“IS Atheism dead?” - a response
Eric Metaxas’ new book, “Is Atheism Dead?” provocatively poses the question of whether atheism can be justified in the modern age. Metaxas frames his book as a response to a 1966 Time Magazine cover story asking “Is God Dead?” which discussed several scientific discoveries that rendered the existence of God increasingly improbable. Metaxas takes the position that even more recent discoveries have pointed in the opposite direction, supporting the existence of the Christian God so strongly that no reasonable person could deny it.
Metaxas is a Christian author, speaker and host of an eponymous conservative radio show who rose to prominence within evangelical circles with his bestselling biography of Lutheran pastor Deitrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxas followed this up with a hagiography of Martin Luther which was panned by historians and scholars of Luther, one of whom charged Metaxas with ignoring more than a century of scholarship on Luther to create a “largely uncritical endorsement” of the man. Most recently, Metaxas has muscled into the public spotlight as a prominent supporter of Donald Trump, enthusiastically endorsing Trump’s debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and indicating his willingness to die in the fight to inaugurate Trump and send Trump’s enemies to jail. In 2020 he indicated that Jesus was on Trump’s side, describing anti-Trump protesters as “almost demonic.”
Metaxas begins by acknowledging that in 1966, the consensus among academics and scientists was that God did not exist. He claims, however, that five things have happened since then to justify overturning this secular consensus.
1. First, the development of the big bang theory, the significance of which, he claims, is that it “settled the question once and for all whether the universe always existed.”
2. Second, what Metaxas calls “overwhelming evidence of so called ‘fine tuning’ of the universe,” which Metaxas claims to lead inexorably to the conclusion that “the earth could not have emerged by chance.”
3. Third, evolving science on abiogenesis compelling the conclusion that life emerging from non-life now seems “beyond the realm of possibility.”
4. Fourth, archeological discoveries in the Middle East which reveal the Bible as a “historically accurate guidebook to the past” rather than “a collection of folktales.”
5. Fifth, examples of how atheism has worked in practice, which Metaxas employs to argue that an atheist worldview is impossible to logically maintain.
THE BIG BANG
Before discussing Metaxas’ approach to the big bang, it is important to recognize how scientists understand it. The big bang theory posits that our universe is rapidly expanding and that this expansion began from an incredibly dense point approximately 13.7 billion years ago. If Einstein’s theory of general relativity were applied, it would predict a point of infinite density and curvature just before the expansion, which scientists refer to as the cosmic singularity. Relativity likewise predicts such singularities within black holes. But we know that relativity doesn’t apply at the quantum scale and that no actual infinities exist. Accordingly to understand what happened just prior to the big bang or within black holes, scientists must develop a more exact, as yet unknown, quantum-scale description of gravity. Until that time comes, we have no basis upon which to say what happened “before” the big bang. The big bang represents our epistemological horizon, a placeholder for the extent of our knowledge.
Metaxas misrepresents the science as well as the scientific reception to the big bang. Central to his argument is his claim that the big bang entails a “beginning” to the universe, which he claims is consistent with the Biblical creation account. He claims the big bang establishes all matter and energy arose spontaneously out of nothing. But neither of these claims is true. As I discussed in Cross-Examined, the big bang does not require a beginning of the universe as Metaxas claims, with a spontaneous generation of matter and energy from nothing. As physicist Alan Guth has explained, “…the standard big bang theory says nothing about where the matter in the universe came from. In the standard big bang theory all the matter that we see here, now, was already there, then. The matter was just very compressed, and in a form that is somewhat different from its present state. The theory describes how the matter evolved from one form to another as the universe evolved, but the theory does not address the question of how the matter originated.”
Metaxas presents the development of the big bang theory as if “materialist” scientists were obsessed with discrediting it because it disproved materialism, but nothing could be further from the truth. There has never been anything about the big bang theory that contradicts materialism, evident from the fact that the big bang is well accepted by physicists who are overwhelmingly materialists. Contrary to Metaxas’ claims, the theory simply does not necessitate a beginning to the universe or contradict a universe that has always been here. The existence of a universe that has always existed in one form or another is the current scientific consensus, a consensus that fully incorporates the big bang.
