I'm not going to take the bait and bash atheists, malign them, or decry this billboard. Atheists are people that God loves, that I love, and its a free country. They are just as free to post things like this billboard as religious people can post their own billboards, which are occasionally horrible. I have admiration for atheists: they don't take pat answers, they are open to engaging to intellectual scrutiny on a variety of issues, and they take pride in using reason. They don't just swallow whole any teaching that is given to them. There are lessons to glean there.
Many of them, however, believe the misconception and stereotype that you have to check your brain at the door in order to be a follower of Christ.
What I will point out about this billboard, however, is this: why do we feel this drive to "be good"? (even for goodness' sake).
What is the origin of this desire? Why do we even care to try and "be good"?
For one to engage on a search to "be good" implies that in your current condition you have the capability to not be good. When I search for something such as "goodness", it implies that I know that I am not always good, and that I need better actions to rectify the situation.
Atheists may agree on this, but we would arrive at a different causation for the effect. I would call this instinctual/covert movement towards goodness the natural human response to sin. We know we are sinners, and we attempt to satiate our conscience via our attempts at good works, with or without God.
Ultimately, this work is fruitless, because no one can make themselves perfectly righteous. Only faith in Christ, whose perfect sacrifice of righteousness on our behalf, can make us "good", all of it grace. All of it a gift of God on our behalf.
Many have begun to believe in God when they realized how perfectly impossible it is to try to be good, all the time. You can't do it. Why is that?
An atheist may say they want to be good simply because its sensible and reasonable, even if that flies in the face of a true Darwinian perspective of the world, which on an animalistic level should be each man for himself.
It boils down to this: when I have a hunger for goodness, it implies that I was made to know goodness, just as my hunger for food and water reasonably implies I need food and water to survive.
God is the only one who is good, all the time. We are made for God and to be in relationship with God. Our actions speak louder than our words, whether we admit it or not.
