Transcript

In the past six years, the decline of Christianity has stabilized in America and atheism is no longer a dominant cultural force.

In fact, atheism's most passionate advocates are now defending the usefulness of religion when it comes to maintaining social sanity.

As I noted in a previous episode, Richard Dawkins even calls himself a cultural Christian.

In today's episode, we're gonna talk about the death of so-called new atheism, what comes next for the non-religious, and how Christians should respond.

First, let's talk about how all this started.

As a millennial, I remember as a child experiencing a vibe shift when it came to religion and culture.

Growing up in the '90s, morning shows didn't highlight child drag queens.

Instead, they warned parents about how films like 1992's Batman Returns were inappropriate for children.

And instead of cartoons depicting non-binary characters with pronouns they/them, we had Wolverine from the X-Men finding comfort by reading a Bible in a church.

In fact, in 1992, about 90% of Americans identified as Christians and only 5% identified as non-religious.

But today, only about 63% of Americans identify as Christians and 29% identify as non-religious.

So what happened?

First, after the fall of the Soviet Union, identifying as an atheist was no longer synonymous with being an un-American commie traitor.

Second, the internet gave the non-religions something that the religious have had for centuries, a place to feel like they're not alone and a place to encourage one another in their life's mission.

Today, about 96% of American adults use the internet, but in 1995 that number was only 14%.

Just as the printing press gave Protestantism an edge during The Reformation, the internet gave atheism the edge in spreading its arguments during The Information Revolution.

Of course, rapid spread of an idea doesn't demonstrate its truth because flat earth theory is the most popular it's been in the modern world because of its advocates' videos on the internet.

The satirist Jonathan Swift said it best, A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its shoes on.

When it comes to the spread of new atheism, the internet was the accelerant but one historical event served as the match that lit new atheism ablaze, the September 11th terrorist attacks.

After these attacks, people who once tolerated religion as a false nuisance that at least kept people moral now believed that religion was a dangerous delusion that could motivate normally sane people to commit horrible acts of violence.

The late atheist Victor Stenger said something that has been memed ever since, Science flies you to the moon and religion flies you into buildings.

Although religion builds hospitals and science builds atomic bombs, but what do I know?

So during this cultural debate over religion, four figures would rise to prominence to become the faces of the new atheism.

Sam Harris who wrote his book, The End of Faith in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett, the late British journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, and the most famous one, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins who published his bestseller The God Delusion in 2006.

What made the new atheism new w- weren't its arguments.

You could find the same criticisms of the Bible from older authors like Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll, and the same objections to natural theology in philosophers like Bertrand Russell or Antony Flew.

No, what made new atheism new was its rhetoric.

In 1948, Bertrand Russell and Father F.C.

Copleton sat down for what I would call the most polite and erudite debate ever held on God's existence that was broadcast on British radio.

But the new atheists believed the time for treating religion as a respectable alternative to irreligion was over.

Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great bore the subtitle How Religion Poisons Everything.

Peter Boghossian in his book, A Manual for Creating Atheists said that if a religious person didn't become an atheist, that was a sign that they had brain damage.

You can watch my critical review of Boghossian's book in the link below.

Dawkins was fond of comparing belief in God to belief in something as silly as the flying spaghetti monster.

Both beliefs are deluded and so there's no point in politely reasoning with people who hold them.

Instead, here's Dawkins' advice to atheists at a so-called reason rally.

Mock them, ridicule them- in public.

Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion.

But this vitriolic attitude towards religion hasn't caught on among the general public today.

One poll found that in 2006, 42% of British adults agreed with Dawkins' idea that religion is as infectious and dangerous as a smallpox virus.

However, only about 20% of British adults hold that view today.

New atheism failed because it didn't have a cohesive, coherent worldview to offer in place of religion.

All it did was mock religion and naively assume that if religion declined, then perfect rationality would take its place.

But man is a religious creature.

If you remove the Bible and Christ, man will just worship something else in a tribal fashion and impose his own dogmas on the world to reinforce what he values in a religious sense even if he considers himself non-religious.

This became obvious when the new atheists split over liberalism and woke ideology.