Another thing Metaxas misrepresents is the correlation between the big bang theory and the Biblical account of creation. The Biblical account bears absolutely no relationship to big bang cosmology or the remainder of what scientists now understand about the formation of our solar system, planet, and everything on it. It is telling that for over 2,500 years, no Jewish or Christian theologian came up with anything like the big bang from reading the biblical texts. That’s probably why it has been Christians rather than scientists that have been resistant to our developing understanding of cosmology, including the big bang theory, and why it was scientists rather than theologians that first proposed it and then championed it.
FINE TUNING
The next two arguments of Metaxas are logical fallacies – arguments from ignorance, referred to within apologetics as the god of the gaps. In each case, Metaxas argues that because scientists have not arrived at definitive answers for why our world and our universe have the qualities they do, we should immediately cease all inquiry and default to the vacuous conclusion “God did it.” I’ve explored the issue of fine tuning at length in Cross-Examined, but here I’ll make just a few points that demonstrate why Metaxas’ arguments fail.
Metaxas begins by identifying several qualities of the Earth, such as its size, distance from the sun, moon, asteroid belt, and relative position in our galaxy which he claims to represent evidence of fine tuning for human life. Metaxas also acknowledges the existence of “a near infinity” of planets and stars in the universe but fails to see how this thoroughly refutes his argument. The weak anthropic principle tells us that in a life permitting universe containing a “near infinity” of planets, we would expect to find some with life permitting conditions, and that is necessarily where we would find life. Accordingly, naturalism predicts a planet such as Earth upon which we would find ourselves as observers.
Regarding the supposed “fine tuning” of the universe for life, it appears far better suited to the creation of black holes with life permitting properties as a necessary by-product. The universe is overwhelmingly hostile to life and though the constants do very rarely allow for it, we have no way of knowing whether that should be deemed surprising because we know neither all the conditions for life nor the potential range those constants could potentially take. It may seem surprising that out of the theoretically endless values for cosmological constants, those of our universe allow for life, but there’s no way to know if anything close to the full spectrum of those values is even possible. If you take into account the option of a multiverse, supported by many leading scientists and consistent with two of the leading theories of cosmology, the weak anthropic principle resolves any remaining questions just as it does for the Earth within our universe.
Another problem for Christians employing the fine-tuning argument is that we have absolutely no basis for comparing the probabilities of a life permitting universe under materialism versus theism. Before you can evaluate the latter, you must independently demonstrate the probability of the particular type of theism posited which for Metaxas requires demonstrating the existence of the Christian God. That’s why analogies to designed objects such as watches and Ferraris miss the point – the existence of humans capable of designing those objects is already established, but with God, it begs the question. Assume you find a dozen tiny homes in the forest which bear a resemblance to those described in a book on fairies you read as a child. Would your immediate thought be that fairies must exist because these homes are consistent with the book? I suspect you would instead think the homes were likely built by humans, despite being perhaps unprecedented among prior examples of human architecture, because fairies have never been shown to exist. We know humans exist that design watches and Ferraris but we don’t know that fairies exist. In fact, we have no good reason to believe fairies exist and the homes themselves cannot substitute for that proof. So it is with God and fine tuning. Proof of God is a precondition to calculating the probability that God fine-tuned the universe.
Significantly, the fine-tuning argument, even if fully granted, represents at best an argument for a deist God – the kind that sets things in motion from the beginning and never again interferes whether from choice or powerlessness. Only a deist God would need to fine-tune the universe for life because the conditions would have to be right from the very beginning. But the Christian God has the power and will to intervene at any time and either generate or sustain life regardless of the initial conditions of the universe. Unlike the deist God, there would be no reason for the Christian God to fine tune the universe for life at its inception. If fine tuning exists, therefore, it weighs in favor of the deist rather than the Christian God.
ABIOGENESIS
Metaxas’ next argument is purely a god-of-the-gaps, which he more or less concedes though bizarrely claiming that this well-established logical fallacy is merely something atheists invented to avoid acknowledging God. His argument is that because scientists haven’t yet identified the mechanism by which organic matter arose, they should simply admit defeat, “defund all further research in this direction,” and punt to the conclusion that “God did it.”
