There was a time when atheist literature was generally confined to cumbersome college textbooks and dusty classics by David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell.
How times have changed! Visit your local bookstore and you’ll encounter a raft of new books from atheist authors. And unlike the skeptics of the past who couched their denials of the divine in tangled academic prose, these new skeptics are popularizers–writers with a gift for communicating with a wide audience.
The authors at the center of this publishing storm have been dubbed the “new atheists.” Their books bear provocative titles such as God is not Great, The God Delusion, and The End of Faith. During the past few years these books have rocketed to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list and gained widespread media attention.
But there’s nothing new about what the new atheists are writing. They specialize in dredging up old arguments against God’s existence and pedaling them to a credulous public. What’s new is the attitude. They’re confrontational, angry, and militant. The movement’s de facto leader, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), is on a crusade to stamp out religious belief by making it “too embarrassing” to believe in God. Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) spares no believer in his assault on religion. Speaking of the late Mother Teresa he proclaimed, “I wish there was a hell for that (expletive) to go to.”
Such incendiary language has simultaneously repelled some and attracted others. Atheism has suffered serious setbacks in recent years amid a global resurgence of religious belief. But in the wake of renewed religious fervor, the new atheists are finding ready acolytes among western humanists aghast at what they see as an explosion of religious fanaticism. Some commentators see the new atheists (and their shrill tone) as reactionary, and quite possibly as the last gasp of a moribund movement.
Christian responses to the new atheists abound, but the best is The Dawkins Delusion? (IVP) by Alister McGrath. A scientist, theologian, and Oxford professor, McGrath identifies Dawkins’ flawed arguments with surgical precision. But his most important insight comes in revealing that Dawkins, a renowned biologist, actually abandons his evidence-based thinking for “the atheist equivalent of slick hellfire preaching,” and that he and the other new atheists are largely singing to the “god-hating choir.”
