I'll begin with an acknowledgement that this book was obviously not intended as a deep or academic exploration of atheism or religious belief, and that any attempt to pick it apart in detail (as I shall attempt to do shortly) is probably fated to come across as a little excessive and self-indulgent. Plainly this book was intended as a kind of spiritual bromide for people who already consider themselves to be Christians, and there is probably little that I or anyone else could say which is capable of undermining its effect in that regard. Neither this book nor this review is going to change anyone's mind about anything, and so I sympathise with anyone who comes to the conclusion that I'm wasting my time by attempting to engage with it at such length. Nonetheless, the fact that this book has received glowing reviews and plentiful across conservative media outlets, and the fact that it currently has an average rating of 4.57 on goodreads, was enough to motivate me to read it and to contribute, in my own small way, to a discussion which until now appears to be dominated by people who happened to join that site at around the same time this book was published.
To start with the obvious, this is not a good book. At its absolute best this book is bland and inoffensive, at its absolute worst it is mendacious to an extent that I can only describe as shocking, but for the most part it is most aptly described as shallow and lazy. Anyone who has been exposed to conservative, Evangelical apologetics will doubtless already be familiar with most of the arguments in this book, and Metaxas is not skilled enough as an author or nimble enough as a thinker to present or elaborate upon these arguments in any meaningful or interesting way. Rhetorically, Metaxas depends heavily on implicature and question-begging, assuming (perhaps correctly) that since the bulk of his readers already share his mindset, there is little reason to bring any of his arguments to full term, leaving the book littered with ideas that can most charitably be described as ill-formed and underdeveloped. This frequently takes the form of using rhetorical questions in lieu of any explicit argumentation, as exemplified by the following barrage addressed to his mental construct of Richard Dawkins in chapter 25:
On the one hand he says we are essentially robots, amazingly constructed by chance through natural selection. On the other hand we are able to create and appreciate things of ineffable beauty and mystery. But if scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, how are we to appreciate the aforementioned artists? What is art that Dawkins should be mindful of it? And the creators of that art, that he should praise them? And what is Socrates’s much-vaunted ideal of “self-knowledge” but unscientific fluff borne to us by Zephyrus from the myth-filled world of pagan antiquity? And what is that invisible thing called “wisdom,” hailed by millennia of human beings, if not a mere hardware glitch yet to be naturally selected by some genetic Mengele for death? Shall not such things be reckoned worthless and disposable because they dare to exist beyond the gleaming palisades of “science”?"
The tacit logic appears to be that these questions are so incisive that they can permit no coherent answer at all, but it speaks volumes to Metaxas' lack of intellectual curiosity that he does not appear at all interested in pursuing how atheists can and have addressed such topics throughout history, and to address himself to those specific claims instead. At no point does Metaxas exhibit even the most cursory knowledge of the ideas and philosophies that atheists have espoused over the centuries, much less does he attempt to seriously or sincerely engage with them. In fact, despite devoting long, indignant swathes of his book to "the New Atheists", he appears to be distinctly uninterested in what any of them have actually had to say. At no point, to my knowledge, does he ever directly reference any of the major works produced by the so-called "Four Horsemen" (God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, or Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett) and his chapter-long denouncement of Dawkins appears to be based entirely on a 14-page essay written by Dawkins in 2007. That is not to say that "the New Atheist" literature is particularly enlightening or challenging fare, nor that it should be taken as representative of atheistic thought, merely to say that if you're going to spend a third of a book explicitly attacking the ideas of certain people, you should at the very minimum be familiar with what those people have actually said.
Consequent to his lack of intellectual curiosity and egregious lack of research (which we will get into shortly), we should not be surprised to find that most of his arguments appear to be addressed to a vague and amorphous "they", a loose collective of ideological opponents who appear to lack any distinctive purposes or convictions. Across all three parts of the book, those authorities - archaeologists, scientists, philosophers etc. - who do not share Metaxas' view that there exists overwhelming evidence for the existence of God are conflated into a single hive-mind marching under the banner of 'New Atheism'. He, for instance, hand-waves away cosmological speculations about the existence of the multiverse as being motivated by the conviction that "the idea of a world fine-tuned by some Creator was simply too unpleasant to consider", resulting in "the New Atheists... [fleeing] into that realm of pseudo-philosophy we call wishful thinking" (chapter 3), as though string theory and brane cosmology were just invented by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris on a whim one day.
