Who are the ‘New Atheists’ and are they right about God?

In 2001 the world was devastated by an audacious act of terrorism which occurred on one of the most iconic landmarks in America. The fallout following the September 11th attacks was far-reaching in terms of international impact and the after-effects are still being felt more than two decades later. But the impact of 9/11 was not restricted to politics, it echoed down the corridors of culture and society as well. The world at large was unaware that a metaphorical rubber band had been gradually stretching to its limit, and the attack on the World Trade Buildings was just the push needed for it to snap.

Throughout the twentieth century, religious participation had seen a precipitous decline throughout Europe, with some countries becoming all but entirely secular by the 90s. America had seen a very gradual decline in religious participation across the decades, but Christian churches were still relatively stable. However, in the 1980s, branches of the Christian church had undergone a shotgun wedding with certain political interests, exerting pressure in government and media and fostering social resentment which had been festering for almost 20 years.

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However, religion was so entrenched in American culture at large, that those Americans who dissented did so quietly and suffered a perceived, if not actual, marginalisation. There were very few willing to stand in the public forum and loudly criticise religion. The most visible public critics in America were largely radio and television personalities and comedians who were known for saying controversial things for shock value. Otherwise, Christianity was its own biggest critic, with doctrinal and political infighting a kind of white noise that crackled in the distance of every religious discussion.

The September 11th attacks were believed to have been the acts of a Muslim terrorist organization, and this act of religious extremism was just the excuse needed to embolden critics of religion the world over. It began in the UK, where individuals who had already been critical of religion suddenly had the ear of the world, and their books on the errors and evils of faith gained an international audience. After the success of books like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, American authors such as Samuel Harris and Daniel Dennett began to publish best sellers along the same lines. They all had a common mantra: religion is destructive and ought to be done away with.

The arguments and criticisms advanced by these “New Atheists” (a term coined by an American journalist in 2006, during the height of this trend) were nothing new, but they were being heard for the first time by both religious and irreligious audiences alike, and seemed to voice a formerly unspoken resentment felt by a number of people who had been politely declining to talk about religion for years.

The increased availability of internet forums and platforms also helped to spread these atheist arguments, allowing New Atheism to advance at a pace which would have been nearly impossible a decade before. Within ten years of the movement’s beginning, conferences, rallies, and even marches were being held in the name of New Atheism.

But what made the New Atheists so new? Aside from the rapidity and boldness of the movement, it adopted two features never before seen in atheist circles. Atheism had long been a feature within schools of philosophy such as existentialism, absurdism, nihilism, and humanism. Academic elites had been advancing arguments against religious ideas for hundreds of years. As a result, a general attitude of condescension towards religion had been fostered in the arts and academia. But this was overall a polite condescension, and rarely made it into the public square outside of those circles. Smaller political interest groups such as The American Atheist society had been publishing pamphlets and proclaiming the evils of religious influence on the government for years, but because they were considered fringe, their effects were not very intimidating to religious institutions as a whole.

This soon changed. Among the New Atheists, nods to social niceties and public civility were enthusiastically ejected from the window, to be replaced by aggressive antipathy. At a large gathering, atheist front-man Richard Dawkins admonished his audience to root out and relentlessly mock Christians wherever they could be found. Atheism had never been fond of religion, but had formerly consigned itself to a smug elitism. The New Atheism was an atheism of the people: a street-level movement with a fresh new assertiveness.

This assertiveness accomplished its goal of intimidating Christians. In America, Atheism had been a boogeyman for most of the 20th Century: always lurking around the corner threatening to snatch away your teenager if they strayed too far away from the church community. But now, practically overnight, this boogeyman became a very public entity.

Beyond its boldness, the New Atheism brought with it a moralism all but unseen in previous incarnations of atheism. It had long been recognized by the various schools of philosophy that a universe without God was a world in which morality had little footing. Various philosophers found ways of dealing with this lack of meaning, purpose, or moral standard in the world, but these philosophies had proven generally unpopular, and moralistic atheism had never been widely accepted.

In the wake of the terrorist attack, however, the New Atheists were proud to declare religion an evil, and the “Abrahamic God” (neatly including three religions in a single term) to be, in the words of Richard Dawkins, “a Moral Monster.”

A popular motto which sprang up following the 9/11 event was “Science flies us to the moon, but religion flies us into buildings.” If any phrase encapsulated New Atheism, it was this. Science was our saviour, religion was our enemy. With the fire of moral virtue in their chests, the New Atheists followed Dawkins’ battle cry and relentlessly mocked Christians – more frequently on the internet than face-to-face.

The mockery served as a release for the atheists’ frustration with religion, it served to intimidate many religious people into silence, but more than these things, it served another feature unique to the New Atheism: evangelism. Unlike any previous version of atheism, the New Atheism was actively recruiting for its ranks. While the shine has faded now 20 years later, its doctrines and effects are still very evident. Atheism has become a live option for the first time in about three generations in America, and the evangelical aspect of the New Atheism is seeing its fruits in the much more recent “deconstruction movement” where Christians question and/or reject parts or all of their faith publicly.

