The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 43 – Eric Metaxas

Episode 43: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews bestselling author Eric Metaxas about his new book, Is Atheism Dead? Metaxas explains that the book’s central thesis is that, contrary to the popular secular narrative, scientific and archaeological discoveries over the last several decades have increasingly and powerfully pointed to the existence of God. He details the two main discoveries that inspired the book: the scientific community’s complete inability to explain the origin of life from non-life (abiogenesis) and the archaeological discovery of the biblical city of Sodom.

Metaxas argues that this mounting evidence from various fields corroborates the historical accuracy of the Bible and makes atheism an intellectually untenable position. The conversation concludes with Metaxas advising believers to approach conversations about faith with joyful confidence rather than a defensive or argumentative posture.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:00):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify. Try some new platforms too. Edifi and Liftable are new ones, and we really like those and wherever you get your podcasts. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

My guest today is bestselling author, Eric Metaxas. He’s written major biographies on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, William Wilberforce. He hosts a witty lecture series called Socrates in the City, hosts a daily national radio program, has a show on TBN. His op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God remains unofficially the most popular and shared piece in the paper’s history. Please welcome Eric Metaxas to the show. Eric Metaxas, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Eric Metaxas (00:59):
Dr. Jeff, I always knew you as Jeff, but I forgot you are a doctor. It’s an honor to be with you and it just makes me happy to see you. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:08):
Well, I’m happy to see you as well. We are going to get to talk today about your new book, which is wonderful, at least the first 90 pages, because that’s all of it that I’ve been able to read so far. I just got it on Tuesday in my defense, but, Is Atheism Dead? Beautiful writing, fun, funny, bringing a lot of difficult scientific issues right down into a way that we can understand. So congratulations.

Eric Metaxas (01:33):
Thank you. I’ve been saying this lately that I’ve literally never been more excited about a book. I mean, theoretically, when you write a book, you’re excited about it, but I’ve never been as excited about a book when it came out as I am about this book because there’s stuff in here. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. Just the fact that there are things that most of us aren’t aware of, even folks like you who are into apologetics.

So I feel like we’re living in a very exciting time. And that’s what I want to communicate in this book, that there are things happening that God is allowing us to see now that we’ve never seen before, and we should be excited.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:14):
It is exciting. And just last night, I was reading it in bed and I said, “Stephanie, you’ve got to hear this passage,” because you were talking about just the amazing aspects of water that we have never considered before. And you said something to the effect of, “If one’s jaw does not drop, that is impermissible, perhaps even downright rude.” And there’s so much in the book that is jaw dropping, so I can’t wait for us to talk about it.

Eric Metaxas (02:39):
Well, that’s what’s so funny is that it sounds like when you say that kind of thing, it sounds like you’re blowing smoke. I’m trying to get people excited about it. But I have to say, I think the headline is that most of us just don’t know this stuff. There’s stuff in this book that when I encountered it, I thought, “What kind of a world do we live in where even reasonably educated believers are not aware?”

And I thought many of us have taken in a secular narrative even without meaning to. You just kind of take in these ideas that science isn’t ever going to really dramatically point to God. That’s just not possible. And the fact is that’s exactly what’s happening. We need to know it and we need to be excited about it. So I’m glad that comes across in the writing. Good.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:32):
I can’t wait to have that in our Summit library and to recommend it to our students because they’re constantly being faced on university campuses with this sort of a, it’s not just a secular mindset. It’s as if God, who? Who are we talking about? This is not relevant to anything that’s important. And after a while, it’s so easy to get worn down and think, “Yeah, maybe I’m crazy. Maybe a biblical worldview isn’t really plausible.” So when a book like this comes along and students are able to say, “Oh, wow. Okay. Yes, this helps me see truth in a new way.” It’s a breakthrough. So thank you.

Eric Metaxas (04:12):
Well, I mean, you’re welcome. And I have to just thank the Lord because I can’t pretend like this is some project I’ve been working on for years and I had this planned. All I know is about a year and a half ago, right at the beginning of COVID, I realized that I had bumped into two pieces of information that nobody really knew, that by God’s grace, he introduced me to two people that had these pieces of the apologetics puzzle. And you may know a little bit about this, but I thought nobody knows these two things, which are astonishing. Either of them is astonishing.

And I thought, maybe I need to put these in a book along with a lot of other stuff that’s been coming out, but it wasn’t like it was a plan. And so I feel humbled that the Lord would allow me to be the person to kind of introduce a lot of people to this information because it’s true, it’s real, and it is exciting. So again, I don’t mean to just be blowing smoke, but I still can’t get over some of it myself, so that’s not a bad thing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:20):
Well, we’re going to dig into it. So we’ll have a chance to talk about the five main discoveries that you’re focused on in the book. But before we do that, Eric, I think everybody who’s watching this has seen you on television. They have heard you on the radio. They may have seen you give a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. They may have heard you speak in a seminar in some other context at some point in time. They probably have seen your books or maybe read Bonhoeffer or your book on Martin Luther, or maybe they know you through VeggieTales.

