Monday, May 3, 2021

COVID Lockdown-Induced Despair Results in a Loss of Belief in God

By Stephen C. Meyer

Psychologist Adam Grant, writing recently in The New York Times, describes how many Americans are "languishing" without a sense of meaning or purpose as the result of prolonged Covid-induced social isolation. But Covid lockdowns may not be the only reason that people now feel their lives lack meaning and purpose.

For decades, leading scientists, professors, and New Atheist writers, have insisted that we live in a purposeless universe that "did not have us in mind." As Richard Dawkins contends, "the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design... nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Similarly, physicist Steven Weinberg concludes, "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." The U.S. teen suicide epidemic, among other social pathologies, suggests that young people have especially imbibed this science-based atheism and its depressing implications.

In my new book, Return of the GOD Hypothesis: Three Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, I challenge this view. The Covid lockdowns have indeed surfaced an underlying despair in our culture, but that despair derives ultimately from a loss of belief in God and a consequent loss of human significance. Yet, the 'death of God' at the hands of modern science turns out to have been 'greatly exaggerated.' Scientific evidence, far from establishing a universe driven only by blind materialistic forces, now points to a transcendent intelligence, a purposeful creator who did - and does - have us in mind.

Return of the GOD Hypothesis has already made USA Today and Publisher's Weekly national bestseller lists and received endorsements from many leading scientists, including a Nobel Laureate in physics from Cambridge University.

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