Is Atheism Dead?

At a time when secularism appears to dominate our culture, hatred for the Judeo-Christian ethic is advocated, and the belief in God is ridiculed, I came across an insightful and encouraging book by Eric Metaxas entitled Is Atheism Dead? Metaxas offers hope that the belief in God will be resurrected and that atheism is dying a slow death (if it’s not on its last legs). He is honest and direct about his intention in writing this book:

I can certainly hope and even expect to convince any rational person that atheism is no longer an option for those wishing to be regarded as intellectually honest.

He pursues this goal with passion, clarity, at times with a sense of humor, and the latest data to support his contention. Here is a summary of the topics he covers, although these do not reflect the amount of writing he spent on each one. Those topics included the following: the Big Bang, the fine-tuned planet, the fine-tuned universe, water and sunlight, how life originated, life is far more complex than we thought, following the science, biblical and archaeological evidence, New Testament archaeology, and the views of atheists.

One fascinating aspect of the book was his description of a “fine-tuned planet,” and the biblical evidence verified by the archaeology.

Many of us have already heard that the development of our planet was so finely tuned that it would have been impossible for it to come into existence by accident. But Metaxas provides even more evidence than I would have ever imagined. His writing gives many examples of these discoveries, but the following comments sum up his view:

It is simply that there are certain things about our universe—and about our planet—that seem to be so extremely perfectly calibrated that they can hardly be coincidental. If these things were even slightly different, life would not even be possible. One classic example has to do with the size of Earth, which just happens to be exactly what it needs to be in order for life to exist here.

[snip]

The overwhelming impression is that the burgeoning welter of perfect coincidences has mounted to a level impossibly beyond anything we can put down to coincidence, so that even the most hostile atheist must at least wonder whether it is all precisely as it is precisely because it was intentionally designed to be that way.

One example, his description of the discovery of the location of Sodom from the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, was especially intriguing. Steven Collins is an archaeologist who was working near the Dead Sea and was contemplating the existence of Sodom. He suddenly realized that the biblical description was contrary to the contention that Sodom was on the south side of the Dead Sea. Sodom, a very large city for the time, was built on a verdant plain! Over the years he had the opportunity to explore the area to look for Sodom, and was amazed by the discoveries he made. He realized that the area had undergone a cataclysmic event as well:

It seemed that this civilization was thriving for many centuries, but then suddenly, around 1700 BC, the civilization had stopped dead—and then did not start up again for seven centuries.

[snip]

The ‘impact event’ has been estimated to be the equivalent of fifteen megatons of TNT, or a thousand Hiroshima bombs. And yet this inconceivably destructive event would only have required a single small asteroid of about three hundred feet in diameter, exploding five miles above Earth’s surface.

Collins believed that this event could account for the destruction of Sodom. With his biblical expertise and understanding and experience with archaeology, he was certain that he had found Sodom north of, not south of, the Dead Sea.

Metaxas also dedicates his research to the stories of the New Testament. He writes of the prediction of the emergence of Jesus, the presence of Jesus in the Temple, and even shows archaeological proof of Jesus’ childhood home.

The author also takes issue with the argument that the atheists like to make, that faith and science are incompatible. He summarizes his argument with these points:

The first is that the false idea that faith and science are incompatible stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of both faith and science. The second is that the well-known story of Copernicus and Galileo as scientists at war with the Church is false. The third is that many of the greatest scientists in history were deeply committed to the Christian faith, and not only saw their faith as compatible with science, but as inextricably intertwined with it. And fourth—and surely the most distressing to materialist atheists—is the almost unknown fact that science as we today know it arose precisely because of Christian faith—not in spite of it.

When we turn to Metaxas’ analysis of the atheists who refuse to believe there is a God/Creator, he again relies on reason. Of course, the data he supplies about the perfect circumstances that contributed to the creation of the planet Earth are convincing, and some atheists, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, acknowledged that these data were the most impressive. But Metaxas spends a great deal of time discounting two of the most prominent atheists, Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Metaxas felt compelled to read their work, to try to understand their side of the arguments against God. Instead of finding rational and data-driven information to support atheism, these men, particularly Hitchens, relied on bluster and rage to support their points. He describes his experience of trying to read Hitchens’s book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Here is how, in part, he describes the book:

I found that I couldn’t make any real sense of what I was discovering. I don’t mean I didn’t understand the meaning of the sentences; that I understood all too well. What I couldn’t make head or tail of was how much a popular book by someone so previously brilliant could be so aggressively—I thought even ambitiously—awful. I didn’t need to wonder too hard how the book could have been popular, because what it did very well—via unconnected anecdotes and mean-spirited hyperbole and witticisms—was confirm and further inflame the deep emotional animus many readers felt toward ‘religion’ of some kind, or any kind at all.

This is Metaxas’s challenge to the atheists who continue to discount religion:

And since atheists loudly ally themselves with reason and rationality, how shall we shrink from asking them to defend their positions reasonably and rationally? We must hear how it can be that atheists maintain we are merely material beings with no transcendent value, but blanch and sputter when it is pointed out that this is what Hitler and the National Socialists believed—and carried out with typical and tragic German efficiency.

If you find Metaxas’s goals as fascinating as I do, I encourage you to read the book. His passion and dedication to validating people’s beliefs in God and his commitment to religion are inspiring. Near the end of the book, he made this statement:

Somehow—in God’s impossible economy—everything is connected. Somehow. Through him. And because the good and beauty and truth in each thing points to him, it reflects off him and points back to every other good and beautiful and true thing that exists.

[originally published at American Thinker]