Believing in Nothing Takes More Faith Than You Think
Atheists like to say they’ve got the simple position — no faith, no fairy tales, just the facts, ma’am. I’ve never quite bought that. Because when you actually sit down and count up everything a person has to believe in order to land on “there’s no God,” it’s a longer list than most people realize, and none of it comes with a receipt. It takes faith to believe in God. Turns out it takes a truckload of faith to believe there isn’t one, too. Grab some coffee or an energy drink. Let’s count them up, and let’s have a little fun doing it.
1. You Have to Believe Dogs Could Eventually Become Something That Isn’t a Dog
Nobody argues that animals change over time. We’ve bred wolves down into everything from Great Danes to teacup Chihuahuas, and that’s real, observable change. What’s never once been seen — not in a lab, not in a fossil, not anywhere — is one kind of creature turning into a genuinely different kind of creature. Dogs stay dogs. Finches stay finches. You have to take it on faith that if you just wait long enough, all that small shuffling-around adds up to something nobody has ever actually watched happen.
2. You Have to Believe a Recipe Book Wrote Itself, Then Built a Kitchen to Read Itself In
Your DNA isn’t just “complicated.” It’s a language — a four-letter code, spelling out instructions, that gets read, translated, and double-checked by a whole crew of molecular machines. And here’s the kicker: that reading-and-checking machinery is also built from instructions written in the same code. It’s like finding a cookbook that not only wrote its own recipes but also built the oven, the stove, and the chef who reads it. Every other time we run across a code — Morse code, computer code, a phone number — we assume somebody wrote it. DNA is supposed to be the one exception, and you just have to trust that it is.
3. You Have to Believe a Living Cell Assembled Itself With No Help and No Instructions
Before evolution can even get off the ground, you need an actual living, self-copying cell to evolve in the first place. Scientists have spent decades, with unlimited grant money, glass beakers, and PhDs coming out their ears, trying to build one from scratch in a lab — and they haven’t managed it yet. So the story asks you to believe that a puddle of ordinary chemicals, with nobody watching and nothing guiding it, pulled off what our smartest scientists can’t do on purpose. That’s not a small ask. That’s asking you to believe the puddle out-engineered the engineers.
4. You Have to Believe the Universe’s Dials Just Happened to Land on “Life Possible”
Picture a control panel with dozens of dials — gravity, the strength that holds atoms together, how fast the universe is expanding — and every single one of them has to be set inside a razor-thin window or nothing exists. No stars and no planets. No chemistry and no you. Nudge almost any dial the tiniest bit and the whole thing falls apart before it starts. And the story says all those dials landed exactly right, on their own, with nobody’s hand anywhere near the panel. That’s not luck. That’s a slot machine hitting the jackpot on every single reel, blindfolded, first pull, and then insisting nobody was in the room.
“For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.” (Romans 1:20, NLT)
5. You Have to Believe Absolutely Nothing Produced Absolutely Everything
Even secular physics agrees the universe had a starting point — it hasn’t just always been here. So something got it going. But if there truly was nothing before that — no matter, no energy, no time, not even an empty box sitting around waiting — then you have to believe that nothing, with no cause, no ingredients, and no one pulling any strings, somehow produced everything there is. That might be the single biggest leap of faith on this whole list, and it doesn’t even get a magician. Just an empty stage and, somehow, a show.
6. You Have to Believe Right and Wrong Are Just Opinions — Until It’s Something You’re Sure About
Ask around and plenty of folks will tell you morality is just something we made up along the way — different rules for different cultures, nothing carved in stone. Then bring up something like child abuse, and watch how fast “that’s just an opinion” turns into “no, that’s actually wrong, everywhere, for everybody, no exceptions.” You can’t have it both ways. Either right and wrong are real, or your outrage over real evil doesn’t mean anything either. Most folks believe morality is just an invented rulebook, right up until the moment it isn’t convenient to believe that anymore.
7. You Have to Trust a Brain That Was Never Built to Find the Truth
If your mind is nothing but the leftover wiring of unguided evolution, its only real job was keeping your ancestors alive long enough to have kids — not helping you figure out what’s actually true. A brain built purely for survival has no particular reason to also be good at figuring out DNA, physics, or whether God exists. That’s like trusting a toaster’s opinion on quantum mechanics because it’s pretty good at browning bread. You have to trust the very same brain that, by its own account, was never built for anything more than helping you not get eaten.
The Takeaway
None of this is a mathematical, slam-dunk proof, and I’m not pretending it is. What it does show is that “I just stick to the facts, no faith required” isn’t really what’s happening on either side of this conversation. Everybody’s operating on faith about where we came from and why we’re here. The real question was never who has faith and who doesn’t. It’s which faith actually matches what we can see when we’re being honest — the code, the dials, the sense that some things are really, truly wrong, and the strange fact that a bunch of atoms somehow produced somebody who could stop and ask why any of this is here at all.
If one of these got you thinking, tell me which one in the comments — or better yet, bring it up next time this topic comes up with a skeptical friend or a curious teenager at your kitchen table. And if you want more content like this, subscribe to the newsletter below so you don’t miss what’s coming next.
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