The Unceremonious Death of New Atheism, by Ben Bartee

Intellectual support for atheism is almost nonexistent. From Ben Bartee at armageddonprose.substack.com:

Back in the day, as a teenager in the mid-aughts, I admired the gleefully blasphemous works of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris — the de facto leaders of the “New Atheist” movement and respective authors of “God Is Not Great” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

What I took from them was pleasure in badmouthing what I viewed as the religious nutbaggery of both the Islamic faithful and the American Right a la George W. Bush and Co., who justified their various Wars of Terror through the prism of not just standard geopolitics but a civilizational conflict between the forces of Christendom and Islamic Jihad.  

Via Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (emphasis added):

“The New Atheists are authors of early twenty-first century books promoting atheism. These authors include Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. The “New Atheist” label for these critics of religion and religious belief emerged out of journalistic commentary on the contents and impacts of their books. A standard observation is that New Atheist authors exhibit an unusually high level of confidence in their views.  Reviewers have noted that these authors tend to be motivated by a sense of moral concern and even outrage about the effects of religious beliefs on the global scene. It is difficult to identify anything philosophically unprecedented in their positions and arguments, but the New Atheists have provoked considerable controversy with their body of work*…

The New Atheists make substantial use of the natural sciences in both their criticisms of theistic belief and in their proposed explanations of its origin and evolution. They draw on science for recommended alternatives to religion. They believe empirical science is the only (or at least the best) basis for genuine knowledge of the world, and they insist that a belief can be epistemically justified only if it is based on adequate evidence. Their conclusion is that science fails to show that there is a God and even supports the claim that such a being probably does not exist. What science will show about religious belief, they claim, is that this belief can be explained as a product of biological evolution. Moreover, they think that it is possible to live a satisfying non-religious life on the basis of secular morals and scientific discoveries.”

Things have changed. These days, the primary emotion I feel toward the faithful who feel deeply their faith and find solace in it is not derision but rather envy, and I am now unconvinced that all we are is a conglomeration of atoms floating around on a rock in cold space.

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