An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist

An up and coming philosophy student takes a second look at the evidence for God

Richard Dawkins once said that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Why wasn’t it possible before, according to Dawkins?

Because prior to the theory of evolution, atheists couldn’t explain the complexity and apparant design of biological systems. They had to hunker down and hope for an explanation to be discovered in the future. In the meantime, they had to live with the fact that their position prevented them from accepting the best available explanation: that these systems were designed by a higher intelligence.

But after evolution, atheists enjoyed a period of euphoric certainty; at last, everything could be clearly and elegantly explained in naturalistic terms.¹ Unfortunately for them, this period of certainty was short lived. Modern physics introduced an avalanche of confounding mysteries. And old fashioned philosophical conundrums continued to stick around.

Enter Matthew Adelstein

A few weeks ago I stumbled onto Matthew Adelstein’s YouTube channel. At first glance, it didn’t look like much. The channel has a little over a thousand subscribers, and only a handful of videos with over two thousand views. It looked like a run of the mill niche philosophy channel.

But as I browsed through his videos I saw people like Trent Horn, Mike Licona, and Graham Oppy being interviewed. With hardly any audience to speak of, and not even an undergraduate degree to his name, Adelstein was attracting some of the biggest names in philosophy and Christian apologetics. His only credentials were the quality of his thought. I found this seriously impressive, and I think it’s only a matter of time before he reaches a wider audience.

In that respect, liftoff might already be happening given the explosive popularity of some of his most recent Substack posts. Despite his history as a staunch and provocatively outspoken atheist, Adelstein has now converted to theism. I’m not holding my breath for him to convert to Christianity, but then again, after reading many of his articles, I also wasn’t holding my breath for him to start believing in God.

A Crisis of Faithlessness

Adelstein is bright, and he writes voluminously. He could probably mop the floor with the vast majority of Christians in a debate about religion. If you browse his Sutbstack archive you’ll find dozens of all out assaults on nearly every conceivable rationale for belief in God.

But you’ll also find this article. Back in January, Adelstein had what he calls “a crisis of faithlessness.” Adelstein, a passionate advocate for utilitarianism, effective altruism, and veganism, has long acutely felt an obligation to help end suffering. But the sheer, astronomical magnitude and horror of suffering in the world made it difficult for him to interpret reality as anything other than a pointless tragedy.

Thinkers like William Lane Craig have claimed that it is impossible to believe in atheism consistently and happily. To live a happy life that can make sense of the suffering, injustice, and absurdity of life, you must either believe in God, or believe in things that only make sense if God exists. In his crisis of faithlessness, Adelstein came to realize that there are two possible readings of reality: one hopeful and one tragic. I agree with him, and I think that the more someone reflects seriously on suffering and evil, the more difficult it is to sustain a middle reading. On this Substack page, I find myself returning again and again to this passage from W. Norris Clarke’s book The One and the Many.

"I am now faced with a radical intellectual choice between two ultimate alternatives on the meaning of my life: Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being and goodness, […] and then my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, sense-making, and my life is suffused with hope of fulfillment. Or in fact, there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness: a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, "a useless passion," as Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist atheist puts it, oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion.

[...] But what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as a meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not? […] This unique kind of "argument," based on my own inner experience, can lead me to a profoundly reasonable affirmation that a real Infinite must exist as my final end…" (227-228)

Of course, none of this proves God exists, but it forcefully makes the case that we should hope that God exists, and that we should give the evidence for his existence a second look. Adelstein did, and he was convinced. What convinced Adelstein that this hope is real? The argument that pushed Adelstein over the edge and made him comfortable with making the leap of faith was the Fine Tuning argument for God’s existence.

The Fine Tuning Argument

Before I explain what the fine tuning of the universe is, let me point out that you don’t have to take my word for it that this is a problem for atheists. On a panel discussion with Richard Swinburne, Dawkins himself said,

[Physics is] where the problem is at present. Biology is essentially solved, and that was the big one. […] But nevertheless since biology is solved, we're now pushed back to physics and cosmology as the place where the mystery is now deepest. And, as you know, there's a strong argument to say that these fundamental constants are fine-tuned in the sense that if any of them were slightly different from what they are then we would not have galaxies, we would not have matter, we would not have chemistry, we would not have biology, and we would not have us.

