Is Atheism Dead? Eric Metaxas Interview - The Becket Cook Show Ep. 46

hey guys eric mataxis is about to join me to talk about his new book is atheism dead but before that i just want to remind you we have patreon and there's a link below you can click on and subscribe as little as five dollars a month it would really help out the show and help us to continue to bring you content thank you [Music] hey guys welcome to the show today i have a very special guest a man who needs no introduction but i will introduce him he's a number one best-selling author books like bonhoeffer at all and he's the host of the eric mataxa show and socrates in the city and he's just written a new book called is atheism dead which is amazing welcome eric mataxis it's not about me it's about the book it's about the book i love the cover by the way it's well allusion to the time magazine article from 1966 right well at least yes it's um that's correct and uh i am i've literally never been more excited about a book than i am about this book there's stuff in here that i'm astonished at at this information so i'm thrilled i got to put in a book so that people can read it because nobody seems to be writing about some of this stuff i don't know how it is that i got to discover this stuff or to meet people who apprise me of this information but i said this is wild evidence for the existence of god i mean just unprecedented i dare i would almost say end times kind of evidence like i don't know how it is that these things get revealed now but they've been revealed and people need to at least know what is out there so that's why i wrote the book yeah and so the what led you to write the book i think was the 2014 op-ed piece you wrote for the wall street journal that came out on christmas day right and tell us about that it was called the title with science increasingly makes the case for god so how did that lead to this book well um over the years i you know i read a lot of kind of apologetics or science stuff and i when i was writing my book on miracles i thought you know the biggest miracle without any question is this the idea of the fine-tuned universe the idea that the more science whoops the more science learns the more impossible it is to believe there's no god that we got here randomly now you don't hear about that in the pop culture but you should because this is science this is not you know christian philosophy or theology this is just science and so when i put that together in my book miracles um i kind of boiled it down into an op-ed for the wall street journal and it went so viral that it got 650 000 facebook shares and nothing had ever come close in the history of the wall street journal like nothing went over 300 000. this was like more than double and i thought why is that well it's because there is such a hunger uh that people have to know can science be compatible with faith does science disprove faith i've always heard that the two are at odds and then you hear read an article in the wall street journal that says no science increasingly makes the case for god what's that all about so i think it revealed that just the hunger that people have and i actually print that op-ed at the end in the appendix of this book but i remember thinking i i probably need to dip back into this at some point and it was right at the beginning of covid uh i i thought of two people that i had met and things they had told me and i and and i said that's reason enough to write a book that deals with all this stuff and the two people are a guy named dr james tour he's a nano scientist organic chemist at rice university in houston right and the other guy guy is a uh an archaeologist in albuquerque and i just you know it seems like randomly met them and they told me these wild stories i mean i shouldn't put it that way i mean they they explained some things to me with tremendous evidence and i thought how is it possible that nobody knows this this is like earth shaking information um the story of uh dr collins uh this was just written up in nature and i actually wrote about it in newsweek obviously there's a chapter on it in my book but um newsweek.com has a very short version that i just wrote but the fact is that dr stephen collins discovered biblical sodom it is just like a stunning concept that 1700 bc when the time of the the biblical patriarchs like way before you know modern history in the midst of of prehistory it seems was this event that the bible talks about we kind of dismiss it the way we dismiss noah's flood or the garden of eden or whatever but the fact of the matter is no we can now say with tremendous confidence that dr collins discovered biblical sodom and you know down to chapter and verse of what he discovered and what the scientists say and when was that again what year was that uh well 1700 bc is when this event what year what year did he discover it uh about 10 years after that just kidding he discovered it about um well i tell the story in my uh in the chapter it was 1996 that he first thought something's wrong here the people who say where sodom and gomorrah probably are they're way off and he was he was looking at the bible and saying according to what the bible says this is in 1996 genesis says clearly that this city was on the car plane around the jordan river north of the dead sea he says why are people saying it's down by the bottom of the dead sea it made no sense he says that the bible is really clear where this is and he said at some point as soon as i can i need to to look into this so it wasn't until uh i think eight years seven years later that he was able actually to investigate and excavate um and when he finds the the place that he thinks is it he had no idea but he said this is the best candidate he starts to excavate and when he gets down to the 1700 bc level because obviously when people like what are they called stratigraphy you know they're going down by level by level layer by layer back into the past and they get down to 1700 bc uh and they find they call it a destruction matrix uh five foot thick layer of soot which