Around the mid-00’s, a group of writers and public intellectuals came together to front a
new kind of crusade - one that was passionately anti-God. The so-called New Atheists
defended ideas of rationality, reason and evidence in the face of what they deemed to
be the dangerous delusions of religious belief.
The so-called Four Horsemen of the New Atheism – Richard Dawkins, Christopher
Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris – were famed for their aggressive
reductionism. They argued, firstly, that physical matter is all that exists and, secondly,
that the whole of reality can be explained by science alone. This view is sometimes
called scientific materialism. It teaches that human beings are no more than evolved
animals controlled by their DNA and that any objective meaning or purpose to life is
purely illusory.
The New Atheism also attached a salvific component to their cause. From their
perspective, science had the ability to emancipate the world from regressive religious
dogma to embrace a bright future of rationality in which many of the moral atrocities
associated with religion, including religious wars, terrorism and bigotry, would be
consigned to the past. A scientific-materialist worldview would make possible a
humanism which would treat everyone as equals and see humanity released to fulfil its
potential. The New Atheist perspective was summed up concisely by the late physicist
Victor J. Stenger, who said, in reference to the 9-11 terrorist attacks, “Science flies you
to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings”.[i] The Four Horsemen, and others who
became associated with them, resolved to take no prisoners in their war on belief in
God.
Twenty years since the New Atheists first came to prominence, the world has moved on
in many important respects. The New Atheism is no longer the force it once was. Many
now conclude that it was an emotional and simplistic response to religious belief.
Despite this the New Atheists have, in recent times, hit the headlines once more - but
not for the reasons we might expect.
In November 2023, the political activist, author and New Atheist hero, Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
made an announcement that shocked many in the New Atheist community: she had
become a Christian. Dubbed by many as the ‘fifth horseman’, Hirsi Ali had once spoken
against belief in God as aggressively as her New Atheist colleagues. She ridiculed the
so-called irrationality of faith and denounced it as oppressive and damaging. For her,
faith was the antithesis of evidence, and religion was a dangerous lie. But then
everything changed.
Hirsi Ali describes two realisations that underpinned her conversion. The first was
recognising the failure of the scientific materialist worldview to make a change for the
better. Whereas once Hirsi Ali had believed that getting rid of God in favour of science
would usher in a bright new future, she eventually became convinced that it would be
nothing short of disastrous. From the threat of outside authoritarian forces by Russia or
militant Islam to the inside dangers of woke ideology, Hirsi Ali came to believe that
western civilization’s break from its Judeo-Christian heritage had removed the
foundation for the many moral norms and values that once kept it stable. She writes:[ii]
[W]e can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what
is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too,
does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The
only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-
Christian tradition.
For Hirsi Ali, the move away from the Christian God has left a void which has enabled
other, more aggressive, ideologies to start taking root. As the writer GK Chesterton is
reported to have remarked, “When men stop believing in God they don't believe in
nothing; they believe in anything”.[iii]
The second realisation that caused Hirsi Ali’s change of mind was more intensely
personal. She describes, very movingly, a decade-long period of personal crisis during
which she suffered a breakdown and the darkness of deep depression. Not only was
her scientific materialism unable to provide answers to the global situation, it had also
robbed her of any personal hope. She writes:[iv]
I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual
solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a
simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
Hirsi Ali attended counselling, during which her therapist suggested she was suffering
from ‘spiritual bankruptcy.’ She describes how this resonated with her in a profound way
and caused her to cry out to God in desperation. The resulting turnaround, which she
credits to God, she describes as nothing short of miraculous.[v] For many years the New
Atheism had preached that the world needed saved from the tyranny of religion. But for
this New Atheist, the logical consequences of her atheistic worldview led not only to
cultural decline but also to a world without personal meaning, value or hope.
In April 2024, a few months after Hirsi Ali’s conversion, the New Atheist world was
rocked again by reports that its front runner, Richard Dawkins, had described himself as
a ‘cultural Christian’. Speaking on LBC Radio to Rachel Johnson, he said:[vi]
I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer, but there’s a distinction between
being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so I love hymns and
Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home within the Christian ethos.
In one sense, Dawkins; concession is not as significant as people may like to think. He
has referred to himself as a cultural Christian for many years.[vii] Furthermore, he is at
pains to distance himself from the charge of personal faith. What is interesting,
however, is that Dawkins’ recent comments were made in reference to his recognition
that the move away from Christian belief has opened the door for more threatening
worldviews to emerge. Like Hirsi Ali, Dawkins is alarmed by the threat caused by
militant forms of Islam and woke ideology. His atheism and his scientific materialism,
once propagated so strongly, have not provided the cultural salvation he hoped for.
