The Basic Flaws of the 'New Atheism'

The New atheism is a form of popular atheism – the sort well-represented on internet blogs and websites, but which rarely finds its way into more scholarly atheistic writings. 'Pop atheism' would be a good description of it, for like pop music pop atheism is shallow, trite and difficult to listen to. It has a number enthusiastic proponents among public intellectuals. These include (in alphabetical order) Russell Blackford (50 Voices of Disbelief), Peter Boghossian (A Manual for Creating Atheists), Jerry Coyne (Fact vs. Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennet (Breaking the Spell), A.C. Grayling (The God Argument), Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Christopher Hitchens (god is Not Great), Lawrence Krauss (A Universe form Nothing), P.Z. Meyers (The Happy Atheist), Michel Onfray (The Atheist Manifesto), Alex Rosenberg (The Atheist's Guide to Reality) and Victor Stenger (The New Atheism), just to name a few. Various scholars have publicly criticized ‘pop atheism’ – even some other atheists, such as Michael Ruse, John Gray, Nathan Johnstone and Thomas Nagel. The New Atheists complain that they are attacked for 'speaking plainly' or 'speaking their minds'. Despite these protestations, they are not generally criticized for ‘speaking clearly’ nor, even, for their new militancy. Militancy has always been a feature of modern anti-theism, at least from the time of Denis Diderot, who infamously declared, "Man shall never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Compared to this, Dawkins & Co. are almost mild. 

 

Instead, the new atheists are most often criticized for five main reasons:

1.) Their lack of substantial engagement with leading religious scholars, e.g. philosophers, theologians, scientists, historians – particularly with regard to the best arguments for the existence of God, but also with regard to the historical relationship between reason and religious belief and the impact that various religions have had on history - positive or negative. It is a common claim among the new atheists that there is no ‘evidence’ for belief in God. In order to support this claim, one would expect carefully-constructed, logical critiques of key theistic arguments. Dawkins comes the closest to this, perhaps, in The God Delusion, with two chapters devoted to theistic arguments (Chapters 3-4). However, anyone familiar with the best arguments presented by theistic philosophers will quickly realise that most of the ‘arguments’ Dawkins criticises are not defended by any theistic philosopher or theologian – meaning that Dawkins spends most of this space attacking ‘straw man’ arguments (or is that ‘straw god’ arguments?). In other cases, Dawkins attacks caricatures of real arguments – in most cases grossly misstating the real arguments.

For example, when Dawkins attempts to critique Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’ (pp. 77-79), he makes several significant errors that show he hasn’t really studied Aquinas, at all. The first error he makes is to claim that Aquinas’ Third Way is based on the claim that there “must have been a time when no physical things existed” (p. 77), that is, that the universe had a beginning. Actually, Aquinas’ argument has nothing to do with cosmogony (origins) and everything to do with ontology (existence). The question of whether the universe had a beginning does not come into this argument, as the point of the argument is to argue that material reality - whether is has a beginning or not - is not and cannot be self-existent.

Secondly, he claims that Aquinas’ first three Ways “make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune” to regress arguments (p. 77). Actually, the conclusion that the regress of causes must end in a First Cause that is itself uncaused is a deduction of the argument, not an assumption built into the argument. If, as Aquinas argues, an infinite regress of the sort he is discussing could not exist, then it follows logically that the regress of causes must terminate in a First Cause that is itself uncaused (i.e., self-existent).

Thirdly, he accuses Aquinas of “arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name” (p. 77). Actually, that the regress terminates in a First Cause is a conclusion of the argument, therefore it is not arbitrary, but a logical consequence of the argument itself.

Fourthly, Dawkins claims that Aquinas provides “absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design” (p. 77). Again, in reality Aquinas spends a considerable amount of space in his Summa Theologiae, his Summa Contra Gentiles and his Quaetiones Disputate De Potentia Dei working out the characteristics that a First Cause would have to have in order to be a self-existent, uncaused cause of material reality. Among those characteristics, Aquinas concludes that the First Cause had to be: self-existent, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, omnipotent, omniscient…in short: infinite, intelligent Being. As Aquinas puts it “this all men call God”. Aquinas devotes hundreds of pages to these arguments across several major works, so the fact that Dawkins is unaware of this only shows that he never bothered to study Aquinas' writings. Furthermore, in the centuries since, hundreds of books have been written by Thomists (followers of Aquinas' philosophy/theology) on the subject, including detailed exegeses of Aquinas main works. Some examples would include The One God (1943) by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (2000) by John Wippel.

