CHAPTER 1: THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW ATHEISM
I STILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I saw a red London bus sail past me on Vauxhall Bridge Road, emblazoned with the words “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” There was something rather thrilling about it.
The 2009 bus poster campaign was the brainchild of comedian Ariane Sherine, who had become annoyed by religious adverts in public places that paraded Bible verses about heaven and hell. Sherine wrote an article in The Guardian newspaper suggesting that atheists needed their own advertising campaign, and with the help of the British Humanist Association, a fund was established to raise money for the project.
The cause quickly attracted public interest. Once the celebrity power of atheist Richard Dawkins was thrown behind it, over £150,000 was raised, allowing many more buses to carry the advert than the handful originally envisioned.
But why the word probably? The word seemed to leave room for doubt in a campaign aimed at settling the God question and backed by people who seemed very confident about the nonexistence of any deity. Richard Dawkins said he had wanted to opt for something stronger —“There’s almost certainly no God.” However, when I asked Sherine about it, she told me that the note of uncertainty was included for “scientific” reasons. Since it is logically impossible to disprove the existence of God, it was better to leave a window of possibility open. The softer wording may also have been calculated to ensure the message didn’t fall foul of official advertising rules.
The Atheist Bus Campaign came at the zenith of the New Atheist movement and was the closest thing it had (in the UK at least) to an official advertising campaign. Like the movement that spawned it, it was a bold, unapologetic, in-your-face affair.
However, at one level, the campaign hardly seemed necessary. Encouraging people to ignore God in twenty-first-century Britain is a bit like asking a teenager to consider having a lie-in on a Saturday morning. It hardly needs saying. According to the most recent data, over half of the people in the UK claim no religion,[1] and only a fraction of the population attend church.[2] Even when regular churchgoing was part of the fabric of society, talking about faith in public was generally considered very bad form.
Yet the great irony of the Atheist Bus Campaign was that, by attempting to make people forget about God, it did precisely the opposite.
Oscar Wilde wrote, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”[3] Hence, my thrill of excitement at seeing a bus emblazoned with the anti-God slogan. Apparently God was being talked about after all.
For several months buses circulated in London, bearing posters that forced the question of religion into the eyeline of any passersby, whether they liked it or not. Perhaps that’s why some Christians, including Paul Woolley, then director of Christian think tank Theos, donated money to the bus campaign, saying it was “a great way to get people thinking about God.”[4]
Furthermore, it confirmed a growing sense that modern atheism was starting to look suspiciously . . . religious. As Margaret Atwood shrewdly observed, “Once you’re paying money to put slogans on things, well it’s either a product you’re selling, a political party or religion.”[5]
If God does exist, then he must have a sense of humor.
At first sight, the high-water mark of New Atheism also marked a particularly low ebb for the tide of faith in the West. Religion was being cast not merely as old-fashioned and irrelevant —it was also seen as dangerous and irrational. Yet tides have a habit of going out and coming in. The popularity of the New Atheist movement would end up dissipating as quickly as it began. However, the rise and fall of this particular movement is worth spelling out in some detail. The way it dissolved so rapidly has opened many eyes to how insubstantial the answers were that it offered. In its wake, a fresh tide has begun to gather again —a new conversation on God, religion, and the deepest questions we can ask about what it means to be human. So . . . let us begin.
THE RISE OF NEW ATHEISM
“New Atheism” is a term that was first coined in the mid-2000s. It soon stuck as a useful label for the emerging cadre of celebrity scientists, journalists, and public intellectuals who were increasingly vocal about their opposition to religion and their commitment to reason and science.
At its helm were the so-called “four horsemen”: philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, neuroscientist Sam Harris, journalist Christopher Hitchens, and biologist Richard Dawkins. Each had published his own bestselling book attacking religion.
Dennett’s Breaking the Spell sought to give an evolutionary explanation for religion. Letter to a Christian Nation, written by Harris, was an extended essay on the evils of Christianity in the United States. Hitchens’s God Is Not Great was a characteristically blistering polemic on the evils of religion generally. And the most popular of all, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, was accompanied by a TV series and a book tour that saw the author speak to thousands of enthusiastic fans across the world.
Atheism had been a common enough feature of twentieth-century culture, whether it was Bertrand Russell’s scholarly skepticism or the existential angst of continental philosophers like Camus and Sartre. But their influence usually remained siloed in academia and didn’t tend to trouble the general public. So what caused this particular manifestation of atheism to become so prominent in the early twenty-first century?
A variety of factors coalesced in the rise of New Atheism. The 9/11 attacks in the United States reminded the world that religion was capable of causing people to commit terrible atrocities. The leading voices of the movement have all cited the rise of religious extremism as a motivating force in their own vocal response.
At the same time, a culture war had also developed between the religious right and secular society, especially around science. The 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial saw intelligent design pitted against evolutionary theory in the classroom. Many secularists saw it as an attempt to sneak God into schools and, in response, came out swinging for science and Charles Darwin.