On the other hand, he predictably cites sympathetic authorities with unbounded credulity and an often deceptive lack of transparency about their credentials. Those 'authorities' whom he cites as brave, independently-thinking experts invariably turn out to be unqualified ideologues upon even the most cursory of examinations. For example, most of his arguments from Chapter 7 - which is focused primarily on the supposed 'impossibility' of non-theistic origins of life - are taken from the work of Dr. James Tour, a supposedly well-credentialed scientific authority on the subject. It should surprise none to find out that Dr. Tour is an Evangelical Christian who is intimately involved with the Discovery Institute (an organisation founded to advance the cause of creationism and its various offshoots), and whose scientific work - so far as I have been able to establish - has nothing to do with biology, or even with organic chemistry.
Similarly, in chapter 18 he presents the case for what he sees as the historic destruction of Sodom at the hands of God, with all of his evidence for this claim coming from the work of a single 'archaeologist', Dr. Steven Collins. What he of course fails to mention here is that his intrepid 'archaeologist' received his doctorate from an unaccredited Evangelical institution of higher education, and that he is currently the dean of another unaccredited Evangelical institution of higher education. Metaxas also fails to mention that Collins' theories have won virtually no support from other archaeologists, and that he has been accused of a number of academic malpractices, including photoshopping images from the sites and operating without proper permits. My point is not to suggest that ideologically committed people cannot be right about anything ever, merely to highlight the double-standard that Metaxas repeatedly succumbs to: people who agree with him are all ideologically compromised sheep who only say what they do out of hatred God, whereas all of those who agree with him are unimpeachable, clear-thinking authorities who have been unfairly sidelined in scientific discourse.
The book itself is divided into three parts. The first part covers 'scientific' evidence for the existence of God (primarily devoted to so-called 'fine-tuning' arguments), the second part covers 'archaeological' evidence for the veracity of the Bible, and the third part is a grab-bag of resentment and innuendo directed loosely at 'atheists', where this book really begins to plumb the depths of sleaze. I will not attempt to 'debunk' the arguments he presents here (though some debunking is unavoidable), but rather attempt to restrict myself to critiquing the kinds of arguments and strategies that Metaxas employs.
Part I
The first part of the book, as we have said, attempts to marshal contemporary scientific evidence for the existence of the God, with most of the heavy-lifting being done by 'fine-tuning' arguments, which suggest that many of the fundamental values of the universe are so precisely configured to support the emergence of life (or, at least, those cosmic structures upon which life depends) that they could only the product of a divine creator. Or, at least that's what fine-tuning arguments should be about. In Metaxas' treatment of the issue, we don't have 'arguments' so much as we have a paean to Metaxas' own sense of incredulity and scandalisation over the low probabilities of certain universal values which are necessary for the emergence of life (let us say, the weight of a proton) being what they in fact are.
Without seeking to debunk 'fine-tuning' arguments more generally, I will start by saying that merely pointing to the 'improbability' of something happening does absolutely nothing, in itself, to strengthen the case for the existence of God (much less a specifically Christian conception of God). Overwhelmingly improbable things happen every day and we do not ordinarily view them as evidence for divine intervention. If you go to a random number generator and generate a 100 digit number, the odds of that particular number being generated are astronomically small (far smaller than most of the odds discussed in this part of the book), yet there does not appear to be anything about that number existing which demands a supernatural explanation.
Moreover, even if we do accept the central conceit of fine-tuning arguments (that the occurrence of a truly improbable event really does demand a supernatural explanation), there is still no a priori reason to assume that this 'ultimate explanation' must resemble traditional theistic conceptions of divinity. In fact, all we could really say about the 'supernatural force' necessitated by fine-tuning arguments is that this force just happens to be particularly good at creating universes like the one we live in for some reason: it tells us little else about what kind of properties this force might have. It might be a blind, dumb, impersonal supernatural force (e.g. something like 'karma' or the 'tao' might be sufficient to explain why our universe is the way it is, even though I don't think such concepts are typically employed in a cosmological context) or it might be even be totally a natural force (e.g. the multiverse theory appears to do a good job of accounting for universal 'fine-tuning' without resorting to the ostentatious metaphysics of theism). Of course, further arguments can be added to the fine-tuning arguments to show why a theistic explanation is superior to explanations which depend on karmic cycles or multiverses, but these arguments must actually be made, not merely implied.
