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The philosophy of religion did not end with Hume and Kant; it is a living discipline, and in the early twenty-first century its most public battleground has been the clash between the New Atheism and its theistic critics. Where earlier atheists were often content to find religion false, the New Atheists — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, the so-called "Four Horsemen" — argued that it is also harmful, and they took the case to a mass readership with combative best-sellers in the years after 2001. Their challenge forced a vigorous theistic response from figures such as Alister McGrath, Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, and it reopened the perennial question of the relationship between science and religion: are they at war, do they occupy wholly separate territories (Gould's NOMA), or can they engage in fruitful dialogue? This lesson examines the New Atheist arguments at their strongest, the most serious theistic replies, and the rival models of the science–religion relationship. The evaluative thread is whether the New Atheism represents a genuine intellectual advance or, as its critics charge, a popularisation that mistakes the misuse of religion for its substance and a caricature of faith for the real thing.
The New Atheism crystallised in a burst of publishing in the 2000s, shaped by the post-9/11 climate in which the destructive potential of religious zeal was vividly in view.
| Author | Key book | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Sam Harris | The End of Faith | 2004 |
| Richard Dawkins | The God Delusion | 2006 |
| Daniel Dennett | Breaking the Spell | 2006 |
| Christopher Hitchens | God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything | 2007 |
Key term: New Atheism — the early-twenty-first-century movement (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris) marked by the claim that religion is not merely false but positively harmful, that faith is opposed to reason and evidence, and that science and secular ethics can supply everything religion was thought to provide.
What distinguishes the New Atheists from earlier unbelievers is militancy and scope. They do not merely decline to believe; they campaign, arguing that religion fosters irrationality, sectarian violence, the oppression of women, the obstruction of science, and the indoctrination of children — Dawkins controversially likening a religious upbringing to a form of child abuse, and Hitchens summarising the case in his subtitle, "religion poisons everything." Dennett adds a distinctive proposal: that religion should be studied as a wholly natural phenomenon — a product of evolution and cultural transmission — and he popularised calling atheists "brights." Harris presses the moral and political danger of faith-based certainty, especially where it touches weapons and martyrdom.
Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), the evolutionary biologist, is the movement's most prominent voice. The God Delusion (2006) advances several lines of attack.
The "Ultimate Boeing 747" argument is Dawkins's centrepiece and his attempt at a positive argument against God (not merely a rebuttal of theism). It inverts a famous image of the creationist Fred Hoyle, who said the chance emergence of life was as improbable as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. Dawkins replies that the theist's God is the ultimate 747: any being intelligent and powerful enough to design a universe would have to be at least as complex as what it designs, and so would itself be enormously improbable and in equal need of explanation. Positing God to explain the universe's order therefore explains nothing — it merely relocates and worsens the problem. "Who designed the designer?" is, he says, the question the theist cannot answer. Darwinian natural selection, by contrast, genuinely earns its explanatory keep: it shows how immense complexity can arise by gradual, cumulative, unguided steps from simple beginnings — a "crane," in Dennett's terms, rather than a "skyhook."
The seven-point scale. Dawkins proposes a spectrum of belief from 1 (certain God exists) to 7 (certain God does not), placing himself at about 6.9 — a "de facto atheist" who regards God as very improbable rather than strictly disproven.
Religion as a "virus of the mind." Extending his concept of the meme (a unit of cultural inheritance analogous to a gene), Dawkins argues that religious ideas propagate not because they are true but because they are good at replicating — through childhood indoctrination, emotional reinforcement and social pressure — like mental viruses spreading through a population.
The New Atheism provoked a substantial counter-literature. The strongest replies do not defend everything done in religion's name but argue that the New Atheists attack a caricature, misunderstand the logic of theistic argument, and confuse the abuse of religion with its essence.
Alister McGrath (b. 1953), uniquely qualified with an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics and one in theology, is Dawkins's most direct respondent (Dawkins' God, 2004; The Dawkins Delusion?, 2007). His core arguments:
| Argument | Detail |
|---|---|
| Science does not disprove God | Science is methodologically naturalistic — by method it investigates only natural causes — but this does not entail metaphysical naturalism (the claim that the natural is all there is). The leap from "science explains by natural causes" to "therefore there is nothing supernatural" is illicit; on the God question, McGrath argues, the natural sciences are strictly silent, not hostile |
| Dawkins misrepresents faith | Dawkins defines faith as "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence." McGrath replies this is a straw man: in the mainstream Christian tradition faith is trust based on evidence, experience and reason — closer to the warranted confidence one has in a person than to wilful credulity |
| Dawkins attacks a caricature of theology | He engages popular, crude religion rather than the considered theology of Aquinas, Barth or Plantinga, and so refutes a position serious theists do not hold |
| The balance sheet of religion | Against Hitchens's "poisons everything," McGrath points to religiously-motivated goods — the founding of hospitals and universities, charitable relief, the abolitionist movement, the language of human dignity — insisting the ledger has two sides |
Key term: Methodological vs metaphysical naturalism — methodological naturalism is the working assumption that science explains phenomena by natural causes; metaphysical (or ontological) naturalism is the further claim that nature is all that exists. McGrath's key move is that the success of the first does not establish the second.