In the '90s and early 2000s, the dividing line tended to be between being religious or non-religious.

If you were religious, then you tended to still be against things like so-called same-sex marriage and you were at least ambivalent towards abortion.

Only radical atheists were fully pro-sodomy and pro-abortion.But by the 2010s, the cultural divide was rooted in politics, not religion.

For many liberals, what mattered was not whether you believed in God, but whether you accepted the ideology that was the foundation of a worldview that had come to replace traditional religion.

From their perspective, it was better to be a religious person like Barack Obama or Joe Biden who towed the line on liberal cultural issues than to be a non-religious person who had the audacity to espouse non-liberal ideas, such as the claim that some non-European worldviews are really bad.

You see this shift in incidents like this 2014 exchange between Ben Affleck and Sam Harris over whether it's racist to criticize Islam.

But why are you so hostile about this topic?

We have to- 'Cause it's- it's gross, it's racist.

It's not, though.

But it's so not.

It's so, it's like saying those statements- It's so not.

You're a shifty Jew.

You're not listening- Absolutely not.

to what we are saying.

You guys are saying if you want to be liberals, believe in liberal principles- Right.

like freedom of speech, like- Right.

um, you know, we are endowed by our cr- uh, forefathers with inalienable rights, like all men are created equal.

No.

Ben, we have to be able to criticize bad ideas, and-

Of course we do.

Islam-

No liberal doesn't want you to criticize bad ideas.

Okay, okay.

But Islam at this moment-

But why wouldn-

is the mother lode of bad ideas.

Jesus.

So we have, we have-

That's just a fact.

an idea like, like blasphemy.

No.

It's an ugly thing to say.

Apostasy.

It is a basic liberal principle of tolerance.

Well let me unpack it.

Let me un- let me unpack it a little bit.

But not for intolerance.

No, of course not.

During this time, new atheism was trying to rebrand itself as a positive worldview and not just as a rejection of religion.

My favorite brand that they floated was atheism plus, which would be atheism and a bunch of liberal causes, with the symbol of an A+ as their logo, to which I can only say

Nerd!

Dave Rubin, who in the 2010s was a self-identified gay liberal atheist, said the Affleck-Harris spat and his disagreement with The Young Turks over it was the last straw that caused him to leave the left.

In fact, many atheists who just wanted an A in atheism, i.e.

the not believing in God part, rejected liberal views on Islam and then later transgenderism.

Of course, some partisans of the new atheism fully embraced the new liberal movement, as can be seen in people like Matt Dillahunty, who at least three months ago was in a queer relationship with a man pretending to be a woman.

When Andrew Wilson pointed this out in his debate with Dillahunty and also showed how atheism leads to absurd social consequences related to sexual identity and sexual ethics, including Dillahunty's own de facto same sex relationship under the guise of dating a so-called transgender woman, Dillahunty stormed out of their debate.

For a whole breakdown of what happened, click the link in the description below.

But other atheists saw that the new atheism had become so intertwined with woke liberalism that it had become a kind of religion that they always despised.

Even in 2006, the animated series South Park satirized atheists and depicted them as worshiping science, worshiping Richard Dawkins, and fighting over dumb stuff like what should atheists call themselves.

But in a case of life imitating art, new atheism became an exercise in group think, something that valued dogma over data and even excommunicated heretics.

One example I've previously covered was when the Atheist Community of Austin denounced atheist Steven Woodford, AKA Rationality Rules, for questioning liberal dogmas about transgender athletes.

Peter Boghossian, the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, doesn't engage atheism anymore.

Instead, he is more concerned about woke ideology and he blames the new atheism for creating a vacuum that it was able to occupy.

The new atheists perhaps cleared a path by killing God-

Yes.

again -

Yeah.

um, for these new religions to, these new quasi-religions-

Yes.

pseudo religions to flourish.

100%.

Is there, is there a link?

It's absolutely true, and I think there was a Pollyanna attitude that many new atheists had that so- somehow will, will bury God, b- b- borrow, turn of phrase, Nietzsche, and everybody's going to be living in some rational paradise.

