A Dialogue With an Atheist

While living in Toronto, an atheist and I would meet once every two weeks for a coffee and a chat. Sometimes the chats were insignificant; other times they were intense. On one occasion we talked about answered prayer. I told him how I had lost my keys and after praying, found them again in a most implausible way. He then shared a story of how his mother had left her purse on a city bus, had prayed about it and at the end of the day, a transit employee called her to let her know her purse had been turned in to the lost and found. He mocked any possibility of this as an answer to prayer and wrote it off (as well as my example) as total coincidence. Furthermore, he held up the fact that the same day that his mama dared to presume that God cared about her purse with its relatively meaningless contents, hundreds of mothers on the other side of the world who also cried out to God lost their babies to starvation. “What kind of God does that” he asked with a flourish, as if he had hit a home run.

Christian, how would you answer?