There have been a number of turning points in the history of mankind. We are now going through one of them. Some people call it globalisation or “the information age.” Although such analyses are correct, there is another development far more important than these. Although some people may still be unaware of it, there has been a huge change in the field of science and philosophy in the last 20-25 years. Atheism, that has so influenced the world of science and thought, is now undergoing an irrevocable collapse.
Atheism, in other words the denial of God, has existed since the very earliest times. Yet the real rise of this idea began with a number of 18th century thinkers who were opposed to religion. Materialists such as Denis Diderot, Baron d’Olbach and David Hume claimed that there was no world of existence outside that of matter.
Atheism spread still further in the 19th century.
Thinkers such as Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Durkheim and Freud applied atheistic ideas to a number of different scientific and philosophical fields.
The greatest support for atheism came from Charles Darwin, who denied creation and replaced it with the theory of evolution.
Darwinism offered a so-called scientific answer to the question “How did living things and man come into existence?” something atheists had been unable to do for centuries.
He claimed that there was a mechanism in nature that gave life to inanimate matter and then produced all the millions of different living species. A great many people came to believe that deception. By the end of the 19th century, atheists had established a “world view” that they believed accounted for everything.
They denied that the universe had been created, saying that it had existed for ever and had no beginning. They suggested that the order and equilibrium in the universe were the result of chance, and that there was no purpose in it. They imagined that Darwinism accounted for the emergence of man and all living things.
Yet every one of these views collapsed with scientific, political and sociological advances in the 20th century. Discoveries in a great number of fields, from astronomy to biology, from psychology to social ethics, fundamentally overturned the most basic assumptions of atheism.
In his book God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, published in 1997, the well-known American writer Patrick Glynn offered the following analysis:
The past two decades of research have overturned nearly all the important assumptions and predictions of an earlier generation of modern secular and atheist thinkers relating to the issue of Godé Over the course of a century in the great debate between science and faith, the tables have completely turnedé Today the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis. [1]
Cosmology: The Discovery of Creation
The first blow dealt to atheism by 20th century science came in the field of cosmology.
Belief in “a universe that had existed for ever” collapsed, and evidence emerged that the universe did indeed have a beginning, in other words that it had been created.
The idea of an infinite universe was first put forward by atheist philosophers in Ancient Greece.
The first person to support the idea in the New Age was the famous 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Kant claimed that the universe had existed for ever, and that all possibilities could actually happen within that infinite expanse of time.
In the 19th century, the view that the universe had no beginning, that there was no moment of creation, came to be widely accepted.
Science would shortly prove, however, that the universe did indeed have a beginning.
That proof came from the Big Bang theory.
The theory of the Big bang was the result of a string of discoveries. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble realised that the galaxies in the universe were constantly moving away from one another, which meant that the universe was expanding.
If the flow of time in an expanding universe were reversed, then it emerged that the whole universe must have come from a single point. Astronomers found themselves facing a “metaphysical” situation in which this “single point” possessed infinite gravity yet zero volume. Matter and time emerged with the “explosion” of that infinitely small point. To put it another way, the universe was created from nothing.
Although the Big bang theory disturbed materialists, it continued to be supported by concrete scientific discoveries.
During their observations in the 1960s, the two scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson identified the radioactive traces left behind by that explosion.
The same thing was confirmed in the 1990s with the levels of radiation captured by the satellite Cosmic background Explorer (COBE).
Today, atheists have been completely backed into a corner by these scientific truths. One example of the atheist reaction to the Big Bang theory appeared in a 1989 article by John Maddox, the editor of Nature, one of the best-known materialist scientific magazines. In that article, called “Down With the Big Bang,” Maddox wrote that the Big Bang is “philosophically unacceptable,” because “creationists and those of similar persuasionsé have ample justification in the doctrine of the Big Bang.”
He also predicted that the Big Bang “is unlikely to survive the decade ahead.”[2] Yet despite Maddox’s optimistic statements, the Big Bang theory has since grown ever stronger, and many more discoveries confirming the creation of the universe have been made.
The fact arrived at by modern astronomy is this: Matter and time were brought into being by an infinitely powerful Creator who is bound by neither of them. The Creator of the universe we inhabit is God, Lord of all the Worlds.
