| Before looking at Islam's world-wide growth, we must examine another critical development: the collapse of atheism and the rise of faith. Almost everyone who has studied human history, particularly its philosophical and social aspects, will agree that the nineteenth century was an important period, for it was during those years that the first steps were taken toward the future spiritual collapse. Its most important characteristic was the growth of atheism (i.e., rejecting God's Existence) as opposed to theistic beliefs and religion, which had been generally dominant in the world until then. Although atheism has existed from ancient times, the rise of this idea actually began in eighteenth-century Europe, with the spread and political effect of the philosophy of some anti-religious thinkers. Materialists such as Denis Diderot (1713-84) and Baron d'Holbach (1723-89) proposed that the universe was a conglomeration of matter that had existed forever and that only matter existed. In the nineteenth century, atheism spread even further afield. Such thinkers as Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), Karl Marx (1818-83), Friedrich Engels (1820-95), Friedrich Nietzsche (1884-1900), Emile Durkheim (1859-1917), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) applied atheist thinking to different fields of science and philosophy. The greatest support for atheism came from Charles Darwin (1809-82), who rejected the idea of creation and proposed the theory of evolution, which gave a supposedly scientific answer to the question that had baffled atheists for centuries: How did human beings and living things come to be? This theory convinced a great many people that there was a mechanism in nature that animated lifeless matter and produced millions of different living species from it. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, atheists formulated a worldview that "explained" everything: The universe had not been created, for it had no beginning and had existed forever. They claimed that it had no purpose, that its order and balance were the result of chance, and that Darwin's theory of evolution explained how human beings and other living things came into being. They believed that Marx and Durkheim had explained history and sociology, and that Freud had explained psychology on the basis of atheist assumptions. However, twentieth-century scientific, political, and social developments disproved these views, for ongoing discoveries in astronomy, biology, psychology, and social sciences nullified the bases of atheist suppositions.
In his book God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, American scholar Patrick Glynn of the George Washington University writes:
Science, which has been presented as the pillar of atheist/materialist philosophy, turns out to be just the opposite. As another writer puts it: "The strict materialism that excludes all purpose, choice, and spirituality from the world simply cannot account for the data pouring in from labs and observatories."3 In short, atheism suffered a sudden collapse in the last quarter of the twentieth century at the hands of the very scientific and sociological concepts from which its adherents had hoped to receive the most support. In this chapter, we will look at its collapse in the areas of cosmology, biology, psychology, medicine, and sociology; later sections will discuss how this has prepared the foundation for Islam's rise. 2. Patrick
Glynn, God: The Evidence, the Reconciliation of Faith and Reason
in a Postsecular World (California: Prima Publishing, 1997), 19-20,
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