Did Richard Dawkins’s ‘New Atheists’ spark a Christian revival?

The battle between New Atheism and religion was never likely to have a clear winner. It was never very likely that the arguments of Richard Dawkins and co would topple the towers of theology. Nor was it likely that the atheists would provoke the sleeping giant of faith into rising up and crushing the impertinence for good.

I suppose atheists can claim that their cause is making steady progress, with organised religion continuing its gentle decline in the West, but the more honest among them might admit that the energy of their movement fizzled out long ago. Secular idealism opted for identity politics instead, making the pontifications of white male know-it-alls sound dated and uncool.

Believers, on the other hand, are likely to be more bullish. They might observe that New Atheism was widely disdained by agnostic thinkers, and that one or two prominent atheists have changed their tune, most recently Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But maybe they shouldn’t be too bullish either. Most of the agnostics who have criticised New Atheism have stopped short of advocating religion. A good example is Tom Holland. New Atheism prodded him to write a defence of Christianity’s centrality to the West, but he hasn’t come out as a believer. Much the same is true of Jordan Peterson. Atheism may have fizzled out, but no bold new theology has emerged.

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Katja Hoyer

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I therefore have my doubts about a new book called Coming to Faith Through Dawkins. It claims a bit too much: that the hubris of New Atheism has backfired comically, and sparked a new mood of Christian confidence. It’s a collection of essays by people who were keen on Dawkins for a time, and then became Christians.

It’s not surprising that there are plenty of such people. Any God-curious youth in the 2000s was bound to engage with Dawkins, and maybe Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens too. For a few of the contributors, Dawkins’ work really did spark an interest in religion, one that turned from hostile to positive. But most of the contributors had a religious upbringing, and Dawkins was just their rebellion phase. 

It’s mostly standard evangelical testimony, but there are a few thoughtful voices. A historian of science called Sarah Irving-Stonebraker includes Peter Singer in the discussion. As a secular humanist, she expected to agree with his utilitarianism, but was alarmed that it dispensed with the principle of human sanctity: ‘The equality of all human beings is not a self-evident truth, as Singer and other world-class secular philosophers are happy to remind us.’

Dawkins, she observes, is less clear on the issue. He presents natural selection as the truth about life, and then says that of course we should defy it by acting humanely, but doesn’t bother exploring the roots of the latter assumption.

This is the real flaw in New Atheism: it inherits a vague rational humanism that it has to pretend is natural, or common-sense. It’s an important task of Christian apologetics to point this out, to insist that the moral assumptions of our culture have Christian roots. But most Christian apologists fail to focus on this and get bogged down in tedious arguments about first causes, and try to make a rational case for God, and even the historical likelihood of the resurrection. Most of these contributors take this approach, some citing the apologetics of William Lane Craig and Alister McGrath (who is this book’s co-editor).

To my mind, this is deeply unhelpful. It sinks to Dawkins’ level. A wise apologetics is minimalist. It calmly exposes the moral muddles of rational humanists, their weak grasp of the history of ideas. But it doesn’t overstate the role of intellectual argument in belief.

People don’t come to faith through arguments. They come to faith because they find that they like religion – the stories, the songs, the art, the speech-forms, the culture. They might also like the intellectual side of religion, but this is mixed in with everything else. For example, I might be intellectually persuaded by something that a theologian says, but this is tied up with my wider appreciation, which is more aesthetic or emotional than rational, of the core Christian themes that he or she develops. Most apologetics overlooks this wider embedding and overstates the role of abstract rationality, and makes theology look brittle and little.