THE FALL OF ATHEISM

There are significant turning points in the history of mankind. We are
now living in one of them. Some call it globalization and some say
that this is the genesis of the “information age.” These are true, but
there is yet a more important concept than these. Although some are
unaware of it, great advances have been made in science and philosophy
in the last 20-25 years. Atheism, which has held sway over the world
of science and philosophy since the 19th century is now collapsing in
an inevitable way.

Of course, atheism, the idea of rejecting God’s existence, has always
existed from ancient times. But the rise of this idea actually began
in the 18th century in Europe with the spread and political effect of
the philosophy of some anti-religious thinkers. Materialists such as
Diderot and Baron d'Holbach proposed that the universe was a
conglomeration of matter that had existed forever and that nothing
else existed besides matter. In the 19th century, atheism spread even
farther. Thinkers such as Marx, Engels, Nietsche, Durkheim or Freud
applied atheist thinking to different fields of science and
philosophy.

The greatest support for atheism came from Charles Darwin who rejected
the idea of creation and proposed the theory of evolution to counter
it. Darwinism gave a supposedly scientific answer to the question that
had baffled atheists for centuries: "How did human beings and living
things come to be?" This theory convinced a great many people of its
claim that there was a mechanism in nature that animated lifeless
matter and produced millions of different living species from it.

Towards the end of the 19th century, atheists formulated a world view
that they thought explained everything; they denied that the universe
was created saying that it had no beginning but had existed forever.
They claimed that the universe had no purpose but that its order and
balance were the result of chance; they believed that the question of
how human beings and other living things came into being was answered
by Darwinism. They believed that Marx or Durkheim had explained
history and sociology, and that Freud had explained psychology on the
basis of atheist assumptions.

However, these views were later invalidated in the 20th century by
scientific, political and social developments. Many and various
discoveries in the fields of astronomy, biology, psychology and social
sciences have nullified the bases of all atheist suppositions.

In his book, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason
in a Postsecular World, the American scholar Patrick Glynn from the
George Washington University writes:
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 God.
Modern thinkers assumed that science would reveal the universe to be
ever more random and mechanical; instead it has discovered unexpected
new layers of intricate order that bespeak an almost unimaginably vast
master design. Modern psychologists predicted that religion would be
exposed as a neurosis and outgrown; instead, religious commitment has
been shown empirically to be a vital component of basic mental health…

Few people seem to realize this, but by now it should be clear: Over
the course of a century in the great debate between science and faith,
the tables have completely turned. In the wake of Darwin, atheists and
agnostics like Huxley and Russell could point to what appeared to be a
solid body of testable theory purportedly showing life to be
accidental and the universe radically contingent. Many scientists and
intellectuals continue to cleave to this worldview. But they are
increasingly pressed to almost absurd lengths to defend it. Today the
concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis.1

Science, which has been presented as the pillar of atheist/materialist
philosophy, turns out to be the opposite. As another writer puts it,
"The strict materialism that excludes all purpose, choice and
spirituality from the world simply cannot account for the data pour in
from labs and observatories."2

In this article, we will briefly analyze the conclusions arrived at by
different branches of science on this issue and examine what the
forthcoming “post-atheist” period will bring to humanity.

Cosmology: The Collapse of the Concept of An Eternal Universe And the
Discovery of Creation

The first blow to atheism from science in the 20th century was in the
field of cosmology. The idea that the universe had existed forever was
discounted and it was discovered that it had a beginning; in other
words, it was scientifically proved that it was created from nothing.
This idea of an eternal universe came to the Western world along with
materialist philosophy. This philosophy, developed in ancient Greece,
stated that nothing else exists besides matter and that the universe
comes from eternity and goes to eternity. In the Middle Ages when the
Church dominated Western thought, materialism was forgotten. However
in the modern period, Western scientists and philosophers became
consumed by a curiosity about these ancient Greek origins and revived
an interest in materialism.


Immanuel Kant: Proposed the idea of a universe without a beginning or
an end. He was terribly wrong.
The first person in the modern age to propose a materialist
understanding of the universe was the renowned German philosopher
Immanuel Kant—even though he has not a materialist in the
philosophical sense of the word. Kant proposed that the universe was
eternal and that every possibility could be realized only within this
eternity. With the coming of the 19th century, it became widely
accepted that the universe had no beginning, and that there was no
moment of creation. Then, this idea, adopted passionately by
dialectical materialists such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, came
into the 20th century.