The deconstructionism apes its predecessor in most ways, but it differs from the New Atheism insofar as its ranks are not so much filled with entrenched religious dissenters finding their voices for the first time, but rather with committed Christians who have made a sudden and difficult move across the border from faith to atheism. This very visible migration of religious people into the camps of atheism suggests that the early 21st Century atheist evangelism has seen its fruit – although there are some who say they were influenced in the other direction by this movement. 

The New Atheist Philosophy

The unifying philosophy of New Atheism can be boiled down to two claims: religious belief is destructive, and rationality can usher in a better world. With these two claims alone, it is apparent why New Atheism has sought the destruction of religion. Recall the words of Dawkins: that religion should be rooted out and relentlessly mocked. Further evidence can be found in the book by author Peter Boghossian titled A Manual for Creating Atheists. In addition to providing “devangelising” strategies to his readers in this book, Boghossian asserts unironically that religious “faith” ought to be added to the official catalogue of mental illnesses used in the psychiatric community.

The reasoning behind this stigmatisation of religion is fairly straightforward: they argue that when one’s beliefs are a matter of blind faith, one can be led to believe in anything. When a person uncritically accepts anything he or she is told, that person can be manipulated into doing destructive things (including hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings) on a religious basis.

If one can replace blind belief with some system of rational inquiry which would lead to true conclusions, religious evils such as terrorism could be eliminated, they claim. To this end, it is worth asking, are the New Atheists correct about the evils of religious belief, and does their proposed solution of scientific rationalism work?

Is religious belief destructive? Scripture cautions about religious fraud

A decade or so after the 9/11 attacks it became unpopular or controversial to question or criticize Islam, even in atheist circles. Not that atheists began to accept Muslim claims, but rather that the minority status and oppression of Muslims made it uncouth to offend them. Nevertheless, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers remains the prime evidence for the New Atheist criticism that when a person claiming to speak for God tells the religious person to do something, that person will follow the instruction without question. To do otherwise would be a breach of religious dogma: one must not ask questions or express doubts – one must simply do and die.

This is the essential view New Atheists have of religious faith, and demonstrates a surprisingly reasonable concern: history is replete with examples of people doing extreme and destructive things in the name of religion. This should not be surprising to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of human nature: hucksters, power-mongers, and victimisers will pursue any avenue which would allow them to fulfil their criminal designs, and the opportunity to back their goals with the power of divine authority makes religious leadership a very tempting position.

However, this is not a new phenomenon, and the Bible is very conscious of the fact that people would eagerly take upon them the mantel of religious leadership as a means of manipulation and oppression. This issue is first addressed by Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, wherein he lays out two tests for those who claim to speak for God: first, they must perform a miraculous sign to demonstrate that they are speaking from more than merely human authority, and secondly their message must in no way contradict the words of scripture.

Following the writings of Moses, the Bible is saturated with examples of false prophets, opportunists, and manipulators claiming to speak for God, and in each instance, the shyster meets his comeuppance. The message is clear: God does not take religious manipulation lightly.

This theme continues into the New Testament. In the book of Matthew, Jesus is ruthless in his criticisms of the religious leaders of the time. Observing that they shamelessly manipulated the people and lorded their religious authority, largely to soak the supplicants for money and goods, Jesus compares them to vipers, swine, and rotting corpses. Further, following the standard set by Moses, on the several occasions Jesus’s authority is question, he points to his miracles and his teachings, and challenges his detractors to identify any flaws therein.

Beyond Jesus, the epistles of John and of Paul acknowledge that – like the false prophets of old – manipulators will come among them and attempt to victimise them. Whereas the apostles do not require miraculous signs as the test of sincere religious leadership, they do still strongly urge the reader to hold leaders accountable to the authority of scripture. On any given Sunday, religious worshippers will have their bibles open on their laps as the minister speaks, and the opportunity to inspect the speaker’s message is not merely available, but encouraged.

The fact that religious worshippers are urged by scripture to hold leaders accountable and to double-check the source is not enough to protect the church entirely from religious manipulators, and there are churches which teach their congregants that it is improper to ask questions or raise objections. This unfortunate fact has some counter in the institution of ecumenicism. The fact that there exist hundreds of different Christian denominations or religious approaches in the world is frequently seen as a point against Christianity, but in reality it works as a check against religious extremism. If any church got something wrong or came under the control of a bad actor, there are dozens of other churches offering alternatives, and holding one another accountable. Religious freedom in a secular society is a surprisingly efficient check against the sort of totalitarian control exercised in state-religions, and the competition it encourages allows investigation, discussion, and refinement of doctrines and scholarship rather than a static system incapable of self-examination.