There are a lot of different things that you’ve done, but what do you think, as you look back over your own life growing up in the Bronx, or I’m sorry, in Queens, growing up in a Greek and German family, going to Yale, what do you think? Give us the trajectory from there to a project like this one.

Eric Metaxas (06:12):
Wow, that’s a big and challenging question. That’s a big question, Jeff. I think the truer something is, the more it’s like a cliche, right? Because truth is by definition something that it’s not. On the one hand, it’s astonishing and on the other hand you think, what else would it be? It’s true.

So when you look back on your life, you get that feeling like there’s a sense of inevitability, but then you’re also, I think if you’re honest, amazed because you think, why would the Lord allow me to do this or this or this or this? And there’s no answer. God is sovereign. But I look back on my life and I have to say, apart from God, there’s no explanation. I mean, and I think this is, again, it’s sort of true of everybody’s lives. Our stories are strange, but you’re forced to say that there’s no logical explanation.

(07:15):
I mean, I grew up the son of immigrants. My dad is from Greece. My mom is from Germany. And I wrote about this. My last book is called Fish Out of Water. It’s this story. It’s called Fish Out of Water: Search for the Meaning of Life. And I go into the story of growing up in a good home, going to church every Sunday, but not getting the gospel. Like a lot of people who go to church on Sunday who don’t get the gospel. They just kind of get religion.

And we’re all trained to say, “That’s really bad.” Well, yes, it’s horrible, but there are a lot of good people kind of just doing this every Sunday. They just don’t know that there’s more. And God in his mercy around my 25th birthday very dramatically, very miraculously spoke to me in a dream. It’s one of those things, you don’t ask for it.

(08:05):
God just does it and changes your life. And since that moment, I have had a, I guess it’s really a deep calling and a desire to communicate what I know about God to those who don’t. And some of that is evangelistic and other parts of it are apologetics oriented, but I think the bottom line is, since I came to faith seriously, I have known that we’re living in a world that doesn’t know or acknowledge God in the way that it should.

Now, that’s just living in the world after the Garden of Eden. We’re in a broken, fallen world, but the world in which we live, particularly in the United States of America, I just grew up in a world that pretended as though religious reality is over here, but the rest of the world is mostly secular. And I think when I got serious about Jesus or when he got serious about pulling me into his plan for communicating this, I thought this is really the story behind the story that we all, even if you’re a believer, there are pieces of God that you’re still holding at arm’s length You haven’t really pulled it all in.

(09:32):
And if we all saw God as he is, we would be overwhelmed, we would melt, we couldn’t handle it. And so in a funny way, I’ve always been interested in apologetics, but I just never thought that I would write a book that has what I’d call new information because I thought that’s for the experts, the apologetics experts like you or whoever else that this is what you think about.

And so looking back on my life, even this piece, it just has to be God’s sovereignty because the two people that I met, which I’ll mention in a minute, but why did I meet, why did I get to know Dr. Steven Collins and Dr. James Tour? Who am I that I would meet these people and that I would suddenly be compelled to say they have information about the reality of God that’s so amazing, nobody knows it, I want to put it in a book.

(10:27):
But that’s kind of the story of my life even before that, writing Bonhoeffer, all the stuff that I’ve done, I just have to say that looking back, it’s obvious that it’s God because I don’t have any real explanation. And I’m not trying to be falsely humble. I mean, there’s certain things that when you look back, you realize that God had a plan. And I’ve always had a compulsion to communicate as a writer and as a speaker, but the way the Lord has woven it together, I could take zero credit.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:59):
Wow, wow. When you were a student at Yale, were you compelled by atheism or was it?

Eric Metaxas (11:09):
No, I’ve never been an atheist, but I think to be fair, I think a lot of times when you get into the world of apologetics, we always act as though there are all these atheists out there. And I think most people who don’t believe are not atheists, they’re just drifting along. There’s some kind of agnostics or they have questions. And I think we tend to focus on atheism.

And so this book, I don’t want people to think this is a book really about atheism. The reason it’s titled, Is Atheism Dead?, which I’ll say upfront, is because in 1966, there was a famous Time Magazine cover article that said, “Is God dead?” And so it’s almost like the secular narrative came into America’s living rooms in the ’60s, this idea that it had once been only in universities and stuff, but now it’s in America’s living room, on the coffee table, is God dead?

(11:59):
Almost as though the larger narrative is secular, science is day by day, pushing faith out. And the irony for me is that since about the ’60s, since I was a kid, the narrative has shifted, but nobody’s made note of it. In other words, the more science has learned, because you want to talk about a counterintuitive headline, the more science learns, the more it points to God.

