The God Delusion came out in 2006, two years after Harris’s The End of Faith, a year before Hitchens’s God is Not Great., and the same year as Harris’s followup book, Letter to a Christian Nation. (Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell also came out in 2006, but I consider that a different kind of book from these.)
The four books together could be considered the foundation of “New Atheism”, which is pretty much like “old atheism” save that it leveled more aggressive attacks on religion, emphasizing its harms, and was more science-oriented than was the atheism of, say, Robert Ingersoll. (Carl Sagan wasn’t quite so aggressive against faith, but did use science to attack religion.). Now I can’t prove that these books helped promote America’s continuing rejection of faith, instantiated in the rise of the “nones,” but a lot of people have told me that this was indeed the case.
What I can say is not the case that “New Atheism” is dead. That’s like saying that “Mendelian genetics is dead”: it was an advance that changed a lot of minds, and it’s been assimilated into the culture as we move on. The blockheads who proclaim that “New Atheism is dead” are simply saying that “the arguments against faith by Dawkins et al. fail to embrace woke-ish social justice”. (This led to the lame movement “Atheism Plus”, which really is dead except in those few people who still insist that arguments against religion and gods must perforce embrace their preferred moral philosophy.)
At any rate, Dawkins has just published in the Torygraph his two-decade retrospective on The God Delusion, and you can read it for free by clicking on the headline below. He claims no particular expertise in physics, but does show the intellectual vacuity of “scientific” evidence for God I discussed the other day, like the “fine-tuning” and “Big Bang” arguments.
If clicking on the headline doesn’t work, you can find the article archived here.
You can (and should) read the whole thing, but I’ll give a few choice quotes about arguments for God that are being resurrected by the likes of Stephen Meyer and Ross Douthat:
On Oct 2 it will be 20 years since The God Delusion was published. Coincidentally, books by Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens came out at around the same time. This led someone (not any of the four of us) to invent “New Atheism” as a “project”.
We wrote our books independently without collusion, and as far as we were concerned there was no such project. It was sad that the old arguments needed to be restated. Even sadder, they still need to be re-stated, in 2026.
The delusion of God will not lie down. Partly because it serves as a comfort blanket for those whose idea of logic takes the form, “life would be intolerable without X, therefore X must exist”. Then there’s the Great Stalin Syllogism: “Stalin was an atheist. Stalin was a horrible man. Therefore God exists.” The variant that begins, “Hitler was an atheist” is equally illogical, and therefore untouched by the fact that he wasn’t.
My guess is that the “life will be intolerable without X” argument is the one underlying the weakness of the media for religion, including places like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Free Press. These places are too savvy to tout the “scientific” arguments for God. Instead, they proclaim the existence of a “god-shaped hole” in our minds, ergo there must be a god which fits that hole.
Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?
Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?
But the arguments below still have a puff of stale air in their sails:
If Paley’s relative judgment is now reversed, it is not because the cosmology version of the argument from design has grown any more powerful. Rather it is that the biological version has disappeared altogether. If Paley had lived after Darwin, he would probably have agreed, for his knowledge of biology was deep and detailed.
What, then, of the cosmology version today? Our universe began in a singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. The “Let there be light” moment – when conditions cooled enough for electrons to bond with nuclei, forming the first neutral atoms – came about a quarter of a million years later.There was then a further delay of about nine billion years before the sun (and Earth) came into existence. In a triumph of wishful thinking, this sequence of events is seen by some as a vindication of the Book of Genesis. Seriously!Nobody knows what came before the universe. A strong school of thought among physicists denies the very word “before”, because time itself began in the Big Bang. Commonsense abhors this paradox, but common sense evolved to think no more deeply than was needed to survive and reproduce.. . .Not all physicists accept the premise of the fine-tuning argument. See Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. Some suggest that it works only if you twiddle one knob at a time. If you turn several knobs together, there could be a very large number of combinations of settings that yield biologically promising universes.
Other physicists, including Martin Rees himself, point out that the currently favoured theory of universe inflation predicts the existence of a multiverse embracing huge numbers of universes. A small minority of these universes happen to have their knobs set to biology-favouring values. We obviously have to be sitting in one of that minority, because here we are – the so-called anthropic principle.
As a biologist, I lack authority to enter this debate. I agree with Paley that the biological argument from design was the big one. Darwin’s solution has correspondingly huge significance. It inspires confidence that the relatively minor cosmological version will in due course yield.