Physics and Astronomy: The Collapse of the idea of the Accidental Universe
Another atheist dogma demolished by astronomical discoveries in the 20th century is the idea of the “accidental universe.” The claim that the matter in the universe, the heavenly bodies, and the laws that regulate them emerged by chance with no purpose behind them, has collapsed in a most striking manner.
It was in the 1970s that scientists first realised that all the physical balances in the universe had been set up in a most sensitive manner so as to permit human life.
As research deepened, it was found that that the physical, chemical and biological laws in the universe, fundamental forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, and the structure of the elements had all been set up in the most ideal form for human life. Let us now consider a few examples of this.
There is an extraordinarily sensitive balance in the initial expansion rate of the universe, that is, in the explosion force of the Big Bang. According to scientists’ calculations, if the expansion rate had differed from its actual value by more than one part in a billion billion, then the universe would either have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size or else have splattered in every direction in a way never to unite again. To put it another way, even at the first moment of the universe’s existence there was a fine calculation of the accuracy of a billion billionth. That, of course, is no coincidence.
Physical forces such as gravity and electromagnetism are all at the necessary levels for an ordered universe to emerge and for life to exist.
Even the tiniest variations in these forces (for instance differences of just one part in a billion billion billion) would have meant that the universe would be nothing more than a cloud of radiation or hydrogen. In that event, our solar system, the planets and our earth would not have come into being.
As with every detail in the universe, our own solar system has been created within a most delicate balance.
The size of the sun, the wavelength of its rays and its distance from the earth are all at the levels necessary to support human life. Even the slightest deviation from these could destroy life on earth at a stroke.
The way that the earth’s atmosphere contains the gases necessary to allow respiration, or that the earth’s magnetic field is ideally suited to human life are just two examples of such important “delicate balances.”
The water that covers three-quarters of our planet also contains features designed to support human life.
Unlike other liquids, water freezes from the top down. That prevents the seas from turning into blocks of ice and allows life to continue.
The viscosity of water and its other physical and chemical properties are all at the ideal levels for supporting life.
These delicate balances, of which we have seen a few examples, have led scientists to one important conclusion. There is an “anthropic principle” in the universe, as they describe it. In other words, every detail in the universe has been designed to make human life possible.
The interesting thing here is that most of the scientists who revealed that truth were actually materialists who had no great wish to reach such a conclusion.
In his book The Symbiotic Universe, the American astronomer George Greenstein admits the fact in these words:
As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency… must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? [3]
In his 1998 book Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, the well-known molecular biologist Michael Denton makes the following comment:
The new picture that has emerged in twentieth-century astronomy presents a dramatic challenge to the presumption which has been prevalent within scientific circles during most of the past four centuries: that life is a peripheral and purely contingent phenomenon in the cosmic scheme. [4]
In short, the concept of the “accidental universe,” perhaps the fundamental basis of atheism, has been totally collapsed.
The deceptive nature of the concept was revealed in the Qur’an some 1,400 years ago:
We did not create heaven and earth and everything between them to no purpose. That is the opinion of those who disbelieve. (Qur’an, 38: 27)
The Natural Sciences: The Victory of Intelligent Design
The most important foundation of atheism as it reached its peak in the 19th century was Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Darwin proposed that the origin of man and all other living things could be explained by unconscious natural mechanisms. In that way, he offered a false explanation for the origins of life for which atheists had been unable to account for hundreds of years.
In fact, the atheists of the time rushed to embrace Darwin’s theory. Beginning with Marx and Engels, 19th century atheist thinkers described the theory as lying at the heart of their philosophies.
However, the major support of atheism itself collapsed with the scientific discoveries of the 20th century. The evidence put forward by different branches of science, such as palaeontology, biochemistry, anatomy and genetics undermined the theory of evolution from a number of directions.
Darwin had maintained that all living species were descended from a common ancestor, and had grown apart from one another in a series of small, progressive changes.
He hoped that fossils would provide evidence for that claim.
Yet all the fossil research throughout the 20th century presented a totally different picture. Not one “transitional species” that might prove Darwin’s theory was found.
For example, the phenomenon known as the “Cambrian Explosion” is by itself sufficient to destroy the theory of evolution. Almost all the basic categories in the animal world emerged all of a sudden in that early geological period.
