As any Christian can testify, faith is a very difficult virtue. When my faith has flagged, it has sometimes consoled me to think about how unbelievable most of the world is.
The thought experiment which I typically use is to pick something around me and try to think of it not as an everyday object, but as science tells me that it is. Let's take the wooden table in front of me. Ordinarily, the table is just a flat piece of wood resting on some long pieces of wood on the ground, wood being a hard substance with a grainy pattern to it. But what is it really?
Anyone with a cheap microscope can tell you that would is actually a collection of stiff fibers running parallel to each other. Someone with a moderately powerful microscope will tell you that the fibers are actually made up of a collection of cells with stiff cell walls. These cells stick to each other for some reason or other. The reason is some mystery called Van der Waals forces, or something like that.
If we now talk to a chemist, he'll tell us that the cells are actually made up of millions of molecules, which have various amounts of attraction to each other based on their charge. Their charge we can determine because the molecules are made up of atoms, and the atoms in the molecules have a charge, and we can (roughly) look at how the atoms distribute their charge to figure out how various parts of the molecules behave. Where does their charge come from, though? Well, that's because of a nucleas composed of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, orbited by negatively charged electrons. Well, not quite orbited, precisely, so much as within a probability cloud of, or something. Let's leave quantum mechanics out of things for the moment, though only for the moment.
So what looks like a table is actually a mass of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons bumping around. Some of the protons, neutrons, and orbiting electrons gather rather closely together as they bump about (molecules), some of which gather closely together as they bump about (various parts of cell aparatus), which then gather together (cells) and then gather together again (fibers), which stick to each other to form the wood that we see. The reason that this collection of atoms madly bouncing about doesn't go through the floor is that the atoms in the wood stick to each other so tightly that they can't find their way through the atoms in the floor, which are also sticking to each other very tightly.
Now, to bring quantum mechanics back into it, those electrons which look like they're neatly orbiting the protons and neutrons are actually doing no such thing. We can't really pin them down, we can only say where they're likely to be if we try to interact with them. And it turns out that we can't give any boundary to where they are; we can only say that it gets less likely that you'll interact with them the farther away from the nucleas which they orbit. And the same is true of the protons and neutrons — the further away from where we think that they are, the less likely we are to bump into them. But there's no stoppping point; nowhere can we say "no further; here thy proud waves shall break!" And indeed there's a very slight chance that wander around somewhere in mexico you might actually bump into my table here in upstate New York. And it's just possible that I might try to set my glass of water down on the table and it fall to the floor because it didn't encounter any of the atoms of the table. It's not very likely, but it's possible.
So, looking at the table, don't see the familiar old object. See instead the whorling mass of protons, electrons, and neutrons which might at any moment suddenly be in Mexico, or on Venus, or drifting through space thirteen galaxies over. Try to really believe it, as if the table that you see is the illusion and the teleporting mass of madly dashing particles is the reality. Try to believe it not in the dry sense of intellectually assenting to the words, but actually try to comport your mind around that reality.
No? Well, I can't believe it either.
But that's what science tells us is the reality underneath the illusion that we take for granted. This wild tale is more real than the beverage rest we've taken for granted a thousand times.
Now, it's very difficult to really believe that God picked an insignificant people to be his people, and then became flesh in a dirty stable in a cave that this insignificant people held to be insignificant, was crucified, died, and was buried, and on the third day rose again according to the scriptures (which he previously inspired).
Is it more difficult to believe in this than in the coffee table? It's hard for me to say. I can't really believe in either, and you can't have a zero which is less than another zero.
And yet the coffee table is there. Rather than concluding that there's something wrong with the coffee table and God-in-the-cave, it's an easier explanation that there's something wrong with me. I have a hard time believing in things which are true. That means that when I have a hard time believing something, it's not necessarily a good reason to doubt it.
(These thoughts have been brought to you by G.K. Chesterton's introduction to the book of Job.)
As a post script, I would like to point out how ludicrous it is when some atheists try to describe science and Christianity as being in opposition. As the post above indicates, science is actually one of the best friends of Christianity.