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Doesn't it take a lot of faith to be an atheist?
No, not at all. To me being an atheist isn't something that demands certainty. I am not certain that no gods exist, I am a weak atheist and agnostic, but that doesn't mean that I think the existence of gods is in any way likely. I know how gods are created and how religions are created. How can you be scared of fictional characters? My fear of gods is very similar to my fear of vampires, I don't believe they exist but I cannot be 100% certain about it. Because atheism is not a faith and does not demand faith or value it I am quite comfortable with being almost certain that gods don't exist.
How can you take the risk?
The risk of dying without asking Jesus to forgive me is as far as I can tell as dangerous as going to bed without a clove of garlic to stave off vampires or a big knife to fend off an unprovoked attack by a disgruntled tooth fairy. Of course if it was true Hell would be a terrible fate, but describing Hell ever more terribly does not change the chance of it existing at all one iota. The more terrible Hell is portrayed the less likely it seems, the less likely people in general consider it to be the more luridly it is described. Eventually its perfect wretchedness would be complemented by a perceived chance of it existing of zero, or vice versa.
It is totally fatuous to imagine that any idea invented in the human mind which cannot be disproved must be assumed to have a 50/50 chance of being true. I pick a daisy, I hide it in my cupped hand, now while you can't see it you cannot know whether it has transformed into a lime green scorpion until I throw it at you ... NOW! So what if somebody flinches? The story of Hell is designed to scare people. Maybe it does give a passing twinge to anybody who has heard of it. I am not going to be scared into wasting my life by a fairy story. Scaring people with ghost stories is for men who wear shorts and have an unhealthy fascination with young boys.
Secondly, why do you assume your ridiculous tale is the only valid alternative to eternal emptiness on offer? Perhaps there is a god who judges souls but he is the god of a tribe on a different planet and he hates all humans who “worship” false gods like Yahweh. Think about that, it's a very big universe, perhaps life on Earth is an accident and the real god is watching over some distant planet with a different pet tribe. Perhaps there is a real god but he lacks the capacity to communicate with anybody who is alive and he takes his frustration out on the dead who believed in false accounts of contact with the godhead. Perhaps the true god tells lousy stories so nobody believes him except one little tribe in Borneo who were converted to Christianity as direct result of a small charitable donation which is traceable to you. OK, a bunch of unbelievable and unlikely stories about gods, but I'm not the first to invent crappy stories about gods, am I?
How can you believe in Evolution, when even Darwin himself changed his mind?
No he didn't. That is a pious lie, Christians have been inventing pious lies for centuries.
The vast majority of scientists on this planet accept evolution by means of natural selection to be an essential part of the understanding of biology. Of course the theory does not explain every single finding and process in the natural world but its power to describe and predict makes it one of the most valuable ideas humanity has ever had.
How can random chance explain life?
It can't. Evolution by natural selection is not random at all. Mutations which make life harder are naturally selected against, mutations that make life easier are selected for, naturally, because those organisms with them do better. If there was no mutation evolution would be impossible, but mutations are caused in several ways, none of which appear to be anything other than random.
Do this thought experiment:
Take a pack of cards. Play “52 card pick up” that is throw the cards up in the air and let them fall over as wide an area as you can manage. Then carefully select the five highest value red cards on display, without turning them over if they lie face down. Pick up the rest of the cards and repeat the process. How many times do you think you can play before there are no more red cards left? That is how evolution works. Premature death and relative failure in breeding ensures that no matter how random parts of the process are the overall effect is driven towards an apparent purpose. Were you trying to ensure that there were only black cards left being shuffled and dealt in that particular way? No, you were selecting high value red cards to remove. Environments supply the selection pressure which is very definitely non random: the thin bear fails to survive the winter, the deaf rabbit is easily caught, the cowardly elephant seal wins no harem, the stag with the inefficient gut never reaches breeding potential. That is how evolution works: sex and death are the driving forces, mutation is just the fuel.
CS Lewis used to be an atheist...
Yes, maybe, but not a very good one.
What do think about your great atheist hero Antony Flew becoming a Christian? Huh?
My first response on hearing this story was Antony who? I had never heard of him, he had not produced any arguments that convinced me of anything. On reading the story it seems that Flew, in his dotage and with little grasp of the appropriate science, decided that DNA shows there had to have been a designer god of some kind. He in no way acknowledges Jesus or any kind of god interested in individuals or interfering with life in any way.
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