is scattered through throughout it are bits of you know charred human bones and melted bricks and melted pottery i mean no one had ever seen anything like this period this was unprecedented uh scientists have poured over every detail of what he discovered and they say there's only one thing that can account for this kind of destruction we've never seen it before the only thing that accounts for it is what they call a cosmic uh air burst event which means a meteor probably about 200 feet in diameter kind of like tunguska siberia people who know what happened in siberia 1908 uh it almost never happens but it has happened and in 1908 in a remote part of siberia i think most of siberia is pretty remote but yeah a meteor of about 180 feet in diameter which is tiny compared to the earth you just think about it it's like tiny tiny tiny but that came into our atmosphere at about 35 000 miles an hour uh the friction whatever eventually made it explode about five miles above the surface of the earth in this remote area of siberia and the explosion from this 180 foot diameter meteor was the equivalent this is what scientists say of a thousand hiroshima bombs wow and you think wait what like a thousand hiroshima bombs if it instantly flattened 80 million trees i mean it's one of these things you just can't make it up it's just insane and because of that when the scientists looked at what happened at this spot which he believed was biblical sodom they said that's precisely what happened there's no other explanation levels of heat that are far beyond the surface of the sun which is pretty hot um really crazy crazy crazy stuff 12 foot thick brick walls 12 foot thick we're just sheared off like like wet cardboard nothing absolute you know stuff that we've never seen before but what i find even more interesting is that when he was looking through this this ash and he knows this is 1700 bc sure enough he finds a piece of pottery from 1700 bc and he knows he's a ceramic typologist boom he sees it he knows what it is and he flips it over and it has this glassy green glaze and he says well the technology for this didn't exist until like you know 750 a.d how is this possible what is this so they took it to a lab in albuquerque i'm sorry in new mexico another part of new mexico and they said the same thing they said this the only thing that can account for this is a cosmic air burst event we're talking a level of heat you know maybe 4 000 degrees for 25 seconds because it melted the pottery there's nothing else that can do that volcanoes and and other fires and earthquake but nothing can do this and so long story short uh everything checks out including you know every detail checks out but what i find really interesting also is that right above this 1700 bc layer you would figure there'd be more civilization on top of that right well for seven centuries there is zero evidence of civilization that simply never happens anywhere if you have a premier piece of real estate with with uh water and uh military advantage whatever you know there's a reason that cities exist there for thousands upon thousands of years cities have been there for two to three thousand years before 1700 bc and for 700 years there's nothing and it's because it was so destroyed and so horrifying to people that i think it was like it seemed haunted it seemed deeply cursed and that no one would go there i mean it's anyway i write about it more obviously in the book is atheism dead but that's just one example that you think you know if you want proof or evidence that the bible is true that is really it's just nuts so the details are more fascinating but that's kind of the overview yeah well let's move from sodom to the big bang so tell us how the big bang which was a term coined by fred hoyle how the big bang theory points to a creator because before the big bang we thought the the universe was eternal so so tell talk about the big bang for a second this is funny too i mean i i the first part of the book is science the second part of the book is tons of archaeology that's just one example of sodom and the third part of the book is looking at atheism itself and the lives of atheists and and all that stuff so the first part of the book that science i deal with three things one is uh the fine-tuned universe uh the other is how did life come into existence from non-life four billion years ago nobody seems to ever talk about that and i find that really funny and you you'll find out why in the book but the third thing is the big bang and i feel like we've kind of moved on from that but i wanted to revisit that because the implications of the big bang were incredibly obvious and staggering which is why people were resisting the big bang and now we kind of act like well we all know what happened and well when you look at the story of how people came to figure out that it happened you see the resistance to the idea of a universe with a starting point was completely uh unlike anything we can imagine today since science has proved it people think well i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say i don't agree with that well if you're a scientist right well to show you how what let me let me say this beckett one of the the the principal theses if not the principal thesis of the book is that we've had a paradigm shift uh where because of darwin and some other things the idea came into being that the bible is at odds with science or that faith is at odds with science and logic and you can see how that happened in 1859 with the publication of the origin species and then freud comes into the picture before you know it anybody who is a scientist has bought into this idea that we don't do that stuff we don't go anywhere near that stuff before that and i write about this in a whole chapter in the book every genius scientist was a profound person of faith some of them were just unbelievably profound people of faith and some of the greatest scientists who ever lived maxwell is like that's an amazing story but um einstein already in 1911 was deeply troubled by the implications of