I- i- f- little did anybody know at that point, although the canaries in the coal mine were in the new atheist movement and the skeptical movement, we started to see this in the very beginning, that what would replace it would be horrific.

I mean, it would just be I mean, l- look, look, look what the kind of things that we're dealing with now and So the s- substitution hypothesis is when you get rid of the Abrahamic traditions or whatever is traditional religion in a, in a country, something else will come in sub, some other form of irrationality or, will come in and, and substitute for what was lost.

And while 20 years ago parents worried about their Christian children going off to college and becoming godless liberals, today liberal non-religious Millennial parents, the original cheerleaders for the new atheism in the early 2000s, are terrified their children will go off to college and get brainwashed into becoming far right religious fanatics.

Liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom even admitted his son is a fan of conservative commenter Charlie Kirk.

Literally last night, trying to put my son to bed, he's like, No dad, I just, what time?

What time is Charlie going to be here?

What time?

And I'm like, Dude, you're in school tomorrow.

He's 13.

He's like, No, no.

This morning, wakes up, it's 6:00 something, he's like, I'm coming.

I'm like, he cra- he literally would not leave the house.

Did you let him take off school?

No, he did, of course not.

He's not here for a good rea- but the point is, the point-

No, you canceled school for like two years, once one, for one day though.

This new appreciation for the role of religion in society has led former new atheists to at least reject being anti-theist or anti-Christian, as in the case of Richard Dawkins when he said he prefers to live in a Christian society instead of a woke or Islamic one.And it's led other former new atheists to completely reject atheism entirely and to be more open to God and religion because they see how insane society gets without those things.

Joe Rogan used to be very anti-religious, but now he speaks with religious people with a genuine sense of curiosity and openness.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a vocal atheist who now embraces a form of Christianity as the only viable means to uphold Western values.

Since 2019, Dave Rubin no longer identifies as an atheist, and Jordan Peterson has led many young men to view religion as a means to have a proper ordering of one's life that can't be had through strict atheistic scientism.

Another side the tide has turned is that strident forms of atheism on the internet are now seen as cringe and they get made fun of, whereas examples of based or cool lifestyles tend to be rooted in traditional forms and images of masculinity, including that of uber-religious men shouting, Deus vult.

Even paragons of immorality like Andrew Tate want a religious world, not an atheistic one.

I don't think that atheism as a whole has been any good for the world.

I look at the most degenerate things that are happening on the planet and usually it's in the name of atheism, and I don't believe most people are intelligent enough to be atheists.

I know many smart atheists and they're normal, but I also know many stupid atheists and they're just like, Oh, nothing matters anyway.

May as well have this 11th abortion, like- like morons, right?

So I don't think for the general population, if you look at most poor countries which are very religious, if you remove religion from those countries, it'd be chaos.

So I think religion's good overall for society.

But along with the cultural shift that exposed new atheism as being culturally and socially deficient, a resurgence in Christian apologetics in the 21st century helped to show new atheism was intellectually deficient.

In the first half of the 20th century, a popular school of thought called logical positivism made religious claims seem not just false, but meaningless to many academics.

Along with the counter-cultural trends of the late '50s and early '60s, this led to Time Magazine publishing their famous cover saying, Is God Dead?

In response to the exaggerated death of God, Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga promoted robust philosophical defenses of Christian theism.

The late naturalist philosopher Quentin Smith said that Plantinga's legacy led to resurgence of religious, and specifically Christian, philosophers throughout the academy.

He said in 2001 that, quote, God is not dead in academia.

He returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold: philosophy departments.

You can see this today in academically challenging works from philosophers like Josh Rasmussen, Ed Feser, Alex Pruss, William Lane Craig, and countless others whose articles can be read in journals, many of which were started in the early '90s, devoted to the Christian philosophy of religion, as well as in secular journals.

These academic resources also filtered down to laypeople through popular level books and debates with atheists.

William Lane Craig demolished Christopher Hitchens in their 2008 debate at Biola University where Hitchen's mo religion bad arguments were no match for Craig's laser-focused philosophy.

Sam Harris said William Lane Craig put the fear of God in his fellow atheists, and Richard Dawkins still refuses to debate Craig.

