I just picked up Michael Baigent's latest book Racing Toward Armageddon. Although I haven't finished reading the book, I found it quite fascinating. No doubt this book would serve atheists and skeptics alike in disparaging many "end-time delusions" propagated by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. However, I think there's some hypocrisy on the part of the skeptic. I don't know if Baigent is an atheist but surely he realizes that atheists hold to an end-time scenario as well. In fact (and in my opinion), it's even worse than the Christian's, Muslim's, or Jew's.  At least for these religions, there's hope in the end. But not for atheists.

Two words: heat death.  Heat death is basically what the world will inevitably come to. It's the atheist's "armageddon" except there is no war, but a universe collapsing. Everything that is made and done and accomplished on earth will not last or be remembered, because all will be annihilated.  As theologian and philosopher William Lane Craig puts it:

Scientists tell us that everything in the universe is growing farther and farther apart. As it does so, the universe grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out,and all the matter will collapse into dead starts and black holes. There will be no light at all. There will be no heat. There will be no life, only the corpses of dead starts and galaxies, ever-expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space, a universe in ruins. The entire universe marches irreversibly toward its grave. So not only is each individual person doomed, the entire human race is doomed. The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction. Death is written throughout its structure. There is no escape. There is no hope. If there is no God, then man, and the universe, are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death row, we stand and simply wait for our unavoidable execution. If there is no God, and there is no immortality, then what is the consequence of this? It means that the life that we do have is ultimately absurd. It means that the life we live is without ultimate significance, ultimate value, ultimate purpose.

[William Lane Craig, cited by Erik J. Wielenberg, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16.]

As far as I can tell no atheist philosopher that I know of disagrees with Dr. Craig's assessment. On the contrary, they would agree with him! However, there's a catch. Many atheists have said that although life is ultimately and objectively meaningless, we can at least have subjective meaning. Atheist Jeff Lowder affirms this:



Technically, he's right. I don't see how someone can't have meaning in life despite there being no ultimate meaning.  However, what good is it to live life if life is no good anyway? Is it worth the task? Of course not.  That's like building a bridge but knowing it's going to get knocked down anyway.  Why build on something worthless if it's going to stay worthless no matter what you do with it?  Furthermore, think of the psychology behind this. You have to fool yourself into thinking that life is meaningful even though you know it's not. That is, man must lie to himself in order to live life "meaningfully". This is what Loyal D. Rue called the "noble lie":

The option of the noble lie introduces a third voice into the debate, one which first agrees with the nihilists that universal myths describing the origins, nature, and destiny of human existence are pretentious lies but then insists, against the nihilists, that without such lies humanity cannot survive.

[Loyal D. Rue, By the Grace of Guile (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5.]

If someone decides to have meaning in their life, then who's meaning is more meaningful? And who's meaning is right? No one's.  This has lead atheist Dan Barker to admit that life is no better than a piece of broccoli!

For the Christian life ends with Christ's reign. For the Muslim the Mahdi will overcome the Dajjal. For the Jew a coming Messiah will rebuild the Temple. For the atheist, evil and human suffering wins because in the end the universe dies. Bertrand Russell knew this all too well:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

[Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 107.]