But of course the argument from design is still with us, albeit in a more sophisticated form. It is “the argument from design of features that could not have arisen in a continuously adaptive step-by-step way.” In other words, say the proponents of this nonsense, now known as “intelligent design” (“ID”), there are adaptive features of organisms that could not have arisen by natural selection itself. All the examples touted so far, including the bacterial flagellum and blood clotting, now have plausible scenarios of origin by selection. Yet ID hangs on. That is not because its arguments are plausible. I have never seen anybody make “scientific” arguments for God, including ID, who wasn’t a believer themselves. If those arguments were plausible, we’d see a ton of avowed atheists suddenly becoming religious, but that doesn’t happen.
There’s a lot more in the piece, including Richard’s answer to the claim that he’s a cultural Christian, ergo God, but I’ll mention just one more response:
“But Dawkins,” the critics cry. “If you’d only read your theology you’d know that God is not complex at all. It’s just Theology 101. God is profoundly simple.”
Ah yes, so simple that he’s capable of listening to a billion prayers simultaneously. So simple he has the bandwidth to judge each and every sin on its merits. So simple that “the very hairs of your head are numbered” and not a single sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge. All this on top of knowing exactly how to fine-tune the laws and constants of physics to ensure our eventual existence. Ah me, theology. Is it actually a subject at all?
Well, as Dan Barker said, “Theology is a subject without an object.”
Is New Atheism dead? Nope, not at all. It lives on in the minds of every erstwhile believer who, having read the arguments of Dawkins & Co., realized that there’s no more evidence for God than there is for the Loch Ness Monster.
Richard ends his piece with this sentence, “Twenty years on, I stand by what I wrote in The God Delusion.”
If you are reasonably smart, how can you possibly see a rational person’s unwavering belief in God as anything other than a weakness of mind or character? (I am excluding those who were brainwashed into having faith.)
Well, to my mind, the bible itself is still by far the best antidote to Judeo-Christian theology. It’s certainly what made me an atheist.
It’s said that the surest way to test one’s faith is to enrol in a Seminary. Actually looking behind the cultural curtain at the texts, church history, etc. provides lots of occasions for doubt. It’s a good filter for wannabe PRPs (Professional Religions People).
At the very least, The God Delusion showed that everyone has an endowed right to express when religious liberties are being abused, such that they violate the conscience of the individual.
Any given religion has no right to a “free pass“, any more than does the individual.
Before TGD – no way. Couldn’t “rock the boat”(classic Dawkins quote) – IOW sit down and take the demoralization.
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
-Thomas Jefferson
Letter to Issac Tiffany
1819
Amen 🙂.
RD’s arguments are of course very good, but the ‘Aha!’ moment for me, already an atheist, was his attack on the unexamined cultural respect for religion. Freedom!
I woke up from the drunken stupor of faith forty years ago (pre-internet) in my early twenties, but it was watching Dawkins’ documentary “The Root of all Evil?” on TV in 2006 that began my internet journey on the subject. At the time, I had never even heard of Richard, and when you start searching for something online, one thing leads to another, and I landed on an atheist based debate/discussion forum, and logged on. I wound up spending ten years on that forum, and in the first few years, it was enormously affirming that I was indeed right twenty years earlier that the supernatural worldview that was inculcated into my unformed mind was indeed false. Over the years on that forum (and elsewhere) and devouring stacks of books and countless YouTube videos on the subject, I developed a black belt in debunking the baseless claims of theists. It was an invigorating time, but I eventually got burned out by the intellectual dishonesty of most theists, so mostly gave it up, although I’ve still chimed in in myriad places over the last decade.
Thank you Richard Dawkins for all you’ve done.
I had a similar experience in 2006 too. I needed to learn English and I typed “interview” on YouTube. One of the first things that came up was “The Atheist Tapes – Jonathan Miller (2004)” — interviews with Colin McGinn, Steven Weinberg, Arthur Miller, Richard Dawkins, Denys Turner, and Daniel Dennett. It changed my life and am very thankful to all of them.
Yes, I remember that!
I guess it doesn’t seem like twenty years ago to me, because I only read it a few years later. 😉
I’ve always said that, if god is out there, he is more like the trickster-god than the all merciful one.