Living things from very different classes, such as molluscs, vertebrates, arthropods and echinoderms, with their very different physical characteristics emerged with their exceedingly complicated organs and systems all at once.
This fact that emerges from the fossil record demolishes the theory of evolution and is proof of creation instead.
In putting his theory forward, Darwin based it on the idea that animal breeders produced different species of dog or horse.
He then applied the changes observed in those creatures to the whole of nature, and suggested that all living things might have descended from one common ancestor in this way.
However, that claim was made in the light of the low level of 19th century science, and discoveries made in the 20th century demolished it.
Decades of observations of different animal or plant species revealed that variation within living things never went beyond specific genetic bounds.
Genetic experiments, on the other hand, showed that the mutations that Darwinists regarded as an “evolutionary mechanism” could never add new genetic information to living things, but that on the contrary they always had harmful effects. The countless mutation experiments carried out on fruit flies only yielded deformed individuals.
According to Darwin’s theory, life on earth must have begun from inanimate matter. So how did the first living thing come about?
Darwin failed to address that issue, contenting himself with writing that the first cell could easily have formed “in some warm little pond.”
Those evolutionist biologists who attempted to make good this deficiency in Darwinism ended up disappointed. All observations and experiments showed that it was impossible for a living cell to emerge from inanimate matter.
Scientists then discovered something else in the second half of the 20th century.
Life, and especially the living cell and the complex organelles within it, is full of the most complicated designs.
Our eyes, with which no camera can possibly compare, bird wings that inspired aeronautical technology, the complex and interdependent systems within the living cell, the extraordinary information contained in DNA é All these are clear “examples of designé”
They also leave the theory of evolution, that regards life as the product of blind chance, utterly helpless.
These scientific facts left Darwinism backed into a corner by the end of the 20th century. Scientists in many Western countries, particularly the United States, today reject Darwinism in favour of the theory of “intelligent design.”
The reason for that is that the scientific facts show that life emerged with design, not by chance. In short, science once again confirms the fact that God created all living things.
Psychology: The Freudian Defeat
The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud represented atheist dogma in the psychological field in the 19th century.
Freud put forward a theory of psychology that denied the existence of the soul and attempted to explain man’s internal world in terms of sexual impulses.
Freud claimed that to have accounted for the origin of psychological problems. Yet his theory actually encouraged new ones. This teaching, which describes man as a species of animal that lives only to satisfy its selfish desires, actually increased loneliness, fear and depression in people by debasing spiritual values.
Pictures by artists influenced by Freud depicted the dark world of that teaching.
Freud’s most important attack was aimed at religion. In his book The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927, he alleged that religious belief was a kind of mental sickness, and maintained that religious beliefs would disappear as man progressed.
Other prominent 20th century psychologists were fervid atheists too, as well as Freud. Burrhus Skinner and Albert Ellis, the founders of the behaviorist school and rational emotive therapy respectively, were the best-known of these atheists. As a result, psychology came to be a breeding ground for atheism. A 1972 poll among the members of the American Psychology Association revealed that only 1.1 percent of psychologists in the country had any religious beliefs.[5] Yet the great error into which most psychologists had fallen was unmasked by means of their own researches.
It emerged that Freud’s theories in particular had almost no scientific foundations. It was also realised that contrary to the claims of Freud and certain other psychological theoreticians, religion is a fundamental of mental health. The American writer Patrick Glynn sums up these important developments:
Scientific research in psychology over the past twenty-five years has demonstrated that, far from being a neurosis or source of neuroses, as Freud and his disciples claimed, religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates of overall mental health and happiness. Study after study has shown a powerful relationship between religious belief and practice, on the one hand, and healthy behaviors with regard to such problems as suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, [and] depressioné on the other. [6]
In other words, atheism suffered a terrible defeat in the realm of psychology.
The Collapse of Atheist Ideologies
The collapse of atheism in the 20th century applies to political and social ethics as much as it does to the various branches of science.
The overthrow of communism is one of the most important examples of this.
Communism was the major political result of the atheistic deviation of the 19th century. The founders of the ideology, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao, all adopted atheism as their most fundamental principle.
Communist regimes wished to spread atheism throughout society and destroy religious beliefs. Terrible oppression was aimed at religious communities, particularly Muslims, in Stalin’s Russia, Red China, Cambodia, Albania and certain Eastern Bloc countries. This even turned into genocide.
