and its origin is unknown.
One day a scientist went to God with an announcement. "Listen, God," he said, "we've decided we don't need you anymore. These days we can clone people, transplant organs and do all sorts of things that used to be called miracles."
God listened patiently. "You don't need me, eh?" he said. "Well, let's put that to the test. Why don't we have a competition to see who can make a human being? Let's say, a man."
The scientist was delighted. "Agreed," he said.
"But we'll do it the way I did it in the good old days," said God, "when I created Adam."
"Fine," said the scientist. And he bent down and scooped up a handful of dirt.
"Whoa!" said God, shaking his head. "Not so fast. You get your own dirt."
Takeaway: Every human achievement, however brilliant, works with materials we did not make. "The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it" (Psalm 24:1). Science can explore creation, but it cannot do without a creation to explore.
Source: Traditional joke, origin unknown.
Galileo's Telescope and Our Place in the Universe
In 1609 a man looked through a telescope and started a revolution that would change the world. His name was Galileo Galilei. How could looking through a telescope start a revolution? Because Galileo turned it toward the moon and saw that its surface was covered with craters and mountains. He published his observations in Sidereus Nuncius in 1610.
To us that is old news. But to Galileo and the people of his time, it was frightening. Galileo had grown up learning what everyone "knew" to be fact. The earth was the changeable, imperfect, impure centre of an unchangeable, perfect and pure universe. And that universe spoke powerfully about God and our place in it. The earth was at the centre because human beings were at the centre of God's concern.
The sun, the moon and the stars existed for our benefit. We were the focus of God's unfathomable love. The heavens, as the creation of a pure, perfect and unchanging God, were also pure, perfect and unchanging.
Everything except the earth, that is, which had become impure, imperfect and changeable because of human sin. And because we were at the centre of God's concern, God had sent Christ to atone for our sin and reconcile us to himself.
But one look through Galileo's telescope changed that picture forever. The heavens were not perfect and unchanging, and before long it was clear that the earth was not the centre of the universe either. It was a ball of rock and mud travelling through the vast, dark expanse of space.
And that raised a troubling question. If we were not the physical centre of the universe, were we still the centre of God's love and purpose?
In the year Galileo died, 1642, another great scientist was born: Isaac Newton. Newton was the towering genius of his day. He showed that the earth was part of a universe governed by laws that worked with mathematical precision. If we knew those laws and every detail of a situation, it seemed we could predict every event that would ever happen, not just the return of comets, but everything.
That seemed to make a God who works miracles and is involved in the world impossible. God was moved from being an ever-present helper to being a divine watchmaker, who built the clock, wound it up, and left it to run.
Still, all was not lost. Even if we were floating on a ball of mud through endless space under unbending laws, we could take comfort that human beings had been specially created by God, distinct from the animals. Some even calculated the date: Archbishop James Ussher famously placed creation in 4004 BC.
But that comfort did not last long either. After Newton came the geologist James Hutton, who argued that the shape of the earth was the result of tiny but constant changes over immense ages of time. Now we were not only a speck in space but a speck in time. Then came the final, dizzying blow to our sense of place: Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, set out in On the Origin of Species (1859). We were no longer seen as God's special, unique creation, but as distant descendants of ancient microbes and cousins of the apes.
This has become the dominant story of our culture, the mental map we use to find our way through life. We treat what we can see and touch as what is truly real. And in such a world, we pursue the only goal that seems to make sense, our own individual happiness, and expect to find it in what we can see and touch: possessions, relationships, work and leisure.
Takeaway: Our size in the universe has never been the measure of our worth. Long before telescopes, the psalmist looked at the stars and asked, "What is mankind that you are mindful of them?" (Psalm 8:3–5). The answer was not that we are big, but that we are loved.
Source: Scott Higgins. Dates checked against Wikipedia.
Gabrielle Carey: From Puberty Blues to Faith
Gabrielle Carey was an Australian writer best known for co-writing the novel Puberty Blues (1979) with Kathy Lette. In a later book, In My Father's House (1992), she told the story of how she came to Christian faith.
Carey grew up in an atheist, humanist household. Her father, Alex Carey, was a university lecturer and writer with a passionate commitment to left-wing causes. Throughout her childhood he spoke out against oppression and capitalism, and he was active in the movement against the Vietnam War. He also spoke out against God and the church. He could not believe in God in a world so full of suffering.
But that upbringing left Gabrielle carrying a heavy weight. In In My Father's House she wrote about the worry of having to live up to impossibly high intellectual and moral standards, and the fear of what would happen if she was found to have failed. Would she be given a second chance? Could she admit her weaknesses? Would she ever be forgiven? What would her father say if he discovered that she was just another brainless, media-manipulated failure?
It was this burden of guilt that lifted when she became a Christian, in her case a Catholic, in the mid-1980s. What she liked most about the faith she had been introduced to, she wrote, was knowing that she could be wrong, could behave badly, even terribly, and still be loved. All she needed to do was own up, and she would be forgiven. With that God and Father, she said, you could fail without feeling it was the end of all hope. And that was such a relief.
Takeaway: Many people imagine that faith adds rules and guilt. For Gabrielle Carey it was the opposite: the gospel freed her from a crushing demand to be good enough. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins" (1 John 1:9).
Source: Scott Higgins, based on Gabrielle Carey, In My Father's House (Pan Macmillan, 1992). Biographical details checked against Wikipedia.
Can We Believe in Miracles? David Hume's Challenge
Is it reasonable to believe in miracles? The famous Scottish philosopher David Hume did not think so. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he argued that miracles are so improbable that it can never be reasonable to believe one has happened.
To believe a miracle had taken place, Hume said, we would need witnesses of such great learning that they could not possibly be fooled, of such good character that they could not possibly be lying, and of such high reputation that being caught in a lie would cost them everything. And the miracle would need to happen in public, in a well-known part of the world, where any fraud would quickly be exposed.
In Hume's view, these conditions were never met. Yet, remarkably, Hume himself admitted that he knew of miracles reported in France, at the tomb of the Abbé Pâris in Paris, which, in his words, "were immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses of credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the most eminent theatre that is now in the world."
That would seem to meet his own test. But Hume still rejected them, on the grounds of what he called "the absolute impossibility or miraculous nature of the events which they relate."
In other words, Hume's final reason for rejecting the miracles was not the quality of the evidence. It was that he had already decided miracles could not happen.
Takeaway: Whether we believe in miracles often depends less on the evidence than on what we have already decided is possible. Christians are invited to examine the evidence for the resurrection with an open mind, as Luke did when he "carefully investigated everything from the beginning" (Luke 1:1–4).
Source: Adapted from Colin Brown, History and Faith (IVP, 1987), citing David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding.
Final thoughts
A madman with a lantern, a philosopher who changed his mind, a mathematician's famous one-liner, a scientist with a fair question about suffering, and a writer who found that faith set her free. Atheism raises real questions, and Christians do best when they listen to them carefully and answer with honesty and humility.
Which of these questions do you find hardest, and who could you explore it with?
More stories you may like:
- Stories About the Bible, Science and Faith
- Stories About Doubt and the Problem of Evil
- Best Stories on Worldview
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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