Metaxas, predictably, doesn't bother supplying these arguments. Part I of this book is therefore little more than an extended tribute to 'the God of the Gaps', where scientific uncertainty and any putative gaps in scientific knowledge are presented as de facto proof for the existence of God. Metaxas does nothing here but cite his personal incredulity about the improbabilities of various facets of the physical world, with the understanding that the target audience will abduct to the inference that 'God' - according to their own idiosyncratic understandings of that floating signifier - must be responsible. But no attempt is ever made to define this being, nor does Metaxas ever explicitly spell out for the reader the kind of being that the 'evidence' purportedly demonstrates. This book exists purely to salve theistic consciences, not to change minds.
Consider chapter 6, where Metaxas subjects the famous Urey-Miller experiment on abiogenesis to scientific scrutiny. As he correctly point out, many of the assumptions undergirding this experiment (e.g. the kinds of elements which were present in the Earth's early atmosphere) proved to be mistaken, and there are therefore some doubts about how much it can tell us about how life may have first formed. However, Metaxas presents this 70 year-old study as the final and definitive word on abiogenesis, as though nothing else on the topic of abiogenesis has been published since. One more, the mere existence of scientific failure or scientific ignorance is just posited, without commentary or elaboration, as indirect proof for the claims of conservative Christianity. This deification of lacunae is not merely an impoverished view of science, but an impoverished view of divinity.
In some cases, the fetishisation of improbability and coincidence is taken to absurd extremes. Take in, if you can, this discussion of eclipses in chapter 3:
"How is it that the sun and moon happen to fit over each other so very precisely during these eclipses? Why do they match up as though they were made to do that? When one knows the circumstances and details of all the other planets in our solar system, the whole thing seems even stranger. Nothing close to this happens on any other planet. So if one aspires to be a dedicatedly rational person, one can’t help suspect that perhaps this isn’t mere coincidence. It just seems too perfect and too strange. But there it is. Who can help but wonder whether these things are not accidental or coincidental? Can it be that this outlandish and happy oddity was actually intended—and just for us?"
All of Metaxas' deficiencies as a writer and thinker are on display in this passage. Rhetorical questions, rather than explicit argumentation, do all the heavy-lifting. Personal incredulity is projected into the heavens and hypostastised as a fairly crude instance of divine agency. Arguments are half formed - the relative sizes of the sun and moon "are not accidental or coincidental", apparently, but how else Metaxas wishes us to understand these facts (as a divine sign of... something?) is never made clear. Only those who wish desperately to be impressed by this kind of argumentation could ever find themselves impressed by this kind of argumentation.
Part II
Part II is where this book is most consistently able to reach the dizzying heights of being bland and inoffensive. Metaxas here focuses on archaeological evidence for the Bible, with most of the text devoted to recounting stories of how certain archaeological discoveries were made. These accounts, so far as I can tell, are relatively unembellished and true to history, so if you're interested in knowing the stories behind the personalities who discovered the Dead Sea scrolls, or who first started excavating Hittite sites in the 19th century, then this part of the book is almost competent enough to serve that purpose. I will stress the word "almost" there, though, because most of the issues I've discussed which plague the rest of the book also crop up here.
Once more, Metaxas frames the field of Biblical archaeology as a Manichean theatre of struggle between mendacious, ideologically compromised skeptics, who are simply desperate to dismiss any evidence which might appear to suggest that any part of the Biblical text is true, and brave, plucky truth seekers, who have successfully revealed Earth-shattering truths to the world despite their ongoing oppression at the hands of snooty academics. It should not surprise anyone to learn that this is the exact opposite of the truth (it is only comparatively recently that Biblical archaeology has managed to graduate from being a branch of Jewish and Christian apologetics - with uncredentialed men running around the desert "with a trowel in one hand and a Bible the other" - into a serious discipline) but it is a fiction that Metaxas is required to maintain, here moreso than anywhere else in the book, for two main reasons.
The first reason is that most of the archaeological findings he 'reveals' here are relatively banal, lending credence only to obscure and peripheral aspects of the Biblical text, and do nothing to support any of its more extraordinary claims. As such, Metaxas is pressed into inventing a cabal of Biblical denialists who found themselves very much scandalised and embarrassed by the archaeological revelation that there was indeed a King Omri who reigned in the northern kingdom of Israel in the 9th century BCE, just as the book of 1 Kings said there was (see chapter 9). But for the vicarious little thrill he gives his more credulous readers at seeing imaginary opponents tripping up on their own hubris, most of the content of this part of the book is fated to come across as underwhelming at best, as pathetic and desperate at worst (such as Metaxas' crowing in chapter 17 about how the archaeological discovery of Ur shows us that the Bible is "an accurate historical record of the events, people, and places it depicts", based solely on fact that this city is referenced in the narrative of Abraham).
