Losing faith in New Atheism: ‘The God Delusion’ 20 years on

Who is the most unpleasant character in all of fiction? For Richard Dawkins, it’s the God of the Hebrew Bible, a ‘petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully’.

This much-quoted attack comes from The God Delusion, which was published 20 years ago. It sold over three million copies, was translated into 35 languages, and even inspired several book-length refutations. It was also the leading example of a publishing phenomenon turned cultural movement known as New Atheism. The movement centred on Dawkins and several other outspoken atheists – including Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett – who combined bestselling books with lectures, debates and media appearances. In the process, they turned hostility towards religion into one of the dominant intellectual trends of the decade.

Academics have been writing sceptical books about religion for centuries, but The God Delusion was published at an important historical moment. In the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was possible to believe that Islamic extremism represented the major threat to global peace and progress. Rather than entering a period of post-ideological politics with the end of the Cold War – characterised by globalisation, liberalisation and increasing prosperity – the West was suddenly threatened by outdated religious beliefs.

The New Atheist books ranged across history and philosophy, biology and cosmology, politics and international relations. For Millennials like me, coming of age in the early 2000s, this was heady stuff. Reading The God Delusion, I became convinced that the flaws of radical Islamism – regressive intolerance and unreasoning fanaticism – were shared by all forms of religion. At the same time, YouTube was filling with footage of the New Atheists debating priests and pious believers with a mix of chilly logic and witty disdain. So I spent hours watching Rich, Hitch and the rest of the gang argue that religion was the enemy of every social advance and scientific breakthrough.

Twenty years later, the historical moment has changed. The threat from terrorism is dwarfed by the potential impact of Russian and Chinese aggression. Similarly, the economic shocks caused by the Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic, or the existential risks of shrinking populations and an overheating planet, are far more daunting challenges. In many Western countries, Christianity appears to be in terminal decline, making it less convincing to claim that religion represents an urgent threat to public life.

But New Atheism has also changed. Two of its leading figures – Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett – are dead. Others have softened their positions over time: Sam Harris launched a mindfulness meditation app, while Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the outspoken critic of Islam, converted to Christianity. New Atheism was also an early victim of the culture wars, its leaders’ emphasis on free-thinking and resistance to ideology colliding with its followers’ wish to create a progressive political movement. In April 2021, the American Humanist Association even withdrew the Humanist of the Year award it had given Dawkins in 1996, after he tweeted asking why people were permitted to identify as different genders, but not different races.

There was a deeper problem, however, with the New Atheist movement, and it can be found in the pages of The God Delusion. The book remains an entertaining polemic, blending attacks on religion with biology, cosmology and waspish turns of phrase: ‘We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.’ Much of his criticism is justified, especially the attacks on spiritual pseudo-science and literalist believers who take every word of their sacred text as true: ‘Do the people who hold the Bible up as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?’

At first glance, a line like this shows Dawkins at his scornful best, but read the line a second time and it reveals the author’s blind spots. Many of those who seek moral guidance from the Bible know the text much better than Dawkins, and also know the vast theological literature that exists to interpret its stories. Dawkins, by contrast, has read little of this material, let alone engaged with the brilliant minds who have confronted his objections in the past. For instance, nobody familiar with the writings of Thomas Aquinas, or the research of clerical scientists like Georges Lemaître and Gregor Mendel, could argue ‘one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding’.

The God Delusion is a compelling but limited critique. Most of its attacks are aimed at the cartoon version of faith conjured by American pastors and Islamic fundamentalists. As a result, Dawkins struggles to understand why any sane person would believe. Earlier this year, Dawkins sat down for a discussion with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and at one point the moderator asked the two men to summarise each other’s positions. Try as he might, Dawkins could not articulate a credible reason for faith. When pushed, he was forced to admit: ‘Well, I’m rather baffled.’

Dawkins is no philistine, yet the religious instinct remains a mystery to him. In its place, he can offer only the wonder of the natural world and the values of liberal humanism. But this failure to appreciate the appeal of religion – not to mention the human appetite for the strange and symbolic, the immaterial and non-rational – helps to explain why the movement he led made little lasting impact. For all religion’s flaws, New Atheism’s aggressive doubt could offer no substitute guidance, nor any sustaining ideology.

To younger generations, for whom faith is either an irrelevance or a mild curiosity, the message of The God Delusion feels out of date. Instead, the most permanent consequence of the New Atheist movement may be the improved quality of religious writing and thinking. In the last two decades, woolly apologetics have given way to more assertive defences of faith offered by believers like Iain McGilchrist, friendly on-the-fencers like Tom Holland, even well-informed sceptics like Alex O’Connor.

At the same time, religion is becoming a new source of intellectual energy to thinkers across the political spectrum. Faced with problems like the decline of the family and the dilution of community, or the excesses of capitalism and environmental destruction, these thinkers are returning to religious texts. Perhaps the best example was the recent publication of Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI. As Silicon Valley races to create consciousness, defeat death and build machines with divine levels of knowledge, the Catholic perspective on this technology found a wide audience, from trade unions to the MAGA movement.

The God Delusion shares the Enlightenment belief that increasing scientific knowledge will lead society away from faith. But, given the dizzying pace of technological change, religious ideas may become more relevant over the course of the century, either because people are seeking a fixed point in an uncertain world, or else because they want answers to the fundamental questions such progress poses: what does it mean to be human and what is our purpose on this earth? Though the tide of faith is still withdrawing from the shore, religion remains our most enduring attempt to answer those questions.