Indeed, science was at the forefront of New Atheism. It was no accident that three of the four horsemen were academics before they found fame as celebrity atheists. (Hitchens was the only one who lacked a PhD.) From the outset, their movement cast religious faith as the enemy of science, reason, and progress. In fact, it was tantamount to mental illness. Dawkins pithily summarized this perspective, writing, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”[6]
Added to all of this was the rise of the Internet. Now any lone atheist in a small town in the Bible Belt could find a community to be part of. Blogs, chat rooms, and early forms of social media allowed like-minded skeptics to find common cause and organize together in ways that had never been possible before.
Within a few short years a variety of atheist and skeptic organizations were meeting, not just online but in person. Skepticon, the Global Atheist Convention, The Amazing Meeting (hosted by magician and paranormal debunker James Randi), and a variety of other public initiatives large and small proliferated in the “freethinker” community.
If the 2009 Atheist Bus Campaign represented the apex of the movement in the UK, then the United States’s high-water mark was arguably the Reason Rally in 2012.
According to some estimates, between twenty to thirty thousand people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC, for a day that was described as “Woodstock for atheists.”[7] The lineup included musicians, activists, and entertainers such as Eddie Izzard, Tim Minchin, Bill Maher, and Penn Jillette. Naturally, popular scientists like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins were a central feature too, given the ostensible purpose of the rally to champion reason and science.
However, Dawkins went somewhat further than just extolling the virtues of reason in his mainstage address. When talking about the religious beliefs of individuals, he encouraged the cheering crowd to “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!” Dawkins brought his speech to a rousing close with these words: “Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.”[8]
This was not merely an invitation to critical thinking and intellectual inquiry. This was fighting talk.
“RIDICULE THEM”
Many of those spearheading New Atheism hardly needed encouragement on this front. Admittedly, the bouffant-haired-televangelist forms of fundamentalist Christianity had been ripe for scorn already (often deservedly). But this time, the target was religious belief in general. In the eyes of the New Atheists, religion had been afforded an undeserved respect for too long, often enshrined in outdated blasphemy laws and cultural Kowtowing. Now it was their job to dismantle the reverence with irreverence. Mockery and ridicule soon became the modus operandi of the movement.
Apart from the flood of online atheist memes disparaging faith, some leading public figures began to gain a reputation for deriding religion too. TV personality Bill Maher created a documentary titled Religulous, aimed at exposing the absurdities of various forms of religious belief, especially Christianity. Christopher Hitchens, whose unmatched rhetorical skills were frequently employed to devastating effect, enjoyed likening God to a “celestial dictator, a kind of divine North Korea”[9] in public talks and debates. British comedian Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office, became increasingly vocal in his mockery of religion on Twitter and dedicated a whole stand-up routine to making fun of the Bible.
While mockery was a given, outright offensiveness was not beyond the pale either.
PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist and popular blogger, caused controversy when he obtained a Communion wafer from a Catholic church and made a show of publicly desecrating it to prove that no thunderbolts would rain down on him for his blasphemy. The picture he posted of the wafer pierced by a rusty nail and lying in a trash can was hardly the stuff of satanic ritualism, but it offended a good number of Catholics.
Of course, these personalities and their theatrical denunciations of religion were never representative of the vast majority of nonbelievers. But the actions of a few can taint the reputation of many. As these figures took center stage, so the public perception of atheism began to take on new associations. Whereas the word atheist might be defined by the dictionary as “a person who does not believe in God,” in the mind of the public it increasingly came to mean something more like “a person who thinks the idea of God is stupid, along with the people who believe in it.”
If a public intellectual like Richard Dawkins described Christians as “faith-heads” and their beliefs as “fairy tales” often enough, it was bound to breed a certain sense of superiority. Atheists were cast as the ones with science, facts, and reason on their side. Religious people were still bogged down in superstitious thinking based on ancient fables compiled by “Bronze Age desert tribesmen.”[10] Atheism was gradually turning into anti-theism.
However, as the levels of condescension reached a crescendo, New Atheism itself was about to come under scrutiny.
NEW ATHEISM FALTERS
Early on in the movement, the term “brights” had been proposed as an alternative moniker for the New Atheist cause. It was intended as a way of replacing a negative-sounding term (atheism is, after all, a denial of something) with a positive-sounding one. The idea of atheists who valued science, reason, and skepticism renaming themselves “brights” was championed by at least two of the four horsemen, Dawkins and Dennett. Christopher Hitchens dissented, however, writing, “My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called ‘brights,’ is a part of a continuous argument.”[11]
It was perhaps a relatively small spat in the scheme of things, but even Hitchens could see that the atheism he championed was in danger of appearing presumptuous and arrogant.
Meanwhile, other notable atheist voices also started to air their concerns over the direction their movement was heading in.
