Arguing with atheists is embarrassing. I don’t mean embarrassing for Christians. It’s embarrassing, not because the arguments for atheism are so strong, but because the arguments would be impossible to make if atheism were actually true. Only the existence of a rational, moral Creator makes it possible to make a case for atheism.
To put it another way, as soon as atheists begin to argue for their viewpoint, they actually destroy it. To make a case for why God doesn’t exist, atheists are forced to use assumptions that are possible only in a world where God actually does!
Take human reason as an example. If everything in the universe is a cosmic accident with no Rational Designer behind it, whence came rationality? Why should we trust minds whose powers emerged from a random, chance process? So when your atheist friend assumes that his own thoughts are true and trustworthy instead of random and chaotic, he’s proving that he can’t live by what he believes.
Or consider the indignation of atheists when they talk about the problem of evil: “Tsunamis, mass shootings, childhood diseases—if there is a God, He sure has some explaining to do.” But given the premises of their worldview, why all the indignation? If there is no God and everything is just atoms randomly moving around, who can say there’s a right way and a wrong way for the atoms to move? But instead of living within their own framework, atheists must borrow the existence of moral absolutes from Christianity and then use their borrowed presuppositions to attack Christian belief. The whole argument is embarrassingly irrational.
It reminds me of a favorite story from the classic cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes, where the mischievous Calvin creates a 100% virtuous duplicate of himself. The amusing result is a “Calvin” clone who works hard in school, is nice to girls, and goes the extra mile to help at home—nothing at all like the real Calvin. The story comes to its ridiculous conclusion when the real Calvin angers his duplicate so much that the good “Calvin” tries to attack him and, in a bizarre twist, poofs out of existence. Hobbes remarks, “You’re the only person I know whose good side is prone to badness.” Calvin responds: “That’s why he evaporated. He could only be perfectly good as an abstraction. In his human manifestation, he wanted to throttle me. He spectralized just in time!”
So with atheism: it can exist only as an abstraction. To exist in the real world, atheism must assume God is there in order to prove He isn’t!