How do I convince an atheist that there is a God?

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I’ll say how this atheist came to be convinced in a God.

It wasn’t through any proselytizing. And it wasn’t through any one person’s arguments. It was a simple set of observations. The first and most important is that life is bigger than one person’s conception of it. If you can’t acknowledge this then you are doomed to a very boring life because games that you can understand are super boring.

When I was perhaps ten I mapped out all the possible moves to tic-tac-toe and worked out a perfect strategy, one I still recognize 20 years later when Randall Munroe did the same thing albeit with much better design. Victory is assured if you move first and your opponent’s first move isn’t in the center. You can draw every other time. Knowing the perfect strategy for tic-tac-toe made it boring for me, the most interesting part was taking advantage of most people’s unwillingness to map out the moves like I did. Cold comfort knowing I could study Chess and Monopoly and have a much more interesting time of it.

That’s what it’s like living in a world without God. There’s an implicit belief that humans are the pre-eminent intelligence in the galaxy if not universe and that makes me sad.

Atheists don’t leave out the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence, but physics would limit their intelligence level to be roughly similar to ours.

I believe in three possible ‘levels’ of divinity. Polytheistic divinity, monotheistic divinity, and the God of the ALL. As my abiding principle is that all beliefs are valid rather than none or just one, I am compelled to accept that all of these conceptualizations have real-world counterparts. This is not as hard to justify as it seems. They all fit into my big idea, which I will paste below:

In the beginning, there was a ‘something’ and a ‘nothing’. The ‘something’ moved into the ‘nothing’ and swirled around in it, creating forms. Eventually universes were formed. The rules of matter got worked out over countless universe cycles. Eventually life formed. Life evolved.

Life eventually learned about how the universe works and became masters of it. It conquered the ‘something’ and forced everything that had come from the ‘something’ back inside of it. Leaving again the ‘something’ and the ‘nothing’. But the ‘something’ was now aware of itself. When it swirled into the ‘nothing’ it didn’t do it willy-nilly anymore, it had purpose. It created life anew, and taught the life what it knew. Eventually the life mastered the world it was created in, and went to join the older beings in the ‘something’, who were only too happy to have new companions.

On and on and on and on again. What we call God is the impossibly vast collection of everything that has ever lived, in any of the infinitely-many universes that happened since the first ‘something’ and ‘nothing’.

In this conception, ancient beings from earlier realities can accommodate any conception of God that we can throw at it, from the Judeo-Christian God, to the blind watchmaker, to the so-called God of the Gaps, the latter of which I find particularly compelling and use frequently in my own thought experiments. It also cuts as close to an acceptable answer to ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ as I’ve ever seen in a spiritual idea.

That’s how this atheist was convinced that a bigger world than gross materialism is possible. Did you want to convince him that a particular conception of God was ‘true’? Good luck with that.