The second reason Metaxas needs to invent a narrative of 'snooty skeptic' versus 'intrepid truth seeker' is because otherwise he would have no way of explaining why some of his more extraordinary claims - such as his claim that we have discovered evidence of the city of Sodom meeting a fiery doom, or Jesus' house being unearthed - have not been accepted by mainstream archaeologists, or more widely publicised. We have already discussed the 'controversies' (to put it as euphemistically as possible) surrounding the 'discovery' of Sodom, but consider here how he frames the publication of the archaeological study which, in Metaxas' telling, succeed in excavating Jesus' house:
An article about it appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review in 2015, although that itself was oddly tentative. Even so, nothing more was said on the subject since, as though the discovery of the actual home where the Holy Family lived wasn’t worth looking into or was a subject too embarrassing for serious archaeologists. Only in late 2020 did Dr. Dark publish the book containing the findings of his continued excavations since 2006, but the book cannot help but strike one as almost calculated to hide the discovered pearl of great price, instead bizarrely focusing on the nesting wooden boxes in which the superlative pearl had been found.(Chapter 16)
Here, the fact that archaeologists working on excavations in Nazareth failed to claim that they had discovered Jesus' house is explained as a "calculated" bid to suppress an embarrassing finding, rather than as a consequence of the more obvious possibility that the archaeologists didn't have any solid scientific reason to believe that they had discovered the home of Jesus in the first place. As with most of his conservative brethren, when the facts of the matter don't line-up with his preconceptions, Metaxas simply casually declares the existence of some grand conspiracy and moves on as quickly as possible to the next talking-point before anyone is able to ask "how" or "why".
Elsewhere, he attempts to lean on the Biblical text itself as evidence for God, but his ignorance of Biblical scholarship ensures he once more falls flat on his face. He insists, for example, that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls validates the integrity of the Biblical text owing to the fact that "what we possess today as our own Bible is precisely the same as what existed then" (chapter 11). He predictably inflates the significance of this fact once more to a self-parodying degree:
Never in human history has an observed absence of change so instantly and dramatically changed everything. This discovery within the larger discovery was the earth-shaking bombshell of the whole affair. Despite the unfounded but stubborn rumors that the Bible 'had been changed' over the centuries, this unexpected evidence at last proved the opposite. As anyone could see—and as clearly as anyone might have hoped—the ancient Hebrew Scriptures had been copied with a perfectly extraordinary faithfulness over the centuries.
Firstly, it should not escape our attention that this is untrue: the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls do differ from other textual traditions. Secondly, the claims that the Bible "had been changed" over the centuries, is - unfortunately for Metaxas - more than just an "unfounded and stubborn rumor", and is in fact fairly well-known and easy to demonstrate. In the case of the OT, there exist two manuscript families referred to as the 'Masoretic Text' (MT) which has been preserved in the Hebrew language, and the 'Septuagint' (LXX) which has been preserved in the Greek language, and each of these manuscript traditions differ greatly at some points. What we have today as the Old Testament in English is essentially a compromise between the two traditions, in which scholars attempt to reconstruct what they believe the original text to have been by deciding, on an almost passage-by-passage basis, whether the MT or the LXX are more likely to have preserved the original tradition. In the case of the New Testament, the situation is probably worse. Bart Ehrman notes that we possess thousands of different manuscripts of books from the NT and that no two are identical, and that - in fact - there are probably more differences between the manuscripts than there are words in the NT. Contrary to Metaxas' considerable bluster, the Bible has actually changed a lot.
In other places, he attempts to defend the accuracy of the Bible by employing his dependable, fall-back tactic of appealing to his personal sense of incredulity and then just sort of abandoning the argument halfway through, as though he just got bored of the argument and wanted to move as quickly as possible onto something else. He, for example, suggests that Jesus'prophecy about the destruction of the Temple must be a genuine, divinely-inspired prediction of the future because "anyone who has read the gospels realizes that for many reasons they simply cannot have been written after the Destruction of Jerusalem" (chapter 11). Obviously, he never attempts to elaborate on what these "many reasons" are. In chapter 12, he suggests that the story in John 21 about Peter and Jesus capturing 153 fish must be true, because Metaxas can think of no reason why the author would have used the number 153 unless that was the exact number of fish that Peter and Jesus had actually caught that day. (Does he think Peter and Jesus sat there and counted them all, so that the true number could be reported in the Gospel of John 60 years later?) He then suggests that the enigmatic story of boy in linen fleeing naked from Mark 14:51-52 must be a reflection of eye-witness accounts because there is no other reason for Mark to have included this detail - I mean, what?
