I confess it's not clear to me why it would be important to my atheist friends to convince others to believe ultimately in nothing but oneself. There is is nothing obvious - either in state-enforced atheism (Marxism/communism), nor the micro of individual lives voluntarily choosing to believe in nothing but oneself - that appears strongly appealing.

Nor does research support the social benefit of atheism. In one of Project Canada’s studies, for instance, researchers compared the attitudes of theists (including, but not limited to followers of Christ) to atheists in Canada. Researchers found that believers in God, however generically, were up to twice as likely to hold community-building values—such as honesty, kindness, family life, being loved, friendship, courtesy, concern for others, forgiveness, patience and generosity—as atheists.

While this may be surprising neither to atheists or to theists, the candour of motivation and subsequent logic involved in the decision to deny God expressed by one prominent advocate, was to me refreshingly more so:

"I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that  it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this  assumption . . . . For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the  philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.  The liberation  we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and  liberation from a certain system of morality.  We objected to the morality because it  interfered with our sexual freedom." (Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, first published 1937)

It is this desire for autonomy without ultimate accountability which appears to be the driving force for the contemporary insistence on presenting students with selective information in biology and astronomy leaving out evidence for intelligent design.

Science was born in the Christian worldview of the universe as the product of God's purposeful order. Christians therefore generally welcome the fruit of science as it progresses and over time overturns earlier theories with theories which better explain newly discovered evidence. This process however must be, if it is to be science as generally understood, objective and conclusions to be suggested by the evidence, rather than by the previously determined views of the person selectively seeking evidence which fits his or her preconceived motivation as expressed by Huxley.

It is true that the heart has reasons of which the mind knows not. But the mind should seek out its heart for those reasons and invite it to be as candid as Huxley.

A brief meditation of a friend invites atheists to be as honest about their uncertainties as they invite believers to be about theirs.

Blasé Pascal was a seventeenth century mathematician who reflected on the decision of faith in terms which came to be known as Pascal's Wager.

A fuller, light hearted but powerful expression of a thoughtful honesty I would highly commend, is CK Chesterton's Orthodoxy available in the public domain in PDF or RTF.