Now, if you’re a believer, that makes some sense, but we’ve all kind of accepted this idea that we live in a world that’s pretty much secular and it’s never going to happen that science is going to point in any dramatic ways to God or to the idea of a God behind everything. But what I’m writing about in this book is the fact that that’s exactly what’s been happening and it has happened slowly but surely over the decades until you get to a point today where when you look at the evidence, it’s so astonishing you have to ask, is atheism dead because maybe you’re an agnostic, but atheism, forget it.

(13:01):
Atheism really is dead, I think, if you’re honest. So the title of the book is Is Atheism Dead, but what I’m really doing in the book is just looking at science, I’m looking at biblical archeology. And then at the end, I do talk about atheism and about this narrative, this idea of a world where we push God to the side, he’s in this religious corner and how ridiculous that is.

But that’s a long way of saying, I, like most people, even when I was not a real believer, I was never an atheist. I was always just kind of lost, kind of wondering what’s going on, wondering if we can know. Because a lot of times you could say like, “Well, maybe there is a God, but can we know? Can anyone talk about it intelligently?” Because maybe it’s just one of those things we can’t know.

(13:51):
So I never took atheism seriously even before I came to faith. And I do think we want to be clear that most people, and I think I wrote this book for a lot of those people too, that they would never say, “Hey, I’m an atheist.” They would just say, “I don’t know what I believe.” I think it’s more honest. I think most people, I think so too. I think when somebody says I’m an atheist, it’s almost like they’re posturing. I think most honest people really don’t know what they believe and they don’t declare themselves as Marxist atheists. They just say, “I don’t know what I believe in.”

So I’m trying to reach those people in a sense. People who say, “Hey, if you’ve got some information, I’m open-minded. I just didn’t think there was such information, but if you have some, I’m interested.” So that’s part of why I wrote the book and the title, Is Atheism Dead? It’s less about atheism than it is really about just the larger question. Can we take atheism seriously knowing what we now know? Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:47):
Yeah, that makes sense. The generation that we’re working with at Summit Ministries, they’ve been described by George Barna as the “don’t” generation. They don’t know, they don’t believe, and they don’t care. I don’t know about that last part. I think the students I’m working with do care. They do want to know that there are answers, but they want to know that what they would be believing is plausible to the people they know and respect. So there’s a social aspect to it. It’s not just, “What is my life purpose?” It is, what is our purpose altogether?

Eric Metaxas (15:23):
Well, it’s funny too, because you also realize that when you’re dealing with young people, young people, because I remember being young, you haven’t really experienced life usually, you haven’t suffered, you haven’t had your head punched in where you just think like, “Well, I’ve got to figure out why am I here, whatever.” Usually that comes later.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:47):
Yeah.

Eric Metaxas (15:48):
And so it’s very easy to say, “I don’t care,” or whatever. But look, if somebody dies, if you are close to somebody and you see them die, or if you’re close to somebody who’s in terrible pain and misery, you will, because you’re a human being, want to know, can I make sense of this? Is there a reality behind this? Is suffering for nothing? It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense. Most people, because they’re creating God’s image and long for meaning, even if they’re not consciously aware of it, something inside them says there has to be a reason, there has to be whatever.

So everybody has that, but where people are explicitly on that journey, everybody’s different. So there’s no real answer. So I think that if you’re fortunate enough to say, “Hey, I don’t care.” You’re just really blessed and you don’t have a clue that life is full of difficulty and suffering and you will care.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:45):
You will care.

Eric Metaxas (16:45):
And someday you will care.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:49):
Yeah. Let’s dig in. I want to hear the conversations with the two individuals you mentioned, and this is especially important for everybody who’s watching or listening to this. If the last book you read about creation or intelligent design or God working in nature was 20 years ago, there’s a lot of new, interesting, exciting information that is available now, even five years ago or 10 years ago. So tell us about the conversations you had with Dr. Collins and Dr. Tour and how you met them and what you learned from them. And then we’ll spend as much time as we can. Talk too about the five pieces of evidence you have in the book.

Eric Metaxas (17:29):
Well, look, it all started, this whole thing, this journey started for me. I was born again in the summer of 88, and within a couple years, I started bumping into these books. I think it was Dr. Hugh Ross’s book. There are a few books that I thought, wow, there are these geniuses that talk about how believing in the God of the Bible and believing in science, there’s no contradiction. In fact, science points to God.

Now, we can quibble about, and people who are into apologetics, a lot of Christians, they love to argue about evolution. Is it young earth, old earth, whatever? I’m here to say, look, I live in New York City where most people don’t talk about God, they don’t believe in God. They are so secular that you just want to have a conversation with them, is there a God? You don’t need to get bogged down into details of, is it a six day creation or is it this or can it? All of that stuff is, it’s not unimportant, but your average person believes that everything in this universe got here randomly.

