Eric Metaxas, author of the bestselling, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy,” has now written, “Is Atheism Dead?” In it, he concludes atheism is proving itself unreasonable.
In an online interview with Sebastian Gorka, Metaxas explained that he based the title off a 1966 cover article in Time magazine asking, “Is God Dead?” which asserted that humans need to acquiesce negative on the God question.
But since then, the age-old inquiry has revived, backed by evidence that Metaxas said has been “piling up quietly, like the snow coming down, and when you wake up, the drifts are covering the windows,” proving atheism intellectually untenable. “If you want to say you’re agnostic, that’s fine. Atheism, I don’t think anyone can claim that anymore, realistically.”
Gorka said in simply “picking up a strawberry or looking at a blade of grass, understanding photosynthesis,” we see the handprint of God. He compared someone believing life to be an arbitrary occurrence to finding, while walking along the beach, a space shuttle and determining its existence random chance.
Along with science and archaeology, Metaxas said, we can examine evidence from the experiment of atheism itself, looking, for example, to countries that have denied God’s existence. “How have they treated their people? How have things gone for those nations?” he asked. “Do you want to live in a place like North Korea…or Romania in the 1980s? The record is clear; the evidence is dramatic.”
Much of it, however, has not been reported. For instance, Metaxas asked how many people know that two of the most famous and intellectually honest atheists of the 20th Century – John-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus – became Christian by the end of their lives? That headline, he said, never ran.
And recently, a peer-reviewed scientific paper showed strong evidence of the existence of the city of the Biblical Sodom. “This is blockbuster stuff, what they have pulled out of the sands of the Middle East,” Metaxas said, offering more proof of the Bible’s historicity.
“It’s time to say, let’s vote,” he added, “and the vote is overwhelming” in favor of God’s existence.
The two also discussed the lack of courage in Americans nowadays, many Christians included, to fight for what’s right and good. “If you discern the times, we are in a war, a spiritual war, a war for the soul of the West,” Metaxas said, noting that our children are depending on us. “Are we willing to speak the truth…even if it means we must suffer?”
Failing to exercise our freedom to speak freely, he continued, we help foster the societal evil we are increasingly experiencing. It’s our duty to speak up.
Metaxas said Bonhoeffer’s story of going to the gallows during World War II convicts people simply because he did the right thing. “He was the kind of Christian who knew Jesus had defeated death, and that that wasn’t a metaphor,” he said, adding, “God is the only hope any of us has, and when we labor and battle with him, everything changes.”
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Oct. 18, 2021.]
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