New atheism grossly exaggerated the evidence against God and arrogantly dismissed the powerful arguments for God's existence.

For example, Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that, The five proofs asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century don't prove anything and are easily, though I hesitate to say so given his eminence, exposed as vacuous.

One option for new atheists was to just double down and ridicule this new sophisticated case for God and try to refute it with mockery and straw man arguments.

This was the approach Dawkins took in The God Delusion where, as atheist philosophers have even noted, Dawkins didn't even understand St. Thomas Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God and he confused them for a simple first cause argument and then said the Big Bang was a better explanation than God.

Alvin Plantinga said of Dawkins, Some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores.

The fact is, grade inflation aside, many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

Other atheists simply refused to engage sophisticated arguments for God's existence and mocked them as word salad, which is often a sign a person doesn't know how to engage complex arguments on any subject.

Or they just rely on good old-fashioned early internet bluster.

For example, here's The Angry Atheist in 2010 rebutting St. Thomas Aquinas' arguments for God.

Because why is the unmoved mover necessarily God?

Why can't it be a blueberry muffin?

Why can't we say, Yeah, there was an unmoved mover.

It was a blueberry muffin and from it came all other things.

Sounds a little bit more plausible than God to me because, hey, I've seen a blueberry muffin.

Those motherare tasty.

I ain't never seen God.

I don't know what he tastes like.

Probably like sour milk.

What I've noticed is that online audiences have grown tired of these angry provocateurs, especially since their intellectual shallowness has become obvious when they run out of things to criticize and have to keep reaching for something more shocking that keeps them relevant.

I mean, the last time I saw The Angry Atheist was in a 2020 video where he said that firefighters are overrated.

Stop worshiping firefighters, America.

Thankfully this clip was ruthlessly savaged by Fire Department Chronicles, which is a hilarious channel you should check out if you have time.

Doubling down on new atheist rhetoric also didn't come off as being cool or edgy.

It just reeked of anti-intellectualism and a dogmatic refusal to read complex works that challenge your worldview, which is ironically the very same complaint new atheists made about religious people in the '90s and 2000s.

The image of a new atheist wasn't a thoughtful, rational person, but an insufferable debate me bro who thinks he's smarter than everyone, but whose pride keeps him from seeing the obvious logical fallacies in the dumb memes he shares and the obvious creepiness of some of his wardrobe and behavioral choices.

It's been said that this meme of a fedora-tipping atheist did more to hurt new atheism than every Christian apologist put together.

And if you didn't want to double down on annoying new atheism- then you had to hit the books and upgrade your arguments.

This new approach has been called analytic atheism, and it draws not from loudmouths like Richard Dawkins, but from the legitimately best atheistic philosophers like J.L.

Mackie or Graham Oppy.

And in the process of doing that, these thoughtful atheists got a new respect for serious religious thinkers and lost their teenage new atheist chip on their shoulder.

Compare how angry atheists discuss St. Thomas Aquinas to someone like Alex O'Connor, aka the Cosmic Skeptic, who is willing to spend an hour with Ed Feser going over the finer points of the argument.

Or Rationality Rules engaging Cameron Bertuzzi in a thoughtful and very sophisticated critique of the Kalam cosmological argument.

You can also check out my debate with Ben Watkins from Real Atheology, linked in the description below, as an example of how it's possible to have high-level civil conversation about the topic of God's existence.

So moving forward, my recommendation to Christians would be to keep atheism on the defensive and show how it leads to absurd ethical and social beliefs.

At the very least, push atheists away from village atheism and towards more thoughtful nonreligious critiques.

At the very least, show that Christianity offers a virtuous worldview that doesn't lead to the absurdities we see among many secular people.

Then hit the books to get a good understanding of how to offer a solid case for God's existence.

Don't be snooty and say, Just read Aquinas, because the more thoughtful atheists will have already done that.

Instead, take the time to read higher-level yet accessible books like Five Proofs for the Existence of God by Ed Feser, How Reason Leads to God by Josh Rasmussen, and The Best Argument for God by Pat Flynn.

Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.