The Aging of New Atheism
From the Four Horsemen to the Intellectual Dark Web
The world has changed since 2004. This was the year George W. Bush was re-elected president of the United States; the year evangelical Christians secured another term for one of their own. This was also the year that the War in Iraq, led by an evangelical president against the forces of radical Islam, picked up steam.
It was, for secularists at least, as rational a time as any to be concerned about the undue influence of religion in society.
It is no coincidence this was the year that crystallized the rise of “New Atheism,” a movement offering an unapologetic critique of religion and conveying an unwillingness to make space for what it viewed as the retrograde suppositions of traditional faith.
In this new milieu a core group of public intellectuals rose to prominence. Books like The End of Faith by Sam Harris (2004), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett (2006), and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (2007) provoked an introspection towards, and a backlash against, society’s acceptance of religion as a moral and intellectual scaffolding upon which to build civilization.
Fourteen years later, the philosophical energies have shifted. Though we are not necessarily witnessing a renaissance of religious belief, there is today, within popular intellectual culture, a swelling recognition of the inevitably religious nature of human existence. We are observing a secular reckoning with the ways in which both collective religious structures and individualized behaviors long nurtured through religion usher society towards a qualitatively progressive new age. The question for our time has ceased to be “What makes religion bad, and how can we eliminate it?” The question has become “What has made religion beneficial and how can we build upon that edifice today?”
The phrase “new atheism” was coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in a multi-profile piece for Wired in late 2006 titled “The Church of the Non-Believers.” The article examines the views and approaches of three of the four figures who would eventually come to be known as “The Four Horsemen” of New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. (The term “The Four Horsemen” was adopted as the title of a discussion held by the four filmed at the residence of the fourth member of the group, the late Christopher Hitchens, in 2007.) Wolf’s piece is not uncritical, accepting the New Atheists’ arguments while ultimately rejecting their argumentative style and unyielding certainty. He writes, for example, that “[t]hey condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God.” Yet the piece suggests that, despite the unlikelihood of atheism capturing the heart and mind of society, the New Atheists are themselves worth paying attention to.
They were then and they still are now. Daniel Dennett’s insights into the human mind are profound. Sam Harris’ range of social, scientific, and philosophical commentary is prodigious. Richard Dawkins speaks for many and the charismatic conviction of Christopher Hitchens challenges and inspires us nearly eight years after his death. Yet the acerbic dismissal of the respectability of faith is one that, while maintaining its core constituency, has ceased to energize a mainstream intellectual culture.
Twelve years later a new intellectual cohort is en vogue. In a multi-profile piece with a nocturnal aesthetic that hearkens back to the black pictorial backdrops used in the Wired article, Bari Weiss of The New York Times invites readers to “meet the renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.” The subtitle poses a question: “An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?”
The Intellectual Dark Web boasts a larger and more philosophically diverse roster of figures than the core cabal of New Atheists. It includes some we would not think of as public intellectuals in the traditional sense—for example, media entrepreneurs/comedians like Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. Its lineup shifts depending on who one asks, yet each figure in this group, including mathematician Eric Weinstein, his brother and brother’s wife, biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, Jordan Peterson, Michael Shermer, Ben Shapiro, and also…Sam Harris, are united in opposition to the intellectually corrosive impact of modern identity politics on society, and in support of freedom of speech and inquiry as our essential antidotes to ignorance and oppression. Left- and right-wing opposition to both left- and right-wing tribalism produces something approaching uniformity on this subject among these figures—and the result is a loose arrangement of thinkers devoted to free and open discourse.
It is precisely this shared commitment to the intellectual virtues of free and open debate that has enabled this group to engage in far more interesting conversations than the New Atheists. This is true even when we have in mind the main preoccupation of the latter group: religion. The IDW’s diversity of opinion on this issue is massive, which facilitates a richer conversation on the nature, importance, and philosophical validity of faith.
Despite this diversity, there is something of a loose consensus among these thinkers when it comes to one particular aspect of religion. It is that religious faith, whatever its errors and limitations, is far from an obvious cancer on humanity. Rather, faith has been a vital vehicle for the evolution of humankind’s moral framework and sociobiological development. Thus, where it is not conspicuously corrupt it ought be respected, its modern-day relevance not simply dismissed out of hand.
On the strong end of this spectrum is Jordan Peterson. I recall Hitchens’ claim, perhaps in reference to the theism of Newton, that we would never again see impressive faith, one that could withstand the scrutiny of rigorous cross-examination. It’s safe to say Hitchens would have been ambushed by the Peterson phenomenon. Peterson’s tying of religious themes to the architecture of moral evolution and even the brain—in such a way that suggests no obvious alternative course for this evolution—has likely provoked thousands to either re-embrace some version of Christianity or reconsider the psychological and metaphysical value of scriptural claims. This doesn’t make Jordan Peterson Isaac Newton. But prior to Peterson, it wasn’t obvious that a figure standing outside the tradition of organized religion would generate an excitement for Christianity’s particular metaphysical claims this deep into the 21st century.
Accordingly, Peterson has collided—not just in his famous encounters with Sam Harris but in debates with individuals such as Matt Dillahunty—with the New Atheist perspective more directly than any other figure in the IDW.
Dillahunty is one of New Atheism’s most able modern-day exponents. In fact, if the intellectual vitality of this perspective is diminishing, you would never have known it from his debate with Peterson. In it, Peterson makes the types of arguments he is known for — arguments for the profound utility of religious belief. Its archetypal stories ground our moral structure. Transcendent experiences—such as those that are produced by spiritual contemplation and are also producible under controlled settings with the use of psychedelic substances like psilocybin—reorient our psychology in positive, transformational ways. Religious language is the only language we have to effectively “communicate to people who are in the direst of straits what’s most important about life in the manner that will help set them straight and put their soul at peace.” Is this just a therapeutic technique or does Peterson leave the door open for God’s literal existence? If he does, it’s a door Dillahunty seeks to emphatically close. Dillahunty observes that, whatever the practical benefits of belief in God, they do not demonstrate that God actually exists.