(18:37):
Now we have to unpack how crazy that is. Okay? It means that the universe itself, which the more you study it, the more astonishing it is, the earth, which totally shouldn’t be here, the idea that there’s this planet where you can go outside and breathe oxygen and walk around should not exist. It’s this exquisitely designed thing. And then life, a single cell, an unbelievable level of complexity that, again, the more science discovers about the earth, about the universe, about life, the more you realize the odds that any of this stuff emerged randomly are effectively zero.

The more we know, the more we know. It’s not like, “Oh, the odds are against it.” The odds aren’t against it. The odds are zero. A logical person looks at the complexity of a cell with the kind of technology we have today and just says, “There is zero chance.” It’s like the old thing of finding a watch on the beach.

(19:39):
There is zero chance that this was created by the wind and the waves, zero. And I think that we have to be honest, that’s the world we live in where the world kind of says everything happened randomly. And I think that when I became a believer and started looking into this stuff, I started thinking like, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.” But not only does it make any sense, but science is more and more letting us see that it doesn’t make sense.

It’s not like it’s 1940. It is now at a point where we have the technology to look at stuff and say, “Wow, who knew how complex a cell was? Who knew how complex the atmosphere of the earth is?” It’s all so amazingly complex. So science starts pushing us in that direction. And so I was interested in this stuff over the years.

(20:33):
I was interested every now and again, I’d read about biblical archeology, but I never dreamt that in my lifetime, like right now, the evidence would increase dramatically pointing to God. And so the two people that I met, it was a guy maybe three or four years ago, I was in Houston and my friends, the Blakemores, introduced me to a friend of theirs, James Tour. And they said, “Oh, you got to meet this guy.” Well, who’s James Tour? He is one.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:04):
Another scientist.

Eric Metaxas (21:05):
Well, he’s one of the most brilliant scientists on earth. He’s absolutely a genius, but his field is nanoscience, which means he creates molecules in the lab. I mean, it’s freaky stuff, but when I met him, he started talking to me about something that I was embarrassed I had not thought about for many years. He talked about, I mean, believers always talk about, okay, once there’s life, then what? Did it evolve? Was it theistic evolution? Was it blind evolution? Was it punctuated? We get into these arguments, but forget about all of that.

Let’s just go back to the first cells. If you go to a scientist and you say, life emerged on planet earth in the form of single cells four billion years ago, most scientists will say that, right? So I say, “Okay, how did that happen?” They have no idea. And what I find funny is that we get on these tangents of what kind of evolution or what kind, we get into these arguments and you think, “Forget about all of that.”

(22:16):
“Let’s just talk about how life emerged on planet earth four billion years ago.” And again, you don’t have to be a believer, a non-believer, just talk to any scientist. They will say, “That’s what happened.” And you say, “Okay, great. Let’s say I agree. How did it happen?” And what James Tour made me understand is that the answer is, they have no idea.

(22:42):
But they’re not going to volunteer that they have no idea because it’s very embarrassing. What could be more embarrassing to a scientist and, “Hey, I’m going to ask you the most basic question, life, how did it emerge from non-life?” And then he tells me, he reminds me, some of us remember this from like eighth grade or something like that. It was on the test that there was an experiment in 1952, University of Chicago, and this was the experiment that was mentioned over and over. We all probably had it in junior high and high school, was on the test.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:12):
I remember it from biology, yes, the Miller-Urey.

Eric Metaxas (23:16):
The Miller-Urey experiment, and they all say, “That’s when we figured out how life emerged from non-life.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:23):
Because there were amino acids that were apparently created.

Eric Metaxas (23:25):
What James Tour reminds us is, he says, “Well, that’s not true.” What happened was they were able somehow to come up with amino acids without going into it. The point is, that’s like saying I was able to create a piece of metal and then it’s just a matter of time before I’m able to take that metal and turn it into a flat screen TV and a computer.

When they were so excited about discovering that they created amino acids in the lab, they thought, “Well, that’s just step number one. Science, which is on the march, is going to lead us to the next step and the next step to the next. And next thing you know, we’re going to have life.” But the problem that James Tour was unpacking to me, he was saying, “Eric, it’s been seven decades. We have gotten nowhere. We haven’t moved a millimeter forward, but nobody’s talking about that.”

(24:16):
And the more I understood, the more I thought this is like gigantic news. It’s been 70 years since the experiment that everybody’s been talking about. It’s on every test, it’s on every. They have moved the ball forward, not at all. In fact, he makes the case that the ball has moved backwards because the more science discovers, and I know you know about this, but when I really got this, I just thought, nobody talks about this.