On my own Unbelievable? show, bestselling novelist Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy takes aim at organized religion, told me he was very unhappy about the Atheist Bus Campaign. Given his role as a distinguished patron of the British Humanists, the sponsoring group for the campaign, his assessment was withering: “I thought that slogan [‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’] was demeaning and stupid beyond words and I wish I’d had some say in it because I’d have said . . . ‘Don’t do it! Say something else for goodness’ sake; this is an absurd thing to say.’”[12]
Prof. Michael Ruse, a well-known philosopher of science, was aggravated enough to pen several articles stating that the New Atheists’ bombastic approach to religion was “a disservice to scholarship” and that Dawkins’s book The God Delusion made Ruse “ashamed to be an atheist.”[13] He even penned several endorsements for Christian books that responded to the movement.
Another notable critic came in the form of atheist philosopher Daniel Came, whose open letter to Richard Dawkins was published in The Daily Telegraph in 2011. Came, who was an Oxford University lecturer at the time, criticized the biologist for taking aim at easy targets in religious circles while running away from Christianity’s most serious intellectual advocates.
Dawkins had declined several invitations to debate philosopher William Lane Craig, a notable Christian thinker. Came’s letter stated that Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig was “apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part,” going on to say (with just a hint of sarcasm), “I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House.”[14]
That same year, I was involved in organizing a speaking tour for the aforementioned William Lane Craig. As part of it, our small team had arranged several public debates with notable atheists. The icing on the cake (we hoped) might be a debate with Dawkins himself. An invitation was sent, and a date was set for an event on Dawkins’s home turf, Oxford University.
Daniel Came offered his help, hoping that his letter and further admonishments might cause Dawkins to seriously consider the invitation. There was even a tongue-in-cheek bus campaign of our own in the city that mimicked the atheist bus slogan, reading, “There’s probably no Dawkins . . . but come along to the Sheldonian Theatre and find out.”
Dawkins, as expected, did not put in an appearance. However, Came and a panel of fellow agnostic and atheist academics stood in to represent the loyal opposition at the auditorium packed with Oxford students. The organizers included one theatrical flourish. An empty chair was left onstage, a reminder to the audience of Dawkins’s no-show and an invitation to the biologist to take up the challenge, if he so desired.
But that empty chair has increasingly stood for something else in my mind: the emptiness of the New Atheist project as a meaningful movement. It had declared belief in God a delusion, but what had it erected in its place? As the architects of the movement were about to discover, without proper foundations, even the most glittering of edifices will crumble under its own weight.
NEW ATHEISM UNRAVELS
The cracks in New Atheism began to show most visibly in 2011 in a controversy at the World Atheist Convention that came to be dubbed “Elevatorgate.”
Rebecca Watson, the founder of the website Skepchick, had been speaking on a panel alongside Richard Dawkins and other guests on the subject of the sexualization of women in the online atheist movement and her own experience of the same.
That evening some of the panelists and attendees gathered for drinks at the hotel bar. When Watson made her way back to her room in the early hours, she was followed into the elevator by a man from the group whom she didn’t know, who asked her if she would like to come back to his room for coffee. Watson says the uninvited proposition made her very uncomfortable.
“I was a single woman, in a foreign country, at 4:00 a.m., in a hotel elevator with you —just you . . . don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I have finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.”[15]
However, the incident itself wasn’t the main problem —men who make inappropriate advances exist in all sorts of circles. It was the fallout from the episode that began to divide the atheist community. When Watson related her experience in a video on her YouTube channel, many fellow skeptics came out in support of her. But her reaction was also seized upon by many other atheists as an example of an overly censorious and politically correct culture that they didn’t want infecting their oasis of freethinking. No harm was intended by the man, they claimed. What was all the fuss about?
The argument spilled over into the blogs and online forums of other notable atheists such as PZ Myers, who took Watson’s side, arguing that their movement needed a more feminist outlook and denouncing atheists who were downplaying the incident. Then Richard Dawkins himself chimed in.
As the unofficial leader of the movement and someone present at the conference, you might expect him to have tried to extinguish the flames of the growing controversy. Not a bit of it. He chose instead to pour on gasoline by firing off a heavily sarcastic imaginary letter titled “Dear Muslima”:
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.[16]
He went on to poke further fun at Watson’s experience in the elevator as trivial compared to the suffering of women in repressive religious cultures.
Up to this point Dawkins had enjoyed a relatively harmonious relationship with most sides of the atheist community, but now he was inundated with accusations of misogyny, sexism, and male privilege. Naturally, others leapt to his defense, claiming his was the voice of common sense and reason. It would turn out to be the first of numerous controversies stoked by Dawkins that divided the atheist community, but the charge of sexism was where it all began.
In recent years, the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the subsequent rise of the Me Too movement have made the world aware of the sexism and power dynamics that lurk behind the entertainment industry and arts. But years earlier, “Elevatorgate” had prompted a not-dissimilar movement to expose sexist behavior within atheist ranks. And it wasn’t just run-of-the-mill conference delegates being accused of inappropriate behavior. The conduct of some of the best-known names on the atheist speaking circuit was also being called into question.
