Ontology, Atheism, and Your Conversational Witness

 

The Mission Field Has Moved Next Door

Something has shifted in the neighborhood. The person sitting next to you at the coffee shop, the colleague across the conference table, the friend you grew up with — more and more of them identify not with a different religion but with no religion at all. According to Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey, 28% of American adults are now religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheists, agnostics, or simply ‘nothing in particular.’ That figure has risen from just 16% in 2007. The religiously unaffiliated are now the single largest group in American society — more numerous than Catholics or evangelical Protestants.

This shift carries enormous implications not for church programming but for you personally — for the conversations you have across the backyard fence, over lunch, in the comment thread, and in the quiet moments when someone trusts you enough to ask what you actually believe. You are participating, every day, in God’s mission to a world that increasingly says, ‘There is no God — and even if there were, we couldn’t know it.’

This post explores one of the most foundational of the twelve value orientations used in cross-cultural witness: Ontology. Specifically, it engages the orientation that holds that there is no God or Higher Power, and that such things cannot be known. Understanding this orientation — its inner logic, its deep emotional roots, and its hidden vulnerabilities — equips you to engage in the kind of thoughtful, caring, conversationally intelligent witness that can actually open doors.

 

What Is an Ontology Value Orientation?

Value orientations are the foundational beliefs that individuals and communities hold about fundamental aspects of reality. They function below the level of conscious argument — shaping not just what people think but how they experience the world, what they find plausible, and what they reflexively dismiss. The Ontology value orientation addresses the most basic of all possible questions: Does anything or anyone exist beyond the physical?

Among the twelve value orientations that shape intercultural witness, the ontological dimension is the most foundational because it undergirds everything else. Before you can talk about morality, meaning, purpose, or salvation, there is a prior question: Is there a God? Is ultimate reality personal or impersonal, knowable or hidden, present or absent?

The orientation this post addresses answers both parts of that question negatively: No, there is no God or Higher Power — and even if there were, we couldn’t know it. This double claim — metaphysical (there is no God) and epistemological (we can’t know) — characterizes much of contemporary atheism and agnosticism. It is the dominant ontological orientation of secular Western culture, and it is expanding globally through education, urbanization, and digital connectivity.

What makes this orientation particularly significant for conversational witness is that it is not always an intellectual conclusion reached by argument. For many people, the ‘no God’ position is more accurately described as an existential posture — shaped by suffering, disappointment, perceived hypocrisy, or the simple experience of a world that seems to run perfectly well without a divine explanation. Meeting people at this level requires more than information. It requires presence.

 

The Fool’s Denial and the Honest Doubter: What Scripture Actually Says

Two of the most misapplied verses in contemporary apologetics are Psalm 14:1 and its near-parallel Psalm 53:1: ‘The fool says in his heart, There is no God.’ Christians sometimes wield this text as a quick dismissal — implying that atheists are simply unintelligent or willfully stupid. That reading misses almost everything Scripture is actually saying.

The Hebrew word rendered ‘fool’ (nabal) describes not a person with low intelligence but a person whose moral and volitional orientation has gone wrong — someone who lives as if God does not exist because they do not want him to. This is not primarily a claim about IQ; it is a claim about the heart. The Psalms’ point is that the ‘no God’ position is ultimately not reached by pure reason but sustained by a disposition — a will to live autonomously, free of divine accountability.

This insight does not license contempt toward atheists and agnostics. On the contrary, it generates compassion. The person you are talking with is not simply making an error in logic; they are, in some complex way, navigating a deep existential situation — and that situation deserves to be understood, not dismissed.

Scripture itself models this. The book of Job is the Bible’s most sustained engagement with the problem that drives many people toward atheism: the apparent silence and absence of God in suffering. Job’s cry — ‘Oh, that I knew where I might find him!‘ (Job 23:3) — is not the cry of someone who has never believed but of someone whose belief has been shattered by experience. God’s answer from the whirlwind does not explain the suffering; it reveals divine presence and magnitude in the midst of it. That is a missional model: meeting people in their actual pain rather than winning arguments from a comfortable distance.

The apostle Thomas offers another model. When the other disciples told Thomas that Jesus had risen, he refused to believe without evidence: ‘Unless I see the nail marks in his hands… I will not believe‘ (John 20:25). Jesus’s response is revelatory — he did not rebuke Thomas’s demand for evidence. He met it. He offered his wounds for examination. Authentic Christian witness does not fear honest skepticism; it meets it personally and concretely. The resurrection is not a metaphysical abstraction but a claim about a publicly investigable historical event.

 

General Revelation and the God Who Will Not Be Silent

One of the most important passages for understanding and engaging the ‘no God’ orientation is Romans 1:18–32. Paul argues that the knowledge of God is universally available — ‘his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made‘ (Romans 1:20). This is not knowledge that has to be taught; it is knowledge that is simply there, disclosed in the structure of created reality.