Fifthly, Dawkins insists that “it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a 'big bang singularity', or some other physical concept as yet unknown” (p. 78). Again, the question for Aquinas is one of ontology, not cosmogony. The fact that Dawkins’ misses this basic distinction is at the root of his misunderstanding of the argument. (For a more accurate and detailed discussion of Aquinas’ arguments you should probably read Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism or his Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide.) Also, appealing to a ‘big bang singularity’ does not explain the existence of material reality, as that big bang singularity would either be a part of that material reality or the point at which material reality began to exist. Either way, appealing to a ‘big bang singularity’ does nothing to explain the existence of material reality.

Having made no fewer than five significant errors regarding Aquinas’ cosmological arguments, Dawkins goes on to make several more about the other two Ways. The most significant of these is his discussion of the Fifth Way – Aquinas’ teleological argument. He claims that the argument is essentially the same as William Paley’s design argument. It's not. It’s not surprising that Dawkins’ does this. His habit when dealing with theistic arguments is to re-interpret any argument he doesn’t understand to make them more like arguments he half-understands, and then refute the half-understood argument, instead. (What is evident from this is that Dawkins constantly puts the least amount of effort possible into his background research.) Aquinas’ argument has nothing to do with ‘organised complexity’, as Dawkins calls it, or complexity of any kind, rather it deals with the more fundamental issue of order in the universe - the rational structure of the universe. His argument here (as with the other Five Ways) is heavily dependent on Aristotelian metaphysics. In particular, he bases this argument on Aristotle’s view that teleology is intrinsic within nature. By contrast Paley’s argument presupposes a mechanistic, rather than an Aristotelian, metaphysics and argues not from intrinsic teleology innate within nature but for extrinsic teleology, imposed upon nature artificially by a Divine Watchmaker. Whatever the merits or weaknesses of these two teleological arguments, they are very different.

Daniel Dennet spends not more than three-and-a-half pages of his Breaking the Spell on theistic arguments before summarily dismissing them - and most of these pages is spent quoting himself trying to justify why he doesn't bother debating theistic arguments anymore. (Something about 'diminishing returns'.) Sam Harris, in Letter to a Christian Nation, confuses the design argument with the cosmological argument, in the process completely misrepresenting both arguments! Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, tries to refute the cosmological argument by conveniently equivocating over the meaning of key terms like 'nothing'. Jerry Coyne's discussion of theistic arguments in Faith vs. Fact is even worse - probably the worst of all the new atheist texts. No wonder the new atheists claim that there is 'no evidence' for the existence of God, since they are almost completely ignorant of such evidence! All this should be enough to show that the new atheists are ill-informed about theistic arguments.

2.) Their use of self-serving definitions of key terms, e.g. religion, faith, God, science, reason, evidence, atheism, superstition…to name just a few. Similarly, the term ‘nothing’ has been abused by neo-atheist Lawrence Krauss in A Universe from Nothing - where he redefines ‘nothing’ as ‘something’ and then proceeds to explain how something could have come from something simpler, which he then conveniently calls ‘nothing’; see Peter William's, Edward Feser's and David Albert's reviews - and the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are used equivocally by Sam Harris in his book The Moral Landscape (see H. Allen Orr’s and Russell Blackford's reviews).

How one defines any one of these terms can significantly change the nature of the debate. In fact, the new atheist critique of religion depends heavily on their definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘faith’. Their working definition of ‘religion’ appears to be ‘any belief-system based on faith in God’ and their definition of ‘faith’ is ‘belief without evidence’ (The God Delusion, p. 199). Thus, from their definitions of these two terms alone (without any further argument), the new atheists have essentially defined all religious belief as opposed to rational thought. Furthermore, the new atheists not only use self-serving definitions of these terms, but tend to ignore, dismiss and even deride philosophers and theologians who argue for other, less polemical, definitions of these terms.