This idea has always been compatible with atheism. This is because to
accept that the universe had a beginning would mean that God created
it and the only way to counter this idea was to claim that the
universe was eternal, even though this claim had no basis on science.
A dogged proponent of this claim was Georges Politzer who became
widely known as a supporter of materialism and Marxism in the first
half of the 20th century through his book Principes Fondamentaux de
Philosophie (The Fundamental Principles of Philosophy). Assuming the
validity of the model of an eternal universe, Politzer opposed the
idea of a creation:
The universe was not a created object, if it were, then it would have
to be created instantaneously by God and brought into existence from
nothing. To admit creation, one has to admit, in the first place, the
existence of a moment when the universe did not exist, and that
something came out of nothingness. This is something to which science
can not accede.3
By supporting the idea of an eternal universe against that of
creation, Politzer thought that science was on his side. However, very
soon, the fact that Politzer alluded to by his words, “if it is so, we
must accept the existence of a creator”, that is, that the universe
had a beginning, was proven.

This proof came as a result of the “Big Bang” theory, perhaps the most
important concept of 20th century astronomy.

The Big Bang theory was formulated after a series of discoveries. In
1929, the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, noticed that the galaxies
of the universe were continually moving away from one another and 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 assessing the validity of
Hubble’s discovery were faced with the fact that this single point was
a “metaphysical” state of reality in which there was an infinite
gravitational attraction with no mass. Matter and time came into being
by the explosion of this mass-less point. In other words, the universe
was created from nothing.


John Maddox: His prophecy about the Big Bang utterly failed.
On the one hand, those astronomers who are determined to cling to
materialist philosophy with its basic idea of an eternal universe,
have attempted to hold out against the Big Bang theory and maintain
the idea of an eternal universe. The reason for this effort can be
seen in the words of Arthur Eddington, a renowned materialist
physicist, who said, "Philosophically, the notion of an abrupt
beginning to the present order of Nature is repugnant to me".4 But
despite the fact that the Big Bang theory is repugnant to
materialists, this theory has continued to be corroborated by concrete
scientific discoveries. In their observations made in the 1960’s, two
scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, detected the radioactive
remains of the explosion (cosmic background radiation). These
observations were verified in the 1990’s by the COBE (Cosmic
Background Explorer) satellite.

In the face of all these facts, atheists have been squeezed into a
corner. Anthony Flew, an atheist professor of
philosophy at the University of Reading and the author of Atheistic
Humanism, makes this interesting confession:
Notoriously, confession is good for the soul. I will therefore begin
by confessing that the Stratonician atheist has to be embarrassed by
the contemporary cosmological consensus. For it seems that the
cosmologists are providing a scientific proof of what St. Thomas
contended could not be proved philosophically; namely, that the
universe had a beginning. So long as the universe can be comfortably
thought of as being not only without end but also without beginning,
it remains easy to urge that its brute existence, and whatever are
found to be its most fundamental features, should be accepted as the
explanatory ultimates. Although I believe that it remains still
correct, it certainly is neither easy nor comfortable to maintain this
position in the face of the Big Bang story 5
An example of the atheist reaction to the Big Bang theory can be seen
in an article written in 1989 by John Maddox, editor of Nature, one of
the best-known materialist-scientific journals.

In that article, called “Down With the Big Bang,” Maddox wrote that
the Big Bang is “philosophically unacceptable,” because “creationists
and those of similar persuasions… have ample justification in the
doctrine of the Big Bang.” He also predicted that the Big Bang “is
unlikely to survive the decade ahead.” 6 However, despite Maddox’
hopes, Big Bang has gained credence and many discoveries have been
made that prove the creation of the universe.

Some materialists have a relatively logical view of this matter. For
example, the English materialist physicist, H.P. Lipson, unwillingly
accepts the scientific fact of creation. He writes:
I think …that we must…admit that the only acceptable explanation is
creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is
to me, but we must not reject that we do not like if the experimental
evidence supports it. 7
Thus, the fact arrived at finally by modern astronomy is this: time
and matter were brought into being by an eternally powerful Creator
independent of both of them. The eternal power that created the
universe in which we live is God who is the possessor of infinite
might, knowledge and wisdom.