But Paul describes something else happening as well: this knowledge is being suppressed. The word he uses (katechō) means to hold down, to restrain — as if truth is pressing up and the person is actively pushing it back. This is not a dismissal of genuine intellectual struggle. Romans 1 is not claiming that every atheist is consciously lying about what they know. It is offering a theological account of the deepest layer beneath the ‘no God’ position: that the human heart, turned away from God, learns to inhabit a world saturated with divine address while filtering out the Addresser.

The missiological implication is profound. The person who says ‘there is no God’ is not living in a world from which God is absent. They are living in a world in which God is continuously present and speaking — through the order of the cosmos, through the persistence of moral intuition, through the strange power of beauty, through the universal experience that death feels wrong. They have learned, culturally and personally, not to hear these things as divine speech. Part of conversational witness is helping them hear again.

John Calvin captured this with his concept of the sensus divinitatis — an innate awareness of God planted in every human being as a feature of the imago Dei. No one begins from a purely neutral epistemic position regarding God’s existence. The person who says ‘I don’t believe in God’ is not reporting on a blank slate; they are reporting on a suppressed signal. This does not make witness easier, but it does make it more hopeful: you are not introducing something entirely foreign. You are addressing something that is already there.

 

The Incarnation: God’s Answer to ‘We Can’t Know’

The agnostic’s ‘we can’t know’ deserves a serious, honest theological response — and Christianity actually has one. The claim is not wrong that human beings cannot, through their own initiative and inquiry, penetrate to the depths of ultimate reality. The classical Christian tradition has always affirmed divine incomprehensibility — the infinite God exceeds the grasp of finite minds (Job 11:7; Isaiah 55:8–9). In this narrow sense, the agnostic is right.

But the agnostic assumes that divine transcendence means permanent inaccessibility. Christianity’s startling claim is that the transcendent God chose not to remain inaccessible. The incarnation is the definitive answer to ‘we can’t know.’ As John’s Gospel opens: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us‘ (John 1:14). The Logos — the rational principle underlying all existence — enters history as a particular human being in a particular place and time. The invisible becomes visible. The unknowable becomes known. As the letter to the Colossians puts it, Jesus Christ is ‘the image of the invisible God‘ (Colossians 1:15).

This is not asking the agnostic to dissolve their epistemological humility. It is pointing them toward the possibility that the question has been answered — not by human investigation, but by divine initiative. The relevant conversational move is to say something like: ‘I actually agree that God cannot be discovered through ordinary inquiry alone. That’s why Christianity’s claim is so specific — it’s not that we figured God out, but that God made himself known. Does that reframe the question for you?’

 

When Doubt Is Rooted in Pain: The Missional Entry Point

Here is something that careful attention to the research confirms and that experienced witnesses have long known: most people who hold the ‘no God’ orientation did not arrive there through philosophical argument. A 2024 Pew Research report found that while two-thirds of religious ‘nones’ cite nonbelief or skepticism as their primary reason for leaving religion, a substantial portion point to bad experiences with religious people or institutions. And beneath the intellectual positions, the most common catalyst for moving away from theistic belief is not a better argument — it is suffering, loss, or the experience that prayer went unanswered at the moment it mattered most.

This is missiologically critical. A witness strategy designed only to win intellectual debates will miss most of the actual people it encounters. The apologetics that matter most in your neighborhood are not the ones you read in books (though those matter too) but the ones that begin with the question: ‘What happened that made God feel absent or impossible for you?’

The God revealed in Scripture is precisely the God who enters suffering rather than explaining it from a distance. The incarnation is God stepping into the mess. The crucifixion is God absorbing, in his own person, the worst that the world can produce. When you sit with someone in their pain and do not offer easy answers, you are embodying a truth about the God you represent: this is not a God who is indifferent to what hurts.

The book of Ecclesiastes serves as an important resource here. Qohelet’s unflinching confrontation with meaninglessness, death, and cosmic indifference — ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity‘ (Ecclesiastes 1:2) — covers exactly the existential territory that many atheists and agnostics inhabit. Scripture does not paper over these questions. It engages them with devastating honesty before pointing beyond them. When you can say to someone, ‘The Bible actually asks the same questions you’re asking,’ something changes in the conversation.

 

Presuppositions Beneath the ‘No God’ Position

Every worldview rests on presuppositions — foundational commitments that are not themselves argued for but that make the argument possible. Part of your conversational witness to the ‘no God’ orientation involves gently surfacing these hidden foundations. There are several worth noting.

