I've just read that The God Delusion, the central text of the New Atheist movement...is now twenty years old!
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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 Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins have been replaced by respectful atheists such as Alex O'Connor. Flame wars have been replaced by friendly dialogue.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.
"In one way, it's hard to believe. In another, it's easy. The book seems to belong to a very different era now"
ReplyDeleteI agree. On the one hand, it's surprising it was two decades ago, but on the other, it seems like more than 20 years with all that has changed.
In terms of the resurgence of Christian apologetics, that was one way in which the New Atheist movement had the opposite effect as intended. By openly arguing against religion, the New Atheists made people think about religion and think that it was important.
Another thing about that era of the 2000's is that, thinking back on it, people with all kinds of different views seemed to have this idea that everything would just fall into place. Left-wingers thought that we would finally rise above the prejudices and narrow-mindedness of the past into a new era of progress (or so they would say). Right-wingers thought that common sense would reassert itself and the foolish excesses of the left would fade away.
Others thought that the Internet would birth a renaissance of political freedom and scientific discovery. Not just a little bit, but a completely new era.
I think the New Atheist movement partook of that attitude. The idea being that it was finally time to rise above superstition and ground society in reason and science (as the New Atheists would put it).
At the time these attitudes were just in the air and I did not notice it, but looking back, it was there, probably related to excitement about the new millennium. Also, ironically, with such a diversity of expectations, many were at odds with each other. Thinking back on it, the early 2000's was a distinctive era, not just in that way, but in a lot of ways.
Also, I hope that I did not come across as quarrelsome when I responded to your comment on Bruce Charlton's recent AI post. You had a valid question. What I wanted to do was to present a different perspective.
Hi NLR
DeleteI didn't think you were being quarrelsome in that comment at all. In fact, I entirely agree with it.
Thanks for the comment here, very interesting. I hadn't actually noticed a lot of excitement about the new millennium, but I suppose it could have been there without me sensing it. Certainly the New Atheists seemed to have extraordinary expectations for a godless society. (Personally, even when I was an agnostic who leaned to atheism, I never would have liked the idea of a society grounded in reason and science. It seems very inhuman and bland.)
It also certainly seems true that many New Atheists have realized that secularism can breed as many irrational ideas as they ever ascribed to religion, what with woke and everything like that.
Sorry I was a couple of days late responding!