David Silverman was president of the American Atheists organization and the chief organizer of the 2012 Reason Rally. However, he was fired from his position after complaints of financial and sexual misconduct, with the website BuzzFeed publishing a string of allegations against him from various women. Other notable names in the atheist movement, such as Michael Shermer and Richard Carrier, have also had claims of inappropriate behavior at atheist conferences leveled at them and have subsequently been disinvited from public engagements. All three men have vigorously denied the allegations.
Perhaps the most widely publicized case has been that of physicist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss found recognition early in his career following the publication of the bestselling book The Physics of Star Trek. He went on to become a professor of astrophysics at Arizona State University in 2008, as well as holding numerous high-profile positions on scientific advisory boards. But it was his larger-than-life stage personality and scathing treatment of opponents that led to his huge popularity as a speaker at major skeptical gatherings and debates.
However, in 2018 allegations of improper advances toward female students while he was in previous teaching positions and a complaint about groping a woman at an Australian conference were published (again by BuzzFeed). Arizona State University investigated the latter allegation and concluded that Krauss had violated their sexual harassment policy, leading to his position as director of the university’s Origins project not being renewed. Krauss has consistently denied the allegations, remaining on administrative leave from ASU before leaving his position at the end of the academic year.
As part of the viral BuzzFeed article that detailed the allegations, Rebecca Watson remarked, “Skeptics and atheists like to think they are above human foibles like celebrity worship. . . . In a way, that makes them particularly susceptible to being abused by their heroes. I think we see that over and over again.”[17]
NEW ATHEISM SPLITS
Accusations of sexism weren’t the only controversies brewing within atheist circles, however. Dawkins himself was continuously embroiled in a string of self-made squabbles and gaffes. Twitter is the Achilles’ heel of many celebrities and has oft proved to be the same for Dawkins. Over the years, he has courted multifarious controversies —from tweets advising a woman to have an abortion if she ever became pregnant with a baby with Down syndrome, to downplaying the evils of date rape and “mild” pedophilia.
These episodes developed into a predictable cycle: the tweetstorm of criticism following each statement would be met with defensive tweets from Dawkins, recriminations about being taken out of context, and culminate in a lengthy blog post attempting to nuance his original 140-character statement. After the hubbub died down, the whole process repeated itself a few months later following another incendiary tweet.
However, some of his online activity has had offline consequences. In 2016, after retweeting a video parodying feminism and Islam, he was subsequently disinvited from a science and skepticism conference in New York where he had been booked as the star speaker. Other cancellations followed, including a book event hosted by a California radio station and an invitation to speak at the Historical Society of Trinity College Dublin. The organizer announced that the society would “not be moving ahead with his address as we value our members’ comfort above all else.”[18]
None of this is limited to the world of New Atheism, of course. Cancel culture has been increasingly under debate in recent years, as various individuals from the worlds of arts, entertainment, and academia have been disinvited from public events after airing unpopular views on hot-button issues. But the fallout from the controversies that have circled Dawkins and other leading atheists has revealed the deep rifts at the core of atheist communities, which were simply waiting to be uncovered.
The perceived sexism and privilege within atheist celebrity culture became too much for many. Skeptical conferences, once the lifeblood of the movement, had gotten a reputation for chauvinism. Feminist skeptics were recommending that people stay away from them, demanding more representation of women and an acknowledgment of the imbalance of power that existed within their community. On the opposite side, others believed their movement was being hijacked by an ideologically driven agenda that had nothing to do with the “freethinking” culture they valued in skeptical circles.
Those advocating for a more progressive, social justice–oriented version of skepticism began to draw up plans for “Atheism +.” The plus sign indicated that those who stood under their banner were committed not only to reason and science but also to gender equality, anti-racism, LGBT rights, and a host of other causes. Those who championed this new brand of atheism-with-moral-requirements were painfully aware that the movement had thus far been primarily represented by a phalanx of old, white, straight men (just think of the four horsemen) and was therefore in desperate need of an overhaul at the leadership level.
However, the reality was that the New Atheist movement was largely dominated by white males —not only on the platform but also among the rank and file who occupied the online forums and physical chairs of their conferences. Rather like beard grooming, model railways, and Warhammer, atheism as an organized movement remains a largely male-dominated pastime. Many of those who had enjoyed the movement’s honeymoon in the 2000s rounded on “Atheism +.” This unwelcome new variant added a potentially endless sequence of causes to their manifesto, along with a lot of awkward questions about patriarchy and privilege. Atheism, they said, was simply a statement about what one did not believe in —namely, God. Yes, science and reason were welcome to the party too. But they balked at the idea of having to sign up for a list of additional ideological commitments. Atheism was starting to look more like a moralistic form of religion than they had ever anticipated.