Two analytic philosophers sharpen the reply. Alvin Plantinga (1932–2025) targets the "747" argument's premise that God must be complex: on the classical doctrine of divine simplicity, God is not an assembled, parts-having object at all, so the inference "complex, therefore improbable" simply does not apply to God. Plantinga also presses his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN): if both naturalism and evolution are true, our cognitive faculties were selected for survival, not truth, so we would have no good reason to trust them — including the reasoning that led us to naturalism. Naturalism, he argues, is thus self-defeating, providing a "defeater" for itself in a way theism does not (a God who designs truth-aimed faculties underwrites their reliability).
Richard Swinburne (b. 1934) argues, against Dawkins's complexity premise, that God is in fact a remarkably simple hypothesis: a single being of infinite power, knowledge and goodness is simpler than a being of some large but finite degree of each, because infinity is a simpler stopping-point than an arbitrary finite quantity. For Swinburne, theism is a simple explanation of a vast range of data (a law-governed, fine-tuned, conscious-life-bearing universe), and on the principle that simple explanations of much are probable, theism is more probable than Dawkins allows.
Although Dawkins is the movement's lightning-rod, the other "horsemen" press distinct lines worth distinguishing, because exam questions on the New Atheism reward candidates who do not simply equate it with Dawkins.
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), in God Is Not Great, mounts a primarily moral and historical indictment: his thesis ("religion poisons everything") is that faith has been, on balance, a force for cruelty, tribalism, sexual repression and the abuse of children, and that its conduct is worsened by the conviction of divine sanction. The theistic reply is twofold. First, this is a claim about religion's effects, not its truth: even a perfectly damning balance-sheet would leave "does God exist?" untouched (one cannot infer the falsity of a belief from the bad behaviour of some of its holders). Second, the balance-sheet is contested: McGrath and Hart point to the role of religious conviction in founding hospitals and universities, in abolitionism, in the civil-rights movement, and in the very vocabulary of human dignity — and to the lethal record of the explicitly atheist regimes of the twentieth century, which undercuts the implied claim that removing religion removes the impulse to atrocity.
Sam Harris (b. 1956) presses the political danger of faith-based certainty — especially where religious conviction touches martyrdom and weapons — and, unusually among the four, defends a naturalistic objective morality: in The Moral Landscape (2010) he argues that moral truths are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, in principle accessible to science. This is significant because it concedes the importance of objective morality while denying that it needs God — directly engaging the theistic moral argument (below).
Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) is the most measured: in Breaking the Spell he proposes that religion be studied dispassionately as a natural phenomenon — an evolved, culturally-transmitted system — and famously argues for "cranes, not skyhooks," explanations that build complexity from below rather than invoking a top-down designer. His distinctive contribution is methodological: not "religion is wicked" but "religion is explicable without remainder in natural terms." The standard reply, once more, is the genetic fallacy: a complete natural account of how religion arises and spreads would not show that its central claim is false, any more than a natural account of how we came to do mathematics shows that mathematical truths are illusions. A further reply notes that Dennett's project, taken to its limit, is self-threatening: if all belief is to be explained "without remainder" as the output of natural selection, that explanation engulfs Dennett's own beliefs, including his atheism and his confidence in science — the point Plantinga's EAAN makes sharp. A debunking that debunks everything debunks nothing in particular.
One front deserves separate treatment because it is where the contemporary theist most often goes on the offensive: the moral argument. In the form pressed by William Lane Craig, it runs: (1) if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist; (2) objective moral values and duties do exist (the torture of children for fun is really wrong, not merely disapproved of); (3) therefore God exists. The argument's force is that it turns the New Atheists' own moral seriousness — their fierce denunciations of religious cruelty — into a premise: if Hitchens is right to condemn religious atrocities as objectively evil, whence comes the objective standard he invokes? Craig argues that a purely naturalistic universe of particles and selection pressures supplies no foundation for binding moral obligation, only for evolved sentiment and social convention.
The atheist has serious replies, and the exchange is genuinely open. Some, like Harris, accept premise (2) but deny premise (1), grounding objective morality in facts about well-being (a form of ethical naturalism); others deny premise (2), accepting that morality is, at bottom, a human construct or an evolved disposition (J. L. Mackie's "error theory," which holds that objective values would be metaphysically "queer" entities, and that moral talk, though useful, is strictly false). The theist presses that the first horn must show how an is (facts about flourishing) can yield an ought (Hume's gap), and that the second horn is hard to live by — few can really believe that the wrongness of genocide is merely a feeling. The atheist presses, in return, the Euthyphro dilemma: is an act good because God commands it (making morality arbitrary) or does God command it because it is good (making goodness independent of God)? — to which the theist typically replies that goodness is grounded in God's own nature, neither arbitrary fiat nor an external standard above him. The moral argument thus remains, like the cosmological and design arguments, unresolved but live — which is precisely the point about the contemporary scene.
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