Nobody talks about the fact that science cannot tell us how life came into being from non-life. And I think it doesn’t get more basic. This is really, really basic life. How did it emerge from non-life? So I remember talking to him about that and of course saying to him like, “Jim, have you written a book about this?” No, no. He’s written hundreds of peer reviewed articles and he’s too busy doing all this stuff.

(25:08):
And I thought, it’s crazy that most believers, most Christians that I know, they don’t talk about this. This is the most powerful evidence for God that there is, that in 70 years of trying, we haven’t figured out how life came into being. Well, that was one piece. Then I was with my friend Skip Heitzig in his church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he said, “Oh, you’ve got to meet a friend of mine. His name is Dr. Steven Collins. He’s a biblical archeologist.” And he says, “Oh yeah, Steven Collins, by the way, he discovered biblical Sodom.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:41):
Wow.

Eric Metaxas (25:42):
And I said, “What? What do you mean he discovered biblical Sodom? That’s 1700 BC. Nobody’s ever discovered biblical Sodom. That’s one of those things nobody will ever discover. It’s like from a zillion years, it’s from the first couple of pages of Genesis.” And I looked into it and to make a long story short, I couldn’t believe it, but I came to the conclusion that he totally discovered biblical Sodom. This is not like he discovered what we think is biblical Sodom. It’s just like, open and shut, game over. And it was the same kind of thing. I thought nobody that I know knows about this.

Now maybe somebody like you knows about this, but your average non-Christian, they’ve never heard this. And I thought this is some of the most powerful evidence for the Bible that even if you don’t believe the Bible, this is nonetheless just outrageously compelling evidence. Nobody talks about it. So it was those two pieces of information, one from science, one from biblical archeology that I always think, how is it possible that nobody’s talking about this? Because this is big, big, big stuff.

(26:54):
So eventually those two pieces and those two gentlemen that I’m privileged to know, I thought I want to write about those and then I want to write about all the other stuff that people also don’t know about or maybe they don’t know. And I said, “I want to get it out there because people need to know.”

Christians and pseudo Christians, non-Christians, agnostics, just people living their lives need to understand, look, I can’t prove anything to you, but if you look at the evidence, you’re going to be knocked backwards. You haven’t even heard about this evidence. It should be on the front page of every major newspaper, but we live in a secular world that does not tend to deal with this stuff. They tend to, if something goes along with a secular narrative, they go along with it. Otherwise, they sort of ignore it or whatever.

(27:48):
But I just thought I’ve got to get this information out there. And as I was saying to you, it’s exciting to think that we could be living in a time where science is pointing day by day more dramatically to evidence of God. And again, that’s just the fine tuned argument. There are a few basic things, which I don’t want to get into too much.

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:11):
Well, if people should learn about it. Well, when they read the book, they’ll learn. You first of all talk about the Big Bang. And I want to come back to that in a minute, because I thought one of the examples you used was fascinating, and I wanted to ask you about it. Then you talked about the fine tuning of the universe from its most distant elements down to its tiniest. And then you talked about biogenesis, which we just discussed. I thought it was interesting that it seemed like it was a turn in a different direction to then talk about archeology.

Eric Metaxas (28:42):
It’s not normal. It’s like I’m not proud of the way I structure things. It’s just like I just realized that there’s all this scientific evidence, there’s all this evidence from biblical archeology, there’s all this other kind of evidence and I’m not, I could have easily written three books, but I thought sometimes that’s the problem is that I just think your average reader, it’s not that they’re not interested, but they don’t have time and they need to have things presented in a way that they can digest.

And I said,” All this information is so exciting, so I’ll put it all in one book and people can read it however they want to read it.” But you’re right. Normally you would just write a book about science and faith or write a book about biblical archeology. But you know me, Jeff, I’m a generalist. I don’t have a PhD in biblical archeology. I’m not a scientist, but I have the ability to read books just as you do and to kind of try to process the information and communicate it for a normal reader who hopefully will get as excited as I am.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:44):
Yeah. Make a quick case, though, for why those who are watching or listening ought to take archeology seriously. Now, what does that have to do with the Christian faith?

Eric Metaxas (29:57):
Well, it’s almost funny. I mean, I think to myself, There’s certain things you can prove and other things that, they don’t rise to the level of proof. But as I say, we live in a secular world and the secular world kind of has these assumptions. And the assumptions are science is pushing God and religion out of the picture. Similarly, biblical archeology, which it’s a kind of science, is that the more we discover in the sands of the Middle East, the more it will push away the idea that the Bible is history.

Everybody knows, right? That’s just the way it is. We live in a secular world and the more we discover, the less we’re going to need God. We’re going to see the evidence as the evidence. Well, ironically, and it’s very ironic, the exact opposite has happened with science, but nobody’s talking about it.