Even a left-leaning skeptic like Sam Harris, someone happy to self-describe as a feminist, feared that the ideological doctrines of the “progressive left” were eroding the fact-based, science-driven culture of the skeptical movement. After receiving a volley of sexism accusations from atheist bloggers, he penned an article titled “I’m Not the Sexist Pig You’re Looking For.”[19] In it he defended the scientific arguments for the general differences in temperament and psychology between the sexes and why it could easily account for the fact that 84 percent of his Twitter following were men and the atheist movement was largely male-dominated.
Harris has likewise been accused of other prejudices such as Islamophobia but has refused to tone down his critique of the religion. Perhaps most controversially, Harris has been willing to give a platform to voices such as Charles Murray, a researcher who argues in his book The Bell Curve that there are genetically based disparities in IQ between different racial groups. Murray’s work has (inevitably) been co-opted by racists to argue for white superiority, and many of his scientific peers have argued that the research is fundamentally flawed.
For Harris, however, the issue was about being able to openly discuss these ideas, regardless of whether society approves of them. Rational debate cannot be sacrificed for political correctness, he argued. It’s why Harris is frustrated by the increasing amount of energy expended by his peers on “safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions”[20] that have marked the emergence of “woke” culture.
NEW ATHEISM IMPLODES
In recent years another major front to emerge in the culture war is the issue of transgender rights. The dramatic rise in the number of young people pursuing gender reassignment medication and surgery has been well-documented. Controversies abound over whether transgender women who have the physiology of a postpubescent man should compete against other women in sports. And then there’s the thorny issue of changing rooms and female-only spaces.
Even beloved cultural icons like J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, have been swept into the maelstrom of controversy. Since beginning to openly argue that transgender activism is eroding the gender rights that feminists fought for, she has become a social pariah in many progressive circles and heralded as a champion of free speech and feminism in others.
Transgender rights has proved to be yet another divisive issue within the atheist movement. In 2021, Twitter comments by Dawkins questioning the self-identification of transgender men and women led the American Humanist Association to strip him of his 1996 Humanist of the Year award. They said that Dawkins had made statements “that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values.”[21]
In 2019 The Atheist Experience, a long-standing, popular call-in show based in Austin, Texas, underwent a major split. The host Matt Dillahunty says that he and the Atheist Community of Austin who run the show are completely trans-affirming. “I was being called a transphobe while sitting with two trans women, a young trans boy, and two gay men, planning out our Pride festival event.”[22]
However, the controversy was sparked when UK-based atheist YouTuber Stephen Woodford appeared as a special guest on the show. Woodford had gained prominence for his Rationality Rules channel, in which he seeks to debunk various apologetic arguments for religion. He also uses his platform to respond to various hot-button issues and had posted a video arguing that transgender athletes had an unfair advantage when competing in female sports.
However, following Woodford’s appearance, a deluge of criticism came in from those who believed a “transphobe” was being featured on the show. Despite having been warmly welcomed onto the show (and the trans issue never raised), Woodford flew back to England only to find he had been officially denounced by the Atheist Community of Austin, who had issued an apology for the “pain and anguish” caused by his appearance.[23]
Despite the official apology, the backlash led to a number of staff and volunteers quitting the organization. Woodford himself subsequently revised his views on transgender athletes, admitting he had made some factual mistakes but denying accusations of transphobia. Dillahunty has since stepped down as host of The Atheist Experience and resigned from the Atheist Community of Austin due to ongoing disagreements.[24]
Similar fallouts and debates around gender, trans rights, LGBT issues, and race have increasingly marked popular culture. These rifts in ideology have tended to be inflamed by the “callout” culture of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and the clickbait appeal of celebrity controversy. However, the phenomenon began early for the New Atheist community, which had already been driven by a sprawling network of blogs and websites before social media came to rule the roost. The “Elevatorgate” scandal of 2011 seems to have marked the pivotal moment when the New Atheist movement officially began to tear itself apart from the inside.
Up to that point, New Atheism had been largely united in agreeing that religion was bad and science was good. But it turns out that life is more complicated than that. Once the community discovered they held radically differing views about how life should be lived once religion has been abandoned, things quickly spiraled downwards.
Where the energy of the movement had once been dedicated to critiquing religious superstition and unscientific ways of thinking, now atheists seemed to spend most of their time attacking one another. The vitriol and anger of the exchanges between former friends in the skeptical community dwarfed anything that had preceded it between atheists and their religious opponents.
Popular atheist blogger PZ Myers, who stood firmly with the progressive “Atheism +” faction, fell out dramatically with Sam Harris and just about every other leading atheist voice in the community. He would later pen an article titled “The Train Wreck That Was the New Atheism,” bemoaning the right-wing trajectory of the movement and asking, “Who put Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens in charge?” He concluded that his period as a standard bearer for the movement was “the deepest regret of my life.”[25]
The once well-attended atheist conferences and speaking events were also feeling the strain as the infighting continued.
