This is obviously the million dollar question that every believer would like to have answered. We all have friends, family or acquaintances that we would like to see saved by the blood of Jesus. However nothing we do seems to work. We all want to have a ten step program that will convince everyone that Jesus is God and died for our sins. We have witnessing models, yet none of them seems to work.
Having listened to over a 1400 hours worth of debating between Christians and Atheists, and about the same on atheist arguments against God, I realised that nothing can change anyones mind if they are not willing to have their minds changed. We often forget that changing ones belief is not a simple thing. It means changing your world view, and that means changing everything you thought about the world you live in.
Changing from an evolutionary world view, means changing everything you believed about life, people and the universe. It might mean ridicule from friends, being ostracised from the community, be it intellectual or social groups, it might mean a schism in the family life, between husbands and wives, parents and children or between children. The same holds true for changing from an atheistic world view or even the world view of a different religion.
When we therefore debate about the veracity of the Bible and the Christian faith we have to remember that we are not just arguing the person on the grounds of the facts presented, we are arguing against a life system that if shown to be wrong has serious consequences for the person that needs to change.
The sad news is that in all our research and all the knowledge we have gained over the last 2000 years, there is not one argument that will convince an atheist about the veracity of the Biblical account. I have seen first hand how in debates the Christian argument being far superior, even after a vote from the audience confirmed it, the atheists still did not change their mind even though their points of argument were totally debunked.
The question often asked is, is there any one point that cannot be debunked by an atheist. Something that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is real and alive. The answer is of course there is. But for any proof there is a counter argument. We hold on to the truth as we understand it, but so doe the atheist.
For instance, speaking in a purely evolutionary point of view. It is now an accepted hypothesis that the universe had a beginning. However the beginning of the universe has a few difficulties. The latest offering is that the universe started from a quantum fluctuation. In other words from "nothing." Yet a quantum fluctuation is not nothing it is something, it is a quantum fluctuation. The overarching point here is that the universe had a beginning. With what we know of science and observable facts is that the beginning of anything in this world has an cause that is outside of that beginning. The beginning of new life is caused by reproduction. The element that cause the child are outside of the child. Similarly the beginning of a car has a cause outside of the car – an engineer.
It is therefore safe to state based on the observable evidence that the beginning of the universe had a cause outside of the universe. This means that such a cause had to be outside of time and space as the universe is time and space. The cause had to be objective and directed with purpose otherwise the universe would not have laws to govern its existence. (These laws are so fine tuned that it is highly unlikely that they just happened by chance.)
The counter argument at this point is always well then who caused God. The answer is simple, no one. If there is time in the universe, then the cause had to be outside of time, otherwise it would be part of the universe. This means the cause is timeless. Timeless means without beginning and without end. Therefore God could not have been caused or made by anything. It is the eternal principle. In eternity there is no beginning.
This is a great argument, however, for the atheist this is not good enough, no matter what we offer as an argument they will not accept its truth or veracity. I suppose the same way that we do not accept all their arguments which they hold as absolute. In the end we cannot debate people into the kingdom of heaven. It is first the work of the Holy Spirit that causes conviction of sin. Once we respond to this call God reveals Himself in a manner that surpasses the logical argument. This in itself is a great argument for God.
In our experience of reality, there is room to also experience God. The atheist will call up experiments that were done showing that the experience of God or the supernatural can be induced by neurological induction. The counter argument is that because it can be induced does not make it less true. Our experience of the real world for that matter can also be induced. If this was the end of the argument it would mean that we could all be living in a matrix and that nothing we experience is real, it is all induced by neurotrinsmitted pathologies by some mad scientist. This of course goes against the grain of our experiance of reality and we can therefore assume that mental induction is not an argument agains an experience of God, just as it cannot be an argument against our experience of every day reality..
It is true that people have experiences of the supernatural with fairies and ghosts. Would these be halucinations. Or as our atheist friends like to put forward, would an experience of the flying spaghetti monster be an halucination or also a real experience. If we say that all experience must count as reality, then obviously we open up a real can of worms. But what makes the Christian's claim to an experience of God more valid that the people that experience fairies?
Let me start by saying, neither the flying spaghetti monster, nor the fairies had a thousanth of the scrutiny the Bible received, and after just that much scrutiny it was shown that these were myths born from the minds of men. Not difficult to prove at all. On the other hand the Bible has had the in depth study, meditation of scholars and critics, and it stands firm in its claims. It was and still is the one record of God that gives us the ability to test its claims historically and supernaturally.
We find archeology showing the peoples and situations written in the Bible to be true. Historically it proves itself as a reliable document. Spiritually it proved itself through the prophecies made, and it will prove itself as a true document again through prophecies that still need to be fulfilled. It makes statements of fact that could only be shown to be true once our knowledge of the world has increased. No other religious document makes so many truth claims that can easily be checked and proved wrong as the Bible. It speaks of nations that no longer exists. as a matter of fact, it names nations such as the hittites that we had no historical record of in any other documents. For many years sceptics claimed the Bible was false because of this nation that could not be seen in any histories. Yet, the hittite ruins were found. There are more examples like this that shows that the historical record of the Bible is reliable.
The prophecies found in the Bible also show its reliability. Scholars have long shown that the dates of the writings predated the actual prophecied events. This fact shows a great power in the scriptures that you cannot find in any other writings.