Physics and Astronomy: The Collapse of the Idea of a Random Universe
and The Discovery of the Anthropic Principle

A second atheist dogma rendered invalid in the 20th century by
discoveries in astronomy is the idea of a random universe. The view
that the matter in the universe, the heavenly bodies and the laws that
determine the relationships among them has no purpose but is the
result of chance, has been dramatically discounted.

For the first time since the 1970’s, scientists have begun to
recognize the fact that the whole physical balance of the universe is
adjusted delicately in favor of human life. With the advance of
research, it has been discovered that the physical, chemical and
biological laws of the universe, basic forces such as gravity and
electro-magnetism, the structure of atoms and elements are all ordered
exactly as they have to be for human life. Western scientists have
called this extraordinary design the “anthropic principle”. That is,
every aspect of the universe is designed with a view to human life.

We may summarize the basics of the anthropic principle as follows:
The speed of the first expansion of the universe (the force of the Big
Bang explosion) was exactly the velocity that it had to be. 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.

The four physical forces in the universe (gravitational force, weak
nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and electromagnetic force) 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
example, one in 1039, or one in 1028; that is—crudely calculated—one
in a billion billion billion billion), the universe would either be
composed only of radiation or of no other element besides hydrogen.

There are many other delicate adjustments that make the earth ideal
for human life: the size of the sun, its distance from the earth, the
unique physical and chemical properties of water, the wavelength of
the sun’s rays, the way that the earth’s atmosphere contains the gases
necessary to allow respiration, or the Earth’s magnetic field being
ideally suited to human life. (For more information on this topic, see
Harun Yahya, The Creation of the Universe, Al-Attique Publishers,
2001)
This delicate balance is one of the most striking discoveries of
modern astrophysics. The wellknown astronomer, Paul Davies, writes in
the last paragraph of his book The Cosmic Blueprint, "The impression
of Design is overwhelming."8

In an article in the journal Nature, the astrophysicist W. Press
writes, "there is a grand design in the Universe that favors the
development of intelligent life."9

The interesting thing about this is that the majority of the
scientists that have made these discoveries were of the materialist
point of view and came to this conclusion unwillingly. They did not
undertake their scientific investigations hoping to find a proof for
God’s existence. But most of them, if not all of them, despite their
unwillingness, arrived at this conclusion as the only explanation for
the extraordinary design of the universe.

In his book, The Symbiotic Universe the American astronomer, George
Greenstein, acknowledges this fact:
How could this possibly have come to pass [that the laws of physics
conform themselves to life]? …As we survey all the evidence, the
thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or, rather
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? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially
crafted the cosmos for our benefit?10
By beginning his question with “Is it possible”, Greenstein, an
atheist, tries to ignore that plain fact that has confronted him. But
many scientists who have approached the question without prejudice
acknowledge that the universe has been created especially for human
life. Materialism is now being viewed as an erroneous belief outside
the realm of science. The American geneticist, Robert Griffiths,
acknowledges this fact when he says, “If we need an atheist for a
debate, I go to the philosophy department. The physics department
isn't much use.”11

In his book Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose
in the Universe, which examines how physical, chemical and biological
laws are amazingly calculated in an “ideal” way with a view to the
requirements of human life, the well-known molecular biologist,
Michael Denton writes:
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.12
In short, the idea of a random universe, perhaps atheism’s most basic
pillar, has been proved invalid. Scientists now openly speak of the
collapse of materialism.13 The supposition whose falsity God reveals
in the Qur’an, “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) was shown to be invalid by science in
the 1970’s.

Quantum Physics and the Discovery of the Divine Wisdom


When scientists have gone deeper into the atom, they found it
shockingly "empty".
One of the areas of science that shatters the materialist myth and
gives positive evidence for theism is quantum physics.

Quantum physics deals with the tiniest particles of matter, what is
called the sub-atomic realm. In school everyone learns that matter is
composed of atoms. Atoms are made up of a nucleus and several
electrons spinning around it. One strange fact is that all these
particles take up only some 0.0001 percent of the atoms. In other
words, an atom is something that is 99.9999 percent "empty."

