The End of Atheism

Opening

A small item went round the news agencies that month, and struck many as a kind of fantasy: Antony Flew — the British philosopher who had carried the banner of philosophical atheism for half a century, author of the paper that founded modern atheism, Theology and Falsification (1950) — announced, at eighty-one, that he had come to believe in the existence of a God.

He was asked why. He offered no theological demonstration and no philosophical dialectic; he pointed instead to the laboratory. Research into DNA, he said, had disclosed in the arrangements of life a complexity that admits of no explanation but an ordering intelligence, one that brought these disparate elements together so that they might work as one. Three years later he set the matter out at length in a book whose title is itself a confession: There Is a God (2007).

A man who had taught generations that atheism is the default until evidence is produced against it was led, by the Socratic principle he had repeated all his life — “follow the evidence wherever it leads” — to acknowledge the Creator. That is the scene I begin from.

Two questions, not one

By the end of atheism I mean that atheism — considered as a rational case capable of being defended — has ended for good. Refusal, on the other hand, will last as long as desire lasts: “You do not guide whom you love.” [al-Qaṣaṣ: 56]

The difference between the two is fundamental. The first is a position whose holders claim it is the fruit of inquiry and inference; the second is a turning away from the result of inquiry after that result has been established. The Qurʾān distinguished them long ago, and with precision: “And they rejected them, though their own souls were certain of them, out of injustice and arrogance.” [al-Naml: 14] The trouble, then, is not in the intellect but in what lies behind it.

An indispensable preliminary

Those who have reasoned about the existence of God have divided — as I see it — along two paths: the path of abstract theological argument, which establishes the conclusion by rational demonstration; and the path of the observed, sensory sign, which looks at the created things standing before the eye. The Qurʾān addressed the people of both paths, and left neither of them an excuse.

First: the rational arguments

The Qurʾān does not begin by assuming what is to be proved, nor does it ask its opponent to concede anything at the outset. It advances tight syllogisms, most of them in the form of the rhetorical question that returns the opponent to what he already knows of himself, so that he finds no way out of it.

1. Inferring the second making from the first. “Say: He will give them life who produced them the first time, and He knows well every act of creation.” [Yā Sīn: 79] The force of it is that one who was able to produce a thing at the outset — with no prior model — is the more able to produce it again; and whoever concedes the harder case is bound by the easier. It is among the soundest of the analogies, and the closest to native intuition. Its counterpart: “And it is He who begins creation, then repeats it, and that is easier for Him.” [al-Rūm: 27]

2. The exhaustive division. This is the most remarkable thing in the whole subject: “Or were they created from nothing? Or are they themselves the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? No — they have no certainty.” [al-Ṭūr: 35–36]

The rational possibilities for the existence of a human being are three, and there is no fourth. Either he came to be with no one bringing him into being at all — and nothingness produces nothing. Or he created himself — which is more impossible still, since it requires that he exist before he existed. There remains only the third: that he has a creator who created him.

A complete logical enclosure, with no way out of it. And so, when Jubayr b. Muṭʿim heard these verses — a polytheist at the time, who had come to ransom the captives — he said: “My heart all but took flight.” (Reported by al-Bukhārī.) An Arab who had never read Aristotle grasped by native intuition that the argument had been made against him.

3. The argument from mutual exclusion. “Had there been in them gods besides God, the two would have gone to ruin.” [al-Anbiyāʾ: 22] And its exposition: “God has taken no son, nor was there ever with Him any god; else each god would have taken off with what he created, and some of them would have risen above others.” [al-Muʾminūn: 91] A plurality of independent wills entails the breakdown of order, and the regularity of order is evidence that the one who orders it is one. And this argument — for all its age — is exactly what physics says today when it finds a single law running through the farthest galaxies as it runs through the atom.

4. Binding a man by what he has already granted. “And if you ask them who created the heavens and the earth, they will surely say: God.” [Luqmān: 25] The Qurʾān extracts from its opponent an admission he makes of his own accord, then holds him to what follows from it — and in the craft of disputation that is stronger than establishing the proof from the beginning.

5. Returning the burden of proof. “Say: produce your evidence, if you are truthful.” [al-Baqara: 111] “You have no warrant for this.” [Yūnus: 68] The burden is returned to the one who denies, and his claim is exposed for what it is: “They follow nothing but conjecture, and conjecture avails nothing against the truth.” [al-Najm: 28]

6. Abraham's argument. A complete lesson in the craft of debate. He said, “My Lord is the one who gives life and death”; and Nimrod muddied it by answering, “I give life and death.” Abraham did not busy himself refuting the equivocation and arguing about it; he moved the debate onto ground that admits of no reinterpretation: “God brings the sun from the east — bring it then from the west” — and the disbeliever was confounded. [al-Baqara: 258] So too his course with the setting of the stars: “I do not love those that set” [al-Anʿām: 76] — for what is bounded and changing is unfit to be a god.

