Is Atheism Dead?

The following is an exclusive excerpt from Is Atheism Dead? by Eric Metaxas, available October 19 from Salem Books. 

In 1996, an Albuquerque scientist named Steven Collins was in a modest hotel room in the Israeli city of Arad, on the bleak southwestern side of the Dead Sea. Dr. Collins was a field archaeologist and ceramic typologist who had spent many years studying the millennia-old vessels buried throughout the Middle East. He was also a Christian who believed the Bible was a reliable source of history, and was leading a group on a Bible tour of Israel. But what lay ahead of the group the next day gave him an uneasy feeling. Being a scientist, he was especially careful about making claims, and hated seeing other tour guides say things he knew to be mere speculation. 

On the docket the next day were what scholars said were the sites of the biblical cities Sodom and Gomorrah. But Dr. Collins was aware of some of the discrepancies concerning these sites. These things hadn’t nagged at him before, but for some reason now they did. So to better prepare himself for the next day, he opened the Book of Genesis and reread the biblical accounts. But reading these words with an actual view of the land to which they referred, he became confused. According to what he was now reading, what everyone had for many decades accepted as the locations for these ancient cities simply couldn’t be right. How had he missed this before? Why certain views harden and become the consensus, never to be questioned, is one of the themes of this book. For Dr. Collins to find himself questioning the consensus about these locations was difficult. Back in the latter part of the nineteenth century most top biblical and archaeological scholars had believed precisely what Collins was at that minute wondering about. As he was now doing, they had read the biblical text and had without any question understood that the location of these fabled cities must be somewhere northeast of the Dead Sea, in what was called the Kikkar Plain, a verdant area surrounding the southernmost part of the Jordan River. That’s simply what the text said. There were many other questions to be answered about Sodom and Gomorrah, but their location—along with the other cities of the Kikkar Plain—was not disputed. 

But in the twentieth century this changed. That’s because a