According to Romans 1, the rejection of God is shown to have some very nasty effects on both the minds and moral character of sinners. While God is self evident, even to the extent of having His law already written on our hearts, people still reject Him. He, in turn, rejects them. While they claim to be wise, they become fools, and they begin to do some very immoral and self-destructive things.
I have said in the past that the current state of atheistic apologetics is ironically strong evidence for God, as it not only shows that atheism is a weak and feeble worldview, but even the top atheistic apologists know it. But what's more interesting about this is that, much as Romans 1 describes, atheism was not always in this sorry state. Rather, as much as it has increased in numbers, it has decreased in sanity.
Atheism has existed in some form or other for thousands of years. As Psalm 14:1 says, "The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”..." But it has not always been in the weak state it is now. Historically speaking, atheists have actually attempted to take their views seriously, and make us believe it, too.
Perhaps one of the best arguments atheists have ever presented is the so-called "problem of evil". This apparent dilemma is no longer a good one, as it has been answered many times, and in many ways, throughout the centuries. Furthermore, with the invention of the internet, access to those answers is both free and easy. Therefore, atheists no longer have an excuse for posing it as if it was a silver bullet. When it was first posed, however, it was a very real, and more importantly very serious argument.
When you are attempting to prove atheism, it is vitally important that your argument logically concludes with "therefore, God does not exist". If your argument does not draw this conclusion, it fails as an argument for atheism. The "problem" of evil attempts to draw this conclusion, at least as far as the Biblical God goes. According to Scripture, God is a maximally great being. He is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving. If God is all powerful, He can stop all evil. If God is all knowing, He would know how to stop evil. If God is all loving, He would want to stop all evil. Therefore, the fact that evil exists should logically contradict the existence of an all powerful, all knowing, all loving God.
One of many answers to this is to simply understand that God is a logically coherent being. A simple way to explain this is that God is not completely limitless, the only limits upon God are God Himself. Scripture rather explicitly tells us that God "cannot deny Himself" (2 Timothy 2:13). In other words, true contradictions are impossible for God. Thus, He is all powerful, because there is no power beyond His own, but that does not mean that He can go beyond His own. Thus, not even God can, as the saying goes, "have His cake and eat it too". When there are two mutually exclusive options, God must pick. He can create a world in which no one is free to sin, thereby eliminating free will, or He can create a world in which free will exists, and therefore evil can be committed. Thus, we solve the apparent dilemma by simply understanding that God, in His infinite knowledge, knows how to use His infinite power to create a world in which He is maximally glorified by His mercy towards redeemed sinners, even if that means He has to show longsuffering towards the impenitent, who will eventually suffer His wrath.
This was about the best argument atheists ever had, and it died the death of a thousand beheadings long ago. All the while, especially with the advancement of science (by Christians, no less), atheists simply had no leg to stand on. They could sit there and deny all day long, they could demand more and more evidence, but it was always apparent that they had no actual case. Thus, they decided to create one.
Human beings have often exaggerated our own history for some kind of gain, and have often sought to push God aside by coming up with strange ideas about where we came from. From magical explosions to fish people who "gradually articulated words", human history is littered with strange myths about our origins. These were given a scientific veneer in the 1800s, when misotheists like Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin began posing similar theories on the history of the heavens, the Earth, and the life therein.
Popular atheist apologist Richard Dawkins once wrote "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." With the promulgation of Evolution as a scientific model of origins, atheists were no longer required to just deny that there is a God. Instead, they had their own alternative. A pure rejection of one claim now had its own, credible counter claim.
Or did it? Does Evolution actually work as an origins theory, or is it held to purely because it is an alternative? Let's let Darwin answer that one for us: "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
Darwin, ironically, was one of the greatest anti-Evolution apologists history has ever known. He pointed out a large number of flaws in the so-called "theory" that still, to this day, have not been solved. Of course, many have been found that even he did not anticipate, and these have also not been solved, but Darwin still pointed out some of the best.
But it would be unbelievably difficult to overcome the simple fact that if Evolution was true, we could never truly know it. As Darwin pointed out, if men are truly just advanced animals, the end result of an endless struggle to survive and reproduce, we would have no more reason to believe we are intelligent than to believe a monkey is. Evolution is not geared towards the pursuit of truth, and so how could we know we are even capable of it? Thus, Evolution ranks among the stupidest arguments atheists have ever lodged against Theism.
But not even Evolution can top the revisionist history that says Theism and science are somehow mutually exclusive. This got to a point where atheists would literally start using the very word "science" as some sort of cuss word to offend Christians. In reality, any competent historian will affirm the Christian influence on science, both in its origins, and in its continuation to this day. Indeed, philosophically speaking, even atheistic scientists are borrowing Christian assumptions to continue the practice.
But tragically, in the modern day, those assumptions have been discarded by many, which has had some rather unfortunate effects on society. Things such as ethics are already a thing of the past, in favor of a more "ends justify the means" approach. But setting this aside, science itself is being set aside. "Trust the science!", they cry, while inventing one new gender for every mental illness. Where once atheists would have pretended they care about facts, their own feelings now take center stage. Racist, homophobe, TERF, these are just a few silly names they call anyone who doesn't fully conform to their most radical agendas.
Of course, not all of this applies to all atheists. People are complex, and individual, which means I have personally had the privilege of knowing atheists who would agree with a lot of what I have said in this article. But the state of atheism as a whole, and the fact that it has affected our culture in exactly the way described in the Bible, is strong evidence for the Christian faith.
There is a solution to this problem, and that, of course, is to simply humble ourselves and repent. God is merciful, giving His own Son to die for us while we were yet sinners. Therefore, as much as He rejects us when we reject Him, so much more does He receive us as sons and daughters when we receive Him as our Father. All who confess Jesus as Lord, and believe in our hearts God raised Him from the dead, will be saved. Those who remain in atheism, however, will be trapped on a futile path to eternal destruction.