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 God… Over the course of a century in the great debate between science and faith, the tables have completely turned… Today the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis.
