In this article, we will be recommending the best books to refute atheism and agnosticism. They will give you answers for those people who challenge you. It could also be for Catholics who have questions about the faith or want to go deeper in their understanding of it. These books will help strengthen your faith by providing answers and a deeper understanding of theism.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #1:
Why Do You Believe In God?: Catholic Conversations With Skeptics and Non-Believers by Bryan Mercier.
Every Confirmation retreat I give, I ask the teens, why do you believe in God? Usually, they all give answers such as, “I don’t know…because my parents do.” I tend to follow up with, “Do you have any proof?” The answer is generally, “No.”
I challenge the teens by asking, “So you believe in something you have no proof for. Do you believe in the Easter Bunny? Why? You don’t have proof for that either!”
So, I try to challenge them in their faith to help them understand what they believe. This book is fantastic because it really is the product of people asking me questions for 20 years about the faith which prompted me to look up all the answers. I realized that there are really good answers to our questions.
The book has 15 real conversations I’ve had with atheists, skeptics, non-believers, and people who have left the Church and have questions. These are questions about God, Jesus, signs, religion, and the crusades. Its goal really is to answer as many questions as possible from people who have common objections. You hear them all the time, but how do you respond.
We have people as young as sixth grade reading this book multiple times. We have high schoolers read it up to five times because they say that it really helps them to answer their peers and understand the faith. So, we highly recommend it. You can find it here, on Amazon, or on other platforms.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #2:
Answering Atheism by Trent Horn
It’s a pretty well to do manual on how to make the case for the existence of God. It’s pretty basic. It starts out talking about what an atheist is. It probes the differences between an atheist, an agnostic, and a theist and explains how to distinguish between them.
Then, he gets into popular arguments and objections from atheists and agnostics for the existence of God. He also tells you how to answer them and gives a pretty thorough treatment of the subject on a simple level that everybody can understand. I highly recommend Trent Horn’s book, Answering Atheism, which you can find here.
There are going to be several books I recommend here that are much deeper than this one and may be more difficult to understand. Even so, the arguments are really good, so I recommend reading them despite the level of difficulty.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #3:
New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy by Father Robert Spitzer
Father Robert Spitzer, if you don’t know, is a brainiac, scientist Catholic priest. I came across him on Oprah if I remember correctly. He was discussing with Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra about the existence of God. Stephen Hawking was trying to explain how the universe can come about from nothing. Father Spitzer replied that this was impossible. Zero plus zero is zero, and a hundred thousand zeros plus zero is zero. Nothing plus nothing is nothing. And if there was only nothing in the beginning, there would be nothing now. You can’t get something from nothing. And I felt like he really proved Stephen Hawking wrong on national TV.
This is a great book. It’s very deep, very complex, and over my head in some ways. He doesn’t hold back on topics such as physics and other deep sciences. But if you do love science, and you do love a deeper background from a scientific and a philosophical worldview, definitely check this out. It’s full of information from beginning to end. It will definitely help you to answer those deep questions of the faith.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #4:
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins
If you would like a simpler version of all of that, I would recommend this book. The only reason I recommend it is because even people like Richard Dawkins, who hates religion, Christianity, and the existence of God, have respect for Francis Collins. He is the one who found the human genome and is a brilliant scientist. He’s not Catholic, but he’s brilliant. He believes in both science and religion and shows how some people confuse the two together. It’s also a simple read.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #5:
Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
This is probably where most people get their arguments for the existence of God. You’ve all heard of the five famous proofs for the existence of God. This is the first book in the Summa. There are five volumes total. In this first one, he goes through these five proofs, which preceded the new proofs. These five proofs have really never been disproven in over a thousand years. They still hold up today.
Atheists really don’t even try to grapple with them. Richard Dawkins only attributes 1.5 pages to try to debunk these. But he ignores the fact that Thomas Aquinas goes on for another 100 to 200 pages to explain who God is. I don’t even know a single atheist who has ever tried to seriously challenge Thomas Aquinas and his view on God. So, if you are looking for a deep read, which most people can’t understand and have a hard time grasping, definitely check out Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #6:
Five Proofs for the Existence of God and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism by Edward Feser
If you want these deep topics broken down a bit more, definitely check out both books. Some of my favorite books come from Edward Feser. Anything by Edward Feser is going to be great because he’s a brainiac. He discusses with serious critics and people who condemn the faith, and he’s extremely deep, especially in the philosophical realm.
He argues that atheism is a superstition because they just believe that we basically came about from nothing. He goes through this and debunks Richard Dawkins and many of the newest atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. He thoroughly destroys their arguments.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #7:
What is God? Answering the World’s Most Important Question (with the Help of Thomas Aquinas) by Kevin Vost
If you would like an even simpler explanation, this is your book. It is really a very simple synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, and he breaks it down for modern, everyday people like you and me. Kevin Vost really helps the reader understand questions about apologetics. He answers every single question you can ever have about God, his nature, his essence, the Trinity, and so on. The author is a former atheist and now a Catholic apologist.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #8:
Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case About God by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker
I would highly recommend this book if you would like a simple debunking of Richard Dawkins and other new atheists. It is fantastic. I had to read it twice, but the information in it is really good. They take Richard Dawkins’ arguments and debunk them and show how foolish they are and how he doesn’t understand a lot of things about God or the reality of religion and philosophy.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #9:
The Catholic Church and Science: Answering the Questions, Exposing the Myths by Benjamin Wiker
This book answers the deepest questions about science and religion. Is the Catholic Church against science? What about evolution? What about Galileo? What about the Catholic Church’s so-called persecution of science? What about Darwinian evolution? He goes through them, and he answers them masterfully in my opinion.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #10:
Now, our honorable mention in this article is a very large book. I don’t even know how many hundreds of pages it is, but it’s a huge book. It was written by two Protestant apologists, but it’s very good. It goes through all of the contradictions in the Bible. I mean literally – book by book.
They start with the contradictions atheists bring up in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and so on. Then, they go through the so-called contradiction of the New Testament, and they show how and why these things can be explained. For example, in Matthew, it says that Jesus healed two lepers. But in Luke, it says that he healed one. However, we have to remember that Matthew was writing to Jews who believed in miracles, and Luke was writing to Greeks who really didn’t. They thought it was foolish, so it’s going to be hard enough for them to swallow that he healed one person (much less two people). So, he probably just simplified it for them, and it’s not a contradiction. This is a great book.
Additionally, the first author has another book called When Skeptics Ask. It deals with the difficult things that atheists bring up.
We hope this list will make your life easier so that you don’t have to feel so overwhelmed in explaining the faith as I was years ago. We want to help you to really know your faith, and these books will definitely do that. We have many other recommendation lists on spirituality, apologetics, and books for beginners who are looking to grow in their faith. You can find them on our YouTube Channel. Even if you’re at a plateau, you’re depressed, anxious and you want to be inspired, you can check out these book series that we have to help you.