7. The argument from innate disposition. “And when they board a ship they call upon God, devoting their religion to Him alone; but when He delivers them to dry land, at once they associate others with Him.” [al-ʿAnkabūt: 65] This is a psychological observation of great exactness: denial collapses at the first moment of honesty with oneself, and returns with the first moment of safety and ease. And in it — if you consider — lies the explanation of why refusal survives the end of atheism.

8. The challenge to incapacity. “This is God's creation; show me then what those besides Him have created.” [Luqmān: 11] “Those you call upon besides God could not create a fly, even if they gathered together for it.” [al-Ḥajj: 73] And the challenge still stands: man has reached the point of reading the genome and editing it, and has not reached the point of beginning a life from nothing.

Second: the observed, sensory proofs

This is the dominant path in the Qurʾān. Its method is to bring forward what the person addressed sees with his own eyes every day, and overlooks the significance of through long familiarity — for heedlessness of a thing does not come of its being far off, but sometimes of its being near.

1. Looking at what is near at hand. “Do they not look at the camels, how they were created? And at the sky, how it was raised? And at the mountains, how they were set? And at the earth, how it was spread out?” [al-Ghāshiya: 17–20] And consider that it begins with the camel: the nearest thing to the Bedouin's eye, and the most inseparable from him. The proof, then, is scattered through the familiar, not through the remote and strange.

2. “Have you considered…” “Have you considered what you emit? Is it you who create it, or are We the creators?” “Have you considered what you sow? Is it you who make it grow, or are We the growers?” “Have you considered the water you drink? Is it you who sent it down from the clouds, or are We the senders?” [al-Wāqiʿa: 58–69]

The method is one in all three: you perform the outward act — you emit, you sow, you drink — and you possess nothing of the real act. The farmer sets the seed and does not make it germinate; the father sets the seed and does not make the man.

3. The stages of creation. “We created man from an extraction of clay; then We made him a drop in a secure lodging; then We made of the drop a clinging form, and of the clinging form a lump, and of the lump bones, and We clothed the bones with flesh; then We brought him forth as another creation. So blessed be God, the best of creators.” [al-Muʾminūn: 12–14] A proof recited to a people who knew nothing whatever of the embryo, which has today become the matter of a science standing on its own. And it is what is pointed to in two words: “And in yourselves — do you not see?” [al-Dhāriyāt: 21]

4. Divergence from identical inputs. This is among the subtlest things in the subject: “And in the earth are neighbouring plots, and gardens of vines, and crops, and palms sharing one root and not sharing one root, watered with a single water — and We make some of them excel others in what is eaten.” [al-Raʿd: 4]

One soil, one water, one sun — and then come fruits differing in taste and colour and scent. The difference, therefore, is not in the material inputs but in an internal programme that drives each plant to its own end. And that is what we came to call, fourteen centuries later, the genetic code.

5. The regularity of order. “It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor does the night outstrip the day; each is swimming in an orbit.” [Yā Sīn: 40] “You see no disproportion in the creation of the Merciful; look again — do you see any rifts?” [al-Mulk: 3] Regularity is not the work of chance; chance produces scattering, and disorder does not give birth to a law.

6. The signs in ourselves and in society. “And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your tongues and your colours.” [al-Rūm: 22] “And among His signs is that He created for you spouses from among yourselves, that you might find rest in them, and He put between you affection and mercy.” [al-Rūm: 21] The proof, then, is not confined to physics and biology; it extends into language, society and the inner life.

7. Precision in the small. “Does man suppose We shall not gather his bones? Indeed — We are able to shape his fingertips.” [al-Qiyāma: 3–4] The appeal is to the tip of the finger rather than to the rest of the body — and it emerged, centuries afterwards, that the fingerprint of any one of us is not repeated in any of billions of human beings.

8. The earthly cradle. “And We made the sky a guarded canopy, yet they turn away from its signs.” [al-Anbiyāʾ: 32] “And We made from water every living thing — will they not then believe?” [al-Anbiyāʾ: 30] And consider what follows: “yet they turn away from its signs” — the cause is declared from the very beginning: a turning away, not an absence of evidence.

Ibn Rushd anticipated something close to this division in al-Kashf ʿan manāhij al-adilla fī ʿaqāʾid al-milla. He criticised the methods of the theologians for standing too far from the understanding of ordinary people, and held that the Qurʾān's method of establishing the conclusion rests on two proofs: the proof from providence (ʿināya) — the sound ordering of the universe and its fitness for man's benefit — and the proof from invention (ikhtirāʿ) — the origination of creation on no prior model. Both are of the observed kind, not of the kind belonging to abstract dialectic.