An even more interesting fact is that when the nuclei and electrons
are further examined, it has been realized that these are made up of
much smaller particles called "quarks," and that these quarks are not
particles in the physical sense, but simply energy. This discovery has
broken the classical distinction between matter and energy. It now
appears that in the material universe, only energy exists. What we
call matter is just "frozen energy."

There is a still more intriguing fact: The quarks, those energy
packets, act in such a way that they maybe described as "conscious."
Physicist Freeman Dyson, on his acceptance of the Templeton Prize,
stated that:
Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert
substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative
possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears
that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some
extent inherent in every atom.14
What this means is that there is information behind matter.
Information that precedes the material realm. Gerald Schroeder, an MIT-
trained scientist who has worked in both physics and biology and
author of the famous book The Science of God, makes a number of
important comments on this subject. In his more recent book, The
Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (2001),
Schroeder explains that quantum physics—along with other branches of
science—is the tool for discovering a universal wisdom that lies
behind the material world. As he puts it:
It took humanity millennia before an Einstein discovered that, as
bizarre as it may seem, the basis of matter is energy, that matter is
actually condensed energy. It may take a while longer for us to
discover that there is some non-thing even more fundamental than
energy that forms the basis of energy, which in turn forms the basis
of matter.15
John Archibald, professor of physics at Princeton University and
recipient of the Einstein Award, explained the same fact when he said
that the "bit" (the binary digit) of information gives rise to the
"it," the substance of matter.16 According to Schroeder this has a
"profound meaning":
The matter/energy relationships, the quantum wave functions, have
profound meaning. Science may be approaching the realization that the
entire universe is an expression of information, wisdom, an idea, just
as atoms are tangible expressions of something as ethereal as energy.
17
This wisdom is such an omniscient thing that covers the whole
universe:
A single consciousness, a universal wisdom, pervades the universe. The
discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of
subatomic matter, have moved us to the brink of a startling
realization: all existence is the expression of this wisdom. In the
laboratories we experience it as information that first physically
articulated as energy and then condensed into the form of matter.
Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to represent
a level of information, of wisdom.18
This means that the material universe is not a purposeless and chaotic
heap of atoms, as the atheist/materialist dogma assumes, but is
instead a manifestation of a wisdom which existed before the universe
and which has absolute sovereignty over everything that exists. In
Schroeder's words, it is "as if a metaphysical substrate was impressed
upon the physical". 19

This discovery shatters the whole materialist myth and reveals that
the material universe we see is just a shadow of a transcendent
Absolute Being. Thus, as Schroeder explains, quantum physics has
become the point where science and theology meet:
The age-old theological view of the universe is that all existence is
the manifestation of a transcendent wisdom, with a universal
consciousness being its manifestation. If I substitute the word
information for wisdom, theology begins to sound like quantum physics.
We may be witnessing the scientific confluence of the physical with
the spiritual. 20
Quantum is really the point where science and theology meet. The fact
that the whole universe is pervaded by a wisdom is a secret that was
revealed in the Qur'an 14 centuries ago. One verse reads:
Your god is God alone, there is no god but Him. He encompasses all
things in His knowledge. (Qur'an, 20:98)

The Natural Sciences: The Collapse of Darwinism and The Triumph of
Intelligent Design


Darwin: His theory is now refuted by a great deal of scientific
evidence.
As we stated at the beginning, one of the main supports for the rise
of atheism to its zenith in the 19th century was Darwin’s theory of
evolution. With its assertion that the origin of human beings and all
other living things lay in unconscious natural mechanisms, Darwinism
gave atheists the opportunity they had been seeking for centuries.
Therefore, Darwin’s theory had been adopted by the most passionate
atheists of the time, and atheist thinkers such as Marx and Engels
elucidated this theory as the basis of their philosophy. Since that
time, the relationship between Darwinism and atheism has continued.

