Is Atheism Dead?

Eric Metaxas

• Publisher: Salem Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684512096
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

Is Atheism Dead? is an entertaining, impressively wide-ranging, and decidedly provocative answer to that famous 1966 TIME cover that itself provocatively asked "Is God Dead?" In a voice that is by turns witty, muscular, and poetic, Metaxas intentionally echoes C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton in cheerfully and logically making his astonishing case, along the way presenting breathtaking—and often withering—new evidence and arguments against the idea of a Creatorless universe. Taken all together, he shows atheism not merely to be implausible and intellectually sloppy, but now demonstrably ridiculous. Perhaps the only unanswered question on the subject is why we couldn't see this sooner, and how embarrassed we should be about it.

PART I Does Science Point to God?

INTRODUCTION The Grand Counter-Narrative

We are living in unprecedentedly exciting times. But most of us don’t know it yet. That’s essentially the point of this book, to share the news that what many people have dreamt of—and others have believed could never happen—has happened, or at any rate is happening this very minute and has been happening for some time. By this I mean the emergence of inescapably compelling evidence for God’s existence.

Although such evidence has been appearing for decades, the culture hasn’t much noticed it or spoken of it. And more recently, such evidence has been accelerating. But we are generally still stuck in the secular narrative that reached its apogee in the 1966 Time magazine cover article with the infamous title, “Is God Dead?” That was essentially the high-water mark for evidence that God had never existed, and as a result of that cultural moment, most of us have carried on with that idea ever since. We have likely heard little to disprove it and have mostly assumed the question was settled.

More importantly, our rather disproportionately secular cultural leaders were quite sure it was settled. So when any evidence came their way to the contrary, they tended to ignore it, since it so clearly defied the trend toward secularization that everyone had already accepted. It is more than anything because of this that the rest of us haven’t heard much.

But while all of us were sleeping through the decades and assuming the religious tide was going further and further out, never to return, something happened. The wind shifted. And for some time now the tide has been returning, slowly but steadily. So those for whom this is somehow bad news will feel like sunbathers who have drifted off to blissful sleep on the beach, only to leap awake hours later to see waves gurgling over their blankets and soaking their Hermann Hesse paperbacks. And then they realize they are badly sunburnt too!

I was myself awakened to this idea about seven years ago, when I wrote my book Miracles, in which I talked about the scientific evidence for God via the argument for “fine-tuning,” which is the idea that many things in our universe are calibrated so perfectly that they cannot have just happened, but rather overwhelmingly seem to point to some Designer. Over the years I had read about this and other evidence, but the sheer scope of it had never hit me until I was writing my book. Because the “fine-tuning” argument struck me as so compelling, I put it front and center in the book. When my publisher at Penguin asked me to write an op-ed to publicize the book, I thought this to be the most miraculous and surprising story of all, and so I wrote about it, sending eight hundred words to the Wall Street Journal. I initially titled it “Is Science Leading Us to God?” but the editors changed it to “Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God.” They seem to have known what they were doing, because no sooner did it appear than it went viral—to use that cliché—and then some.¹ Actually, it was astonishing to watch—but I did watch it, with more interest than I had watched anything in some time.

The article went online on Christmas Eve in 2014 and appeared in the print edition on Christmas Day. Only hours afterward, it had been shared on Facebook thousands of times, with hundreds of comments. And it kept on going at an impossible rate. As my family and I drove to Vermont for a few days’ skiing, we kept checking the link. It seemed there was a bizarre level of interest. This continued the next day—and the next, too. While having breakfast in a Vermont diner three days after it appeared, a young man approached.

“Are you Eric Metaxas?” he asked. He worked in banking in Boston and had read the article, found me online, and recognized me. He seemed thrilled by what he had read in the article, and of course I was thrilled that he was thrilled. What was going on?

Soon the Facebook shares hit one hundred thousand. When would the interest end? But it didn’t even slow. It kept charging ahead until it hit two hundred thousand—and kept going. An editor I knew at the Journal told me that the most Facebook shares any article had ever gotten was three hundred thousand, so if we passed that, the article would have the record—albeit unofficially, since they couldn’t comment on such things publicly. A few days later it hit that number—and kept going. A few months later it hit over six hundred thousand shares, after which the Journal ceased publishing those metrics for the public.

