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Hi, Sarah —
I recommend a book called The Godless Delusion: A Catholic Challenge
to Modern Atheism by Patrick
Madrid and Kenneth Hensley. It
will give you what you need to
engage their arguments.
Meanwhile, a few fruitful avenues:
- The argument from Creation. Look at creation.
- Where did all this complexity
come from?
- What triggered the Big Bang?
- If you go back further and
further before the Big Bang,
what happened and how?
- Didn't it have to be caused
by God?
- The argument from Causation. Every action requires a cause.
Like a Rube Goldberg machine,
all of time is a sequence of cause
and effect relationships. Somewhere,
there must be an uncaused Cause
that started the whole sequence.
This, we believe, is God.
- The argument from Morality. If God doesn't exist, neither
can morality. If we are no more
than animals, it truly doesn't
matter if this bag of chemicals
takes up a sharp instrument and
ceases the metabolism of another
bag of chemicals, meaning, if
I kill you or you kill him. No
one then can condemn what
Hitler did, which frankly was
based on Darwinian evolution principles
(survival of the fittest, Social
Darwinism).
As for his comment about only believing
in God when he does something for
you, someone once said that the
biggest scandal in Catholicism is
Catholics, or something like that.
I don't doubt that a large number
of Catholics may think that way,
so it's not worth refuting, except
to show him in your own life that
you believe in God under all circumstances.
If you want, share with him the example
of some Italian martyrs, who obviously
believed in God under adverse conditions.
Admittedly, I can't think of any
modern ones but I'll leave that as
an exercise to the reader.
Eric
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