Part III
However, it's in the third part of the book (with its apropos title of "What is Truth?") that Metaxas' lazy flailing begins to lose all its charm, and starts to become offensive.
It starts off inconspicuously enough with a litany of routine apologetic fare. Chapter 19 is a cliched and unoriginal attack on 'new atheism' (or, rather, a cliched and unoriginal attack on Metaxas' imaginary conception of what 'new atheism' must be) in which all of the old, worn-out favourites are trotted out in print one more time. We learn that atheists promote "absolutely nothing... even nihilism"; that if the atheists are right and "there really is no God, then it surely follows that there is no order or meaning in the universe... what does any of it matter?"; and that "atheists are so unaccountably tortured by even the possibility that there might be a God that they cannot so much as admit the possibility". Ho hum.
In chapter 20 we finally get around to the argument that Nazism, communism etc. are evidence of the intrinsic evil of the atheistic worldview. "Once you get rid of God," he writes, "you get rid of the idea that human beings have any inherent dignity or worth. It’s unavoidable, and what happens in places where those ideas disappeared amounts to perhaps the most monstrous evil in all of human history." In a way, I almost admire his restraint in waiting 20 chapters to compare all atheists to Hitler and Stalin - but what about all of those religious people who have acted in deference to evil throughout history? "[T]hose acting in the name of religion at least ostensibly took human life so seriously that they rarely did the worst of what they did in the indiscriminate way that atheists did. Even the most evil actors 'in God’s name' were somehow restrained." I'm sure the victims of ISIS will be much reassured that their oppressors were "somehow restrained" while embarking on their spree of apocalyptic violence.
In chapter 24, we encounter the common apologetic technique of insisting that everything that cannot be exhaustively explained through a reductionist, scientific worldview must, pro tanto, be attributable to the existence of God. "[Dawkins] must realize 'beauty' and 'being moved to tears' can have no part in a life dedicated to a strict materialist atheistic philosophy," Metaxas writes. He never bothers to explain why he believes this to be the case, though, so I'm not sure it's worth my explaining why it certainly isn't the case. In chapter 26, he insists that "science as we know it arose only in Western Christendom in the late Middle Ages and flourished in the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in what we now call the Scientific Revolution." He, of course, fails here to explain why nothing particularly like the scientific method emerged in the first 1600 years of Western Christendom, or why proto-scientific thought emerged in Classical Greece, imperial China, the so-called "golden age" of Islam, or as far back as the ancient Babylonian astronomers and mathemeticians. I suppose that such a discussion might be too interesting for someone just needs to churn out a book as quickly and effortlessly as possible in order to make a quick buck.
It's in chapter 21 that the banality finally gives way to something more insidious, though, as Metaxas strives to show us that many so-called atheists actually repudiated their atheism and "found God" at some point in their lives, usually when they were on the verge of death. Firstly, I've always found this genre of narrative to be a very strange preoccupation of apologeticists. Even if people like Anthony Flew really did repudiate their atheism, how is that any more evidence for the existence of God than the millions of people who fall out of faith every year are evidence for atheism? Secondly, it should not surprise anyone to learn that most of the accounts here are blatantly untrue. I will especially focus here on his account of the renunciations of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, since these two men happen to be intellectual heroes of mine, and my interest was very much piqued when a read in an internet review that this book contained some startling revelations about the two existentialists' hidden faith. Might there have been some key aspect of their lives which I had either overlooked, or which all subsequent existentialist scholarship had suppressed out of embarrassment?
No.
His account of Albert Camus' journey into religious faith reads like the hackiest of hack fiction, as it more or less parallels the plot of "God's Not Dead". Camus, a life-long atheist, is presented as a man plagued by doubts, and as struggling to find meaning despite his public professions of the ultimate "absurdity" of our godless universe. During this time, he befriends a pastor and begins attending his sermons. Metaxas says that Camus explained himself to the priest as follows:
"I’m almost on a pilgrimage—seeking something to fill the void that I am experiencing, and no one else knows. Certainly the public, and the readers of my novels, while they see that void, are not finding the answers in what they are reading. But deep down, you are right. I am searching for something that the world is not giving me…"
By 1959, one year before Camus' untimely death (you can probably see where this is going), Camus apparently confided these thoughts in his new friend:
"Since I have been reading the Bible I sense that there is something—I don’t know if it is personal or if it is a great idea or powerful influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life. I certainly don’t have it, but it is there. On Sunday mornings I hear that the answer is God…. You have made it very clear to me on Sunday mornings, Howard, that we are not the only ones in this world. There is something that is invisible. We may not hear the voice, but there is some way in which we can come aware that we are not the only ones in the world and that there is help for all of us."