(30:56):
I talk about it in the book. And the exact opposite has happened with archeology. But the archeological stuff, it’s almost funny because you think that, the reason the biblical Sodom, the discovery by Steven Collins of biblical psalm, the reason it kind of kicked me off is because I thought if there were anything that you don’t expect to discover.

I mean, it’s one thing to say, “Oh, we discovered an ossuary, a bone box, and it says Caiaphas on it, and we think these are the bones of the high priest.” That’s only 2000 years ago. But when you start talking about stuff from 37 centuries ago, from before anybody’s, I mean, think about it. This is hundreds of years before the Trojan war. This is in the midst of almost pre-history, right?

(31:51):
Nobody would think that we would find something that would dramatically corroborate what these ancient Hebrew scriptures say. And so when I discovered that, I thought to myself, that’s just the most dramatic example. But almost everywhere you look over the last 150 years, the sands of the Middle East have been coughing up proof after proof after proof after proof after proof. And I thought, this is news.

Even if I can’t force you to believe, I’m going to say, “What do you make of this evidence?” I mean, if every time we dig something up, it seems to give us another little piece of, “Oh yeah, by the way, the scripture is correct. This king lived during this time and he had this son and he did that.” If you’re logical, if you don’t hate the idea of the Bible, you start saying, “The trend is really dramatic.”

(32:50):
The trend always goes in the direction of proving the Bible to be history. And so there are always going to be people who are going to quibble and they’re going to hate that idea and they’re going to try to find the most arcane example of how it might not be true. But your average person, when you look at the evidence, you just say, “It’s a pretty weird coincidence that these ancient Hebrew scriptures would be corroborated over and over and over and over as history.”

And some of the examples, I mean, the biblical Sodom is a very dramatic example, but it’s almost anywhere you look. One of the things, there’s a chapter in the book, I don’t remember the exact title of it, but there are three dramatic stories of biblical archeology. One of them is the discovery of Hezekiah’s tunnel in Jerusalem about 1879. The other one is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls about 1947, and the other one is the discovery in 1979 of what they call the silver Ketephinam scrolls, these tiny, tiny scrolls, these emulates from about, I guess, 600 BC.

(34:07):
Well, these are three stories, and this is to me the comedy of God. These are some of the most important archeological fines, biblical archeology, ever. And each one of these three stories involves a badly behaved boy, two of them, 12 years old, one of them 15 years old, separated by a hundred years, right? So in 1878, whatever it was, the discovery of Hezekiah’s tunnel is a 15 year old boy playing hooky from school. The story is hilarious. It’s interesting.

And at the end of the day, God uses this poorly behaved, not an evil kid, but a kid who should have been in school, decides to go off play hooky and explore this tunnel and makes one of the greatest archeological discoveries ever. Fast forward to 1947, you have a shepherd boy, a 12 year old. What parent wouldn’t want to kill this kid? You were where?

(35:02):
You were doing what? You were chasing one goat, and you’re telling me you could have died. You were walking along cliffs with caves that nobody has been to in hundreds of years. You did what? Well, this kid discovers probably the greatest archeological discovery in all of history, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And then in 1979, there’s another story, which I won’t go into right now, but that kid was the most poorly behaved of all three. And I thought, what kind of a sense of humor does God have that three of the greatest archeological discoveries in history, each were kicked off by a boy or a young man behaving poorly. And when I say poorly, again, I don’t mean evil, but I mean just doing what he shouldn’t have been doing, doing the kind of a thing that only a 12 year old boy would be dumb enough to do, and God uses that.

(35:58):
And each of these three stories, I thought they’re funny stories, they’re amazing stories, they’re beautiful stories. And it makes it possible for us to realize that, you know what, what the Bible says, it’s true. Every time I turn around, we discover something else and we’ve only begun to discover. Who knows what else is hidden that we’re about to discover.

So it’s hard not to get excited about biblical archeology. And it was hard for me not to get excited because you start realizing the more you learn, the more you want to learn. You start realizing this is very rich. This is exciting. I never thought about Hezekiah’s tunnel before. Now I’m all excited about it. I can’t wait to go back to Jerusalem and explore it myself. So it kind of makes it real.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:46):
I love how those pieces come together. And I think it’s correct. I remember taking a religion class and it’s basically, okay, today we’re going to look at those ancient Hebrews and their crazy stories. But now you’re realizing, “Oh, wait a second, the things they said actually happened.” And then if that’s the case, then the text has value. And in that case, “Oh wow, this is a game changer for my whole understanding of my faith.”

I think that archeology, people either think of something that’s super boring, you’re just dusting rocks, or they think of Indiana Jones, they don’t really grasp that what we’re seeing is history coming to life and that the Bible is a book of history, not like other ancient religious books, which are just books of just so stories that help them explain their culture.

