Person

Four Horsemen

The collective name for the four canonical figures of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, formalized by a 2007 RDFRS-recorded conversation in Hitchens's Washington, D.C. apartment. The two-hour roundtable was published as a video by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS) and later as a printed book: The Four Horsemen: The Discussion That Sparked an Atheist Revolution (Bantam, 2019), with foreword by Stephen Fry.

The label, borrowed from Revelation 6 ("the four horsemen of the Apocalypse") and ironically modified to "Non-Apocalypse", was first used informally by Dawkins, then adopted by the press, then embraced by the movement itself. The labeling crystallized New Atheism as a recognizable movement with shared commitments: scientific materialism, anti-religious polemic, defense of free expression against religious censure, and the conviction that religion is not merely false but actively harmful to human flourishing.

The 2007 conversation


Date	30 September 2007
Location	Christopher Hitchens's Washington, D.C. apartment
Length	~120 minutes
Producer	Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Format	Unstructured roundtable; no moderator
Recording released	November 2007, initially on RDFRS website + DVD; later YouTube
Book publication	2019 (Bantam), full transcript + new forewords by the surviving three + Stephen Fry

The conversation occurred just after the publication of all four canonical New-Atheism books:

2004, Sam Harris, The End of Faith
2006, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
2006, Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell
2007, Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

The Four Horsemen video became a foundational text of the movement, referenced, excerpted, mocked, and analyzed across the next decade-plus of atheism / theism / religion debate.

The four, at-a-glance

Person	Specialty	Canonical New-Atheism work	Distinctive contribution
Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)	Evolutionary biology (Oxford)	The God Delusion (2006)	The most public face; the scientific-naturalism flagship; the "God hypothesis is unnecessary" argument
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)	Journalism / polemics	God Is Not Great (2007)	The rhetorical force-multiplier; the "religion poisons everything" thesis; Hitchens's razor ("what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence")
Sam Harris (b. 1967)	Neuroscience / philosophy	The End of Faith (2004); The Moral Landscape (2010)	The originating book; the moral-landscape (harm-reduction-utilitarian) ethics; the religious-moderation-legitimizes-extremism argument
Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)	Philosophy of mind (Tufts)	Breaking the Spell (2006)	The most analytically philosophical; naturalistic account of religion as evolutionary byproduct; the most respected by Christian philosophical interlocutors

What unified the four

The Four shared (with internal variations) five commitments:

Scientific naturalism, only matter / energy / physical-law are real; the natural sciences exhaust legitimate explanation.
Evolutionary biology as worldview-shaper, On the Origin of Species explains the appearance of design without recourse to a designer; theism's design-arguments are pre-Darwinian relics.
Anti-religion polemic, religion is not merely false but actively harmful (Hitchens's "poisons everything"; Harris's claim that religious moderation legitimizes religious extremism); the normative-cultural claim that the world would be better with less religion.
Free expression / anti-blasphemy, defense of the right to mock, criticize, and ridicule religious claims; opposition to blasphemy laws and "respect for religion" social norms; the Mohammed cartoon controversy (2005-06) as a defining moment.
Cultural-political activism, atheism not merely as private belief but as a political program: secular public square, removal of religious symbols from government, restriction of religious accommodation.

Differences among the four

Despite the shared core, the Four differed in significant ways:

On Islam. Harris and Hitchens were aggressively critical of Islam specifically (Harris notoriously so, drawing accusations of Islamophobia). Dawkins was critical but more diffuse. Dennett took the analytic-philosophical distance.
On metaphysics of mind. Dennett held a strong materialist-functionalist position (consciousness is a "user illusion"). Harris developed a quasi-mysterian view (consciousness is irreducibly first-personal yet naturalistic). Dawkins and Hitchens did not engage the philosophy of mind in depth.
On political alignment. Hitchens supported the 2003 Iraq War (alienating left-wing atheists); Harris has held idiosyncratic positions (defending torture in narrow cases, criticizing the regressive left). Dennett and Dawkins were broadly left-liberal but academic-detached. The political coherence of the movement was always fragile.
On the "religion question." Dennett was most open to dialogue with religion-as-cultural-phenomenon (his "spell-breaking" project); Hitchens was most absolute in opposition; Harris most interested in recovering religion-adjacent experiential content (mindfulness, contemplative practice); Dawkins most focused on the science-vs-religion polemic.

The "Fifth Horsewoman" question

Christian apologists and movement-observers sometimes ask why the Four were all white men. The most commonly named "Fifth Horseman" / "Horsewoman" candidates: Bart Ehrman (skeptical NT scholar; massively influential but explicitly not anti-religious in the New-Atheism polemical sense); Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist; A Universe from Nothing, 2012; later disqualified by 2018 misconduct allegations); Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somali-born ex-Muslim atheist; Infidel, 2007; later converted to Christianity in 2023, dramatically removing her from the list); Greta Christina (atheism-as-identity activist); Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers, 2004); Jennifer Michael Hecht (Doubt: A History, 2003). None achieved the canonical-Four status.

Decline and dissolution

The Four Horsemen as a unified movement effectively dissolved:

2011, Christopher Hitchens dies of esophageal cancer. The rhetorical center of gravity is lost.
2012, The Atheism+ schism (Jen McCreight) fractures the movement over social-justice alignment.
2015-2020, Sustained criticism of Harris (over Islam, consciousness, racism allegations) and Dawkins (over transgender tweets, Islam comments) erodes their public standing in progressive cultural space.
2017-2024, The "Intellectual Dark Web" migration absorbs much of the Four's adjacent space; the theism-vs-atheism axis ceases to be the central polemical axis.
2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a frequent Four-Horsemen adjacent figure, publicly converts to Christianity.
2024, Daniel Dennett dies in April. The last of the original Four.

By the mid-2020s the Four Horsemen as a unified movement is historical. Its rhetorical patterns persist diffusely across secular discourse (atheist Twitter / X; r/atheism; podcast culture) but the movement with its conferences, its identity, and its sense of historical mission has largely dispersed.

Christian engagement with the Four

Principal Christian responses, mapped to the targets:

vs Dawkins, Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? (2007); John Lennox, God's Undertaker (2007); Gunning for God (2011); William Lane Craig vs Dawkins (the 2011 Oxford no-show by Dawkins; the Mexico 2010 confrontation)
vs Harris, William Lane Craig vs Harris (Notre Dame 2011 debate, "Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?", widely judged Craig-win); responses to Moral Landscape by Russell DiSilvestro, William Lane Craig, et al.
vs Hitchens, Douglas Wilson, Is Christianity Good for the World? (2008, debate compilation); William Lane Craig debate (2009 Biola); John Lennox debate (2009 Birmingham)
vs Dennett, Alvin Plantinga's exchange (Dennett-Plantinga, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, 2011); Daniel Came's analytic responses
vs the movement broadly, David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions (2009); Tom Holland, Dominion (2019); David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion (2008); Edgar Andrews, Who Made God? (2009)