And here a principle is settled for the discerning, on which what follows is built: the observed material proof, where it exists, dispenses with the theological one. Whoever has seen the mark of craftsmanship standing before him has no need of a syllogism to establish the craftsman for him.

When the sophists went bankrupt

When the theological argument had been established against the first of the obstinate, they found no refuge but in demanding material proof — which stood before their very eyes, though seduction veiled it from their sight. So they demanded the impossible:

In truth they are not asking for evidence of existence; they are asking that the veil be dropped — the veil on which the whole nature of the trial depends. And had they been granted what they asked, they would not have believed: “And had We opened to them a gate from heaven, and they kept ascending through it, they would have said: our eyes have been dazzled — no, we are a people bewitched.” [al-Ḥijr: 14–15] “And had We made him an angel, We would still have made him a man, and We would have confounded them in what they confound.” [al-Anʿām: 9] They see the sign with their own eyes, and then accuse their eyes rather than their position.

How should we deal with the one who refuses?

Atheism has fallen as a claim deserving discussion, and refusal will remain as long as the heavens and the earth remain. And the method for dealing with the one who refuses is clear: “So remind — you are only one who reminds; you are not set over them as a compeller.” [al-Ghāshiya: 21–22] “So turn away from them and wait — they too are waiting.” [al-Sajda: 30] The believer's task, then, is exposition and reminder, not coercion and superiority.

As for the doubt that visits one already certain, and the whispering the devil casts in, the Prophet — may God bless him and grant him peace — treated precisely this when he said that the devil comes to one of us and says: who created this? who created that? until he brings him to: who created your Lord? He then directed anyone whose obsessive whispering had reached that point to seek refuge in God and to stop. (Agreed upon by al-Bukhārī and Muslim.) The questioner who seeks guidance, then, is answered gently, as a small child is answered.

And there is another figure recurring in our own time, one of the instances of compound ignorance: young in years, his whole stock a novel he has read in English or Russian, who has not read the Qurʾān nor tried to reflect on it, and who then claims to doubt the existence of the Creator by way of disputation — I am not convinced, so convince me. If you wish to reason with him by logic you find he has no stock of that craft; and if you wish to explain to him by science you find he has none of that either. What difference is there — tell me honestly — between him and your own small child who asks you: who created God? and what does He eat? and what does He drink? Except that the child is excused by his youth, and this one chose ignorance of his own free will.

I do not think a Muslim should occupy himself with disputing such people at all; God has spared us the trouble by a promise He made binding upon Himself: “We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth.” [Fuṣṣilat: 53]

And He has done so, and kept His word. The signs of the horizons are uncovered every day in the observations of astronomy and the constants of the universe, and the signs in ourselves in the code of life and the stages of creation — for whoever “has a heart, or lends an ear and is present.” [Qāf: 37]

As for the compoundly ignorant — the man who does not know, and does not know that he does not know — there is no road open to him today but to teach himself and discipline himself. The signs are laid out, and the doors are open; the obstacle is in him, not in the evidence.

The scene today

The “New Atheism” whose clamour rose after the events of September 2001, with its four horsemen — Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett — broke apart within a single decade as a movement, and its people scattered into factions.

Indeed Richard Dawkins himself, author of The God Delusion, in which he made religion a malignant and divisive force, came out in an interview in 2024 describing himself as a “cultural Christian”: he loves hymns and Christmas carols, he is at home in the Christian atmosphere, and he regards his country as a “Christian country” in that sense — while declaring at the same time that he does not believe a word of the creed.

And this, though it is not faith, is a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole project: a man who spent his life cutting down the tree, then came back to shelter in its shade and eat of its fruit, while denying the trunk that bore them both.

The fuller admission, though, is Flew's — the one I opened with. He stated plainly that a surpassing intelligence is the only convincing explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature. Then modern physics opened another door onto the observed: “fine-tuning” — cosmic constants which, had they deviated by a hair's breadth, would have left no life, no matter and no stars. And that is precisely what is pointed to: “He who created seven heavens in layers. You see no disproportion in the creation of the Merciful; look again — do you see any rifts?” [al-Mulk: 3]

The evidence is the evidence

And here are the telescopes roaming the regions of the heavens and the earth — “O company of jinn and men, if you can pass beyond the regions of the heavens and the earth, then pass; you will not pass except by an authority” [al-Raḥmān: 33] — and they return from their journeys with no report but that of a sound and regular order: single laws running through the near galaxy as they run through the farthest thing man has observed, and constants set to a fine limit. And in none of this is there anything resembling blind chance.

On the other side, the life sciences have disclosed that every living thing is no less complex and no less inventive than what the probes carry back of the news of the universe: a single cell containing factories, transporters, correction systems and quality control beyond the most complex thing men have built, and a genetic code that is read, copied, translated and corrected. “And in yourselves — do you not see?” [al-Dhāriyāt: 21]

And the verse has stood unmoved as it was: “Do they not look at the camels, how they were created? And at the sky, how it was raised?” The evidence is the evidence; it has not changed and nothing has been put in its place. The discoveries have only added to its force, its clarity and its eloquence.