Contrary to Metaxas’ claim, scientists have made real progress in origin of life research. They’ve identified three elements all living things on Earth contain -- nucleic acids, proteins and lipids -- as well as hypotheses for how these may have come together and interacted to create the first living cells. Experiments have shown that if carbon monoxide and hydrogen were heated with elements commonly found in Earth’s early crust, as occurred in thermal vents, they could have formed lipids. While the formation of lipid spheres, a likely condition for life formation, was thought unlikely in the salty waters of the early Earth, in 2019 researchers showed that lipid spheres don’t dissipate if they are in the presence of amino acids, predecessors to protein molecules present in the early earth, and the lipid cell walls allow the amino acids to concentrate and form proteins.
In 2009, researchers showed that RNA could have formed on the surface of clays, which would aid in bringing their bases together. In 2017, a study revealed that the building blocks of RNA could have polymerized using molecules from meteorites present 4.17 billion years ago. For a long time, scientists wondered what could drive chemical evolution such that simpler pre life formations could develop the complexity needed to create living cells, but in 2014, a professor at MIT showed that chemical evolution could have been driven by the sun. Other recent studies have shown that RNA and DNA were the most efficient at absorbing solar energy in the early Earth. So there has been a continuing string of discoveries shedding more and more light on the origins of life.
Metaxas points to other areas in which science has made faster progress such as spaceflight, satellite connectivity, the internet, and microchips, but doesn’t acknowledge that those have commercial applications that generate ample funding whereas the search for the initial conditions of life represent something closer to pure science. There hasn’t exactly been a full court press among scientists to answer this question, probably due in no small part to the far lesser level of funding for origin of life research. There’s no doubt this remains an intriguing question and one in which there is much work to be done, but to insist that scientists give up and acknowledge it must effectively have been magic is absurd.
One further point here is that, as with the big bang and fine tuning, what we do know of life’s earthly origins thoroughly contradicts the Biblical account. Once again, no Jewish or Christian theologian ever posited that life arose on Earth 3.5 billion years ago and then evolved through billions of intermediate forms, one of those resulting in modern man. The Bible claims God created life only several thousand years ago, one day before creating the sun and the moon and three days before creating man along with all the other land animals. The science Metaxas points to in this section therefore refutes his Christian faith.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Metaxas begins his discussion of archaeology by erecting a strawman he spends the following pages tearing down. Specifically, Metaxas suggests atheism is built on a foundation of showing the Bible to be nothing more than “fables and falsehoods,” so that demonstrating archeological support for any biblical claim is a bold refutation of atheism. True to form, Metaxas cites no actual atheist who holds such a position.
I’m not aware of any atheist that claims the Bible is devoid of historical value. Atheists join many liberal Christians in seeing the Bible as a collection of stories and letters that vary greatly in historical reliability. Atheists generally follow the lead of critical historians who apply heuristics to separate the wheat from the chaff but without the slavish devotion to the text found among Evangelical scholars, many of whom are bound by statements of faith committing to Biblical inerrancy. To demonstrate, for example, that a city mentioned in the Old Testament actually existed doesn’t refute the claims of any significant number of atheists or atheism as a whole.
As an atheist I believe much of the Bible contains actual history, and much does not. I believe it to be a collection of history, myth and legend. I’ve extensively explained my views on what I believe to be historical, and why, in Cross-Examined. Suffice it to say that nothing Metaxas presents in these chapters in any way undermines the position I have taken or my overall arguments for atheism. Likewise, they don’t undermine any of the reasons anyone I know is an atheist. In a book designed to refute atheism, they miss the target entirely.