The first is metaphysical naturalism: the assumption that the physical universe is all that exists or all that is epistemically accessible. This is not a conclusion reached by science; it is a philosophical commitment brought to the interpretation of science. Science describes the behavior of what is observable; it cannot, by definition, determine whether what is observable is all that exists. The question of God’s existence is a metaphysical one, and its answer cannot be read off the periodic table.

The second is the burden of proof asymmetry. Atheism is frequently presented as the default position — the one that requires no justification — while theism bears the entire evidentiary weight. But this is itself a presupposition. Every worldview bears the burden of accounting for the existence of a universe with rational order, moral obligation, and beings who ask the question ‘Why?’ The theistic framework accounts for these features more coherently than any naturalistic alternative that has been proposed.

The third, and most powerful, is what might be called borrowed moral capital. The atheist’s most emotionally compelling argument against God is the problem of evil: ‘A good God would not allow this.’ But notice what this argument requires — a standard of goodness and evil that is genuinely binding, not merely a matter of personal preference or evolutionary adaptation. Where does that standard come from on a naturalistic worldview? The argument against God’s existence on moral grounds secretly depends on a framework that only makes sense if something like God exists. This is not a gotcha; it is an invitation to a more honest conversation.

 

The Resurrection: Your Conversational Hinge

Paul makes an extraordinary statement in 1 Corinthians 15:14–17: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.‘ This is not a statement of desperation; it is a statement of intellectual courage. Paul is explicitly identifying the condition under which Christianity should be rejected. The resurrection is the ontological pivot — the event that, if it occurred, validates every claim Christianity makes about the God who can be known, and which, if it did not occur, dismantles them entirely.

For the person who holds the ‘no God’ orientation, this is the most productive place to direct their investigative impulse. The resurrection is not asking anyone to believe something despite the evidence. It is pointing to a specific historical claim — about an empty tomb, about post-resurrection appearances witnessed by hundreds, about the transformation of a group of frightened disciples into a movement that turned the Roman world upside down — and saying: look at this honestly. Investigate. The God of Scripture is not afraid of scrutiny.

This was precisely Paul’s strategy at Athens in Acts 17. He was addressing an audience that included Epicurean philosophers — ancient materialists whose worldview closely resembles contemporary secular naturalism. Paul did not retreat into private religious experience. He announced the resurrection as a public, historically falsifiable claim: ‘He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead‘ (Acts 17:31). The resurrection is not a retreat from evidence but an advance into it.

In everyday conversation, this might sound like: ‘Christianity doesn’t ask you to believe something without reason. It points to a specific event and says: investigate this. The resurrection of Jesus is either the best-attested miracle in history or the greatest fraud ever perpetrated. It’s asking you to look honestly, not to believe without looking.’

 

Conversational Witness: Seven Practical Principles

Translating all of this into actual conversations requires moving from information to practice. Here are seven principles for engaging people who hold the ‘no God, can’t know’ orientation in the kind of conversational witness that honors both them and God.

Begin with genuine curiosity rather than a debate posture. The most disarming opening move is a simple, honest question: ‘I’m genuinely curious — is your atheism or agnosticism more of an intellectual conclusion, or did it come out of something that happened? Most people I talk to, it’s both.’ This signals immediately that you are not here to score points, and it opens the actual story beneath the position.

Honor the epistemological humility in agnosticism. Rather than dismissing the ‘we can’t know’ claim, engage it honestly: ‘I actually agree that God cannot be discovered through normal human inquiry alone. That’s the whole point of Christianity’s claim — not that we found God, but that God took the initiative to make himself known. Does that change the shape of the question for you?’ You are meeting them where they stand before pointing forward.

Follow the moral thread conversationally. When someone expresses moral outrage — about injustice, suffering, hypocrisy — that outrage is an apologetic opportunity rather than an obstacle. ‘You clearly care deeply about what’s right and wrong. Can I ask where that moral sense comes from? On a purely material account of the universe, why should anything be genuinely, bindingly wrong rather than just inconvenient?’ This is the moral argument deployed not as a weapon but as a genuine invitation to examine foundations.

Meet suffering with presence before you meet it with argument. If the ‘no God’ position is rooted in pain, argument is not what is needed first. ‘I don’t want to argue you into belief. I want to understand what happened that made God feel absent or impossible. Can you tell me more about that?’ The God revealed in Job and in the crucifixion is a God who enters darkness, not one who explains it away from a distance. Your presence in someone else’s suffering is itself a form of proclamation.

Introduce the resurrection as an investigable claim, not a faith requirement. ‘It’s not asking you to believe without evidence — it’s asking you to examine a specific historical claim. The resurrection is either history’s most transformative truth or its greatest lie. Which are you more curious about?’ You are not closing the conversation; you are redirecting it toward the most consequential piece of evidence.