Furthermore, although Dawkins is adamant that he has no personal belief, he does
admit to an inbuilt intuition that there is something transcendent, even if he chooses to
deny it. In his 2007 debate with Christian apologist John Lennox, Dawkins admitted:[viii]
I think that when you consider the beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to
be what it is, you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of
admiration and you almost feel a desire to worship something… And it’s tempting to
translate that feeling of awe and worship into a desire to worship some particular
thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator.
Again, Dawkins chooses to deny this desire to worship in favour of a purely scientific
explanation. But the one thing he cannot do is deny the sense that there is something
more than his worldview will allow.
Dawkins and Hirsi Ali have this in common. Over many years, both advocated
aggressively for a science-informed atheism and claimed it would emancipate society
and bring true freedom to the individual. Twenty years on, however, the cracks in their
ideology are beginning to show. On a societal level, many people are beginning to see
that the ongoing retreat from the Judeo-Christian worldview is leading to increasing
moral destabilisation. On an individual level, both Dawkins and Hirsi Ali have failed to
live fully consistently with their own atheist worldviews. The desire to worship, to pray, to
seek solace in the divine remains. For Hirsi Ali, this has proven to be the turning point.
In a world where many people reject God simply by breathing the cultural air of
secularism, careful examination of the ‘livability’ or coherence of the atheistic worldview
is often lacking. The New Atheism, once so assured of its reductionist message, has
become a cautionary tale against writing faith off too quickly. In fact, it might be
suggested that the New Atheists’ own faith in the power of science to redeem humanity
has been found wanting.
One of the shortcomings of the New Atheism was its simplistic assumption that all faith
is blind faith. This is simply not true. Faith can be blind, but it can also be evidence-
based. Such a faith stands at the heart of Christianity. The reasonableness of
philosophical argument, the historicity of the biblical narratives, personal experience of
God – all of these help to ground the Christian faith on a reasonable foundation.
It may be argued that, if there really is a God who stands behind creation, we might
expect that he would make himself known. Both Dawkins and Hirsi Ali have spoken, to
some extent, of something approaching an awareness of the divine. In the Bible, the
book of Ecclesiastes tells us that, “God has placed eternity in the hearts of man”.[ix] We
have an inner sense of the transcendent and a desire for the eternal. Where might we
look for further evidence of the divine? Looking at creation, the apostle Paul, writes:[x]
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and
divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made,
so that people are without excuse.
The Bible speaks, then, of a double revelation of God available to everyone: the inner
knowledge of the heart and the outer evidence of creation. One’s inward sense of the
divine might be explained away by some, but it cannot be denied. Any attempt to reduce
it to the mere physical world will ultimately fail.
The revelation of God in our inner experience and in creation is not sufficient to show us
what God is like or how we can know God. But it should cause us to consider whether
God has communicated more about himself to us. The Bible’s answer is that he has, in
two ways. Firstly, through the Bible itself, but, secondly and most fully, in the person of
Jesus Christ. As John’s Gospel says, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is
at the Father’s side, he has made him known”.[xi]
The Christian claim is that Jesus is not only the revelation of God to a world that has
turned away but is also the redemption God for a world that has lost all hope. Jesus is
God’s answer to the moral atrocities - whether done in the name of religion or for some
other cause - that blight both our history and our present. He is God’s hope for a better
world to come: a world in which evil and suffering are done away with forever. He is
God’s answer for the individual who has lost hope and found themselves in the
darkness of despair. This answer was not found in intellectual achievement, nor via a
great discovery, nor through a humanist morality. It was found on a cross - a symbol of
hopeless despair for the first century Jew but upon which Jesus paid the price of our sin
in full and bridged the gap between a fallen world and a holy God.
The New Atheists unquestionably have left their mark on our society, and many have
been influenced by their thinking. But the New Atheism, and specifically scientific
materialism, has failed to deliver the hope that it promised. The hope of Christ, by
contrast, remains forever. Amidst despair, Hirsi Ali discovered this hope for herself.
Each of us can discover Jesus as our hope today.
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Endnotes:
[i] Stenger, V.J. quoted in https://richarddawkins.net/articles/3567
[ii] Hirsi Ali, A., (2023) ‘Why I am Now a Christian’, Unherd, https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
[iii] This quote is widely attributed to Chesterton, although there is only indirect evidence that he said it, found Emile Cammaerts’ The Laughing Prophet (1953).
[iv] Hirsi Ali, A., (2023) Why I am Now a Christian’, Unherd, https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
[v] Hisri Ali’s story can be heard on The God Debate:
[vi] These comments by Dawkins are widely quoted across the internet.
[vii] See, for example, the 2007 article, ‘Dawkins: I’m a Cultural Christian’:
[viii] ‘The God Delusion Debate’, Larry Alex Taunton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF5bPI92-5o
[ix] Ecclesiastes 3:11
[x] Romans 1:20
[xi] John 1:18
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