I realized that what I was watching was evidence for something I had believed for some time: People were hungry for answers to the big questions—or rather, the Big Questions—such as whether there is a God, or if there is a God, can we know it rationally? And of course everyone wondered what science might have to say about all of this. But because we live in a world that generally avoids such questions, we rarely hear these things discussed in any public forum. Good answers therefore elude us, which can be frustrating. So when my essay appeared, was it any wonder many readers responded as they did? Finally, they were getting some answers for these questions no one ever seemed to talk about. And those answers were the very opposite of what the general cultural conversation had led them to believe.

My article was just a tiny trickle of water in the middle of a cultural desert, but who could blame people dying of thirst for getting excited? But it is because of the response to that article that I have written this book. The evidence for “fine-tuning” has only been growing since that article appeared. And other evidence in other areas has come out too, changing much of what we once felt so sure of. So I thought it was about time someone blew the trumpet about this—or sounded the alarm, depending on whether you think this news is generally good or bad.

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It seems extraordinary to think that roughly when Time in 1966 asked “Is God Dead?”—at the moment of what we must now regard as premature secularist triumph—things were already beginning to shift. The evidence began to come in slowly, but steadily as we have said, and has only increased as the years and decades have passed. Those hostile to such evidence and those friendly to it were equally oblivious. Somehow over the years I have had the good fortune to stumble across books in which bits of this evidence have appeared, and have quietly been making mental notes. But it is only recently that I’ve realized the sheer amount of such evidence and thought I ought to share this little-known but paradigm-shifting news. Since the Time article in 1966, roughly five things have arisen to challenge—and I will argue, to overturn—the secular consensus that formed in the wake of that article.

The first is the discovery of what we call the Big Bang—and the proof of the Big Bang, which settled the question once and for all whether the universe always existed or didn’t. In discovering that the universe had a clear beginning, we realized there was a point at which all the laws of physics—and all of matter and energy—did not exist. It was the paradigm-smashing concept to end all paradigm-smashing concepts, one whose effects—like those of the Big Bang itself—continue to ripple onward and outward. One corollary to this is that we now know not just that the universe began, but when it began, and therefore, we know the age of the universe. Before we knew this, we could always say the emergence of life out of non-life had an infinite amount of time to happen; and theoretically, given infinity, anything could happen. But suddenly that infinity shrank to 13.8 billion years, and there was no longer forever for life to emerge. The breathing room of an infinite past had vanished.

The second thing—which we have already mentioned—is our discovery in the last decades of the increasingly overwhelming evidence of so-called “fine-tuning” in the universe. This was already observed in the 1950s, but things didn’t begin to look seriously troubling for atheists until about the 1990s. But since then, because of scientific advances, we can look much more closely at the nature of things and can see more clearly than ever that things in our universe and on this earth could not have emerged by chance, as we once so easily believed. Some of the elements of fine-tuning are, as we shall see, astonishing.

The third major shift in the last decades has to do with our views on how life emerged from non-life on the early earth, often called “Abiogenesis.” The more closely we can examine cells, for example, the more we can see how stupefyingly complex they are. We once thought they were very simple and imagined that they could have randomly assembled themselves in the primordial oceans. Thanks also to the world’s premier nanoscientist, James Tour of Rice University, we know how difficult it is to create molecules under even the best-controlled conditions, so the idea of life emerging from non-life—which once seemed at least theoretically possible—has with the progress of science seemed less and less so, until now it seems so far beyond the realm of possibility that we need to go back to our drawing boards on the whole subject. If the facts on this have not led most scientists in the field all the way to God, they have certainly led many to awe and wonder.

The fourth thing that has happened over the last decades concerns archaeological discoveries in the Middle East. The field has matured to the point where almost every month someone uncovers another small or large piece to add to the jigsaw picture of the Bible as an historically accurate guidebook to the past. Although this trend has been in motion since biblical archaeology began in the mid-nineteenth century, it too has accelerated in the last decades, with astonishing recent discoveries such as the Tel Dan stele, which mentions the monarchy of King David; the discovery and identification of biblical Sodom; and very recently, the discovery of Jesus’s childhood home in Nazareth. Taken together, these things make it impossible for any serious person to continue to regard the Bible as a collection of folktales.

The fifth thing that has changed in recent years is our knowledge of what atheism is, both theoretically and practically. For example, we have had the time to observe the lives of various atheists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Antony Flew, to see whether any of them were able to live out their philosophies in a way that was inspiring or even nearly logical; we have had the opportunity to see which of them most honestly grappled with the eternal question of God’s existence and what they eventually came to believe. We also have had the opportunity to watch the decades-long careers of atheist states like the former Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, and North Korea, and we have seen the inhuman horrors attending that worldview so that anyone with any respect for human rights or freedom must conclude that state-sponsored—and enforced—atheism must rank as the most wicked form of oppression in human history. Which must say something about those nations, and about atheism generally as well.