Eric Metaxas (37:40):
Well, that’s true. And what I was going to say was that what I find interesting about it is that the more you learn from this biblical archeology, the more interesting it gets. You just think like, “I didn’t realize, I never thought about that period. I never thought about this period.” And the pieces come together more and more and more and more. And you really can’t help wonder, why would God allow us to discover this now? Why would God allow science now to point to himself?

Because in 1966, when Time Magazine had its cover article, “Is God Dead?,” even many Christians said, “Science is pointing away from God. Oh, I still believe in God,” but science is pointing away from God. Who would dream that in our lifetime, the opposite would happen? And I think we have to be honest and say, that’s God. The Lord has allowed us in our lifetime for his purposes to see these things that we could not see in 1950 or in 1900, but that science and technology enable us to see today.

(38:55):
And I really believe that in God’s sovereignty, it is for such a time as this. In other words, the scripture, where it says, when the enemy comes in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord will raise up a standard against him, a battle flag. And I really think that with cultural Marxism and lunacy exploding around the world, people are thinking, “Is the world going insane? People don’t know how many genders there are. What is going on?”

And in the midst of this craziness, suddenly the spirit of the Lord lifts up a battle standard and says, “No, I’m still here and amidst the smoke and the noise, follow me.” And I believe that what’s in this book is a part of that, that the Lord is allowing us now to see things which he could have hidden forever.

(39:43):
Let’s be honest. I mean, all the stuff that we’re finding in the Middle East, in archeology, the stuff we’re finding from science, the Lord is allowing this to happen. He’s the Lord of history. And so I get back to the idea that we’re living in very exciting times. Most of us just don’t know it yet. And the reason I wrote the book, Is Atheism Dead?, is I said, people need to know what we’ve been discovering lately because like you said, 30, 40 years ago, a lot of this stuff we didn’t know even 30 or 40 years ago. So it’s undeniably exciting.

And if I hadn’t met James Tour, and if I hadn’t met Steven Collins, I wouldn’t know this stuff either. So when I discover these things, I have a passion to share it. You know how excited I get because I think this is real, this is exciting, this is pointing people to God.

(40:32):
And there are a lot of good people, Jeff, you know that they’re not born again evangelicals like we are, but they’re not hostile to God. They just have been buying this narrative. And I think that if you put this kind of information in front of them in their own time, they’re going to think about it. And if life gets tough, which it does, this is going to be part of the puzzle for them that I think maybe God is real, maybe this God that I’ve heard about is real. Maybe he’s an option.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:04):
Yeah. And people have got to know. I want to take you as a final question into a conversation that I know working with my students, in fact, I’m having an event tonight with several hundred of them to talk about this kind of thing. They’re in their residence hall or they’re around the water cooler at work and they’re having conversations about the Bible and science or is there really a God or the kinds of things that you’re talking about in the book is atheism dead.

Can you just give us a couple of pointers for how to make that conversation go in a way that would really inspire people to say, “Hmm, I’ve got a lot more to think about.”

Eric Metaxas (41:46):
Well, one of the things I think we do sometimes as believers, and obviously I’ve been guilty of this over the years, where you feel like you have to convince people through argument, and I think that clearly has a place, obviously, but I think sometimes we should have an attitude like, “I couldn’t care less what the truth is, whatever it is it is.” And not like I’m worried, what if they discover this? What if they don’t discover this?

The fact is that my faith is faith in the God of reality and whatever he chooses to reveal, I don’t have a dog in the fight. I just want to know what’s real. And I think that when you have that attitude, people don’t feel pressured to agree with you or to disagree. You give them the freedom in a sense to say what you’re saying is like, “Hey, I don’t care what’s true. I just want to know what is true.”

(42:44):
Tell me, tell me, what do the facts say? Because I think a lot of times, especially if you’re young, you feel like I’ve got to pick a side. And I say, “Why do you have to pick a side? Why don’t you just say whatever is true is true. If science shows me something, if math shows me something, if history shows me something, it’s true.” Let’s be people of truth, not people of argument.

Now, maybe that sounds like a cliche itself, but I think I have always believed that, how amazing is it that the God of history, the God of truth is a God of good news? In other words, it’s not like we are worried like, “Hey, maybe the truth is going to be the biggest bummer you’ve ever seen.” We know it’s the opposite. So we can kind of relax and say, “Let’s have fun uncovering whatever is true.”

(43:37):
Let’s talk about it. I’m not afraid that science is going to discover something that’s going to disprove my faith. I mean, if your faith is hinging on that, you don’t really have much faith. So I kind of feel like as believers, sometimes we need to be more relaxed and less pugnacious about arguing. It would be like if somebody says, “I believe one plus one equals two,” you wouldn’t have the attitude like, “I’m going to prove it.”

Because when you say that, you almost kind of introduce the idea that maybe it’s not true, who knows? And I think sometimes we need to be relaxed about our faith and we need to say, “Listen, if there is a God, he is the God of history, he’s the God of science, he’s the God of reality.” There’s no such thing as any other kind of God.