But, at the same time, this greatest support for atheism is the dogma
that has received the greatest blow from scientific discoveries in the
20th century. The discoveries by various branches of science such as
paleontology, biochemistry, anatomy and genetics have shattered the
theory of evolution from various aspects. (See Harun Yahya, Evolution
Deceit, 2000). We have dealt with this fact in much more detail in
various other books and publications, but we may summarize it here as
follows:
Paleontology: Darwin’s theory rests on the assumption that all species
come from one single common ancestor and that they diverged from one
another over a long period of time by small gradual changes. It is
supposed that the proofs for this will be discovered in the fossil
record, the petrified remains of living things. But fossil research
conducted in the course of the 20th century has presented a totally
different picture. The fossil of even a single undoubted intermediate
species that would substantiate the belief in the gradual evolution of
species has not been found. Moreover, every taxon appears suddenly in
the fossil record and no trace has been found of any previous
ancestors. The phenomenon known as the Cambrian Explosion is
especially interesting. In this early geological period, nearly all of
the phyla (major groups with significantly different body plans) of
the animal kingdom suddenly appeared. This sudden emergence of many
different categories of living things with totally different body
structures and extremely complex organs and systems, including
mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms and (as recently discovered) even
vertebrates, is a major blow to Darwinism. For, as evolutionists also
agree, the sudden appearance of a taxon implies supernatural design
and this means creation.

Biological Observations: In elaborating his theory, Darwin relied on
examples of how animal breeders produced a different variety of dogs
or horses. He extrapolated the limited changes he observed in these
cases to the whole of the natural world and proposed that every living
thing could have come to be in this way from a common ancestor. But
Darwin made this claim in the 19th century when the level of
scientific sophistication was low. In the 20th century things have
changed greatly. Decades of observation and experimentation on various
species of animals have shown that variation in living things has
never gone beyond certain genetic boundary. Darwin’s assertions, like
“I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural
selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and
larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a
whale.”21 actually demonstrates his great ignorance. On the other
hand, observations and experiments have shown that mutations defined
by Neo- Darwinism as an evolutionary mechanism add no new genetic
information to living creatures.

The Origin of Life: Darwin spoke about a common ancestor but he never
mentioned how this first common ancestor came to be. His only
conjecture was that the first cell could have formed as a result of
random chemical reactions “in some small warm little pond”.22 But
evolutionary biochemists who undertook to close this hole in Darwinism
met with frustration. All observations and experiments showed that it
was, in a word, impossible for a living cell to arise within inanimate
matter by random chemical reactions. Even the English atheist Nobel
Prize-winner Fred Hoyle expressed that such a scenario "is comparable
with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might
assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”23

Intelligent Design: Scientists studying cells, the molecules that
compose the cells, their remarkable organization within the body and
the delicate order and plan in the organs are faced with proof of the
fact that evolutionists strongly wish to reject: The world of living
things is permeated by designs too complex to be found in any
technological equipment. Intricate examples of design, including our
eyes that are too superior to be compared to any camera, the wings of
birds that have inspired flight technology, the complexly integrated
system of the cells of living things and the remarkable information
stored in DNA, have vitiated the theory of evolution which regards
living things as the product of blind chance.
All these facts have squeezed Darwinism into a corner by the end of
the 20th century. Today, in the United States and other Western
countries, the theory of intelligent design is gaining everincreasing
acceptance among scientists. Those who defend the idea of intelligent
design say that Darwinism has been a great error in the history of
science and that it came to be as the result of materialist
philosophy’s being imposed on the scientific paradigm. Scientific
discoveries show that there is a design in living things which proves
creation. In short, science proves once more that God created all
living things.

Psychology: The Collapse of Freudianism and the Acceptance of Faith

The representative of the 19th century atheist dogma in the field of
psychology was the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed
a psychological theory which rejected the existence of the soul and
tried to explain the whole spiritual world of human beings in terms of
sexual and similar hedonistic motivations. But Freud’s greatest
assault was against religion.


Later studies showed that Freud's ideas, especially the ones about
religion were totally flawed.
In his book The Future of an Illusion published in 1927, he proposed
that religious faith was a kind of mental illness (neurosis) and that,
as human beings progressed, religious faith would completely
disappear. Due to the primitive scientific conditions of the time, the
theory was proposed without the requisite research and investigation,
and with no scholarly literature or possibility of comparison, and
therefore, its claims were extremely deficient. Indeed, if Freud had
the possibility of evaluating his propositions today, he would himself
be surprised by the logical deficiency of his claims and he would be
the first to criticize such senseless presuppositions.