A low point was the 2017 MythCon, organized by the freethought group Mythicist Milwaukee.[26] Despite intense criticism, they had invited firebrand anti-feminist YouTuber Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) to be a contributor. Among other things, Benjamin had caused outrage the previous year after sending a tweet to British MP Jess Phillips, stating, “I wouldn’t even rape you.”
His onstage debate on feminism and social justice with atheist podcaster Thomas Smith culminated in chaotic scenes. Many in the audience were vocally behind Benjamin, while Smith denounced his debate opponent as “awful” and those cheering him on as “deplorables” and “sycophants.” Smith eventually walked off stage, declaring, “This conference is an embarrassment.” When heated arguments continued after the debate, security reportedly stepped in to eject some attendees from the premises.
Latterly, even before the COVID-19 pandemic paused in-person gatherings, numerous skeptical atheist conferences have been canceled altogether. Some have ended due to a decline in interest from those who once frequented them, but the endless political wranglings have also taken their toll.
The blogger “Atheism and the City” summed it up well in an article reflecting on the cancellation of The Atheist Conference 2018 following irresolvable disagreements about the proposed speaker lineup:
The atheist community has splintered into a million shards in recent years. There are the atheist feminists and the atheist anti-feminists, the social justice warrior atheists and the anti-social justice warrior atheists. The pro-PC atheists and the anti-PC atheists. There are pro-Trump atheists and anti-pro-Trump atheists. Atheists are split over gamergate, elevatorgate, whether we should organize, or whether we should even call ourselves atheists at all. The divisions go on and on.[27]
THE FALL OF NEW ATHEISM
Today, New Atheism is a largely spent force, relegated to corners of the Internet where teenage bloggers continue to churn out antagonistic Bible memes in online echo chambers. It has faded from public view as a serious cultural phenomenon. The publishing boom in anti-God literature fizzled out almost as quickly as it began, and the atheist speaking circuit is a shadow of its former self.
The implosion of the atheist community into warring factions was accompanied by a waning of sympathy among the general public. What at first sounded like a principled stand against religious dogmatism and privilege had begun to sound like a form of dogmatism itself. The cause began to wear very thin.
For religious people, the scornful and condescending tone of the New Atheists had been a turnoff from the outset. As evangelistic strategies go, painting your potential convert as an ignoramus tends to be a poor one. And to the nonreligious who actually had religious friends, it was obvious that their friends’ lives and faith were more nuanced than the caricature of faith presented by their detractors.
Moreover, in building a community of like-minded skeptics, New Atheism had inadvertently stumbled into the mold of a religious cult itself. This was, after all, much more than merely “disbelief in God.”
There were the high priests (the four horsemen) and the sacred texts they had written. Science was their object of worship, and naturalism —the belief that all that exists can be explained by matter in motion and the blind forces of nature —was their creed. They gathered regularly to celebrate their beliefs, to praise the wonder of science, and to hear their leaders preach against those who believed another gospel. Atheists who questioned the strict materialist orthodoxy, or even lost their faith altogether, were heretics and rounded on with unswerving zeal.
However, religions are prone to schisms whenever they grow to a certain size and, as its implosion shows, New Atheism proved to be no exception.
In my own personal interactions, I was increasingly encountering nonbelievers who were keen to distance themselves from the movement. The phrase “I’m an atheist, but not of the Richard Dawkins sort” was invoked surprisingly frequently. There was a sense that the shrill religious fundamentalism opposed by New Atheism had simply been replaced by a shrill fundamentalism of another kind.
Part of the problem was that the atheist movement had primarily rallied around what it was against —religion. Consequently, it had struck a negative tone ever since its inception. Aware of this, some atheists have made attempts to create nonreligious communities that are aimed instead at celebrating what they are for and fostering an environment for genuine relationships to flourish.
One of the most prominent has been the Sunday Assembly, a regular church-like gathering on Sunday mornings in London that lacks any reference to God or spirituality. They make a point of avoiding any of the typical anti-religious sentiments that might be stock-in-trade for an atheist gathering. On the contrary, the stand-up comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, who founded the weekly gatherings in 2013, were fully aware that they were borrowing from the Christian tradition. Uplifting pop songs stood in for hymns, an inspirational talk on the wonder of the universe might replace the sermon, and a meditation on love might be the equivalent of a prayer time. Perhaps most importantly, it brought people together in a regular weekly community. In all these ways, the Sunday Assembly has explicitly modeled itself on a typical church service (indeed, many labeled it “the atheist church”), but its only creeds are the values listed on its website: “Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More.”[28]
Whether these cuddlier forms of nonreligious community actually catch on in the long term remains to be seen. The Sunday Assembly has seen its own splits and fallouts in the global franchise. Again, the religious parallels hardly need to be spelled out. However, the fact that such atheist gatherings exist demonstrates that people need more than facts about science and reason to sustain them. They need community, meaning, and a sense of purpose.
