In this article, we will be recommending the best books to refute atheism, agnosticism, and to give answers to 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. 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?
Every Confirmation retreat I give, I ask the teens, why do you believe in God? And they all give answers such as: “I don’t know, because my parents do”. I tend to ask: “Do you have any proof?” The answer is usually: No. I challenge the teens 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 and to help them understand what they believe, and this book is fantastic because this is really the product of people asking me questions for 20 years about the faith and me looking up all the answers and coming to the fact 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 and religion, 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 people in high school, read it up to five times because they say that it really helps them to answer their peers, and understand the faith themselves. 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 is an atheist. What’s the difference between an atheist, an agnostic and a theist and how to distinguish between them. So, if you kind of want to just know it all, it’s all in this book. 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, with a pretty thorough treatment of the subject on a simple level that everybody can understand.
There are going to be several books I recommend here that are much deeper than this one, and maybe more difficult to understand, although their arguments are really good. But I still highly recommend Trent Horn’s book Answering Atheism, which you can find here.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #3:
New Proofs for the Existence of God by Father Robert Spitzer
Father Robert Spitzer, if you don’t know, is a Brainiac, scientist Catholic priest. I came across him just on Oprah if I remember correctly. And he was discussing with Stephen Hawking. He was also discussing with Deepak Chopra about the existence of God. Stephen Hawking was trying to talk about how the universe can come about from nothing. And 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, very deep, very complex and over my head in some ways such as physics and other deep sciences, which he goes through in this book. 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 faith.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #4:
The Language of God 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 hate 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, and he believes in science and religion and shows how you confuse the two together. And it’s 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 been not 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 the Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #6:
Five Proofs for the Existence of God Explained and The Last Superstition by Edward Feser
If you want it broken down a bit more, but still deep, definitely check out these 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.
Atheism is a superstition he says, 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, Christopher Hitchens, and he destroys their arguments.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #7:
What is God? By Kevin Vost
If you would like still an even simpler book of those two, 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, and 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 it if you would like a simple book debunking Richard Dawkins and other new atheists. This book 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, philosophy, or deep concepts like that.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION #9:
The Catholic Church and Science by Benjamin Wiker
This book is answering and exposing some questions and myths. So, he 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 and it’s Protestant-written by two Protestant apologists. But it’s very good, and 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. And 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 he healed one. But we have to remember that Matthew was writing to Jews who believed in miracles, and Luke was writing to Greeks who really didn’t, and 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. So, he probably just simplified it for them and it’s not a contradiction. This is a great book and the first author has another book called When Skeptics Ask, dealing with the difficult things that atheists bring up.
We hope this list will make your life easier, so 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, books for beginners who are looking to grow in their faith, etc. 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.