In this book we will deal with all of these five subjects, although there is no particular reason for the reader to feel compelled to take the chapters in the order in which they appear. Each of them may more or less stand alone, so if someone prefers, for example, to read all of the chapters on biblical archaeology first, or all the chapters on science, that should not affect the flow of the larger argument.

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Finally, we should be clear that in this book we have set the bar rather low in not expecting to convince anyone of anything beyond the larger point: that the belief that there is no God has—at least in recent decades—become untenable. So we won’t wade into anything much beyond that, and anyone looking for an explanation of the Trinity, or proof of the Resurrection, or for eye-popping photos of the Ark—or of the fossil of a serpent with a larynx—will be disappointed. These and many other things are outside the scope of this book, but the claims of atheism are not.

Atheism declares that there is no God, and it claims that this is a rational position; but atheism does not attempt to do much beyond convincing people of this idea. So although I might not be able to convince the reader of specific details of the Bible or of the truth of some of the doctrines of faith, 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. We may all have excellent questions and may doubt many things, and we may even be hostile to many expressions of faith and might reasonably call ourselves agnostics. But the idea that anyone can at this juncture say they believe there is no God—much less know such a thing—must henceforth be regarded as willful unreason or as mere affectation, or perhaps both. But I hope that this will become self-evident to the reader in due course.

1 You may read the original article in the Appendix.

CHAPTER ONE In the Beginning Was the Big Bang

The story of the Big Bang—what it is and how we came to know it happened—is appropriately as big a story as they come. It starts near the beginning of the twentieth century in 1911, when in the midst of a world drifting from the idea of God, a certain German genius came up with what we call the Theory of Relativity. And it essentially ends in 1964 with the discovery of the background radiation from the early universe, although it ends utterly and as decisively as anyone could have hoped—or feared—in the 1990s, when NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite fleshed out the contours of that radiation in extraordinary and indisputable detail. The story about the Big Bang is really many stories, but it is perhaps best told through the story of one of the world’s greatest scientists, an American astronomer named Allan Sandage.

I first heard about Sandage from Dr. Stephen Meyer during a Socrates in the City¹ event in Dallas in 2019. Meyer was telling the story of a conference he had attended back in February 1985, when he had first stumbled across the changing narrative in science and had begun wondering if the idea of God was making a comeback.² The conference featured a veritable Who’s Who of scientists, including Sandage, who was one of those mythical figures one hardly expected to see in the same room. But it was what Sandage did during the conference that especially stunned Meyer and first made him wonder if the strict atheistic consensus he expected at such gatherings was changing.

Allan R. Sandage (1926–2010) was among the most influential astronomers of the twentieth century.

It happened at the end of the conference, when the scientists were asked to “vote” whether they believed there was a God or wasn’t by standing on one side of the stage or another. Meyer was hardly alone in being astounded to see the legendary Sandage walk to the side of the stage representing belief in God. Here was one of the greatest scientists in the world publicly standing with those convinced the universe could not have come into being apart from some unfathomable Mind, whom Sandage at that time already understood to be the God of the Bible.

The story of Sandage is superbly told in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe, by New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye. It is filled with many stories and personages, but Sandage emerges as the most significant. “Few men are handed the keys to heaven,” Overbye says, “but Allan Sandage was one.” Overbye tells about a 1954 Fortune magazine article in which the twenty-eight-year-old Sandage is portrayed as one of “ten promising young scientists” and was “photographed leaning against the base of a famous 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain. He looked lean and Jimmy Stewartish, wearing a bomber jacket and grinning with dimpled cheeks, a spit of curl hanging over his high forehead.” Overbye explains that Sandage “had become the first person in history whose job description was to determine the fate of the universe.”

Science writer Dennis Overbye. Courtesy of Dennis Overbye

What Sandage did for thirty years after that photograph was operate the telescope he is pictured leaning on. It was probably the most famous scientific instrument of the twentieth century, and Overbye says Sandage operated it “as if it were his backyard spyglass, measuring and remeasuring the universe, scraping from the shadows of photographic plates and enigmatic spectra and mathematical drudge-work clues to the size and...