In the early 2000s, cultural changes, the rise of the internet, and the centuries-long advance of materialism coalesced to form a rich soil for a new spin on an old idea. In many respects, the idea had found its modern roots in the aftermath of the publishing of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Since its publication by Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species offered (in the minds of materialists, at any rate) the death blow to any notion of a universe created in seven literal days by a supreme deity, and, consequently, of Christianity itself. In other words, it became the catalyst for a fight in the increasing turbulent waters of religion and science. This new idea, contended by the “Four Horsemen”, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennet, became known as the New Atheism. It was fresh. It was controversial. It had brilliant, charismatic men as its champions. New Atheism appealed to an internet culture that increasingly sought to become transgressive, and found plenty of public anger towards religion in the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror.
For years, these Four Horsemen wreaked havoc on the perception of religion, especially Christianity. What differentiated this atheism from its normal variety, at least as it existed in the United States (which for years previously was represented by a growing number of Americans identifying as “non religious”), was its militancy. The New Atheism was boisterous and very direct in its assault not only on organized Christianity, but even on its influences within the West more broadly. As Dawkins himself said in his bestseller, The God Delusion,
“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”
The internet was the perfect platform for the propagation of this belief; countless debates between these Four Horsemen and various Christian apologists, ministers, and laypeople exist online. Countless of these debates end in absolute disaster for the Christian. In many online spaces, from Reddit to the burgeoning YouTube, the “cool” thing was to be one of these New Atheists. An entire generation of young people were captured by this ethos and grew to support this New Atheism. A poll conducted by the American Survey Center found that among Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine the largest religious group was “none.” As that group has metastasized over the last few decades, those who fell into the new atheism grew to defend it, and its prophets, with religious fervor. The irony was not lost on many commentators and observers; books have been written on the elevation of New Atheism to its own kind of religion (a fact which contributed to its fall from the heights of popularity it once enjoyed). At the time, however, it was very much in command of the public square.
This brief synopsis (which has made massive simplifications) might be known to many. For our purposes, it is especially important to examine the New Atheism in two ways. Firstly, how it argued against Christianity, and secondly, how it viewed the influence of Christianity on the world.
To the first question, we may state the matter simply: New Atheism attacked Christianity on materialist grounds. This fact is absolutely essential for understanding its development, growth, and fall. It cannot be overstated how pervasive one notion became within the movement; not only is there not enough scientific evidence for Christianity, there is enough to actively disprove it. Just as importantly, it must be understood that, by and large, Christianity rose to address New Atheism on materialistic grounds. It was a tremendous blunder for theism generally. Christian apologists and others attempted to prove miracles without realizing (and certainly without criticizing) that their opponents’ worldviews cannot allow for miracles, no matter what the supposed “evidence” is. A true materialist (someone who believes that reality is composed only of matter, and that there is nothing beyond the physical world) could see a man have his arm regrown, and the logical and consistent thing for him to believe would be that he was hallucinating, or that it was an elaborate trick, or even that the “man” was actually a shape-shifting alien! For the materialist, any explanation is better than the supernatural one, because that is simply impossible.
The Christians who rose to meet these Horsemen and their acolytes however, did not (by and large) point this out, nor did they attempt to prove Christianity from a more neutral or even favorable battleground of presuppositions; instead, they met the New Atheism where they wanted to be fought and were utterly crushed. In short, Christians allowed such statements as “science disproves Christianity” to stand, and then attempted to argue from within those categories that it did not.
To the second question, we shall turn to another of the horsemen, Sam Harris. In his work, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris said,
“It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”
For Harris, the calculus is simple: religion, Christianity included, is a force for evil, not good. These sentiments gained traction, and very soon the common view was that Christianity and its moral positions were wrong. Moreover, it was possible to establish a moral system independent of Christianity, or any other religion, while leaving morality itself still nonrelative (although that is not a constraint all New Atheists felt). Christianity then was the poison, and rationalism was the saving cure, especially for civilization.
The examination we have just made, in very short fashion, of these two essential questions will provide the necessary context for the next matter: the much more recent resurgence of the very thing the New Atheism fought against. For now, however, we must leave the issue in the same position the world was in the early 2000s: with Christianity seemingly in retreat on all fronts.