After Freud, psychology developed on an atheist foundation. Not only
Freud, but the founders of other schools of psychology in the 20th
century were passionate atheists. Two of these were B.F. Skinner, the
founder of the behaviorist school and Albert Ellis, founder of
rational emotive therapy. The world of psychology ended up by becoming
the forum 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.24
But most psychologists who fell into this great deception were undone
by their own psychological investigations. It became known that the
basic suppositions of Freudianism had almost no scientific support
and, moreover, that religion was not a mental illness as Freud and
some other psychological theorists declared, but a basic element of
mental health. Patrick Glynn summarizes these important developments:
Yet the last quarter of the twentieth century has not been kind to the
psychoanalytic vision. Most significant has been the exposure of
Freud’s views of religion as entirely fallacious. Ironically enough,
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, depression,
even, perhaps surprisingly, levels of sexual satisfaction in marriage,
on the other. In short, the empirical data run exactly contrary to the
supposedly “scientific” consensus of the psychotherapeutic profession.
25
Finally, as Glynn says, “modern psychology at the close of the
twentieth century seems to be reacquainting itself with religion”26
and “a purely secular view of human mental life has been shown to fail
not just at the theoretical, but also at the practical, level.27
In other words, atheism has been routed also on the field of
psychology.

Medicine: The Discovery of "How Hearts Find Peace"

Another branch of science that was affected by the collapse of atheist
suppositions was medicine.

According to results compiled by David B. Larson and his team at the
National Institute for Healthcare Research, a comparison among
Americans in relation to church attendance yielded very interesting
results. Risk of arteriosclerotic heart disease for men who attended
church frequently was just 60 percent of that for men who were
infrequent church attenders. Among women, suicide was twice as high
among infrequent as among frequent church attenders; smokers who
ranked religion as very important in their lives were over seven times
less likely to have normal diastolic pressure readings than were those
who did not.28

Secular psychologists generally explain such phenomena as having a
psychological cause. In this sense, faith raises a person’s morale and
contributes to his well-being. There may be some truth in this
explanation, but if we look more closely we see something much more
dramatic. Belief in God is much stronger than any other influence on
the morale. In comprehensive research on the relationship between
religious belief and physical health, Dr. Herbert Benson of the
Harvard Medical School came up with some interesting results. Although
he did not have any religious faith, Benson arrived at the result that
faith in God and worship had a much more positive effect on human
health than could be observed in anything else. Benson concludes that
he has “found that faith quiets the mind like no other form of
belief.”29

Why is there such a special relation between faith and human spirit
and body? The result arrived at by Benson, who is a secular
researcher, was, as he put it, that the human mind and body are “wired
for God.”30

This fact, that the medical world is slowly beginning to notice, is a
secret revealed in the Qur’an with the verse, “Only in the remembrance
of God can the heart find peace.” (Qur’an, 13:28) The reason why those
who believe in God, pray to Him and trust in Him are physically and
mentally more healthy than others is that they behave in harmony with
their nature. Philosophical systems opposed to human nature always
bring pain, sorrow, anxiety and depression upon people.

The basic source of the peace experienced by a religious person is
that he acts in order to gain God’s approval. In other words, this
peace is the natural result of a person’s listening to the voice of
his conscience. A person does not live the morality of religion simply
“to be more at peace” or “to be healthier”; a person who acts with
this intention cannot find peace in its true sense. God well knows
that what a person stores in his heart or what he reveals. A person
experiences peace of mind only by being sincere and attempting to gain
God’s approval. God commands:
So set your face firmly towards the [true] religion, as a pure natural
believer, God’s natural pattern on which He made mankind. There is no
changing God’s creation. That is the true religion—but most people do
not know it. (Qur’an, 30:30)
In the light of the discoveries that we have briefly indicated above,
modern medicine is starting to become cognizant of this truth. As
Patrick Glynn says, “contemporary medicine is clearly moving in the
direction of acknowledging dimensions of healing beyond the purely
material”.31

Society: The Fall of Communism, Fascism and the Hippie Dream

The collapse of atheism in the 20th century did not occur only in the
fields of astrophysics, biology, psychology and medicine; it happened
also in politics and social morality.