Yet that bloody, atheist system collapsed in a surprising manner in the late 1980s. What was actually collapsing was atheism itself. The American writer Patrick Glynn has this to say on the subject:
é[A]s historians penetrate the circumstances of the Communist collapse, it is becoming clearer that the Soviet elite was itself in the throes of an atheistic “crisis of faith.” Having lived under an atheistic ideology, éthe Soviet system suffered a radical demoralization, in every sense of that term. People, including the ruling elite, lost all sense of morality and all sense of hope. [7]
One interesting sign of this atheistic “crisis of faith” in the Soviet system was the reforms President Mikhail Gorbachev tried to implement. From the day Gorbachev came to power, he took an interest in moral issues as well as economic reforms. He began by initiating a campaign against alcoholism, for example. He employed the old Marxist-Leninist concepts for a while in order to raise the morale of society, but seeing that this would serve no purpose he began to speak of God in some of his speeches in the final years of his regime é despite the fact that he himself was an atheist. Yet these insincere words of faith were also no use, and the crisis of faith in Soviet society continued to grow. The result was the sudden collapse of the giant Soviet empire.
Communism was not alone in the 20th century: Fascism, another product of 19th century atheist philosophies, also collapsed.
Fascism was a philosophy that can be regarded as a synthesis of atheism and paganism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, regarded as the ideological founder of fascism, praised paganism, fiercely attacked the divine religions, and even described himself as the Antichrist.
Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, one of his disciples, were the main sources of inspiration behind Nazi Germany.
These two thinkers’ atheist philosophy that was so full of praise for violence gave birth to the terrible savagery of Nazi Germany.
Once Hitler and his closest followers, who were all atheists, had turned Germany into a state of fear, they embarked on the bloodiest war in history.
That slaughter, known as World War II, cost the lives of 55 million people. Members of different ethnic groups, such as Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, and people who fell foul of Nazi ideology, particularly religious figures, were exterminated in the concentration camps the Nazis set up during the war years.
Another social result of atheism emerged in liberal Western societies in the second half of the 20th century.
Young Westerners raised in Christian families developed an angry, anti-religious movement under the influence of atheist ideologues such as Darwin, Marx and Freud. That movement developed rapidly in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960s, and gave birth to the sexual revolution and the hippy dream that accompanied it.
The hippies believed that they could find happiness by means of unlimited drugs and sex. These young people who poured onto the streets to the words of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in which he spoke of a world “with no countries, and no religion too” were actually undergoing a mass deception.
In fact, a world without religion actually brought them to an unhappy end.
The hippy leaders of the 1960s either killed themselves or died from drug-induced comas in the early 1970s.
Most of the young people who found themselves on the missing lists on police station walls were the victims of drugs. Those young people of the same generation who turned to violence found themselves facing violence. The 1968 generation, who turned their backs on God and religion and imagined they could find salvation in such concepts as revolution or love, ruined both themselves and their societies.
The information we have so far briefly summarized clearly shows that atheism is undergoing an inevitable collapse. In other words, mankind is turning to God. This truth is not restricted to the political and scientific fields we have discussed here. From politicians to film and pop stars, many “opinion formers” in Western society are more religious than before. There are now many people who have seen the truth and believe in God after living for years as atheists.
That is what makes our age such an important one. Atheism, which people have tried for hundreds of years to portray as “the way of reason and science,” is proving to be mere irrationality and ignorance. Materialist philosophy attempts to use science for its own ends, and yet it is science that is actually destroying it.
It is inevitable that that should happen. Atheism is the greatest irrationality possible. The Qur’an stresses the error of those who deny the existence of God:
How can you reject God, when you were dead and then He gave you life, then He will make you die and then give you life again, then you will be returned to Him? It is He who created everything on the earth for you and then directed His attention up to heaven and arranged it into seven regular heavens. He has knowledge of all things.
(Qur’an, 2: 28-29)
Notes:
[1] Patrick Glynn, “God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World”, Prima Publishing, California, 1997, p. 19, 53
[2] John Maddox, “Down with the Big Bang”, Nature, vol. 340, 1989, p. 378
Harun Yahya is a prominent Turkish intellectual.
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