Ask the question beneath the question. The transcendental argument is not an academic abstraction; it is a practical conversational tool. ‘On your worldview, why is there rational order in the universe? Why does human reason work? Why does beauty move you the way it does? Why does death feel wrong rather than just neutral?’ These questions press beneath the naturalistic assumptions and surface the features of reality that atheism struggles to account for.

Embody intellectual integrity without apology. Nothing is more corrosive to witness in a secular context than intellectual cowardice — pretending questions have easy answers, avoiding hard data, or projecting false certainty. The plausibility of Christian faith in a skeptical world depends partly on whether the people who hold it can engage honestly with the hardest challenges against it. Your intellectual integrity is not a liability; it is an asset.

 

You Are the Plausibility Structure

The sociologist Peter Berger coined the concept of a ‘plausibility structure’ — the social and cultural conditions that make certain beliefs seem credible or incredible. In secular Western contexts, the reigning plausibility structure militates against theism: the default assumption is that educated, thoughtful people do not believe in God, and that religious belief is a relic of pre-scientific thinking or emotional need.

What Berger’s framework implies for missional practice is this: the most powerful apologetics in a secular context is not primarily intellectual, though intellectual engagement matters enormously. It is communal and personal. When the people around you encounter a follower of Jesus who is intellectually honest, genuinely loving, morally serious, emotionally present in suffering, and transparently motivated by something other than self-interest — they encounter a counter-plausibility structure. They encounter evidence, in the form of a life, that the ‘no God’ account of reality may not be the whole story.

This is what Paul meant in Athens when he connected the gospel to the inscription ‘To the Unknown God’ (Acts 17:23). He did not create the opening; he found it in the seeking that was already present. Your neighbors, colleagues, and friends who hold the ‘no God’ orientation are often not as settled as they appear. They carry unresolved moral intuitions, existential longings that materialism cannot satisfy, and — if you listen long enough — questions about suffering and death that no amount of secular reassurance has quieted.

Your role in God’s mission is not to win arguments. It is to be a person whose life and conversation creates space for the God who has never stopped speaking to be heard. That is, at its heart, what missional witness has always been: participating with God in his own self-disclosure to a world that is trying, with mixed success, to live without him.

 

Conclusion: The God Who Pursues

The ‘No God or Higher Power, and We Can’t Know’ orientation is the most direct ontological challenge to Christian witness. It denies the very existence and knowability of the God in whom all mission is grounded. And yet this orientation often carries the deepest honesty, the most serious moral engagement, and the most unresolved existential hunger.

Scripture does not treat the atheist’s challenge as something to be dismissed with a verse or silenced with superior logic. Psalm 14 sees through the moral dimension of denial without contempt. Romans 1 diagnoses the deepest layer of suppression without abandoning hope. Job sits in the silence without easy answers. Thomas demands evidence and receives it. Paul addresses the most skeptical audience in the ancient world with the most falsifiable claim in the Christian proclamation: this man rose from the dead.

The God of the Bible is a pursuing God — one who refuses to accept the distances human beings put between themselves and their Creator. The incarnation is the ultimate act of ontological pursuit: the infinite God crossing the greatest possible distance to become accessible, knowable, and present. That pursuit continues through every honest conversation you have with someone who says there is no God. You are not the originator of that conversation. You are participating in one that God began before you arrived.

Go into your neighborhood, your workplace, your relationships — and listen well. Ask good questions. Be honest about what you don’t know. Sit with people in their pain. And when the moment comes, point clearly toward the God who entered history in a body, died on a cross, and walked out of a tomb — asking not for blind belief, but for honest investigation. That is conversational witness. That is participation in the Missio Dei.

 

References and Further Reading

• Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2: God and Creation. Edited by John Bolt. Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.
• Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books, 1967.
• Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.
• Craig, William Lane. Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics. 3rd ed. Wheaton: Crossway, 2008.
• Frame, John M. Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief. Edited by Joseph E. Torres. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2015.
• Habermas, Gary R., and Michael R. Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004.
• Keller, Timothy. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York: Dutton, 2008.
• Keller, Timothy. Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World. New York: Viking, 2016.
• Kluckhohn, Florence R., and Fred L. Strodtbeck. Variations in Value Orientations. Evanston: Row, Peterson and Company, 1961.
• Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. First published 1952.
• McGrath, Alister E. The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. New York: Doubleday, 2004.
• Pew Research Center. ‘Religious Nones in America: Who They Are and What They Believe.’ January 24, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/.
• Pew Research Center. ‘Has the Rise of Religious Nones Come to an End in the U.S.?’ January 24, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/24/has-the-rise-of-religious-nones-come-to-an-end-in-the-us/.
• Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Schaeffer, Francis A. The God Who Is There. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1968.
• Stark, Rodney. The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion. New York: HarperOne, 2011.
• Van Til, Cornelius. The Defense of the Faith. 4th ed. Edited by K. Scott Oliphint. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008.
• Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.
• Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.