Can rational belief rescue us? The Saviour of Science

The evils of blind faith are countered in the New Atheist schema by the virtues of the scientific process. It’s worth noting from the outset that the mechanism which has made science so successful is the scientific community. Whenever a theorist or researcher publicises a new theory or finding, these data are immediately scrutinised, questioned, and often re-tested by the larger academic body. Due to this process, scientific investigation is much less subject to broad errors than it would be if no questions were allowed. However, this is exactly the process described in relationship to ecumenicism above: a community wherein questions are allowed is a community accountable unto itself.

Nor, sadly, is the history of science entirely free from dogma or ideologues. Occasionally social or political pressure will place restrictions on what science is or isn’t allowed to investigate or conclude, or academia is tasked with parsing data to reach an already-decided conclusion. The same sorts of victimisers attracted to religion are sometimes attracted to science, and for much the same reasons.

Of the various institutions which could be weaponised against religion, science is frequently selected because it has the ability to operate in a “naturalistic” framework. That is to say, a framework which allows for the existence of matter and energy, but without metaphysical, paranormal, or supernatural entities. This is very efficient when one is studying the physical universe, but the New Atheists have more difficulty using science to examine matters of ethics, purpose, or meaning. Science is an excellent tool for describing how things work, but is not equipped to describe how humans ought to behave, or to give them hope, meaning, or personal fulfilment – all things for which religion has been very successful.

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Are New Atheists right to say God is a ‘moral monster’?

The New Atheists aren’t merely disenchanted with Christians and their various ethical and political views: to them, their understanding of the Christian God is a very repugnant creature, as well. For a system that denies his existence, New Atheism is surprisingly preoccupied with the way he acts both in and outside of the Bible. God’s act of flooding the world, commanding his followers to slaughter their enemies (men, women, and children alike), and his condemning people to hell are all particular subjects of disgust within New Atheist circles. So the question arises: are the New Atheists right about God?

The first thing worth noting is that God’s existence isn’t entirely dependent on his likeability. What this means is that whether or not one likes God or agrees upon his actions has little bearing upon whether or not he exists, and in these discussions, the Christian is often tasked with trying to describe God in ways that would make him likeable to the sceptic. God’s existence must be established upon grounds beyond whether or not one finds him pleasant.

From the perspective of the traditional Christian, if God exists, then he pre-exists. He is the Creator of all things, including human beings. Since all things exist by his will, all things exist by his design and for his purposes. When humans, therefore, choose to act outside of the purpose or design for which God intended them, they are acting in rebellion or – to put it in classic terms – “sin.” A second implication of this perspective is that God has the prerogative to deal with people as he sees fit. Given that he is Creator, he is not obligated in any way to provide special treatment to people. Consequently, there is no sense of entitlement. One is grateful for whatever graces one receives, but expects nothing.

In contemporary secular culture, however, the idea of God – especially as Creator – is largely obsolete. The average modern person begins with the idea that there is no particular design or purpose to the universe or to themselves. One’s purpose is whatever one wishes it to be. The ultimate consequence of this thinking is that – if the person is undesigned, and if that person is self-actualising (making his or her own purpose) – no one can impose anything upon them. One gets to do what one wants to do, and no one has any right to say otherwise. Humanist morality recommends that each person gives the other the same respect out of courtesy, but either way all people are existentially self-made.

For the modern secularist, then, when God is brought into the equation, he is an intruder into a universe in which he has no business. They have no use for the “design” he might choose to impose upon them, and he only becomes useful in any sense if he facilitates their own desires. If God cannot prove to be some sort of cosmic butler, he is rejected as either useless or tyrannical.

This is a large part of the modern issue with the problem of evil. Because, if God exists, and one still has to deal with so much that one does not like, he clearly is not doing his job of facilitating individual desires, purposes and dreams.

The Verdict

New Atheism is the offspring of centuries of tension which has been building between religion, culture, and politics across at least three continents (and rapidly spreading beyond). It burst into full bloom when religious extremism became a very public concern due to religious terrorism, and people were ripe to hear about the evils of religion. It states that blind faith is the enemy of human interests, and that science is the remedy.

However, faith is far from blind in a secular world wherein religion is forced to behave under the lens of self-scrutiny and the scrutiny of critics alike. Science, while excellent at describing the physical universe, is not sufficient to the task of addressing morality, purpose, and meaning.

The God of the Bible is a very distasteful character in the eyes of the New Atheists, and subject to endless derision. However likeable God may or may not be, this is a poor argument against his existence, and the core of the issue really boils down to whose universe this really is. If God is the intruder in the universe, any actions he imposes on the creatures therein are those of a dictator or tyrant. However, if God is creator of the universe and all who dwell within, their reason for being comes from him, and he is perfectly just when he holds them accountable to his designs.

Joel Furches is an apologist, journalist and researcher on conversion and deconversion, based in the USA.