Communism may be considered the most important political result of
19th century atheism. The founders of this ideology, Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Trotsky or Mao, all adopted atheism as a basic principle. A
primary goal of all communist regimes was to get society to adopt
atheism and to destroy religious belief. Stalin’s Russia, Red China,
Cambodia, Albania and some Eastern block countries applied immense
pressure on religious people to the point of committing mass murder.

Yet, amazingly, at the end of the 1980s this bloody atheist system
collapsed. When we examine the reasons for this dramatic fall, we see
that what collapsed was actually atheism. Patrick Glynn writes:
To be sure, secular historians would say that the greatest mistake of
Communism was to attempt to defy the laws of economics. But other
laws, too, came into play… Moreover, as 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—one that consisted of
lies and that was based on a “Big Lie”— the 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.32
An interesting indication of the Soviet system’s great “crisis of
faith” was President Mihail Gorbachev’s attempts of reform. Since the
time that he assumed the presidency, Gorbachev was interested in moral
problems as well as economic reforms. For example, one of the first
things he did was to initiate a campaign against alcoholism. In order
to raise the morale of society, for a long time he used Marxist-
Leninist terminology but he saw that this was of no use.


Gorbachev: His futile attempts could not heal the "crisis of faith" in
the Soviet society.
Then, in the later years of the regime, he even began to mention God
in some of his speeches, even though he himself was an atheist.
Naturally, these insincere words of faith were of no use and the
crisis of faith in Soviet society continued to worsen. The result was
the collapse of the gigantic Soviet empire. The 20th century
documented not only the fall of communism, but also that of another
fruit of 19th century antireligious philosophy—fascism. Fascism is the
outcome of a philosophy which may be called a mixture of atheism and
paganism and which is intensely hostile to theistic religions.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who may be called the father of fascism, extolled
the morality of barbarous idolatrous societies, attacked Christianity
and other monotheistic religions and even called himself the
“Antichrist.” Nietzsche’s disciple, Martin Heidegger, was an avid Nazi
supporter and the ideas of these two atheist thinkers gave impetus to
the terrifying savagery of Nazi Germany. (The Holocaust, one of the
greatest act of evil in human history, was the result of Nazi anti-
Semitism, an ideology that hated Jews and the monotheistic faith that
has been the cornerstone of Judaism—and also Islam.) The Second World
War, that caused the death of 55 million people, is another example of
the calamity that atheist ideologies like fascism and communism have
brought upon humanity.

At this point, we must recall another atheist ideology—Social Darwinism
—which was among the causes for the outbreak of both the First and the
Second World Wars. In his book entitled Europe Since 1870, Harvard
history professor James Joll states that behind each of the two world
wars lay the philosophical views of Social Darwinist European leaders
who believed in the myth that war was a biological necessity and that
nations developed through conflict.33


In contrast with the theist and peaceful American Revolution, the
French Revolution was atheist, neo-pagan and extremely violent.
Another social consequence of atheism in the 20th century appeared in
Western democracies. In the present day there is a tendency to regard
the West as the “Christian world.”
However, since the 19th, century, a quickly growing atheist culture
has held sway with Christian culture, and today there is a conflict
between these two cultures in what we call Western civilization. And
this atheist element has been the true cause of western imperialism,
moral degeneration, despotism and other negative manifestations.

In his book God: The Evidence, the American writer Patrick Glynn draws
attention to this matter and, in order to compare the God-fearing and
atheist elements in the West, he takes the examples of the American
and French Revolutions. The American Revolution was carried out by
believers; American Declaration of Independence states that all men
“are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. Since
the French Revolution was the work of atheists, the French Declaration
of Human Rights was very different, with no reference to God and full
of atheist and neo-pagan notions.