3.) Their condescending attitude toward religious believers, and a priori presumption of the superior rationality of atheism. For example, in the introduction to their book 50 Voices of Unbelief Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk state, ‘we think it is important for Voices of Reason to be heard at this point in our history’ (p. 1). And who could disagree? The only problem is that this ‘Voices of Reason’ label refers exclusively to atheists. The presumption that atheists are the true ‘voices of reason’ (and that religious voices are not) demonstrates a deeply-rooted arrogance within the new atheism. This arrogance, I believe, derives at least in part from their ignorance of theistic arguments. Assuming that there is no evidence for the existence of God means, in their minds, that they can dismiss religious belief as intrinsically irrational.

Of course, it is also true that their arrogance affects their willingness to seriously study the best theistic arguments in any depth, in the first place. It is a vicious circle: their assumption of the superior rationality of atheism apparently restrains them from seriously studying the best theistic argument (‘Why study theology? It’s not even a real discipline!’), but then their ignorance of theistic arguments feeds their confidence that atheism is rationally superior (‘I know that theology’s not a real discipline, because there’s no evidence for the existence of God, the subject of theology!’).

Many other atheists are willing to concede that it is possible for rational people to disagree about God’s existence. The new atheists deride this idea. Several members of the new atheists, e.g. Dawkins and Coyne, have even attacked fellow atheists, whom they deem to be too ‘soft’ on religion – causing a small rift within contemporary atheism. Yet they insist that they themselves are not intolerant or arrogant.

4.) Their ‘cherry-picking’ of history. By this, I mean their tendency to search history for examples of religious intolerance to bolster their claim that religion is evil and dangerous, whilst ignoring historical evidence for the positive influence of various – though not all – religions on society. Of course, they do not need to look too hard to find examples of religious intolerance – there are many throughout history. However, there are also many example of the positive influence of religion on society, as well. They do, however, choose to ignore these examples.

Harris' and Hitchens’ books are filled with examples of the dangers presented by extremist religion, which they insist is enabled by moderate religion treating faith as a virtue. This is where the new atheists’ definition of faith again comes into play. ‘Faith’ is viewed as intrinsically irrational and, therefore, dangerous. Dawkins insists that there is a logical route from faith to violence. He never considers that it is possible to find a logical route from almost anything to violence. Even a brief look at history shows that violence can be justified by appeals to such virtues as ‘love of country’, ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’, ‘equality’ and appeals to ‘progress’ (political, cultural and scientific) just to name a few. I believe it was G.K. Chesterton who once pointed out that vice is not the absence of virtue, but the emphasis on one virtue to the exclusion of all others. The emphasis on 'progress' to the exclusion of tolerance; empathy to the exclusion of reason; tolerance to the exclusion of truth; truth to the exclusion of empathy; equality to the exclusion of competence and practicality, etc. has been at the heart of most totalitarian political philosophies in the modern world. Each of these are virtues, but can become vices when not counterbalanced by other virtues.

It has never been hard for people to take something that is positive, turn it into something dangerous and then rationalise this violence by showing a logical route between that virtue and the use of violence to protect it. Typically this logic involves some appeal to 'the greater good' or 'truth' or 'reason' or 'science' or 'equality'. Eugenics is an excellent example of how an idea (Darwinism) was used to justify horrible consequences (e.g., forced sterilisation, mass murder, attempts to forcibly interbreed apes with supposedly 'lesser' humans, such as Africans). Similarly, communism, with it's hatred of the successful bourgeoisie and the approximately hundred-million lives it cost, was the logical outcome of top-down forced equality. This is exactly what religious extremists do when they turn faith into a battle cry. They take something which has been a force for good in the lives of hundreds of millions of people and use it as a justification for the slaughter of those they deem to be their enemies. The fact that the new atheists cannot see that there is nothing uniquely dangerous about religion, does, I think, reveal more about their own state of mind than it does about religion.

In many cases, religion has had a positive influence on society. I can only speak about Christianity here; because, like Dawkins, this is the religion with which I am most familiar. Here’s a few examples. (1) Virtually all early scientists were religious theists and were strongly motivated by their faith in a rational Creator when they chose to study nature. (2) Science originated within an explicitly theistic culture. (3) Leading opponents of slavery, e.g. William Wilberforce, were strongly motivated by moral concerns derived from their Christian theological worldview. (4) Christians, again motivated by New Testament teachings on charity, founded some of the earliest hospitals, orphanages, and (non-state) public welfare societies. Monasteries fed the poor and (when they declined with the rise of Protestantism in some regions of Europe), local Protestant churches took up much of the slack. Until the late nineteenth century, welfare in Western countries came largely from churches. It is only recently that secular governments have taken on this responsibility, with often ruinous results for poor communities.