Metaxas claims archeological discoveries in the last century have confirmed the existence of the following people and things, mentioned in the Old Testament:
• The region of Canaan
• The city of Ur
• The city of Sodom
• The palace of Jehoiakim
• The Hittite people
• The House of David
• The Hebrew king Jehu
• The Hebrew king Hezekiah
• The Moabite king Mesha
• A tunnel under Jerusalem
• Scrolls containing a priestly blessing
• Scrolls confirming the value of a slave in the time of the patriarchs
And with regard to the New Testament,
• Roman officials Sergius Paulus, Junius Gallio, and Pontius Pilate
• The Jewish high priest Caiaphas
• Herod’s Temple
• A mikvah bath referenced in John’s gospel
• Roman crucifixion victims
While none of the discoveries mentioned by Metaxas would be controversial among atheists because they don’t dispute claims made or beliefs held by atheists, a few would raise eyebrows among historians of the Levant. Metaxas claims, for example that not only has the city of Sodom been found, but also conclusive proof it was destroyed by an astronomical event near the time of the destruction described in the Bible. But according to numerous sources, including Christian ones, almost no archaeologists outside the excavation team, led by an evangelical Christian who set out to find Sodom because he knew the story to be true, agree that this was the Sodom described in the Bible. This site was in the wrong place and was destroyed three to four centuries after the Biblical destruction of Sodom. Disinterested archaeologists also found the destruction was not caused by an airburst event and was no different from the destruction observed of other cities around the same time period from invading armies.
Regarding the New Testament, Metaxas claims the birthplace and childhood home of Jesus has been found as well as the home of Jesus’ disciple, Peter, in Capernaum. The only evidence that the site identified by Metaxas was Jesus’ birthplace is that someone told this to Constantine’s mother upon her visit to Jerusalem in 335 CE when she was looking for holy artifacts. The basis of Metaxas’ claim of finding the childhood home of Jesus is that (1) a man visiting Nazareth in 680 CE was told by a local that Jesus’ home was nearby; (2) a first century house in that area was preserved by the early church; and (3) the home showed skilled craftmanship. Metaxas appears indignant that none of the archaeologists that excavated this site agreed with his conclusions, claiming this as evidence that “bias against God and the Bible persists in the academic world.” Metaxas offers nothing to specifically tie the Capernaum house to Peter other than that it was used as a place of Christian worship possibly near the end of the first century and contained fishing gear.
These claims rest on slender reeds of centuries old double hearsay at best. But the main point is that even if they were all legitimate and revealed exactly what Metaxas claims, they wouldn’t move the ball towards refuting atheism because atheism isn’t premised on wholesale denial of the Old or New Testaments. While some atheists may deny Jesus existed at all, most do not. Most accept a historical Jesus that lived in the first century and did many of the things ascribed to him in the gospels. Atheists are skeptical of the miracle claims of the Bible, especially the very lynchpin of Christianity, Jesus’ resurrection, but Metaxas presents no evidence supporting these.
It is also quite telling that Metaxas never even acknowledges the vast body of archaeological evidence directly disputing Biblical claims, many of which I discuss in Cross-Examined, such as a complete lack of evidence for an Exodus, the conquest of Canaan, or a powerful united Israelite kingdom. Metaxas begins his chapter on archaeology with a quote from 1959: “It may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.” This was highly questionable in 1959 but is indisputably false knowing what we know sixty years later in 2021. Metaxas argues that it is time to “call the question” on whether the archaeological record confirms the Christian Bible. With respect to the Biblical claims that actually matter to the Christian faith, I would agree – it does not.
ATHEISTS AND ATHEISM
The final section of Metaxas’s book is addressed to what he considers the impossibility of atheism as a valid belief system, which all rests on a false premise about atheists and atheism. Rather than acknowledging that atheism entails merely a lack of belief in supernatural deities, Metaxas assigns atheism a comprehensive set of affirmative beliefs, doctrines and dogma that he seems to have concocted from the deepest pits of human depravity. Specifically, Metaxas claims atheists are all bitter, angry, joyless, irrational liars who believe human life has no meaning and are likely murderers because the only reason someone could possibly have to avoid murdering and torturing people, or killing themselves in despair, is belief in the Christian God. At the same time, he claims that atheists don’t actually lack belief in God but simply reject God, only claiming God doesn’t exist so they can live a hedonistic lifestyle. Metaxas strongly suggests atheists are in league with Satan and want to murder God. Consistent with a pattern he employs repeatedly, Metaxas never quotes or cites to any actual atheists that support his diabolical conception of atheism.