(44:31):
And so there is zero chance if God is real that science is going to point away from him. It might do so temporarily or there might be, but this idea that I need to worry or I need to argue, I really think, first of all, at this point, I think the facts from science in particular are so overwhelmingly pointing to God that I don’t think there’s much to discuss. In others, you can discuss stuff around the periphery, but I think sometimes we project an attitude almost like, “Well, I’m not sure and let’s get into this argument.”

And the middle part of my book, which is about archeology, says the stones will cry out. We need to take that seriously. God is not depending on us to win an argument. It’s nice if we have the facts, and that’s why I write these books, but at the same time, God is not worried about whether he exists and neither should we be worried about whether he certainly does exist and science more and more points to him.

(45:40):
And I think maybe what I’m trying to say is that we have lived in a world where there’s been this battle between secularism and faith. And I think based on just what I put in this book, the evidence today is so powerful for God that we’re in a new place. I will not take an atheist very seriously. I will take them seriously as a human being, but if somebody came up to me and said, “Listen, I’m a flat earther.” It’s the same thing if somebody says, “I know God doesn’t exist.”

I say, “Well, listen, God loves you and we can have a conversation, but I’m not going to pretend that I take flat earthism seriously. Maybe just to be polite to you, we can have a conversation, but I think sometimes believers act like we’re really worried. Maybe the earth is flat, maybe there is no God.” And you think there’s so much evidence at this point, we need to project the kind of confidence and we need to project the boldness.

(46:44):
Correct me if I’m wrong, you look at this evidence and you tell me, I mean, maybe I can’t prove Jesus is Lord, but I’ll tell you what, if you think I can take seriously the idea that the whole universe got here by chance, that day is over.

(47:00):
And I think we need to adopt that posture. And it’s why I have adopted this, the title is atheism dead. It’s a little bit cheeky and it’s a little bold, but I think it’s the question we have to ask. Do you want to talk about details? You want to talk about what you don’t like about the Bible? That’s fine, but the idea that science is pointing away from God, that idea is dead. That idea is absolutely dead.

And I think we need to be honest about it. I think we need to be bold about it and say, I’m happy to talk about a lot of things, but that to me, it has to be off the table. You look at the fact, you tell me, “What am I missing? Am I missing something?” Some people, no matter what you say, they’re going to argue with you.

(47:43):
But I think a lot of times, just especially young people, we need to stop worrying about arguing. It’s good to have the facts, but sometimes you can sit on the facts and just be confident and say, “Look, this is open and shut. God is real. The Bible is real. You want to talk about it? Let’s talk about it.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (48:00):
And I think that frees you to explore questions. I remember when I first met David Noble at Summit Ministries, I was 17, I was thinking about leaving the church when I left high school and I said to him, “I hope you have a lot of answers because I have a lot of questions.” Which is, again, very cheeky. I was 17, but I was desperate, and his response to me was so powerful.

He said, “At Summit, we aren’t afraid of questions.” I know that life is complicated. I knew that. I knew that not everything has an easy answer. I knew that already. I knew that at 17. But what I didn’t know is that there were really interesting people who were exploring the big questions that I was interested in exploring, people who loved Jesus.

Eric Metaxas (48:44):
You summed it up, of course, brilliantly, what I said in 20 minutes, because that’s exactly right. If you have this confidence, God is real. He loves me. He’s a good God. Exploring reality, exploring truth, exploring all these things is fun. It’s actually fun. It’s a glorious enterprise. I’m not worried about the outcome. I really think that’s the posture we should adopt as believers, a kind of a joy in the search because we’ve answered the basics. So now, let’s talk about the details.

Dr. Jeff Myers (49:20):
Yeah. Well, thanks for demonstrating that for us. Eric, it’s great to see you and thanks for being on the show today.

Eric Metaxas (49:26):
It’s my privilege. I’m just glad to know you’re out there doing what you’re doing, proud of you and your work and Summit. So God bless you, my friend, and thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (49:35):
Thank you. A special thanks to my guest today, Eric Metaxas, for coming on the program. You can follow Eric Metaxas on Twitter. It’s @EricMetaxas and then you can also listen to the Eric Metaxas Show on the radio. You can find that at metaxastalk.com. You can see all of Eric’s books at ericmetaxas.com, wherever books are sold. I really recommend that you pick up this new book, Is Atheism Dead? It’s witty, it’s fun, it’s informative, and it will inspire you in your faith.

Listen, we talk about a lot of difficult topics on the Dr. Jeff Show, but ultimately, as Eric was pointing out at the end of the show, our goal is to winsomely point people to Christ. We know the truth and we know that the truth sets us free. We’ll see you next week.

(50:29):
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information.