some equations he was working you know toward relativity and some of his equations in 1911 led him to believe that the universe is expanding and he thought that can't be everybody knows the universe is eternal it's not expanding and by the way if it's expanding that's not good because it means it expanded from a certain point which means it was created that's religion we do science i'm not into that now imagine in 1911 einstein was still a big nobody now we think einstein the giant he was not known yet i mean he didn't you know publish relativity until just after this time so imagine well i shouldn't say that 1905 he published something but he was not the giant that we think of today so he was still insecure enough to say oh i can't i can't publish something that implies the universe was created that's embarrassing for me as a scientist so he creates this you know cosmological constant this fudge factor to kind of do away with that in his equations because he says i just i can't have this i gotta i gotta kind of like sweep that under the rug this is einstein in other words if you think it's hard for us to speak the truth imagine einstein with all of his genius he was afraid to speak the truth and so shortly after uh he puts his stuff out a a russian uh jew uh friedman uh and then a french a belgian uh priest who was a scientist uh lemaitre and then edwin hubble they all say no no einstein you were wrong in the you were right in the first place yes the universe is expanding we we see the evidence we've looked at your equations we've looked at other stuff you're right so he of course was incredibly embarrassed because he had tried to hide this now people are saying no no you were right in the first place and that's kind of how the story moves that you find people even when uh edwin hubble and uh lemaitre and friedman and others say yes the universe is expanding and it probably came from a specific point it was you know the universe came into being at a specific point it was such an unpalatable idea to these you know biased scientists to scientists who who said we can't have that that no matter what the evidence showed they kept saying no no we still believe in a steady state universe and we want to prove that the universe always existed so we're not buying einstein stuff and whatever and this goes on and on and on until roughly well in the mid 60s uh using uh the hubble telescope no no not the hubble telescope's a regular telescope this was uh i have a picture of it in my book let me look at the picture i have a color picture no extra charge for the colored pictures by the way um is this the red shift there's a color picture no no hold on a second i'm going to show you well at bell laboratories it was a radio antenna uh arne o'penzius and robert wilson basically it was thought in the 60s they said wait a minute if if the universe exploded into existence uh you know whatever some billions of years ago um all of the energy and heat from that explosion is still trapped within the universe uh the universe is not infinite uh so it's kind of like you open up an oven that heat will dissipate into the house or into the room um and so they said we wonder if we could measure that heat we wonder if that that heat must still be around if that really happened if the universe is in fact closed so they basically said let's see if we can measure it all we need is a radio antenna because presumably uh it has degraded to radio waves or i actually i can't remember now but the point is that they detect it in 1964 they actually detect it and they know that they have proved that the big bang happened so people who didn't want to believe in the big bang suddenly in 1964 they're like oops were out of you know now they've proved it they've measured the background radiation and it gets even crazier around 1990 uh they measured it with a kobe satellite and even showed with tremendous specificity um the details of this radiation and how it you know it wasn't particularly it wasn't perfectly uniform the explosion that it allowed for you know uh galaxies to form and i mean the more the bottom line is the more science learns the more it points to a creator god at least yes and that story i mean it's the first chapter and i find it it's just funny because you think because you're always dealing with human beings some of them just don't want to know what's right in front of them and eventually they have to deal with it einstein was one and uh fred hoyle is another uh but they're all they're all through the book you know so and i think this book is going to challenge some people who just they don't want to believe the implications but i challenge people and say listen just look at the evidence just look at the truth and you know make of it what you want but don't look away yeah and you you talk about uh the fine-tuning argument in your book obviously for uh for a long time and it's uh give us just one example of fine tuning that is just extraordinary the fine-tuning evidence is so insane that again i would say i mean i'll give you a couple examples but if you read the book as it piles up your eyes cross because you just say we didn't know this 20 30 years ago like the more evidence comes in the more it's like crippling it's just sick everything is designed i never dreamt that water was this just insane brilliant confection like it seems like water what's the big deal water well there's a chapter in the book on water and you think why aren't they teaching this in school they need to teach this this is nuts water is is crazy but the one that i like is that if the planet that we call jupiter was not there there's no life on earth and you think jupiter i can't even see jupiter if i look up you know maybe on a perfect night if i know where to look i'll see this little pin prick of light and that's jupiter and it's a zillion miles away well guess what that planet which is so far away it is so massive that if it were not there it doesn't seem like a big deal but the fact is science tells science tells us that if it were not there with its incredible mass