First targeted by Metaxas are the so-called “Four Horsemen” of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, for whom he has nothing but spite. Metaxas accuses all four of equally denouncing all religion and religious expressions as “intolerably vile,” “imminently dangerous,” and “in need of forceful eradication by whatever means possible,” clearly suggesting these men advocate violence against people of all religious faiths. Metaxas says that in their irrational hatred the horsemen make no distinction between the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr. and animist cults that practiced human sacrifice. Consistent with his modus operandi, Metaxas includes no quotes or citations to support these wild claims.
And of course they are blatantly false. Not one of these men have ever even suggested violence against religious believers. Further, the writings of all four express great nuance in their feelings toward various religious beliefs. For just one example, here is a quote from Sam Harris: “My criticism of faith-based religion has always focused on what I consider to be bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior. Because I’m concerned about the logical and behavioral consequences of specific beliefs, I do not treat all religions the same. Not all religious doctrines are mistaken to the same degree, intellectually or ethically, and it is dishonest and ultimately dangerous to pretend otherwise.” Harris goes on to explain how Jainism, with its commitment to nonviolence must be treated very differently from religions with dogmatic commitment to using violence, the former being of no particular concern to him. Virtually all Metaxas’ complaints against Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Dennett arise from his malicious mischaracterizations of their writings.
Next, Metaxas returns to the well-worn apologist tactic of blaming atheism for the atrocities inflicted by certain 20th century regimes. In Cross-Examined I’ve extensively covered why this is an unfair and disingenuous argument but will here make a few points. First, none of the regimes identified justified their atrocities, or even their existence, on atheism. These were political movements, each with unique principles and ethical guidelines none of which were grounded in or even referenced atheism. Metaxas repeatedly refers to these countries adhering to the “doctrine of atheism,” but there is no doctrine of atheism. Atheism entails no doctrines because it does not represent a system of beliefs but rather the absence of one particular belief – the belief in supernatural deities. There is nothing about atheism that favors totalitarianism or intolerance toward religious beliefs.
That Metaxas is aware of this is evident from the fact that he is deceptively selective in the governments he highlights. Metaxas never mentions the many atheistic societies that have flourished in the last century alongside those he condemns. Social Scientist Phil Zuckerberg has found countries with high rates of atheism tend to be the happiest and highest-functioning countries on Earth. Their residents score at the top of the “happiness index,” and their societies can claim some of the lowest levels of corruption and violent crime, excellent educational systems, strong economies, well-supported arts, free health care, and egalitarian social policies. By these criteria, atheistic Scandinavia and Northern Europe rank far higher in well-being than the United States, which among the seventeen First World countries included in Zuckerberg’s surveys ranked last. Metaxas fails to even address this body of research which thoroughly debunks his entire argument.
Furthermore, the very premises of that argument are false. Metaxas focuses primarily on the Nazi regime as reflecting what atheism looks like in practice. He claims that all Nazis “were grimly calculating atheists in practice, and the moment they had power they put all the serious Christians in concentration camps or on the front lines of the war, the sooner to die.” This is absolutely, 100% demonstrably false. Six years into the Nazi era, a census revealed that only 1.5% of Germans identified as atheist with 94% identifying as Catholic or Protestant and the remaining 3.5% simply claiming to believe in “God,” which seems incongruous for a totalitarian regime supposedly aligned against Christianity. In fact, one of the first actions of the Nazis upon rising to power in 1933 was to ban all atheist organizations, a ban that remained in place through the end of the war.
Though confidants reported that privately Adolph Hitler expressed a loss of his belief in God and a resentment towards Christianity, this would have been directly at odds with what he said in public. In all his public speeches, Hitler portrayed himself and the Nazi movement as faithful Christians and firmly stated that the Nazis tolerated no one who attacked Christianity. The third highest ranking Nazi official, Hans Schemm, stated of the Nazi party, “We claim one thing for ourselves: that we place the great fundamental idea of Christianity in the center of our ideology – the hero and sufferer Christ himself stands in the center.” Heinrich Himmler, the main architect of the Holocaust, publicly stated the Nazis believed in “a God Almighty who stands above us” and a “Godly worldview.” In rejecting atheists for membership in the SS, Himmler stated: “Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid and thus not suited for the SS.”