Many people had turned to New Atheism for its promise of a brighter, more rational, and more scientific future. They believed it held the key to human flourishing. Just as the secular anthem “Imagine” had envisaged a world without religion, heaven, or hell, it was only reasonable to suppose that the song’s utopian “brotherhood of man” would naturally follow. Yet despite John Lennon claiming it was “easy if you try,” it turned out to be quite complicated.
What could a movement that was built on tearing down God erect in his place? Science was the obvious alternative —surely that was an objective truth to which all people could aspire? But science turned out to be a poor substitute for a savior.
Science can tell you how the universe arose but not why it is there. Science can tell you what you consist of but not what you are worth. Science can generate solutions to poverty but not the compassion to implement them. Science can make you money but not purchase a meaningful existence.
“Science Works, B —s,” declared one popular atheist meme. Yes, it does —for certain things, but not for everything. Most especially it won’t inform us about what things we should value. In that sense, science is neutral. We can use it to create a cure for cancer or to create an atomic bomb. Science won’t tell us which of those options is the right thing to do. That’s a value judgment that must ultimately be derived from somewhere beyond science.
The question of which particular values we should celebrate and support was the issue that came to tear apart the New Atheist world, as proved by the rancorous infighting of its factions over feminism, race, gender, and LGBT issues. It turned out science and reason alone could not provide the answer to such vexed issues. In that sense, New Atheism was shown to be a very thin worldview, not one that could provide a reason for living.
Certainly there were other options open to atheists who wanted to subscribe to a nonreligious ethical framework.
The “Atheism +” movement was one such attempt to flesh out a bare atheist worldview with a list of additional beliefs about rights and values. Likewise, gatherings such as the Sunday Assembly have tried to put a set of shared values at the heart of their own secular services. “Humanism” is another broad ethical system that many atheists choose to align themselves with today, where valuing the inherent equality and dignity of all humans is paramount. But, as I shall argue in subsequent chapters of this book, such value systems owe far more to the Christian societies they emerged from than the professed atheism of those who currently sit under their banners.
THANK GOD FOR RICHARD DAWKINS
Where did all this leave religion?
At the height of its influence, New Atheism looked like a serious threat to religious belief in the West. How could the average church minister shepherding their flock hope to compete with the intellectual prowess of the New Atheist authors and their books? How could the average Christian parent hope to compete with the avalanche of online atheist material that vied for the attention of their teenage children?
By some accounts, you might be forgiven for thinking there was a mass exodus from the church as the four horsemen and their growing army of skeptics came tearing through the culture. Atheist websites were filled with accounts of ex-Christians who had seen the light and abandoned the superstitions they had once gullibly accepted. Indeed, many of the most prominent skeptic organizations were started by ex-believers, now evangelizing as enthusiastically for atheism as they once had for Christianity.
It wasn’t limited to Christianity, either. Ex-Muslim sites also became a feature of the movement, albeit with far greater potential risks for those who went public with their apostasy stories. Nevertheless, the attrition rates of atheism among Christians seemed to far outweigh their Muslim counterparts.
Perhaps churches in the West only had themselves to blame. The great Protestant revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led by Whitefield, Wesley, Edwards, and Booth that had swept the UK and United States were long gone. The Reformation that had renewed the spiritual fervor of mainland Europe was even further back in the rearview mirror. By the mid-twentieth century the living faith of a previous generation had calcified into the dead religion of the next, as cultural forms of nominal Christianity prevailed over personal transformation.
Meanwhile, Christianity’s long-standing Catholic intellectual tradition born of Augustine and Aquinas had also begun to wither on the vine. Despite the best efforts of popular writers such as C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton to reengage a lay audience with rational arguments for faith, churches were less inclined towards rigorous catechism of their members, who drifted instead towards more sentimental expressions of Christianity.
From the 1960s onwards, new church movements sought to counter what they perceived as the dead formalism of the mainline denominations and experimented with a new freedom in music, preaching, and spiritual experience. Both the post–Vatican II era of Catholicism and the “new wine” of the burgeoning charismatic movement and seeker-sensitive churches were arguably a necessary antidote to the dry stuffiness of a previous generation. But it also marked a significant transition towards a more experiential, emotional form of Christian engagement, often at the expense of an intellectually rigorous engagement with Scripture and the world.
By the time New Atheism swung into view in the 2000s, there were precious few churches prepared to equip their members for the onslaught of skepticism it brought. They might have been able to offer uplifting worship songs and an inspiring sermon series on “living your best life now,” but few were in a position to offer a philosophical defense of God’s existence or to defend the historicity of the Bible. There were notable exceptions, of course, but by and large the Western church was caught on the back foot.
How many people have permanently exited the church after falling under the sway of New Atheism is almost impossible to judge. Anecdotally, there’s no doubt that many individuals have lost their faith as a direct result of Dawkins and Co. For some this may have come after a significant period of wrestling with questions. Often it was because they felt the lack of answers from their own church communities.
