New Atheism: A Noisy Fad That Will Soon Pass?

David Hart over at First Things takes on well known atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc) and their literature, lamenting the lack of intellectual vigor applied to any of their arguments on the existence of God:

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any.

What I did take away from the experience was a fairly good sense of the real scope and ambition of the New Atheist project. I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

Read it all for his specific metaphysical and logical takedowns of atheism.  The demographic trends on religion point to an uncertain future for western civilization. I do not think atheism is a passing fad as there is some evidence it is growing in America, however, atheist cultures in Europe and Russia are in a demographic crisis and dying.  On the flip side, Christianity worldwide is the fastest growing religion, followed closely by Islam.  We can't afford to simply shrug our shoulders about Europe: it's the other half of Western civilization.  The question will be what will replace western cultures, or will these cultures do an about face and begin assimilating immigrants as they had in they had in the past, or continue down the path of morally relativistic policies like multiculturalism. If current demographic trends hold, it points to an increasing Islamization of Europe, and/or balkanization of European society.


Here's a bonus video of two intellectuals going at it on the utility of religion vs secularism.  Dinesh D'Souza, author of "What's So Great About Christianity," debating Christopher Hitchens, one of the more charismatic atheists, and author of "God is Not Great." While the video is from 2007, they continue to cover the same ground in current debates across college campuses.