and gravity um an infinity of asteroids and comets and meteors would be hitting earth but because it's there its gravity is so strong that it pulls most of these objects away from earth and enables us to flourish to live uh we don't we don't have you know uh tunguska size meteors crashing down and exploding i mean who would ever think that our existence would depend on jupiter but that's just one example the the existence of the moon if the moon weren't exactly the size that it is exactly where it is there's no life on earth if the earth went exactly the size that it is a little bigger doesn't work a little smaller doesn't work if it weren't exactly the size it is no life on earth you're thinking is this guy just making this up read the book the facts are there they should be teaching this in schools because this is what science says this is not what i say i mean i uh there's bibliography and footnotes and whatever you know i i just put this stuff together but i think part of the reason i wrote this book is i think it was time for a reckoning like all this information is out there but nobody's going to put it in one place right here read this it's about time because the evidence has piled up so astonishingly that we really do need to say stop everything we've got to recalculate we are not where we were when uh in 1966 when time magazine comes out and says you know is god dead the evidence seems to point away from god whatever we're in the opposite place the evidence has been piling up for decades and decades we just really haven't paid attention to it yeah i mean the fine-tuning argument alone is absolutely it's just such strong proof and evidence of of a creator and god but in part three of your book you talk about the four horsemen of atheism uh christopher hitchens richard dawkins sam harris and daniel dennett and talk about just the logical incoherence of atheism like how just talk about that for a minute because you go you get into that in the book i mean i say there have been atheists who are not just smart because you can be really smart and foolish they were smart and they they honestly and earnestly wrestled with the idea of atheism hitchens and dawkins who are the two that i really deal with here i thought they did they didn't their arguments are sloppy to the point of total embarrassment i mean i read this stuff and i thought how can such smart people miss so much and i think it's because they were really they were playing head games they just wanted to poke holes in in the arguments of people of faith or in the bible that's easy uh but to explain a universe without god when we have all this evidence that's not only difficult i think it's impossible and so they didn't even try and so they were kind of putting out these polemical screeds that are really beneath them and when i looked at some of this i said this is astonishingly bad i mean it's very embarrassing in fact uh when you talk about uh dawkins dawkins wrote something and i deal with it one of these chapters some of these chapters were the most fun to write because i it was almost unbelievable when i read some of the stuff they wrote dawkins says there's no knowledge outside of science like that's one of the dumbest statements ever made in the history of language it's like completely ridiculous every society knows that as great as science is there is knowledge beyond the world of science but he insists with this with this scientistic bias toward uh naturalism toward materialism that there's nothing outside the material universe he just states that with no evidence as though it's self-evident well it's not self-evident there's tons of evidence in the other direction but he states it uh really just boldly like he will brook no dissent and and that's that and pretty much hitchens does the same and the reason it's silly is that in the next breath they're saying things like you know isn't that a a glorious piece of art it really moves me or what you know they talk about music and i think according to what you just said about sciences what is music music is nothing music is sound waves we may read them a certain way but that's totally subjective garbage you know that as a materialist they're just sound waves i can say they're beautiful in their music but based on your definition that science is the only thing that gives us knowledge that there's nothing beyond the material world the the beautiful effect you get from listening to music or from admiring uh shakespeare's poetry or these insights whatever all that is beyond the scope of science so they contradict themselves constantly but because of their bluster they think that they can bully people into not noticing well they didn't bully me into not noticing and i noticed it and i was horrified and i said somebody needs to call them on the carpet this is embarrassing if you want to have an argument and say you don't like what i believe that's fine but when you start saying some of the things that they say the only appropriate response is like a horse laugh i don't i have no idea how to respond to some of what they say except to use their own words against them but they're very they're very bad philosophers they're they're brilliant maybe dawkins is a brilliant scientist of course but terrible philosopher yeah and there's obviously no basis for morality if if you follow atheism to it's logical that's what i write about in the book and and that's the point is that if you want to be honest like sartre and camus they were honest they struggle how do you have morality and ethics without god and they really believed there was no god and they were wrestling with us trying to figure this out well dawkins and hitchens seem to be thrilled there's no god and they sort of act like who cares and what are the implications it's like you don't take a long time you shouldn't take a long time to think if there's no god and we're here randomly there's no good or evil i can murder as many people as i want it's not even evil or bad it's meaningless right that follows logically if you can't face that squarely you're being