New Atheism: A Criticism

Sorry to disrupt the narrative, but here's a short piece I wrote. Would be very grateful for feedback.


For the past few years of the last decade, a minor publishing sensation has rocked the bookstores of the English-speaking world. The so-called “Four Horsemen” of “New Atheism”, comprised of renowned biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, neuroscientist/Ben Stiller look-alike Sam Harris, and general character Christopher Hitchens. Together, these four have induced a near Beatlemania-like frenzy among the unbelieving masses, if sales figures are to be believed.

Their books, The God Delusion, Breaking The Spell, The End of Faith, and God Is Not Great, are all, obviously, concerned with one thing. To point out the fundamental absurdity of religious belief in the modern world, and to blame religion for nearly all of the ills of the contemporary world. Their approaches vary considerably, however, with Dawkins stressing that advances in science have made religion superflous as a mode of explanation, Dennett preferring to attack the absurdity of religious propositions in a logical way, while Hitchens and Harris tend to focus far more on the harm that religion has wrought on mankind. What they all share in common, however, is a steadfast conviction that religious faith has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster, and the faster we abandon it, the more progress humanity can make.

That their books should be so popular at this time is no mystery. Last decade began with loaded passenger jets being flown into skyscrapers by a group of men who claimed it was all the will of their God. Over the next few years, all osrts of people of this particular ilk blew themselves, and other people up all around the world. Meanwhile, in the US, a President who claimed to be able to talk to God apparently acted on his orders, by invading Middle Eastern countries, in order to replace one admittedly loathsome tyranny with near total lawlessness and anarchy.


Just this decade, then, the charge sheet against religious belief seems pretty tall. And that's not counting the Inquistion, the Crusades, the whole Israel/Palestine thing,the partition of India, the Thirty Years War...you get the point. In any case, simply looking back at human history, especially that of the last century, and the belief in God, at least in the traditional sense conceived by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, becomes increasingly hard to substantiate.It's almost impossible to think of a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being who would have stood aside and tolerated Auschwitz, the Gulags, and Pol Pot's wickedness. Furthermore, as an explanatory account, Darwinian science and our increased knowledge of physics seem to render the version given us by nearly all religions utterly redundant.


And yet, the religious impulse seems to endure, even in this age where the march of science and technology seem unstoppable. It seems to be this that provokes such fits of fury from the Horsemen. What is this Stone Age, barbaric, anachronism doing in our age of laptops, fiber-optics, and instant communication? Unfortunately, far from killing religion, our greater ability to control our environment has led to the two co-existing, albeit uneasily. The 9/11 attacks were planned over the Internet, after all. In places such as America, supposedly the world's scientific powerhouse, you can encounter well over a third of the population who are still convinced the Biblical account of Genesis is true. How could this be?

In the end, the New Atheists fail to understand the fundamental power of religion. Christopher Hitchens, ex Trotskyist he was, has undoubtedly read something encountered by nearly any first year Politics or Philosophy student, Karl Marx's brilliant analysis of religion as a form of alienation, where he allegedly uttered the famous “Religion is the opium of the people”. Dawkins and Dennett, though, rational, scientific men they are, seem to think the hold of religion on people's minds stems entirely from its ability to explain the natural world. This is a fatal underestimation. They simply can't understand the possibility that faced with the choice between a boring truth and an exciting fiction, many people will opt for the latter. People flock to religion not because the evidence seems to make sense, but because the narrative it provides puts a coherent framework to an often confusing, meaningless, chaotic world. It may not stand up to empirical scrutiny, but it makes the solitary lives of individual human beings that much easier to bear.

This is not to say that they completely ignore this aspect of religious feeling. Instead, nearly all of them propose a form of secular humanism as a replacement for the patent absurdity of faith. An ethics guided by reason, as opposed to the injunctions of some imaginary being in the sky. Supposedly let this dawn upon mankind, and our ills will all disappear. Hitchens, in particular, seems very keen on this. In one especially lyrical passage, he describes a world where ethics are taught through Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, as opposed to the Bible. Not only is it utterly silly,(especially Dostoyevsky, most of whose best novels are arguments FOR faith) it's a fundamental mistake about the power of human reason. Even Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene, seems to think that reasoning alone will satisfy this fundamental void. It's a huge assumption about human nature, namely that all people are middle-aged, well-educated, Anglo-American academics, and will be satisfied with the story given to them by science.


Here's where the danger arises. Even if religion vanishes, the psychological need to place oneself in a larger scheme of things never disappears. There were societies, after all, in the 20th century, where religion was abolished as fundamentally irrational. In the USSR and the People's Republic of China, though, this didn't mean everyone turned to reverence for nature, evolution, and science. Instead, in Russia, the Party replaced the Church, Marx replaced the Prophets, Lenin replaced Jesus, and Stalin became simultaneously Patriarch and God. The underlying assumption about human beings being fundamentally rational creatures is profoundly mistaken. If we strip away one set of idols, we'll merely find others to replace them. To be fair, Sam Harris does acknowledge what went on in the Soviet Union,and China, but he chooses to allot the blame to the totalitarian nature of the regimes as opposed to their policy of 'state atheism'. But this is to totally ignore the fact that atheism is fundamental to Marxism as a system of thought.It was necessary to dispense with Jesus, so he could be replaced with the working class. In fact, it was a prime example of how old faiths are simply replaced by new ones. Perhaps, our old delusions were safer than our new ones.

This of course, does not mean that religious ideologies of violence shouldn't be fought with every resource we can muster. But it also means shedding any assumptions about a religious outlook being inherently malevolent, as these authors seem to claim.Religion doesn't murder people, humans do. The danger, ultimately, is that in ceasing to worship God, we deify human beings.