The actual results of the two revolutions were quite different: in the
American model, a peaceful, tolerant environment was created that
respected religion and religious belief; in France the fierce
hostility to religion drowned the country in blood and unleashed a
savagery such as had never been seen before. As Glynn says, “there is
an interesting historical correlation between atheism, on the one
hand, and moral and political catastrophe, on the other hand.”34

Glynn notes that attempts to turn America into an atheist country have
also caused harm to society. The fact that the sexual revolution (for
example) that spread in the 60’s and 70’s caused immense social damage
is accepted even by secular historians.35


John Lennon: The world he imagined —one without religion— did not
bring a happy end, neither to him nor to his followers.
The hippie movement was a demonstration of this social damage. The
hippies believed that they could find spiritual emancipation through
secular humanist philosophy and by such things as unlimited drugs and
sex. These young people who poured onto the streets with romantic songs
—like John Lennon’s 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. Many other young hippies
shared a similar fate.

Those young people of the same generation who turned to violence found
themselves on the receiving end of violence. The 1968 generation, who
turned their backs on God and religion and imagined they could find
salvation in such concepts as revolution or selfish Epicureanism,
ruined both themselves and their own societies.

The Dawn of the Post-Atheist World

The facts that we have briefly summarized to this point shows clearly
that atheism is undergoing an inevitable collapse. In other words,
humanity is — and will be — turning towards God. The truth of this
assertion is not limited only to the scientific and political areas
that we have written about here. From prominent statesmen to movie
stars and pop artists, those who influence opinion in the West are
much more religious than they used to be. There are many people who
have seen the truth and come to believe in God after having lived for
years as atheists. (Patrick Glynn from whose book we have quoted is
one of these ex-atheists).

The fact that the developments which have contributed to this result
began in the same period, that is from the second half of the 1970s,
is quite interesting. The anthropic principle first appeared in the
1970s. Scientific criticism of Darwinism started to be loudly voiced
at that same time. The turning point against the atheist dogma of
Freud was a book entitled The Road Less Traveled published in 1978 by
Scott Peck. For this reason, Glynn, in the 1997 edition of his book
writes that “over the past twenty years, a significant body of
evidence has emerged, shattering the foundations of the long-dominant
modern secular worldview.”36

Surely, the fact that the atheist world-view has been shaken means
that another world-view prevails, which is belief in God. Since the
end of the 1970’s, (or, from the beginning of the 14th century
according to the Muslim calendar) the world has seen a rise in
religious values. Like other social processes, this does not happen in
a day and the majority of people may not notice it because it has been
developing over a long period of time. However, those who evaluate the
development a little more carefully see that the world is at a major
turning point in the realm of ideas.

Secular historians try to explain this process according to their own
principles but just as they are in deep error with regard to the
existence of God, so they are greatly mistaken about the course of
history. In fact, as the following verse reveals, history moves as God
as determined: “...You will not find any changing in the pattern of
God. You will not find any alteration in the pattern of God.” (Qur’an,
35: 43) It follows, then, that history has a purpose and unfolds as
God has commanded. And God’s command is the perfection of His light:
They desire to extinguish God’s Light with their mouths. But God
refuses to do other than perfect His Light, even though the
disbelievers detest it. (Qur’an, 9: 32)
This verse means that God has sent down His light upon humanity
through the religion that He has revealed. Those who do not believe
want to extinguish this light by their "mouths"— intimations,
propaganda and philosophies, but God will finally perfect His light
and give dominion to religious values on earth.

This may be the “turning point in history” mentioned at the beginning
of this article as also indicated by the evidence we have provided
here, as well as the implications of various hadiths and statements by
scholars. Surely, God knows best.

Conclusion

We are living at an important time. 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 that sought to use science for its own ends has been in
turn defeated by science. A world rescuing itself from atheism will
turn to God and religion. And this process has begun long ago.

It is clear that believers have important duties in this period. They
must be aware of this major change in the world’s way of thinking,
interpret it, make good use of the opportunities that globalization
offers and effectively represent the truth along this road. They must
know that the basic conflict of ideas in the world is between atheism
and faith. It is not a struggle between East and West; in both East
and West there are those who believe in God and those who do not. For
this reason, faithful Christians, as well as faithful Jews are allies
of Muslims. The main divergence is not between Muslims and the "People
of the Book" (Jews and Christians), but between Muslims and the People
of the Book on the one hand, and atheists and pagans on the other. Of
course, we must not show hostility to such people but view them as
people who need to be rescued from their error.

The time is fast approaching when many people who are living in
ignorance with no knowledge of their Creator will be graced by faith
in the impending post-atheist world.

http://www.harunyahya.com/
.

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