Culture moves fast — and faster and faster with each consecutive year.
The likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, et al. — the vanguard of the so-called New Atheist movement that captured the zeitgeist of the youth and society more broadly in the mid-aughts — are all but a footnote in history now, almost totally irrelevant.
Via Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (emphasis added):
The New Atheists are authors of early twenty-first century books promoting atheism. These authors include Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. The “New Atheist” label for these critics of religion and religious belief emerged out of journalistic commentary on the contents and impacts of their books. A standard observation is that New Atheist authors exhibit an unusually high level of confidence in their views. Reviewers have noted that these authors tend to be motivated by a sense of moral concern and even outrage about the effects of religious beliefs on the global scene. It is difficult to identify anything philosophically unprecedented in their positions and arguments, but the New Atheists have provoked considerable controversy with their body of work*…
The New Atheists make substantial use of the natural sciences in both their criticisms of theistic belief and in their proposed explanations of its origin and evolution. They draw on science for recommended alternatives to religion. They believe empirical science is the only (or at least the best) basis for genuine knowledge of the world, and they insist that a belief can be epistemically justified only if it is based on adequate evidence. Their conclusion is that science fails to show that there is a God and even supports the claim that such a being probably does not exist. What science will show about religious belief, they claim, is that this belief can be explained as a product of biological evolution. Moreover, they think that it is possible to live a satisfying non-religious life on the basis of secular morals and scientific discoveries.
*The observation here that they generate criticism is an understatement; their entire brand was built on generating outrage, as evidenced by such titles as Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great.”
The New Atheists as a cultural force have vanished from the zeitgeist, which begs the question: why?
Richard Dawkins, notably, has gone so far recently as to call himself a “cultural Christian” — a statement that, a few years ago, would have been unthinkable coming from him.
Via The Spectator (emphasis added):
Dawkins now says that he is not, of course, a believing Christian, but a cultural one. He’s glad that the old faith is still around. ‘I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.’ He notes that Christian belief is declining in Britain, ‘and I’m happy with that. But I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian.’ Unlike Islam, Dawkins says, Christianity is ‘a fundamentally decent religion.’…
The distinction between a believing Christian and a cultural Christian is dubious, because religion is culture.
On one level, materialist atheism as an explanatory worldview is deeply unsatisfying. There is ultimately no sustenance one can extract from it, as the only real conclusion is one of nihilistic indifference to the world. There can be no real morality if there is nothing to underpin it. Everything is the happenstance result of matter colliding with itself; what is the point of anything?
The answer to the emptiness of the cosmos might be hedonistic pleasure, but, again, on a long enough timeline, that is equally as unsatisfying. It would be so even if the pleasure continued unabated and intensified for a greater thrill at each turn, but that’s not how the world works. Pain is inevitable, and materialism or hedonism are unequipped philosophies to offer any solace.
On a deeper level, though, something dramatic has shifted in the culture over the past few years, particularly accelerating around COVID-19, which is hard to quantify or describe, but which I would attempt to describe as a sort of mass-scale acknowledgment that something is going on in this world that cannot be explained by materialist means alone.
Why do the social engineers, for example, seem to be hellbent on destroying humanity as it exists and re-creating it in their own image?
The old explanations for abuses of power — mainly, that the primary driving force is the accrual of material wealth — don’t hold water. We are witnessing Western civilization — the greatest engine of material prosperity in history, on which the technocrat ruling elite have built their fortunes — plummet into obsolescence.
More and more formerly secular contacts in my own life have slowly come around to acknowledging that something very strange is going on, and it’s not explicable by the conventional lust for money and fame of the elite.
So the real explanation for the obsolescence of New Atheism, I believe, is that the world has awakened to some kind of spiritual war afoot, a realization on which materialist philosophy shines no light.
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