On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 Islamic terrorists boarded four commercial airplanes, hijacked them, and flew them into high-profile government and finance power centers. Four days later, Richard Dawkins wrote an article in The Guardian titled “Religion’s Misguided Missiles.” The subtitle read, “Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause disaster.” His point? Religion breeds murder.
At the time, Dawkins, already a prominent atheist and best-selling Darwin apologist via such titles as The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986), held the position of Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Belief in an afterlife, he said, constitutes an existential threat to the world:
If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place….
At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr’s death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place.
More specifically, the problem is belief in a particular kind of God. Ignoring all distinctions between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he continued:
To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
Put bluntly, theism is a pox on the planet. Atheism must stamp it out.
Religion of the Atheist Kind
Five years later, Dawkins published The God Delusion (2006). At about that same time, Gary Wolf of Wired magazine turned a critical eye toward Dawkins, as well as fellow atheists Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris:
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil.
In a story rife with religious language, “The Church of the Non-Believers” Wolf characterized Dawkins as a militant evangelist for atheism, dubbing him “the leading light of the New Atheism movement.” The cover of the issue read, “The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science. Inside the Crusade Against Religion.”
No Science; Just Rhetoric
The term “New Atheism” stuck, but while the cover described it as “Just Science,” it wasn’t about any empirical science; it was about philosophical worldview. Dawkins was explicit about this, in fact: “My answer is that the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism.”
Whether you state it that way or as “materialism vs. non-materialism” or “atheism vs. theism,” this was indeed where the conflict lay. Unhelpfully, the framing usually reduced to the spurious “science vs. religion,” a caption more apt to generate large, popcorn-eating audiences on a lecture circuit.
And so, while the ID community went about seeking truth about the natural world by doing actual research, Dawkins et al. went about pushing atheism like true out-propagate-the-opposition Darwinians. He and Lawrence Krauss toured the globe advocating for science and reason contra religion. Reason Rallies were held on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to “unify, energize, and embolden secular people nationwide,” while a bevy of books on atheism appeared on bookstore shelves.
Since 2006, The God Delusion has sold more than three million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. Science and Culture regulars have probably seen that Stephen Meyer marked the 20th anniversary of its publication with an article arguing, contra Dawkins, how scientific advances increasingly support the inference to design. Ten days later, Dawkins penned an article asserting that Darwin had “mortally wounded” “the so-called argument from design” and doubling down on what he’d written 20 years ago. In typical Dawkinsian fashion, it was heavy on ridicule and light on science. It didn’t even rise to the level of acknowledging Meyer or the evidence he had put forth. Piers Morgan then invited both men onto his show for a live discussion of their respective takes on the subject, but while Meyer accepted, as David Klinghoffer reported, Dawkins didn’t bother to return Morgan’s phone call.
Make of that what you will (and Klinghoffer’s take on it is hilarious), but suffice it to say that the “leading light of atheism” went dark when invited to defend his views against the arguments and evidence for design.
Irony of Ironies
Twenty years on, the New Atheism, if we are to put the most charitable interpretation on it, is passé. Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett have died, and Sam Harris has moved on to advancing mindfulness, meditation, and a secularized moral philosophy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has announced her conversion to Christianity, and Dawkins, against a rising tide of Islam in Europe, now describes himself as a “cultural Christian.”
Ironically, Dawkins is now even being cited as instrumental in a number of Christian conversions. In Coming to Faith Through Dawkins (2023), editors Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath bring together the intellectual journeys of 12 former Dawkins enthusiasts. All at one time fancied his brand of irreligion but subsequently abandoned atheism altogether for a more robust philosophical worldview. Alexander and McGrath identify five elements of the disillusionment with atheism that influenced them and many others:
- Dawkins’s zealous attacks, particularly on Christianity, “generated a surge of interest in exploring religious faith,” perhaps more effectively than any preacher could have done.
- Dawkins’s shrill, dismissive treatment of life’s big questions eventually exposed “the banality, superficiality, and shallowness of Dawkins and his circle.”
- Dawkins’s unwillingness to reflect critically about his own belief system, including his unstated assumption of the supposed “warfare” between science and religion, began to look a lot like the religious fundamentalism he excoriated.
- The “trenchant certainties” put forth by the New Atheists struck many as “arrogant and improbable, amounting to a significant intellectual overreach on their part.”
- The movement began to be marked by a “cult of personality,” based on rigid and unquestionable dicta emanating from the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens.
Today, they write, the New Atheism is:
generally regarded as having imploded, increasingly (though perhaps unfairly) seen as the crystallization of the cultural prejudices of old, white, Western males….
Many who had initially embraced the New Atheism found that it failed to deliver the secure knowledge they longed for or a sustainable vision of the “good life.” The New Atheism may have presented itself as an antidote to religious delusions; its critics argued that it merely propagated a somewhat different delusion about the omnicompetence of reason and science.
Indeed. That “somewhat different delusion” is stalling out very publicly. How the mighty have fallen.
Paradoxically, Dawkins catalyzed for many a process that eventually led to the kind of faith he most vehemently denounced as delusive — religious faith in the Judeo-Christian understanding of God as a supernatural, self-existing creator of all material reality. Imagine being such a poor evangelist for atheism that people credit you with helping them become Christians. I cannot imagine a more ironic epitaph for the failure of a movement.