Has Atheism Finally Lost the Argument? A Review of: Is Atheism Dead?
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A few years after the turn of the millennium, “the four horsemen of the new atheism,” as they have come to be known—Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion Terror and the Future of Reason, 2005), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 2006), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007), and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2011)—all burst onto the scene claiming to offer “new” insights into what is in fact a very old topic. To be sure, pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Democritus (460-370 B.C.) and Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) had already made similar arguments much earlier. The headwaters of this most recent wave of atheism as an intellectual movement go back to Europe once again, but this time to the nineteenth century, especially to the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach in his The Essence of Christianity (1843), a work that influenced both Marx and Freud, and of Friedrich Nietzsche in his “Parable of the Madman,” as it played out in his celebrated work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883,1885). It was this intellectual (and later cultural) heritage that was developed by the radical theologians of the 1960’s, Thomas J. Altizer and William Hamilton, among them, in their book The Death of God, published in January 1966. Remarkably enough, it was this last book, as well as the broader movement that it spawned, that was taken up and popularized that very same year by Time magazine in its celebrated cover story (April 8, 1966), simply entitled, “Is God Dead?”
As a theologian well acquainted with the history of philosophy and of atheism as intellectual movements, I have given a very careful reading to the work of atheists and neo-atheists alike, hailing either from the nineteenth or twenty-first century. In terms of the logic as well as the coherence of some of the arguments offered in the most recent literature, celebrated by cultural elites and social influencers alike, I must confess that I, and several other theologians, have not been singularly impressed. To illustrate, the neo-atheist Sam Harris apparently knows so little of the Christian faith, which he repeatedly scorns, that he claims that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is a teaching about Jesus instead of its proper referent, Mary, his mother (The End of Faith, p. 95)! To be sure, for the sake of fair-minded critical thinking, accurate description should always precede sound criticism. Moreover, Richard Dawkins shows little understanding of what theologians actually mean by “the God class,” in other words, what is entailed by the specific word “God,” and what therefore would be its proper referent, especially in theological discourse. For Dawkins, who is and remains the great popularizer of the neo-atheism movement, the word “god,” in sharp contrast to its use by theologians, refers to a thing in the world (exactly what God is not) and emerges among other things as the derisive and mocking “flying spaghetti monster,” in his book, The God Delusion (p. 76). However, Dawkins should have skipped the ridicule and instead read the writings of Thomas Aquinas. It would have made for the possibility of a fair and helpful conversation.
Well aware of both the arguments as well as the antics of the neo-atheists, Eric Metaxas, radio host and author of very able biographies on Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer and Luther, took up the challenge of the neo-atheists and radical theologians alike and has responded by turning the tables on the editors at Time as well by publishing the very readable and intellectually engaging work, Is Atheism Dead? Contrary to a whole class of writings that simply assume that science repeatedly makes the case for atheism, as in Natalie Angier’s recent work, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, Metaxas is so bold as to argue quite the reverse, in other words, that scientific developments, especially of late, are actually “pushing back the argument against God” (p. 38). Such a truth is so contrary to the received opinion in many circles in our North American culture today, especially in university classrooms, that this fact alone is enough to energize readers and to have them grapple seriously with all that Metaxas has to offer—and there is much.
Laying out his argument in six basic moves, Metaxas takes up the first one and points out that the Big Bang, which maintains that the universe began around 13.8 billion years ago, has posed a serious problem for the intellectual habits of some scientists (clearly not all), who always seem to interpret the data in an atheistic way. That is, any consideration of God, a Creator, or an Intelligent Designer is immediately excluded by a simple appeal to infinite time in order to shut down the conversation. In other words, given enough time a certain state of affairs is likely to emerge. Simply put, its number will eventually come up. Here, then, there is no need for an appeal to God at all and so atheism is once again confirmed—or so it has been argued. However, with the indisputable reality of the Big Bang in play, confirmed by the measurement of cosmic microwave background radiation among other things, not only does time have a limit but, methodologically speaking, so does science. In other words, there are clear barriers that science itself simply cannot cross. Its explanatory power does, after all, come to an end. To illustrate, prior to the time of a fraction of a second immediately after the Big Bang (ten to the power of -43 of a second), the laws of physics break down and no one has yet come up with a unified theory—if they ever will. Moreover, since time/space began with the Big Bang, and there is general agreement here, then to pose the question, “What was before the Big Bang?” can only become an unintelligible query, and certainly not a scientific one. So then, if scientists criticized “God of the gaps” arguments earlier, put forth by overly eager theists, then given the recent argument of Metaxas, theists can now return the favor in kind and point out the fecklessness of the “infinity of time” arguments. Those too are now at an end.
Moreover, many readers will likely find the “fine-tuning argument” laid out by Metaxas convincing and at the heart of this carefully written book. Sometimes the “fine-tuning argument” is referred to as the “Goldilocks enigma,” as in a recent work by Paul Davies, an English physicist, in his The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? In other words, so many factors of our physical world have been set just right, fine-tuned in a Goldilocks fashion, to allow for life. Change any of these factors, even by infinitesimal amounts, and life simply cannot occur. The list of these factors include all of the following:
The size of the earth and its moon;
The placement of the earth in its orbit around the sun (the habitable zone);
Large planet neighbors (such as Jupiter and Saturn) gathering up asteroids;
The placement of the solar system within the Milky Way galaxy;
The overall density of the universe;
The mass of the universe;
The strength of the four physical forces;
The properties of water and sunlight.