The Bedouin used to look at his camel and see a sign; and we look today at the genome of that camel, and at the structure of its kidney and its lung, and see the same sign in finer detail. The lens has changed; what is looked at has not.

A debate from the tradition

Among the most telling things related on this subject is a debate ascribed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq with an atheist physician. He advanced to him no theological demonstration and no composite syllogism; he led him instead to the limits of his own perception, question after question:

Consider how the matter ended. The man's claim was not overturned by a syllogism; he was led to admit that his claim was not knowledge — and so his certainty dissolved into “I do not know.” And this is exactly the returning of the burden of proof set out above: “Say: produce your evidence, if you are truthful.” Whoever possesses only a slight portion of knowledge has no business issuing a universal verdict on what he has not reached.

And it is — if you look at it — the same gradual movement we watch today with our own eyes: from positive denial to agnosticism. A physician took that road in the second century, so the report says, and the leading men of the age took it in the twenty-first.

It is also related of him that he said to Ibn Abī al-ʿAwjāʾ: if the matter is as you say — and it is not as you say — we are safe and you are safe; and if the matter is as we say — and it is as we say — we are safe and you are ruined. This weighing anticipated by centuries what came to be known in the West as Pascal's Wager. And it is — for all its cogency as a binding argument — a plea of self-interest under uncertainty, not a demonstration of existence; its place in this essay is the place of a closing moral note, after the evidence has been established, not the place of the evidence itself.

Conclusion

Atheism has ended as a case, and remains as refusal. You will not find today an atheist in the old, categorical sense; the leading men of that camp have retreated from positive denial to “agnosticism,” and from agnosticism to a cultural nostalgia for religion — and some of them crossed the bridge entirely, as Flew did.

One matter remains to be settled. The study of sound logic — the principles of inference, the rules of division, induction and analogy, and the checking of conclusions for validity — is an indispensable necessity for understanding science itself. Whoever has not mastered the instruments of inference will not read an experiment well, nor criticise a hypothesis, nor tell evidence from assertion.

As for what branched off from this in former times under the name of ʿilm al-kalām — I mean abstract dialectic about establishing existence and its entailments by purely mental syllogisms — it discharged its function in its own age, and came to an end with the development of tangible material science. To study it today is a historical study, by which we understand how the earliest thinkers thought; it is not a study necessary for making an argument. And there is a difference between learning logic in order to think well, and learning the questions of the theologians in order to fight with them a battle that is over.

Nor does anyone today need to debate those who refuse by means of an abstract rational argument, while the sensory evidence stands there before him. Imagine a man standing in front of you, hearing your voice and seeing your face, and then saying: give me the logical proof that you exist. What could you possibly do with him? Would you set about constructing a syllogism to establish your own existence, while you stand there talking to him?

Such is the state of one who asks for a theological demonstration of the Creator, while the signs surround him on every side: in the self between his own two flanks, and in the universe over which he casts his eye.

And as long as refusal remains, our method remains: “So remind — you are only one who reminds.” We remind whoever listens, and turn away from whoever turns away; and the argument stands there in plain view — in the camels and the sky and the mountains and the earth, and in the code of life and the constants of the universe — for whoever lends an ear and is present.

❊ ❊ ❊

Sources for review

• Antony Flew & Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (HarperOne, 2007) — containing his statement: “I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence”.
• Flew's statement to the news agencies (December 2004): a super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life, and he described himself as a Deist in the manner of Jefferson.
• Richard Dawkins's interview with Rachel Johnson, LBC radio, 31 March 2024 — the “cultural Christian” remark.
• Ibn Rushd, al-Kashf ʿan manāhij al-adilla fī ʿaqāʾid al-milla — the proof from providence and the proof from invention.
• The ḥadīth of the whispering, “who created your Lord… let him seek refuge in God and stop”: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (3276) and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (134).
• The report of Jubayr b. Muṭʿim hearing Sūrat al-Ṭūr: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (4854).

On the links above: al-Kashf ʿan manāhij al-adilla is an open scan on the Internet Archive; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (the Sultanic edition) and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (in ʿAbd al-Bāqī's numbering) are full texts with print pagination on al-Maktaba al-Shāmila. Flew's book is a library lending scan and needs a free account — there is no free copy of it, and the complete uploads of it breach copyright, so they are not linked here. Flew's announcement is the Associated Press report as carried by NBC, and the Dawkins interview is given through a press report quoting his words, since LBC does not make the episode's recording freely available.

This is a translation of an essay written in Arabic. Quotations from the Qurʾān are rendered for sense; the Arabic page carries them in the original.

© 2026 Husain Alkhaldy — published in the site's essays.