dishonest and they are totally dishonest and and here's the great irony and this is to me one of the most amazing things i've ever discovered and i'm thrilled i put it in the book this is going to blow some people's minds because no one's ever written about this um or almost no one but nobody knows it camus and sartre two of the most famous atheists of the 20th century both came to faith in god i know i was going to ask you about that tell us about sartre because tell us the story because that was really fascinating in your book about start how he he wrestled with this and he and camus you could kind of talk about how he died unexpectedly so we don't know what happened at the end of his life but with sartre tell us about that well with both of them it seems clear to me they believed in god that then there are the details you know was uh received into the catholic church was uh camus uh you know did he really believe in the god of the bible whatever but it seems clear to me that they did and the details of the details but there's no question that at the end of their lives they went through complete transformations from the atheism that had become increasingly unsatisfying for them because they were wrestling honestly they were able to see the bleakness of the abyss of a world without god and it troubled them and they tried to work it out and work it out and work it out and in the end they said to be honest we're not working it out we can't work it out and they both chose god and i think to myself this is like major headline news that these two arch atheists have this whole journey at the end of their lives totally independently each other one is in 1960 or the 50s really dies in 60. the other word is 61. the other one uh is in the 80s one is a young man one is an older man but why don't we know this that that the two people that wrestled the most earnestly with atheism that are hailed uh as you know on the banner of atheism here they are the pantheon yeah they both come to faith in god in their different ways how is it the world doesn't know about this i mean the reason the world doesn't know about it is because almost nobody wrote about it i happened to stumble uh on this information and then found the book where a pastor a mumma who had been in paris uh in the 50s as a visiting summer i guess presbyterian priest at at a church in paris and it was a big famous church and people would go there for the oregon recitals and camus who was starting to struggle just showed up in the back to listen to the organ music and heard this guy preaching and followed up and had all these conversations with him and then is killed in a car crash you know in around 1960 61 and no one wrote about it this this pastor this priest didn't write about this until 40 years later when he was 90 he wrote about this and so there's one book with all the details and you just think it's obvious this is true all the details are there nobody knows this story uh the story of camus is somewhat similar i mean the people who found out that he was no longer an atheist got really angry at him like was a betrayal he's senile you know kind of what they said about anthony flew well no they were not senile they were thinking things through and they didn't care about speaking the truth they said you know if you don't like it that's your issue i'm just trying to follow the logic but you can see how people get very upset about this kind of stuff and i just you know you have to tell the truth and that's why i wrote this book i said people have to struggle with this because it makes it effectively impossible to be a real atheist you can be an agnostic but atheism i think has to be taken off the table yeah at this point it's uh you can't reconcile it with with the facts so we'll well let's just leave it at that um the book guys is amazing i read it it's it's so encouraging and i i really recommend it because not only will it help you defend your faith if you're a christian against those pesky atheists but uh it will it will just strengthen your faith as well and i think it'll it'll help non-believers just kind of just see the reality of our world and the universe and how it just it just all points to a creator in all points to god so please pick up a copy of his atheism dead by eric bataxis and we're going to put a link down below for the book and i don't know when does this air roughly this air is in two days okay so then i was going to say please pre-order order of the book because it makes a huge difference i really feel like a burden to get this information out to the world and if a book doesn't do well like right out of the gate it becomes really tough it's like opening weekend for a movie so i'm telling everybody please pre-order the book if you go to my websitetexas.com i think the baker link is 45 off if you go to attack.com it's insanely cheap that price will never be better it'll probably go away when the book comes out so pre-order it if at all possible tell your friends i i just think we're living in a world where almost nobody knows half of what's in this book and and most christians don't know this and i think we need to be emboldened that what we believe is like radically clearly true we need to know that and it'll change you when you know that you you kind of you approach skeptics a little differently all right well let's leave it at that thank you eric for being on the show anytime thank you beckett all right [Music]

Channel: Becket Cook

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Keywords: Chynna Phillips Baldwin, California Preachin', Becket Cook, A Change of Affection, Matt Walsh, Dave Rubin, Andrew Klavan, Lila Rose, Allie Beth Stuckey, Christopher Yuan, Candace Owens, The Remnant Radio, PragerU, Daily Wire, Christianity, Jesse Lee Peterson, Eric Metaxas, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Jean-Paul Sartre, Boenhoeffer, Socrates in the City, John MacArthur, Joe Rogan, Douglas Murray, Elijah Schaffer, RC Sproul, Christopher Rufo, Jordan Peterson, PBD

Id: hSY1_WIqoqA

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021