These are all well-established historical facts. The new atheists, when they even acknowledge that they occurred, complain about these altruistic acts, because, they say, they were used to propagate ‘faith’. But this is just smoke and mirrors. The fact is, these groups and organisations would not have existed at all without such faith. The benefits and supposed ‘deficits’ came as a package. Faith, the (alleged) deficit, inspired altruism, the (undoubted) benefit. It is petty to dismiss these groups because they were used to make converts, when they provided much help for the poor and underprivileged. Also, many of the beneficiaries of such charity were already Christians, and so the aim of providing charity to these could not be to make converts. In fact, charity was typically provided whether the recipients converted or not, so providing charity was no guarantee of conversion. The Christians in these cases were simply living out their faith and hoping that their acts would produce the desired outcome.

Of course, whether every religion has an (overall) positive influence on society is contentious. I would say that some religions truly are evil. Religions that performed human sacrifices would be an obvious example. Attempting to defend (or attack) ‘religion’ in the abstract is actually a very foolish thing to do, because ‘religion’ in the abstract doesn’t exist – only individual religions do and they need to be assessed on their individual merits, rather than lumped together into an amorphous, unrecognisable mess called ‘religion’.

5.) Their tendency to ignore their critics and pretend that no one has answered their arguments, when many have done so. It is remarkable that one of the most common claims made by the new atheists is that ‘faith’ is immune to argument, for, when religious theists respond to the new atheists, the new atheists tend to pretend that no refutation has occurred.  Furthermore, when reminded that theistic scholars have presented arguments, the new atheists complain about religious scholars ‘fabricating’ arguments for God, whilst rarely addressing the actual arguments of these offending scholars directly.

For example, Russell Blackford, in his essay in the volume 50 Voices of Unbelief, challenges theists by insisting that, considering all the evil in the world and the problem it presents for theism, it is not possible to rationally believe in God without independent reasons and evidence for doing so. Later in his essay, however, he complains about the fact that ‘a revived Christian philosophy is well-entrenched within Anglo-American philosophy of religion’. So, there are Christian philosophers, well-established within academia, seeking to meet Blackford’s challenge – and Blackford’s response is to complain about their existence! I mean, I know Blackford doesn’t want theists the meet his challenge, because that would mean he is wrong about atheism being the sole voice of reason, but does he have to be so obviously inconsistent? This type of inconsistency is a flaw common to all the new atheist books. They attack religious people for being irrational, but save their greatest vitriol for those theists who make rational arguments.

Other criticisms could be made. Overall, despite its title, the ‘new’ atheism has contributed nothing new to the discussion over God. (Indeed, they haven’t really tried to ‘discuss’ much of anything with religious theists, though they are willing to discuss peripheral issues endlessly with each other as exemplified by Dawkins’ and Krauss’ propaganda film The Unbelievers.) The new atheists themselves admit that they have contributed little. For example, Richard Dawkins has noted that the arguments they present are basically the same as those used by Bertrand Russell at the beginning of the 20^th century and David Hume much earlier. The new atheists seem to assume that any substantial debate about God’s existence ended – or should have ended – decades, if not centuries, ago. This is unfortunate, as Russell and Hume weren’t alive to discuss the best contemporary theistic arguments, many of which have been revised or updated since the early 1970s – the ‘revival of Christian philosophy’ deplored by Blackford. To assume that Hume is the authoritative word on theistic arguments is naïve. Natural theology continued to flourish after Hume and many later thinkers devised arguments that avoided or refuted Hume’s key criticisms. Also, Russell was not-at-all well-informed about theistic arguments. He was an excellent philosopher (and a decent historian of philosophy) generally, but his critiques of theism tended to lack rigour and detail. His most famous essay ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’, significantly misstates several key theistic arguments, including, most crucially, the cosmological argument. These errors, unfortunately, have been passed down to popular anti-theism today and abound on the internet and in new atheist books. Having Hume and Russell as their patron philosophers has not benefitted the new atheists. In fact, if there is anything 'new' about the new atheism at all, it is that the new atheism differs from the old in that is seems to have inherited all the worst parts of the 'old atheism' whilst failing to retain the better bits. The new atheism has all the arrogance of Nietzsche, but not of his nuance or rhetorical brilliance. They seem to have inherited all of Hume worst arguments, but none of his caution or epistemic humility.  They accept Feurerbach's conclusion that belief in God is a projection (wishful thinking), but do not appreciate the human psychological need for transcendent goodness the way he did.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins claims that the design argument ‘is the only [theistic argument] still in regular use today’ (p. 79). This statement demonstrates, as much as any other statement made by Dawkins, his profound ignorance of theistic arguments and contemporary philosophy of religion. Actually, philosophers today extensively discuss the cosmological argument, just to name one type of argument, various forms of which have been defended by most prominent contemporary theistic philosophers and theologians, such as Richard Swinburne, Robert C. Koons, Alexander R. Pruss, Bruce Reichenbach, William Lane Craig, David S. Oderberg, David Bentley Hart, Richard Taylor, Edward Feser, Stephen T. Davis, Dean L. Overman, etc. Prominent atheist philosophers have critiqued the cosmological argument, also. These include: Adolf Grunbaum, Graham Oppy, J. L. Mackie, Quentin Smith, Michael Martin, J. Howard Sobel, etc. Of course, with the discovery of cosmic fine-tuning and the development of Intelligent Design theory, the design argument has had a significant revival in recent decades. The other argument still widely discussed is the moral argument for God’s existence, which is today defended by Robert Adams, William Alston, John Hare, C. Stephen Evans, Paul Copan, Mark Linville and William Lane Craig, among others. Atheists thinkers such as J. L. Mackie, Eric Wielenberg and Richard Joyce have attempted substantial responses to this type of argument. The ‘Argument from Miracles’ has also had a revival for Christian theists and has been defended by Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, N.T. Wright, Richard Swinburne, Timothy and Lydia McGrew, Michael Licona, Wolfhart Pannenberg and several others.