However, I would venture to suggest that New Atheism mainly reaped its de-conversions among those whose faith was already primed to be lost —those whose religious beliefs owed more to their cultural milieu and the extrinsic activity of churchgoing than to any deeply held personal convictions. To that degree, the church was already due to be winnowed of those whose faith was planted in such shallow soil. In the great scheme of things, Dawkins and his fellow horsemen were only handmaidens to the larger social forces of secularization and religious disaffiliation that have meant faith has not been transmitted to recent generations in the way it once was.
But I thank God for Richard Dawkins. Our harshest critics are often the ones who help us to grow the most. Just as those London buses bearing the words “There’s probably no God” had the unintended consequence of putting religion back in the spotlight, so New Atheism has revitalized the intellectual tradition of the Christian church in the West.
New Atheism arrived with a whole bunch of awkward questions about science, history, and religious belief —questions the church had not had to think about for a long time. But now, with the four horsemen at their heels, the church was forced to put down its tambourines and guitars and pick up its history and philosophy books again.
In short, New Atheism gave the Christian church a kick up the backside that it desperately needed. Arguably, the last two decades have seen the greatest revival of Christian intellectual confidence in living memory as the church has risen to the challenge.
Apologetics ministries have flourished across the world as they’ve sought to make a defense (apología in the Greek) against the rising tide of secular critics. Organizations such as Reasonable Faith, founded by the aforementioned philosopher and formidable debater William Lane Craig, and Word on Fire, founded by Catholic “bishop of social media” Robert Barron, have equipped a new generation of Christians with rational arguments for the reliability of Scripture and the Christian worldview.
In the process, a flood of apologetics books, courses, and resources have been made available to churches, along with an ever-growing number of videos, blogs, and podcasts from apologists large and small. This includes a young, tech-savvy generation of YouTubers and podcasters who are taking the fight directly to their online atheist counterparts.
An increase has even been noted in the number of Christians entering academic institutions to take up studies in philosophy of religion, inspired by leading thinkers such as Alvin Plantinga.
This return to an intellectual, analytical form of Christianity can have its own pitfalls, just as much as the subjective, experiential sort that has dominated in recent years. As always, a balance between the mind and the heart is the best approach. But the swing back of the pendulum was sorely overdue and remains so in parts of the church that continue to self-insulate from the realities of our skeptical age.
While the rise in Christian apologetics has boosted the confidence of those already in the pews and perhaps stemmed the decline, it has also contributed to a significant number of people entering the church for the first time. As far back as the 1950s, C. S. Lewis had cause to remark that “nearly everyone I know who has embraced Christianity in adult life has been influenced by what seemed to him to be at least probable arguments for Theism.”[29]
That anecdotal observation seems to be backed up by recent research. Dr. Jana Harmon earned her PhD in 2019 with a study on adult conversion of atheist skeptics to Christianity, which demonstrated the strong degree to which they are influenced by apologetic arguments.[30] Other factors are also significant, not least having their preconceptions of Christianity challenged by meeting intelligent and gracious Christians. However, once the barriers are lowered, the New Atheist objections have often been met and overcome by cogent Christian arguments in response.
A significant number of people can even trace their own conversion to Dawkins himself. Peter Byrom, who became a confirmed atheist while reading The God Delusion as a student, says that it was also the pathway towards his subsequent conversion:
Looking through the Dawkins and Hitchens work . . . was when I started discovering Christian apologetics. I had seen some Christians who were terrible at defending their faith. . . . but I gradually discover[ed] lots of other, much more robust, academically credible apologists. . . . It made me realize that I’ve run out of arguments and objections. There is really good solid stuff here. I had to face up to the fact that all I was left with was not wanting it to be true.[31]
My own radio show and podcast Unbelievable? was born into this new and dynamic world of Christian apologetics. For over fifteen years I have hosted conversations that have frequently circled the key objections of the New Atheists, and the leading voices in that movement have frequently locked horns with their Christian peers on the show. Meanwhile, my role as host has also given me a front-row seat to the waxing and waning of New Atheism over the past two decades and the revival of Christian apologetics in its wake.
But in recent years, I have noticed an unmistakable sea change in the kinds of conversations that secular culture is now having around Christianity, science, and faith. The excitement of the clashes between the titans of atheism and Christianity that once packed out debating chambers has faded with New Atheism itself. Nowadays, the most well-attended events are for an altogether different kind of conversation between a new breed of secular thinkers who are reconsidering the value of Christianity and asking big questions around meaning, purpose, and identity. This change in the tone and content of the conversation may be evidence that the receding tide of the “Sea of Faith” has reached its furthest limit. Thinking people are being given permission to take the idea of God seriously again. And I believe that the tide is turning.
The church was caught on the back foot by New Atheism and only latterly began to find its stride again. The danger is that, as this cultural conversation moves forward, the church will once again be left answering yesterday’s objections, rather than engaging with those who are asking a different set of questions altogether.
The rest of this book will aim to show exactly what those questions are, who is asking them, and why this new cultural moment is an unparalleled opportunity for the Christian church to share its vision of reality to a world that may be ready to hear it once again.