Twenty Years of the God Delusion

I've just read that The God Delusion, the central text of the New Atheist movement...is now twenty years old!

In one way, it's hard to believe. In another, it's easy. The book seems to belong to a very different era now.

I bought it perhaps a year or two after it came out. I was still hovering between agnosticism and faith at that time. As many people have said, the actual arguments in the book are very poor, but the strength of Dawkins's conviction was quite intimidating.

When I started this blog in 2011, it was very much in the atmosphere of the New Atheist moment.

I'm glad that moment has gone, but I did like one aspect of it: the resurgence of Christian apologetics that it spurred. The New Atheists demanded evidence, and Christian apologists were suddenly in demand. As Edward Feser says here, the New Atheist onslaught did have the benefit of making Christians seek rational grounds for their belief.

Times are changed now. Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins have been replaced by respectful atheists such as Alex O'Connor. Flame wars have been replaced by friendly dialogue.  Richard Dawkins has become something of an ally, pushing against woke and defending cultural Christianity. Another New Atheist (though one I was only ever vaguely aware of), Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has become a Catholic. And I get the impression that many of the rank-and-file of the New Atheist movement are now either believers or have at least come to appreciate Christianity. (I've heard plenty of accounts of that journey, though I can't remember where exactly.)

And there are even some hopeful signs that a Christian revival is coming about.

So we have much to be grateful for. But let's hope that the beefing-up of apologetics that came about in the New Atheist era doesn't wither away.