When I was at university, about fifteen years ago, atheism was at its zenith. The ‘New Atheists’ were all the rage in the world of publishing, landmark books of the movement such as Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great characterised the emergence of an atheism that expressed not just disbelief in the concept of God as a rational proposition, but despised the very idea.
As time has gone by however this movement has aged. While the sting of their rational criticisms of certain kinds of religion remains, be it Dawkins critiques of creationism as ‘science’ or Sam Harris critiques of the extremism many religions find themselves prone to at one end, much of their broader complaints have proved to be contradictory and shallow. They preached a complicated confusion of claiming to despise religion, while judging it ironically on the basis of thoroughly Christian moral categories, claim that their morality is the result of rational enlightenment yet conveniently align with the inherited, largely religious values of their own culture. While they had many serious critiques, their own epistemology turned out to be clumsy and full of category confusion.
There was then, a kind of ‘adolescence’ to this era of atheism. Rather than being a serious reflection of a thoroughly constructed worldview…
