The Tide Has Finally Turned Against Scientific Atheism
On a recent podcast episode, Joe Rogan and his guest Cody Tucker found themselves in a discussion that was clearly skeptical of the atheistic consensus among prominent thinkers of the past few generations.
That atheistic consensus generally states that the following is true. There was obviously once a Great Nothingness that suddenly became our universe and the existence of everything within it — and all of this happened for no reason whatsoever.
Rogan asks a question that every person has likely asked themselves countless times, “wouldn’t it be crazy if there wasn’t something at some point in time? That seems even crazier than [to think] there has always been something.”
He’s not wrong.
To believe that nothing suddenly became everything for no reason whatsoever is an act of pure faith based upon no observable data. What’s more, the proclamation itself an act of heresy for scientific atheists.
The First Law of Thermodynamics insists that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. And yet, the idea that energy was once created from nothing is presumed by the scientific consensus to have occurred with a singular event called The Big Bang.
Simply put, this is the description of a miracle. Not only should it have not happened, but it scientifically cannot have happened at all. And yet the belief that this one event occurred is the foundation of countless atheists’ faith.
Far from being disinterested in what you think about all of this, revered intellectuals and atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris insist that the world must agree with them. It is not enough that they believe that the miracle occurred, and that it occurred for no reason at all. They need you to also believe it.
And they’ve had incredible advantages in their mission to convert the masses toward their faith. As the government increasingly monopolized classrooms across the Western world over the past century, religious explanations for the universe’s existence became forbidden in formative education and replaced with the forced consumption of scientific atheism’s answers to the great question about existence.
Given these advantages, one might forgive them for thinking that the trajectory toward atheism of the past century would never reverse, and that the consensus would never be challenged.
But there stands Joe Rogan, openly mocking the religion of scientific atheism while proclaiming that the Resurrection of Christ is a far more plausible suggestion. Rogan says:
It’s funny, because people would be incredulous about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but yet they’re convinced that the entire universe was smaller than the head of a pin, and for no reason that anybody has adequately explained to me [that makes sense], instantaneously became [blast sound] everything? Mm-kay. I’m sticking with Jesus on that one.
What Rogan expresses here is less an expression of belief in Christianity than it is an expression of doubt about the foundational belief of scientific atheists.
As David Berlinski writes in his excellent 2009 book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions: “Curiously enough, while Western science is saturated in faith, Western scientists remain incapable of seeing that faith itself, whether religious or scientific, is inherently vulnerable to doubt.”
Richard Dawkins has openly mocked Christians by suggesting that the idea of God is as plausible as a “flying spaghetti monster.” What he likely never considered is that the notion that nothing became everything for no reason whatsoever is, at the very least, equally unplausible.
Academia, of course, has its own clergy which serves as a shield to protect the consensus belief that the universe exists for no reason whatsoever from any intellectual doubts or scrutiny. But the clergy of academia doesn’t shape the culture, however much they might wish that they did.
Joe Rogan is not a pioneer in mocking the scientific atheists’ intellectual house of cards. The first moment I can remember for this cultural shift against the pretentions of atheists like Richard Dawkins points to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park.
In an interview with Jake Tapper that is very hard to find, but linked here, both creators express a belief in God.
Trey Parker, who identifies as the more religious of the duo, expresses his doubts about Christianity. But “out of all the ridiculous religion stories,” he says the silliest is the scientific consensus that “yeah, there’s this big giant universe and it’s expanding, and it’s all gonna collapse on itself, and we’re all just here, just ‘cause. Just ‘cause. That to me is the most ridiculous explanation ever.”
As Matt Stone later relates in a separate interview, their resistance to the central beliefs of atheism prompted Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame, who is an avowed atheist) to write an email to them expressing shock that they weren’t firmly on the atheists’ team. So, as is their custom, they produced a two-part show called “Go, God, Go!” to mercilessly mock militant atheists and their many ridiculous claims, and to thoroughly skewer Richard Dawkins, who Matt Stone calls the “smartest dumbest person in the world.”
For example, as physicist Steven Weinberg argued in 2007, “with or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
This is a central conviction of the scientific atheists’ faith that “Go, God, Go!” tackles head-on. The episode is a Buck Rogers parody set in the year 2546, and a world in which everyone is an atheist and “dedicated to rationality and science.” But this world without religion is anything but a peaceful Utopia – it is, more realistically, comprised of three denominations of atheism, each at war with the others over their belief in insufficient answers to “the great question.”
Realistically, this would be the only logical possibility. For what makes humanity good, after all? Dawkins seems to even recognize this problem, saying that perhaps he is “a Pollyanna to believe that people will remain good when unobserved and unpoliced by God.”
In his book, David Berlinski relates a story about a Hasidic Jew who had dug his own grave, and afterward told his Nazi executioners that “God is watching what you are doing.” Berlinski continues:
What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe… was that God was watching what they were doing.
And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.
That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.
For his part, Richard Dawkins seems to have come around to the truth in that observation. He recently proclaimed that he is a “cultural Christian.” He says that he “feels at home in the Christian ethos,” and that replacing Christianity with “any alternative religion” would be “truly dreadful.”
Even though he doesn’t believe that God is observing or policing him, he clearly recognizes the cultural value of others believing that they are being observed and policed by God.
It is a very good thing, therefore, that the presumed superiority of atheists’ beliefs is increasingly the subject of ridicule by the paragons of culture like Joe Rogan. And we have intellectuals like David Berlinski and cultural icons like Matt Stone and Trey Parker to thank, as they have been setting off explosives in the foundations of scientific atheism for decades.
And though it may surprise many to hear, Christianity appears to be making a huge comeback in America, with young people leading this trend. Though I would have never imagined typing the following words just a few years ago – even Richard Dawkins might also agree that this is a very good thing.