For a man who authored a detailed biography of Martin Luther, it is both striking and telling that Luther’s works appear nowhere amid Metaxas’ laying of all blame for Nazi atrocities on atheism. The prevailing scholarly view since the Second World War is that Luther’s views had a major and persistent influence on German attitudes toward Germany’s Jewish citizens between the Reformation and the Holocaust. The first physical violence against the Jews came on Luther’s birthday, November 10 --Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) -- where the Nazis killed Jews, shattered glass windows, and destroyed hundreds of synagogues, just as Luther had proposed. The Nazis prominently displayed Luthor’s treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies, which laid out a detailed blueprint for the Holocaust.
Hitler revered Luther, placing him aside Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner in his seminal work, Mein Kampf where he stated “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator; by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” This was one of the most quoted lines from Mein Kampf, appearing on calendars and posters throughout Germany and becoming one of the SS mottos. Prominent Protestant theologian Karl Barth complained in 1939 about the Nazi’s extensive use of the writings of Martin Luther to support their ideology, and Pastor Wilhelm Rehm declared publicly that “Hitler would not have been possible without Martin Luther.” Even if Hitler himself privately lost his faith in God, there can be no doubt that centuries of Christian anti-Semitism drove his hatred of Jews and was weaponized to justify the Holocaust to Germany’s almost exclusively Christian populace. Nazi atrocities against the Jews resulted not from atheism, but from Christian propaganda, culminating with the works of Martin Luther.
Metaxas needn’t have looked further than the life of the subject of his first best-selling biography, Dietrich Bonhoffer, for evidence that it was Christianity rather than atheism that drove the Holocaust. Though Bonhoffer would ultimately help German Jews to the point of being himself executed by the Nazis, he initially supported the Third Reich’s treatment of the Jews, finding the Reich connected “in a very special way with the Church” because the Christian Church, like the Nazis, never lost sight of the fact that the Jews “that nailed the Savior of the world to the cross, must bear the curse of its action through a long history of suffering.” As late as 1941, Bonhoffer referred to the Jew as the sign of “the repudiating wrath of God.” Among the almost exclusively Christian Germans, many of whom surely thought as Bonhoffer did, the Reich’s anti-semitic policies were very popular and widely supported. Bonhoffer’s contemporary, Lutheran theologian Martin Niemoller, identified the true culprit for the Holocaust in 1946: “Christianity in Germany bears a greater responsibility before God than the National Socialists, the SS, and the Gestapo.”
Finally, Metaxas attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of science and Christianity, beginning by defining Christian faith as synonymous with evidence-based trust and perfectly aligned with reason. Again I found it interesting that this scholar of Martin Luther fails to mention Luther’s many writings extensively discussing the incompatibility of faith with reason. Who can forget Luther calling reason “the devil’s bride,” a “beautiful whore,” and “God’s worst enemy”? According to Luther, “Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding,” replacing any deductions obtained through reason with the “Word of God.” What Metaxas never acknowledges is that science is open-ended while Christian faith is not. Christian inquiry is always bound by the foregone conclusion that God is ultimately guiding everything and nothing science finds can contradict the Bible. Metaxas reveals how science and religion are incompatible every time he argues for stopping scientific inquiry to default to Christian answers.
CONCLUSION
If Metaxas intended to definitively undermine the case for atheism in favor of Christianity, his book must be considered a spectacular failure. His arguments are based solely on logical fallacies, irrelevancies, and mischaracterizations. Repeatedly, Metaxas undermines his own arguments for Christianity by resting them so squarely on things that are the opposite of what he says they are, such as Nazi attitudes towards Christianity and atheism or the scientific consensus on whether the universe had a beginning. In other words, Metaxas’ arguments only work if you buy into his false assumptions. Metaxas ends up proving not only that atheism is alive and well but that recent evidence has only made the case for Christianity weaker than it was in 1966. Metaxas inadvertently shows that the case for atheism has never been stronger.