Eric Metaxas - Is Atheism Dead?

Is Atheism Dead?

Eric Metaxas

With great oratorical skill and irrepressible humor, Metaxas engages lay readers with the story of how recent discoveries have made atheism scientifically, historically, and philosophically untenable.

HUGH ROSS, Ph.D., astrophysicist and founder and president of Reasons to Believe

When Eric Metaxas comes out with a new book, I have a problem: I know I will have to read it. I have read all his booksbecause I learn an immense amount from them and because they are difficult to put down. This latest book features Metaxas versus atheism. Its not a fair fight. Read Is Atheism Dead? and youll understand why.

DENNIS PRAGER, nationally syndicated radio talk show host, founder of Prager University, and bestselling author

Is Atheism Dead? displays the wonders of the universe, the chemistry of life, the vast archaeological evidence, and the thoughts and writings of great thinkers. Yet another all-engaging Metaxas book.

JAMES M. TOUR, Ph.D., professor of chemistry, computer science, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice University

A beautifully written, highly readable compendium of scientific, archaeological, and historical evidence. Highly recommended for anyone wrestling with the big questions!

STEPHEN C. MEYER, Ph.D., director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute and author of Return of the God Hypothesis

Is atheism dead? Metaxas answers this question meticulously and engagingly, addressing the most pressing questions and ostensibly the most compelling arguments for atheism. A must-read.

SARAH SALVIANDER, Ph.D., astrophysicist and author

This book is dedicated to the memory of two of the greatest minds and dearest souls imaginable, my beloved friends, of whom this world was not worthy,

John Rankin and Thomas Howard.

How I long to see you again, my brothers, when we three will round the tent of God like lambs rejoice!

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; thats why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; thats why all this has happened.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I n the course of writing this book I have felt an indebtedness to several people, all of whom I have the high honor of calling friends and whom it is my joy here to acknowledge and thank.

For example, it was in 1990 that my eyes lit on the books of Dr. Hugh Ross, who introduced me to the notion of the fine-tuned universe and who first enabled me to goggle at the breathtaking and soaring pas de deux of Science and Faith.

My friend Dr. Stephen Meyer also has proved to be an invaluable source of kindness, information, and wisdom, as has the extraordinary Dr. John Lennox, whose own books and spoken observations have had the effect of impishly haunting much of what I myself write and think.

I am also indebted to my friend Elizabeth Blakemore for her generous introduction to her Houston friend Dr. James Tour, and to Dr. Tour for his prodigal and withering critique of abiogenesis; and I am indebted to my friend Skip Heitzig for his generous introduction to his Albuquerque friend Dr. Steven Collins, and to Dr. Collins for his indefatigable trust in the Hebrew Scriptures, which extended to his following their lead not only to the Kikkar Plain, but all the way down to the Destruction Matrix level at what we now know to be biblical Sodom.

I would also like to thank my publisher, Tim Peterson at Salem Books, for believing in me and what I have to say in a way that has been profoundly encouraging; and for Salems editorial director, Karla Dial, whose cheerfulness and helpfulness has been entirely unparalleled in my experience with editors. Im also grateful to Salems assistant managing editor, Kathryn Riggs; and to Salems senior marketing manager, Jennifer Valk.

I also here must very heartily thank my own teamElisa Leberis, Katie Madonna, Janille Hawkins, Annalisa Pesek, and Sarah Luebkemannfor their support generally. I am especially indebted to Elisa for her extreme dedication in tracking down citations and photos for this book, which makes me not merely grateful, but grateful to the point of embarrassment.

And finally, I thank my agents on this book, Esther Fedorkevich of the Fedd Agency, and Elisa Leberis, for making it possible that this book could be published and eventually find its way to you, the reader, whom I thank last but not at all least, for as you know it was you I was writing to all along, and none other, and to whom I am writing even now.

W e are living in unprecedentedly exciting times. But most of us dont know it yet. Thats essentially the point of this book, to share the news that what many people have dreamt ofand others have believed could never happenhas 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 Gods existence.

Although such evidence has been appearing for decades, the culture hasnt 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 havent 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