The two made provisional plans for Camus to be baptised, with Camus apparently insisting that "I want this. This is what I want to commit my life to," and "I am going to keep striving for the faith." Sadly, according to Metaxas:
Camus would never be baptized nor have the time to write about what had transpired in his heart and mind, because only a few months later—on January 4, 1960—he was riding in the passenger seat of his publisher’s Facel Vega sportscar, speeding toward Paris... [when] on a long and wide stretch of road the car veered into a plane tree. He was killed instantly, at the age of forty-six.
Now, all of this would be a pretty big deal if it were true (the religious stuff, I mean; not the car crash) so what sources can Metaxas provide to back-up this earth-shattering revelation? Just one: the memoirs of the pastor from the above narrative. The memoirs (entitled Albert Camus & the Minister) were written in the year 2000, some 40 years after these conversations had supposedly taken place, and when the pastor (whose name was Howard Mumma) was 90 years old. Not a single other person close to Camus ever reported on his supposed nascent faith, and there is no evidence to suggest that Mumma ever met Camus, much less that he had been successful in convincing him to be baptised. The book is shot through with basic inaccuracies about Camus' life and obviously there is absolutely no independent corroboration for any of the claims Mumma makes in the book. Of course, Metaxas never makes any of this dubiousness clear in his breathless and utterly credulous recounting of the narrative, for which he deserves to be condemned: to report such self-serving hearsay as bald fact is one step removed from lying.
Do not despair, though, for Metaxas takes that final step into unambiguous, bald-faced lying when recounting the "conversion" of Jean-Paul Sartre. According to Metaxas, in the last year of his life (1980), Sartre "found God", on his deathbed "confessed his sins and came into the Church", and declared fairly unequivocally to the world that:
"I don’t feel I am the product of Chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being that could be here thanks only to a Creator. And this idea about a creator is referring to God."
In an uncharacteristic bout of scholarly panache, Metaxas here provides us with two sources for Sartre's conversion. The first is an interview Sartre conducted with his assistant, a young Marxist by the name of Benny Lévy, and the second we will get to in a moment. With respect to the first source, that interview certainly happened, and it certainly was noteworthy for the fact that a then ailing, blind and tired Sartre, just weeks from death, appeared to relay some diffidence and even outright cynicism about his earlier political and philosophical commitments. Unfortunately for Metaxas, the interview almost never touches on the topic of religion (apart from Sartre making a brief aside about his admiration for the revolutionary zeal of Jewish apocalypticism) and certainly never repudiates his own atheism. In his recounting of this narrative, Metaxas slyly attempts to conflate the (real) scandal of Sartre's last interview with the (unreal) scandal of Sartre's finding God, but properly the two have nothing to do with one another. So where does the idea of Sartre "finding God" come from if not from his last interview?
I mentioned a second source, and this is where you'll probably need to take a seat. I want to remind you before I continue that this is a book that has been published by a real publisher, and which was presumably reviewed and edited before being committed to print, and that the publisher has an address which can presumably be readily found by lawyers representing the estate of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ready? Metaxas' sole source for the incredible conversion of one of history's most famous atheists to the Catholic faith - and which he proudly cites in one of his footnotes - is a comment made on a random Catholic blog post from 11 years ago. Not even a blog post, mind: a comment made on a blog post. Even by the low standards Metaxas has evinced throughout the rest of the book, that is fucking appallingly lazy and dishonest.
But it gets worse. The above quote in which Sartre says that he is "not the product of chance" appears to have been made up out of whole cloth by Metaxas himself. The footnote he appends to the quote suggests it comes from the above blog post, but it certainly doesn't appear anywhere there. A quick google search tells me that the quote, in fact, doesn't appear anywhere in the universe except in this book. He made it up. He lied. One of the most sensational, noteworthy aspects of his book and it's just total bullshit. What a clown.
And now that I've spent more time writing this review than Metaxas spent writing this book I'm finally done. I've had enough. All in all, this book sucks and I recommend it to no-one.
