In 1949, when Ingemar Hedenius 1949 published his book 'Belief and Knowledge',
it was regarded by many people as the death blow towards (Christian) faith.
Even then, it was based upon ignorance of the contemporary science.
Since then, the atheists have found it increasingly difficult to keep their opinion logically defensible.
Essentially, they have tried two different routes:
One is to avoid facts that make atheism questionable.
This works!
Those who want to make themselves stupid, always are successful.
The other route is trying to explain away facts that point towards God.
To do that, they are forced to refer to discoveries that have not been made,
but which they hope will be made in some future time.
I will give a few examples of such false discoveries, and how atheistic expectastions have failed.
How could living organisms exist?
When Pasteur had shown that life is not formed spontaneously in nutrient solutions atheism was faced with a problem:
Life requires life.
(It should be mentioned, that life probably started by chemical processes that were unknown then. But that's another story.)
The atheistic conclusion was that life has always been around.
The sun has always been shining as it does now.
And the Earth has looked the same, and has been moving along its orbit for infinite times.
Then, no God (Creator) is required. And what is not required does not exist.
Hopefully, scientific progress would prove that the sun is eternal.
How does the sun produce its energy?
The atheists were wrong.
By the end of the 19th century, it was found the energy emitted by the sun requires a source.
One could easily see that ordinary combustion is not enough, so it was assumed that the energy source is gravity.
The sun would get its energy by shrinking.
But then, atheists had to abandon the idea, that the sun has always been shining in the same way.
Sooner or later the sun would run out of energy.
To solve the problem, it was thought that life was carried by spores moving through space.
When one sun is exhausted, life is planted on a planet that orbits around a new sun.
If the universe is infinit, there are always new suns to find.
Thus, the hope was that future discoveries would prove the universe to be infinite in time and space.
Expansion of the universe
Hubble found that the universe is expanding, and that it had started some 14 billion years ago.
So the universe seemed to be finite and to have existed during a finite time.
The possibility for life to be started by random molecular motions assembling a living cell, then would disappear.
In the 1950s, Fred Hoyle found a possible solution.
If the universe is negatively curved (like a saddle rather than like a sphere),
it could be infinite in space and time, and yet constantly expanding.
Now, the hope was that future research would show a negative curvature of the universe.
The hope failed.
It was found that the universe is almost "flat", with a minor positive curvature.
Why are nuclei energies adjusted to fit the needs of life?
Hoyle also made another important discovery.
He found that even in an infinite universe,
unless the carbon nucleus has an energy of about 7.65 MeV, life would be impossible.
Since life does exist, he concluded that the energy has such a value.
When the energy later was measured, it was found, of course, that the value is as he predicted.
Now, atheism faced a new problem:
Why did the energy have the value that life made life possible?
Most atheists choose to ignore the problem (if they even know about it).
Hur kan universum pulsera utan att fångas i en fälla?
The atheistic hope for negative curvature proved wrong.
When one finally measured the curvature of the universe, it turned out to be slightly positive or zero.
Thus, the universe has to be finite in time as well as in space.
It started about 14 billions years ago.
Meanwhile more facts were discovered, that indicated that the universe is created to support life.
To save atheism, one turned to hope that the universe is curved enough to be closed.
In this case, the expansion would slow down and eventually stop, after which the universe would shrink,
to end in the opposite of the Big Bang (Big Crunch).
If it then starts again, it is able to go on indefinitely.
If another law is also true, that the constants of nature and other properties get new random values each time,
a universe will eventually emerge that is able to contain life.
There are significant difficulties with such a pulsating universe:
Such a problem is the second law of thermodynamics, which would have to be violated unless the universe,
after all, would have started merely a few cycles back.
Another problem is that with random values of the constants,
one would sooner or later get a universe that was not closed, and then the cycles would end.
The atheists who even knew this, hoped that future discoveries would solve the problem.
Science is founded upon observations!
Then the ground began to be shaky again, when it was discovered
that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than retarding, as one hoped.
Consequently, no pulsating universe!
But suppose that our universe is merely one out of an infinite number,
and also that they all have random values of natural constants and other properties?
Then it is still possible for the universe not to be created.
Presently, the atheistic hopes are
* Constants of nature can have arbitrary values
* The number of universes is infinite
But, bur, but.....
There is not even any trace of observations supporting the atheistic hopes.
There many facts indicating that it is impossible even to do such observations.
For centuries, the atheistic religion has obviously been based upon imagined "facts,"
in the hope that they would prove correct.
But every time when science has been able to investigate the phenomenon,
it has been shown that the fantasies have been just fantasies.
All science that describes the material world, has to be founded upon observations.
Consequently, the atheists cannot build their faith upon science.
And nothing says that just the atheistic fantasies of today, will prove to be true.
Just like before, they are made up out of their own heads,
not due to any kind of evidence,
but only and in order to explain away God's footprints in the universe.