What Is New Atheism?

What Is the Question?

The label "New Atheism" was coined in 2006 by the atheist writer Gary Wolf in a Wired article, to describe a then-emerging group of public intellectuals who argued that religion is not just a mistaken belief but a social evil that ought to be confronted openly. The "new" was not a new doctrine; the arguments had been around for centuries. What was new was the tone, the platform, and the cultural moment. The New Atheists wrote for a mass audience, sold millions of books, and treated the criticism of religion as a public duty rather than a private philosophical stance. The question is what the movement amounts to, philosophically, and whether its arguments hold up.

The IEP article on atheism distinguishes New Atheism from earlier atheism by three features: its assertive public tone, its claim that religion causes measurable harm, and its rejection of the accommodationist view that science and faith are separate but equal domains. New Atheists hold that faith claims are empirical claims, that they can be tested and refuted, and that the time for polite silence about religion's failures is over. Whether that posture is intellectually defensible is the central philosophical question.

The Four Horsemen

The movement is identified with four authors whose books appeared between 2004 and 2007. Sam Harris published The End of Faith in 2004, arguing that faith, especially of the Abrahamic variety, is uniquely dangerous in an age of weapons of mass destruction. Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion in 2006, presenting the case that God almost certainly does not exist and that religion poisons the minds of children. Daniel Dennett published Breaking the Spell in 2006, calling for a scientific study of religion as a natural phenomenon. Christopher Hitchens published God Is Not Great in 2007, a sweeping polemic against religion's historical record.

Each author had a distinctive emphasis. Harris focused on the political and security threat posed by religious certainty. Dawkins focused on the scientific case against theism and on the moral influence of religious upbringing. Dennett focused on the cognitive science of religion and on the demand that religion submit itself to scientific scrutiny. Hitchens focused on the historical and moral record of religious institutions. Together they formed a public face for the movement, including joint appearances and documentaries that amplified their reach.

The Main Arguments

The first New Atheist argument is that theistic belief is unsupported by evidence. Dawkins frames God as a scientific hypothesis, the "God hypothesis," and argues that the evidence for it is weak and the evidence against it, drawn from evolution and the problem of evil, is strong. The universe we observe looks exactly as we would expect if there were no designer: complex, contingent, full of waste and suffering, and explained at the level of life by natural selection. God, if God existed, would be even more complex than the universe, and so would itself need an explanation, which pushes the explanatory demand back rather than satisfying it.

The second argument is that religion is harmful. Harris and Hitchens assemble a long list of religiously motivated violence, persecution, and political obstruction, from the Crusades and the Inquisition to contemporary religious terrorism and the obstruction of stem cell research and sex education. The harm, on their view, is not a corruption of religion by bad actors but a natural consequence of certainty about matters that outrun evidence. When people believe they have God on their side, they will do terrible things, and the moderate believer provides cover for the fanatic by treating faith as beyond criticism.

The third argument is that religion is not owed respect as a separate domain. The New Atheists reject the view, associated with Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria," that science and religion deal with different questions and cannot conflict. They hold that religious claims about miracles, prayer, creation, and the soul are empirical claims, that they have been tested and found wanting, and that the polite fiction of separate domains gives religion an immunity from criticism it has not earned.

Philosophical Criticism

Philosophers have not been kind to the New Atheism, even those sympathetic to atheism. The first charge is that the movement's philosophy of religion is shallow. Dawkins's treatment of the cosmological and teleological arguments often attacks crude versions and ignores the more sophisticated forms developed by Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and contemporary philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga. The result, critics say, is a case against theism that has not engaged the best theism, and so is rhetorically effective but philosophically thin.

The second charge is that the New Atheism treats all religion as fundamentalism. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, distinguished the healthy-minded and the sickly forms of religion, and showed that religious experience has carried genuine moral and psychological goods across cultures. The New Atheist tendency to treat all faith as fanatical literalism ignores the liberal, mystical, and pragmatic forms of religion that have coexisted with science for centuries. The result, critics say, is a caricature that tells believing readers they are not as they understand themselves to be.

The third charge is that the New Atheism lacks the resources to carry religion's cultural work. Religion has supplied communities, rituals, narratives, moral formation, and practices of attention. If religion is to be rejected, what replaces it? The New Atheists tend to answer that science and secular humanism can do the job, but philosophers such as Charles Taylor have argued that the secular age is itself a fragile achievement that draws on the religious past in ways it does not always recognize.

New Atheism and Antitheism

New Atheism overlaps with but is not identical to antitheism. Antitheism, the view that religion is positively harmful, has a longer history, going back at least to the French philosophes. New Atheism is a specific popular movement of the early twenty-first century, identified with particular authors and a particular tone. All New Atheists are antitheists in some sense, but not all antitheists are New Atheists, and the movement's combative public posture is not a necessary feature of the philosophical position.

Contemporary Relevance

The cultural impact of New Atheism was large but brief. Its books sold in the millions and changed the conversation about religion in Western public life, making open atheism a mainstream option. But the movement has faded as a cultural force. The rise of identity politics, the persistence of religion in the global south, and the recognition that "the secularization thesis," that religion would wither as science advanced, has not held up, have made the simple opposition of science and faith look dated. Newer atheist writers, such as Grayling and Eagleton's critics, are more cautious about the cultural work religion still does.

The philosophical lesson of New Atheism is mixed. The movement was right that religious claims are open to empirical and philosophical scrutiny, and right that the harm done in religion's name deserves honest naming. It was wrong to treat religion as a single phenomenon, wrong to attack its weakest forms, and wrong to think that the work of religion could be replaced by science and secular humanism without loss. The better philosophical atheism, the one that runs from Hume through Mackie to the present, is more modest and more careful, and it has outlasted the New Atheist moment.

Sources

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Atheism" (New Atheism section) — https://iep.utm.edu/atheism/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Philosophy of Religion" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "William James" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "David Hume" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/

Related Topics

• What Is Atheism? — the broader category.
• What Is Antitheism? — the underlying position.
• Is Faith Rational? — a key contested question.
• Does God Exist? — the central question.
• What Is the Burden of Proof for God? — the procedural question.
• Philosophy of God — the wider domain.