It gets a mention above. I remember it well. It’s 2012 and a prominent group of skeptics founded a new religion
“ATHEISM PLUS stands for values beyond mere non-belief, including humanism, women’s rights, and active opposition to racism, misogyny, and homophobia, biphobia and transphobia”.
The Argument from Design still rears it’s dead head in many forms. It appeals to people who want to believe that they are at the center of it all. I’m with the late Carl Sagan on this in thinking that—just as our sun is just one of “billions and billions of stars”—I am just one of innumerable, temporary, configurations of matter. Yes, it’s cool that my configuration is alive—I get to drink wine and eat good food—but I’m not at the center and don’t need to be.
Thank you for excluding the brainwashed from your judgement. I was brainwashed from about age 4, threatened with an eternity suffering in hellfire if I lost my faith.
I had trouble sleeping at age 4 because I had to pray that I would live through the night and not go to hell if I died during the night. (Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.)
I started catching on at about age 16. When I asked my Sunday School teacher about contradictions in the bible, she said, “That’s where your faith comes in.” That aroused my suspicions, but it probably took 15 years to gradually lose my faith completely.
So be patient with the brainwashed. It’s not easy for them.
OMG!
I’ll never forget walking in to a public library. There, propped-up on a book display table was a book titled, The God Delusion. I thought, the audacity – and that I was going to grab that book – as I glanced around to see if anyone I knew was looking. I took the book home to read. Every page was soaked up.
After 50 years in the faith, it was over.
Ever grateful for Richard Dawkins writing this book and addressing so many key points which had kept me from thinking outside of the faith.
There is no god shaped hole but there is a meaning shaped hole that many people seem to have trouble filling. It’s of nebulous shape and filling it in a truly meaningful way takes real work. Many people don’t seem to know how to begin and rather than doing the hard work they simply fill the hole with a cookie cutter shaped god.
Actually, evidence for the Loch Ness monster is better than that for God: there are at least grainy photos, of a sort.
On the New Atheists, I thought Sam Harris’ book was the most thoughtful; but of course Christopher Hitchens’ book was the
funniest, hence the most fun to read.
I was raised Mormon and stopped believing at 16 after realizing that miracles don’t really happen. I was a belief leaning agnostic for years despite not believing in miracles until I read the God Delusion, The End of Faith, God is Not Great and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, even thought the latter wasn’t specifically about religion.
My brother attempted suicide two decades ago because as a gay man he was very conflicted with the religion he continued to believe in. He was closeted for years and sought sexual relationships in an underground sort of way, which resulted in hooking up with abusive and manipulative person. He came out of the closet to me, but it was very difficult for him to do so despite his knowing that I would be very accepting. It’s so clear to me that religious belief caused my brother a great deal of suffering, and also caused my parents and siblings to mistake the source of his suffering. Can you guess what they thought caused his suffering?
It’s not just evidence. The idea of Nessie is much more concrete than God. She did not create anything out of nothing, whatever that means. She did not give us free will. She is not Omni-3x, and we know where She is supposed to be. People can hang out hoping for a selfie with Her. But I can’t even get a selfie with the omnipresent. What’s the point? Compared to Nessie, religious ideas seem sorely lacking in substance.
After leaving my Catholic upbringing in my teens I considered myself an agnostic and still had ‘faith in faith’ for many years, but it was reading The God Delusion (in its entirety on a flight from the UK to Canada) and Karen Armstrong’s A History of God that provided me with the push into atheism.
I became an atheist thanks to the first Dawkins video I found on YouTube. He said something like: “people believe because authorities like priests say it, because it’s written in holy books. None of these are good reasons to believe an anything.” That convinced me, as I was aware that my religion was based on authority (even if you ignore tradition and try to strip Christianity down to Jesus you must trust in his story, and probably also the stories of Moses and Abraham). Dawkins made it clear that the burden of proof was on the religion I knew from childhood, not on me.
“The God Delusion” was my starting point in in the life and works of Richard Dawkins. Not only did it lead me to critically question organized religion, but it also paved the way for me to embrace skepticism. And finally, I was advised to check out this blog. I came, read and stayed. 🙂
Thank you very much, Richard Dawkins!
I was brought up within the Church Of England but it never occured to me that the stories were meant to be actually true. I have never been able to imagine an all powerful being responsible for everything in the Universe. It must be difficult to be agnostic if one is given serious indoctrination at an early age, just consider the nonesense that Muslims believe.