In response to Peterson’s suggestion that mystical experiences serve as possible evidence of a deeper metaphysical reality, Dillahunty says:
The thing that people subjectively describe as “I had an incredibly impactful mystical experience”…that is the subjective description of that…that doesn’t in any way serve to confirm there is any sort of supernatural realm or supernatural actor.
The observation that the benefits of religion do not establish the accuracy of its metaphysical assumptions has always been enough for New Atheists to sweep aside the more consequentialist defenses of religion made by figures like Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, who declare just as sweepingly that there is no objectively conclusive evidence to prove or disprove God and who advance belief in (the Judeo-Christian) God on the basis of their tradition’s moral benefit to human society. Yet beyond the more emphatically atheistic circles, Peterson’s views seem to have shifted the popular secular conversation around religion—or, at the least, his work has led to a kind of intellectual detente.
It is possible that Peterson’s work has had this effect because he has tied the development of religious narrative to the imperatives of human social and psychological evolution. And there is a lot going for this thesis—importantly, it does not require wholesale embrace of the metaphysically weighty system of orthodox belief. Even if it’s true that religious/mythological stories and archetypes are evolution’s chosen tools for catalyzing our moral development, that stops short of proving God’s existence. If it is true, though, then it means religion is something more than a cumbersome albatross that needs to be immediately and forcefully removed from the neck of humanity. It is rather something stitched into the fibers of our social and psychological DNA, perhaps needing to be updated in certain ways, but absolutely refusing to be uprooted from our essential natures.
It is not just Peterson, of course — versions of this perspective echo across most of the relevant conversations occurring in the IDW. Bret Weinstein, himself an atheist, contended to Sam Harris that virtually all religious architecture was evolutionarily advantageous (in massive contrast to the New Atheist position that the bulk of religion’s consequences historically and contemporaneously has been but so much destruction). In a segment for Big Think Weinstein explains:
We have minds that are programmed by culture that can be completely at odds with our genomes and it leads to misunderstandings of evolution like the idea that religious belief is a mind virus — that effectively these belief structures are parasitizing human-beings…rather than the more reasonable interpretation that these belief systems have flourished because they facilitated the interests of the creatures involved.
Weinstein goes on to state in the video that “despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm they’ve done nothing of the kind.” These are observations that sync well with Jonathan Haidt’s (again an atheist and sometimes associated with the IDW) analysis of the primacy of moral emotion in determining belief systems and the inevitable social dependency on religious structure. (He has dubbed Dawkins’ view that something like pure reason can mold an enduring social structure the “rationalist delusion.”) Haidt has described our tendency towards such structures as being like the ascending of a staircase that leads from the profane up to the sacred. This means “we evolved to be religious.”
I don’t mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions. Those things came along too recently. I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people, and ideas. … If the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life.
This dissatisfaction is not one that is answered by New Atheism, and for all of the dialectic advantages skepticism would seem to have in the conversation with religion it is not difficult to argue that this fact still leaves religion with a social-evolutionary advantage right up to our current moment. The economist/philosopher/physicist (and also atheist) Robin Hanson illustrated this point, in an appearance with Harris, by assessing the impact of religion on people’s ultimate quality of life:
One of the things to know about religion is that, in fact, religious people are just better off on pretty much all our standard metrics. They live longer, they earn more, their marriages stay longer, they have less crime. They’re healthier. Everything goes better for religious people on average. That’s a real puzzle if you think they’re just all making a big mistake.
The shift in the popular intellectual discourse on the subject of religion from the high days of New Atheism to the era of the Intellectual Dark Web is a marked one. But it is important to observe that there is one figure who has been key to both of these discursive chapters. He is a thinker whose growth illustrates the broader progression of this particular dialogue — a progression that has been wholly positive.
Though Richard Dawkins was the most prominent New Atheist, and Jordan Peterson the most well-known figure of the IDW, the orienting star in both of these constellations has been Sam Harris. It was Harris who wrote The End of Faith in 2004, initiating a period of intense polemical combat, and Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, sparking a movement. And it’s been Harris who, with the launch of his topically eclectic podcast in 2013, has been at the vanguard of the IDW’s appeal to those who long for a discourse kept suppressed by the guardians of cultural orthodoxy. Eric Weinstein may have coined the phrase. But it is Harris who established himself both as a premier thinker within, as well as gatekeeper to, this dynamic space.
Harris’ treatment of religion has deepened over time. He has ceded no ground in his contention that religion must give way to reason. But he has acknowledged the potential for transformative religious experience (for example, on the value of meditation). He has gone as far as entertaining the credibility of the origins of religious traditions, conceding their likely beginning points in the special experiential episodes of religious figures like Jesus and Buddha. In deriving so much of his understanding of the nature of consciousness from such “spiritual” exploration, Harris has elicited slight consternation from allies in the New Atheist camp. His commitment to salvaging from religion those aspects that are worth preserving presents a departure from more uncompromising forms of skepticism, even as his interest in the demise of the larger enterprise means he is still wedded to the fundamental aims of New Atheism.
Ultimately, Harris—and others with him—has opened the door to better conversations. He has concerned himself first and foremost with what it means to live a good life, a question perhaps more fundamental than the rest. Harris’ answer to this question?
The recipe for a good life…is to live a life that is increasingly motivated by love and guided by reason.
What this looks like in practice is a complicated affair. But whatever the role of religion, this is the answer that emerges from the IDW. It is the right summation of the pursuit of truth — the “God” worth seeking, the “God” worth finding.
