Over the years we have had many conversations with people, especially young people, who call themselves atheists. For someone who has “encountered God” such conversations are filled with a mixture of sadness (that the other hasn’t) and “anger” that the education system and society at large encourages a disbelief in God, to the point often of ridicule of “theists”.
From the outset the theist and atheist perceptions of what human beings are is totally at odds. The atheist is simply a brain and a body, an intellect with feelings. Bipartite if you will. The Christian is Tripartite (a Trinity), body, mind and spirit (or soul). The atheist has no afterlife to anticipate or be concerned about. The Christian knows that death is not the end, indeed that this life determines the nature of that afterlife.
Clearly a conversation is difficult from the outset! “How do you know?” “Prove it” “Where is God?”
Sadly, the world and the media daily reinforce that this is all we get, make the most of it, do what makes you happy, etc.
Way better and more qualified people have websites dealing with the logical reasons to believe. Suffice it to say for now that I would encourage anyone not get bogged down in the first few chapters of Genesis, but rather to examine the evidence for the existence of Jesus and the Resurrection. Once you are convinced that He really did die and rise again everything else will fall into place.
By way of a kind of post script I have found it very interesting that people on the autistic spectrum, who by nature are very logical in their thinking, tend to be atheist because God is outside the observable. HOWEVER I have met some whose logical mind has led them to absolutely believe that there has to be a God because of the observable creation.