I do not endorse all these arguments. In particular, the ‘argument from miracles’ is one I am quite sceptical of; but if the new atheists want to claim to have exposed theistic arguments as bogus, then they need to take the best defenders of these arguments seriously. However, you will not encounter any serious, in-depth discussion of the arguments of these scholars in any of the new atheists' key works, nor, apparently, in any of their other writings, either.

Had the new atheists availed themselves of the great resources available today, they may have presented more compelling discussions of theistic arguments than are actually found in their books. For example, there are two excellent peer-reviewed online encyclopaedias of philosophy that have been available for some years now: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Each of these encyclopaedias contains articles on the philosophy of religion, including articles on various theistic arguments, e.g. teleological arguments, cosmological arguments and moral arguments (also here). (For those interested, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy now has an article on the New Atheism, as well.)

Also, a number of printed works by theists are of particular interest in the debate over the existence of God. These include Alvin Plantinga’s refutation of the ‘Logical Argument from Evil’ against theism, in his book God, Freedom and Evil (William B. Eerdmans, 1974), William Lane Craig’s contemporary update of a medieval version of the cosmological argument in The Kalam Cosmological Argument (Macmillan, 1979), Richard Swinburne’s comprehensive modern defence of theism in The Existence of God (2^nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2004) and The Coherence of Theism (Rev. ed., Oxford University Press, 1993), and J.P. Moreland’s development of the ‘Argument from Consciousness’ in Consciousness and the Existence of God (Routledge, 2008). Some excellent restatements of classical theism can also be found in David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013) and David Conway's The Rediscovery of Wisdom: From Here to Antiquity in Quest of Sophia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

Catholic philosophers and theologians have done an excellent job of reviving the classic medieval arguments of Thomas Aquinas and others. This includes the early twentieth-century works of Jacques Maritain (Approaches to God), Etienne Gilson (The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (God: His Existence and His Nature).  Notable contemporary works include John Wippel's The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (CUAP, 2000), Edward Feser's Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (Oneworld, 2009) and Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius, 2017), Eleanor Stump's Aquinas (Routledge, 2004), and Matthew Levering's Proofs of God: Classical Arguments from Tertullian to Barth (BakerAcademic, 2016).

Atheist philosophers have also advanced their side of the debate, as well. Key, I think, among these arguments is William Rowe’s development of the ‘Evidential Argument from Evil’, a revised version of the argument from evil, developed in response to Plantinga’s refutation of the logical argument from evil. (See Nick Trakakis’ The God Beyond Belief, for a discussion of this argument.)

All of this is unknown to the new atheists and their fans.