Eric Metaxas. Is Atheism Dead? Salem, 2021.

Author Eric Metaxas has become known as a Christian intellectual. Is Atheism Dead? is meant as a challenge, as Schleiermacher would have it, to the “cultured despisers” of religion. Metaxas reminds us of the 1966 Time magazine cover that asked, “Is God dead?” Metaxas thinks it is time to re-orient that kind of thinking.

There are already a number of scientific and historical specialties raising the question of atheism’s demise. Metaxas brings them together. In broad terms, he first looks at science since we often hear that belief in God is “unscientific.” Then he takes a look at some recent archaeology. Finally, he looks at the philosophical problems and consequences of atheism.

Is Atheism Dead? first brings into play the anthropic principle, or argument from complexity. When I was a child, science books for kids such as the Golden Big Books of Science and Natural History were still teaching that most cells in most organisms were basically the same. They were all made of some goop called protoplasm that shifted its shape to make different organisms. Even in college, our professor told us that while we have learned that cells and organic chemicals are much more complex and interdependent, they still could “evolve” into complicated organisms given enough time.

We have learned that things are much more complicated than even what I was taught fifty years ago. It is not just the fine tuning of cells in an organism or organelles in cells or chemicals in organelles, it the whole idea of life itself. Back in the 1970s, Carl Sagan said that there were only two conditions necessary for life. Now most scientists admit that there are hundreds of conditions necessary—everything from the universal gravity constant and the type of galaxy to the force that hold nuclei together. Even slight deviations of such constants and circumstances would preclude life of any kind. The odds of all these things coming together are truly astronomical.

As suggested earlier, none of the arguments here are new, but Metaxas brings many different sources together. And he is a gentleman about it. He notes that cultural atheism is a Western phenomenon, so he is aware that most attacks and criticisms on religion specifically target Christianity and Judaism. (Just this week, the New York Times had a weird op-ed about Passover to explain why the writer left his Jewish faith.) Nearly a third of Is Atheism Dead? concerns archaeological discoveries in the Near East.

Metaxas does what Josh McDowell did in his original Evidence that Demands a Verdict by bringing together archaeological finds that support the Biblical narrative. While not as exhaustive as McDowell was, Metaxas notes relatively new discoveries that show that Biblical narratives are based on history. He touches on classics like the Merneptah Stele but also new findings such as one that points to the Gabbatha, where Jesus was tried before Pilate, (see John 19:13) as well as historical references to Pilate himself.

After presenting strong evidence for a creator/designer of the universe and then for the Bible as a historical work, Metaxas deals directly with the question at hand: Has atheism died? While he ends up focusing on the so-called Four Horsemen—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris—he notes the dramatic changes that took place in three of the Twentieth Century’s most famous philosophers. While none became “born again Christians,” Sartre, Camus, and Anthony Flew all became theists. Sartre and Flew’s changes are well documented, Camus’ less so.

Metaxas also notes the abiding faith of many of the pioneers of science and the scientific method. He makes a case, as we have on some of these pages, that the scientific method implies an orderly creation and the so-called Scientific Revolution paralleled the Reformation. He also does a pretty thorough job of debunking the “founding myth” of modern atheism, the supposed conflict between Galileo and the beliefs of the Church.

Metaxas points out, as other have, that the so-called New Atheists seem to be more emotional and less rational. They throw out multiple accusations with little evidence and often confuse different religious beliefs. Still, the strongest argument of Metaxas against atheism is simply that atheism has not been good for people. In the Twentieth Century, atheistic Fascist and Communist regimes were responsible for the deaths of at least 150 million people, excluding victims of wars they may have caused. We think of Germany, China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea. All are totalitarian (see previous review) and do not tolerate even a suspicion of opposition to their views. From the French Revolution on, official atheism’s record has been cruel and, frankly, evil.

Even the total number of victims of the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions were less than a thousand—Metaxas does not trivialize this but notes that the scale of atheism’s brutality is far greater.

No wonder, Metaxas would say. If there is no God, then there is no accountability for our actions. Not only that, but people are nothing exceptional, merely another cosmic accident of no intrinsic value. Where do the senses of virtue and justice come from? The atheist would say, they are merely power plays. What is your meaningless life worth? Camus would write in The Myth of Sisyphus that life was absurd and the only logical act was suicide. Camus would later see that this was untenable, that there was something more. Shortly before he died, he even inquired about getting baptized. Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Kims would say that the only “something more” was more power.

Metaxas did not say it, but his conclusion reminds me of Danton’s observation during the Reign of Terror that the Revolution devours its own children. In all the Fascist and Communist regimes, even many of the regime supporters and party members were killed off by those in authority. Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago wrote of people who willingly submitted to execution because they thought it would help the party. Perhaps atheism is dying because it is killing itself.

A note to more orthodox readers: Metaxas assumes certain things about or for his audience. For the sake of his argument from design, he assumed a conventional Big Bang about 14 billion years ago without considering time-gravity and expansion anomalies and many other old-earth problems. For example, instead of a saying a worldwide flood caused mass extinctions, he credits an ancient asteroid.

He affirms the Biblical dating of the Exodus at around 1500 B.C., which archaeology confirms, but says Abraham lived around 1700 B.C. which certainly does not account for the four hundred years of servitude in Egypt before the Exodus. In spite of the apparent contradictions of his uniformitarian understanding, he still points out the even greater contradictions and words games with the concept of abiogenesis, life from non-life. It seems that modern atheism is taking people in the opposite direction, non-life from life.

A Personal Postscript. I knew I was going to like this book when I first opened it up. It is dedicated to the memory of John Rankin and Thomas Howard. I never knew Tom Howard, but I knew people who knew and studied under him. I was always impressed with their sense of Christianity and culture. I knew John Rankin personally for about thirty years until his passing last year. He was a real scholar activist on the front lines of the culture wars. His approach to truth was profound, and his courage was admirable. I miss him and his work. I pray his written work will live on and grow in influence.

A General Postscript. Is Atheism Dead? also quotes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address:

But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”