Each one of the properties above (and there are many more) are fine-tuned, set just right, to allow for life. The odds of any one property being set in just this way are simply astronomical. However, the larger picture does not yet emerge until each one of these probabilities is then multiplied by the probabilities of all the others to end up with a very unlikely scenario indeed. In fact, the odds at this point are so great, the likelihood of life happening by chance so nearly impossible, that Allan Sandage, the late American astronomer, shocked some of his colleagues by pointing out “how the scientific evidence of a ‘creation event’ had contributed to a profound change in his worldview” (p. 33), which he later referred to as a conversion.
To complicate matters further, Metaxas has the effrontery or chutzpah to point out that in terms of abiogenesis, that is, “the process of non-life somehow randomly [coming] together to produce a living single-celled organism” (p.113), supposed scientific reasoning has once again faltered with a concoction of “just so” stories to fill in the wide gaps of data that are simply not there. Since the advent of the overly-touted Miller Urey experiment back in 1952, we have come to learn that one single cell is an incredibly complex entity, its dynamics akin to the functioning of a little city (see Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell), with the result that “just so” stories, driven by an interested and overly eager imagination, simply don’t work in this area.
But it gets worse. Metaxas points out that the kind of reasoning employed once a living cell is in place, that is, some form of evolutionary theory, is simply inappropriate, a nonstarter, to deal with the contested issue, once again, of abiogenesis, that is, of the change from non-life to life, in other words, from inorganic materials to the first living cell. Such a topic is beyond the bounds of biology and its methods. But this reality, oddly enough, has not stopped the neo-atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, from taking the intellectual apparatus of evolutionary theory, which should simply pertain to biology, and then turning around and applying it to every other field as needed at the moment, whether that be physics, astronomy or even cosmology. Once again this is both intellectually and methodologically inappropriate. “Science,” so conceived, is transgressing the limits, the proper domain, of the discipline itself. It is repeatedly veering off track into sweeping, pontificating philosophical judgments that are clearly unwarranted. Accordingly, in his pronouncements in this area, Dawkins is not standing on solid intellectual ground at all. Indeed, the ground has shifted considerably of late, though he remains oblivious.
Beyond these intellectual moves, demonstrating the very best of critical reasoning, Metaxas takes up the larger question of his book and develops a number of additional lines of argumentation. To illustrate, he lays out a host of evidence in terms of just how science, archeology in particular, is actually confirming the historical veracity of both the Old and New Testaments, and not undermining it, as an earlier age had contended, ranging from the historical reality of Sodom to the very house of Jesus. Herman Reimarus and Alfred Loisy are likely turning in their graves.
Not content with demonstrating how scientific advance is now making life so much harder for atheists, Metaxas then turns his attention to the reality of atheism itself as a worldview and raises the embarrassing question of whether or not the popular atheistic icons of our age, that is, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Anthony Flew, “were able to live out their philosophies in a way that was aspiring or even nearly logical” (p. 8). Indeed, it is one thing for a high school or college sophomore to throw off the family’s Baptist or Methodist god; it is quite another thing to understand the disturbing consequences of atheism (morally, philosophically, and existentially), to thoroughly embrace them, and to live accordingly. Many readers then will undoubtedly be surprised to learn that not even the celebrated names of Sartre, Camus and Flew were able to pull this off.
In terms of Sartre, Metaxas points out that “the writer and theologian Father John S. Dunne personally told M. A. Dean that a priest friend of Dunne’s ‘had been called to Sartre’s deathbed, where the noted atheist confessed his sins and came into the Church’” (pp. 293-94). Moreover, towards the end of his life, Camus was captivated by what he called the “transcendent,” was apparently seeking baptism (though he died before it could occur), all of which has led Metaxas to conclude: “So until now, most of the world has never heard that one of the world’s most public atheists had eventually found his atheism unsatisfactory and had turned toward God” (p. 299). And Anthony Flew’s renunciation of atheism in his book There is a God, published in 2007, has been so public and thoroughgoing as not to warrant any further attention other than to lift up his own observation that “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: follow the evidence, wherever it leads.” Life is getting so much harder for atheists today, especially those who are hiding behind the supposed claims of science. Who knew?
Though Metaxas has insisted that he set the bar “rather low” (p. 8) in this book, nevertheless his statement “the belief that there is no God has—at least in recent decades—become untenable” (p. 8), will suggest otherwise for many readers, both atheist and theist alike. To be sure, it is one thing to turn back several of the criticisms of atheists, point by point, in a well-reasoned argument. It is quite another thing, however, to claim, as Metaxas has done, that the very intellectual viability of atheism as a belief system has now become untenable. If that’s the case, then one could no longer hold an atheistic worldview with any sort of intellectual integrity. And that’s exactly the judgment of Metaxas in his trumpeted declaration made early on in the book: “atheism is no longer an option for those wishing to be regarded as intellectually honest.” Whether Metaxas has actually demonstrated that judgment in the midst of his other careful labors will be best left for readers to decide.
Kenneth J. Collins is Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and a member of the Firebrand Editorial Board.