Renowned atheist physicist Fred Hoyle has also famously claimed that,

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.

I strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with this argument. You could start by watching the video above, or by reading Adelstein’s explanation for why it convinced him. To give my own criminally brief summary: The constants, initial conditions, and physical laws of the universe fall within a stupefyingly narrow range of values that allow life to exist. If any one of these values were different, not only would life as we know it not be possible- we wouldn’t have stars, planets, or even chemistry.

For me, a helpful analogy has always been the famous example of a monkey sitting down at a typewriter - Adelstein uses it too. Imagine the money sits down and bangs out the complete works of Shakespeare. You can’t reasonably say that this happened by chance. It is just too overwhelmingly more likely that the monkey would type out random gibberish. Similarly with our universe, it’s just too overwhelmingly more likely that we should be in a universe that doesn’t permit life for us to think that we have this universe by chance.

The best candidate for a naturalistic explanation of the fine tuning is the multiverse theory. If the monkey types for an infinite amount of time, it’s only a matter of time before he types the works of Shakespeare. And if he has been typing for an infinite amount of time, then, to paraphrase William Lane Craig, not only would he have typed out the complete works of Shakespeare, but he would have done so infinitely many times over. Similarly, our universe might be unlikely, but if there are an infinite number of universes, there was bound to be one like ours.

But the multiverse has major problems with it. First, the idea that there even is a multiverse, let alone one that has produced enough universes to offset the improbabilty is highly speculative and unproven. Second, there are good reasons to think that the multiverse itself is finely tuned. Finally as Adelstein and others point out, it leads to a stunning epistemological problem of Boltzmann brains.

If you remember Elon Musk’s depressed ramblings about how we probably live in a simulation, you know the gist. But the multiverse rockets this idea back into plausibility, because universes that just consist of a single mind hallucinating reality seem to be much more likely and would therefore be much more common than fully fledged universes.

Final thoughts

Adelstein’s journey has been one of the more surprising and edifying changes of mind and heart I’ve seen in quite some time. And as someone who has done the heavy lifting to seriously grapple with the reality of suffering and evil, he has eloquently shown that the problem of evil cuts both ways. And he is happily basking in the reality of God’s existence. It really does make a huge difference. Whether or not someone could be intellectually fulfilled as an atheist, this or any other type of fulfillment pales in comparison to the fulfillment theism offers. I’ll end with a quote from Adelstein. If you believe in God, and you haven’t felt something like this before, you’re missing out, and I encourage you to ask God to help you experience it.

As I mentioned before, I’ve started to believe in God. It’s wonderful, truly! I feel a bit like, to use an analogy Gavin Ortlund has used, I’ve stepped through the closet and entered Narnia! The God in which I believe is one of incalculable goodness, one who made the world to bring about love and value, one who will wipe away every tear and make every wrong right. I believe—not with certainty, but with decent probability—that I will see my dead loved ones again, that I, and you, and everyone else will have the greatest conceivable experience: an infinitely intense relationship with the greatest conceivable being. I believe that the best things in this life are but a pale shadow of what is to come, that an eternity awaits us all where each second is incalculably better than the best moment of your life.

1. As a brief aside, although I personally think that Christians trying to disprove evolution scientifically are barking up the wrong tree, I would still push back a little against Dawkins on the idea that evolution ended the discussion. A fringe minority of scientists vigorously contest evolution’s ability to explain the complexity of life. It wouldn’t be the first time a fringe minority was right. And even if evolution was capable of explaining the complexity of life, there’s a very interesting argument to be made that the arrangement of parts we see in nature is intentional. We can’t speak about natural systems without speaking in terms of purpose, function, and design. But if you think about it, it’s very strange to speak of intention, design, and purpose without speaking of persons and minds.