Concept

New Atheism

Intro

For most of the twentieth century, atheism in the English-speaking world was mostly a quiet academic position. Philosophers wrote technical papers, argued in journals, and few people outside the university noticed.

Then in 2004, a Stanford-trained neuroscientist named Sam Harris published The End of Faith after 9/11 and the book became a surprise bestseller. Two years later, the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion. The journalist Christopher Hitchens followed with God Is Not Great in 2007. The Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett released Breaking the Spell the same year. The four men recorded a conversation together in 2007 in Hitchens's apartment in Washington, D.C., and someone called them the Four Horsemen. The name stuck.

This was New Atheism. It was not new in the philosophical sense; the arguments were mostly old. What was new was the tone, the venue, and the goal. The four wrote bestsellers, packed lecture halls, debated bishops on YouTube, and aimed directly at the general public, not at other philosophers. They were combative, witty, mocking, and openly hostile to religion as such. Hitchens's subtitle said it: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The movement framed religion as not just intellectually mistaken but socially dangerous. Reason Rallies drew large crowds in Washington. Sunday Assembly tried to build "atheist church" services. The r/atheism subreddit boomed. The "Brights" identity push tried (mostly without success) to relabel atheism as the natural worldview of intelligent people.

By the mid-2020s the unified movement had largely dissolved. Hitchens died in 2011. Dennett died in 2024. Harris moved into meditation and consciousness territory. Dawkins kept writing but lost some of his cultural cachet. The movement's loose alliance fractured during the 2010s over politics and feminism. But the rhetorical patterns, the moves, the standard objections, the cultural posture, all of these still live on in popular secular discourse, in YouTube, in Reddit, and in the assumptions a lot of young people inherit without realizing where the assumptions came from.

This page is the encyclopedic entry on the movement: its origin, the four canonical figures, the books, the moves, the standard arguments, the Christian responses (William Lane Craig vs Hitchens, John Lennox vs Dawkins, Alvin Plantinga's broader engagement), the internal collapse, and what remains of its influence today. Christian apologetics in the late 2000s through the early 2020s was shaped directly by the need to answer this movement, and the conversations the apologist will still have today are often downstream of it.

In full

The 21st-century wave of aggressive, popular atheism that began with Sam Harris's The End of Faith (2004) and crystallized with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006). New Atheism distinguished itself from prior 20th-century academic atheism by scope (aimed at mass cultural persuasion, not journal-bound argument), tone (overtly polemical, combative, mocking), methodology (combined popular science with rhetorical attack on religion as such), and explicit anti-theism (the conviction that religion is not merely false but actively harmful to human flourishing).

The four canonical figures, Dawkins, Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, were collectively dubbed the Four Horsemen after a 2007 RDFRS-recorded conversation in Hitchens's Washington apartment. By the mid-2020s the unified movement had largely dissolved, though its rhetorical patterns and commitments persist diffusely across secular discourse.

What distinguished New Atheism from prior atheism

	Prior 20th-c. atheism	New Atheism
Venue	Academic philosophy journals; specialist audiences	Mass-market trade books, conferences, YouTube debates, Twitter
Tone	Dispassionate, technical	Combative, mocking, evangelistic
Religion	Religion as intellectual mistake	Religion as social danger
Target audience	Other philosophers	The educated general public, especially the religiously-unsure
Strategy	Disprove specific theistic arguments	Discredit religion as a cultural category
Self-presentation	Defensible philosophical position	Liberation movement; identity

The shift made atheism culturally visible in a way it had not been since the 19th c. The 2000s book lists, the Reason Rallies (2012, 2016), Sunday Assembly (founded 2013), the rise of r/atheism, and the "Brights" identity-formation initiative (Dennett, Dawkins, 2003) all belong to this moment.

The four canonical figures

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), Oxford evolutionary biologist; The God Delusion (2006); "the God hypothesis" is scientifically unnecessary; the Out Campaign (2007); the most public face of the movement.
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), journalist and polemicist; God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007); "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" (Hitchens's razor). The movement's rhetorical force-multiplier; his death (2011) is conventionally treated as the inflection point of New Atheism's decline.
Sam Harris (b. 1967), neuroscientist; The End of Faith (2004; the originating book of the movement); Letter to a Christian Nation (2006); The Moral Landscape (2010); Waking Up (2014). The intellectual-respectability face of the movement; later migrated toward consciousness-and-meditation territory (the Waking Up app).
Daniel Dennett (1942-2024), Tufts philosopher; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); naturalistic account of religion's evolutionary origin. The most analytically philosophical of the Four; the most respected among Christian philosophers as a serious interlocutor.

Adjacent and second-tier figures

Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist; A Universe from Nothing (2012)
Victor Stenger, physicist; God: The Failed Hypothesis (2007); The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009)
Michel Onfray (France), Atheist Manifesto (2005; French original), the European parallel
A.C. Grayling, The God Argument (2013); the more genteel academic-British version
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013); deconversion technique
Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? (2012); atheism as identity and activism
Matt Dillahunty, The Atheist Experience (Austin public-access TV; then YouTube), popular-debate face

Core commitments

The Four Horsemen and the broader movement shared (with varying emphasis) five core commitments:

Scientific naturalism, only matter / energy / physical-law are real; the natural sciences exhaust legitimate explanation.
Evolutionary biology as foundational worldview-shaper, On the Origin of Species (1859) is the most important book of the modern era; evolution explains the appearance of design without recourse to a designer.
Anti-religion polemic, religion is not merely false but cumulatively harmful (Hitchens's "religion poisons everything"; Harris's claim that religious moderation legitimizes religious extremism).
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.
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, opposition to faith-based education.

Decline and fragmentation (post-2011)

The movement's trajectory:

Hitchens's death (2011) removed the rhetorical center of gravity. No successor of comparable verbal force emerged.
The Atheism+ schism (2012), Jen McCreight's call to align atheism with social-justice politics produced a bitter split. Some Atheists-Plus saw mainstream atheism as still patriarchal/racist; mainstream atheists saw Atheism+ as ideological capture by progressive politics. Conferences fractured; online communities polarized; many lost interest.
Sustained criticism of Harris and Dawkins from progressive circles, Harris over his views on Islam (regularly accused of Islamophobia) and consciousness; Dawkins over tweets perceived as transphobic and Islamophobic. Both lost standing in progressive cultural space.
The "Intellectual Dark Web" migration (2017-2020), former New-Atheism-adjacent figures (Harris, Joe Rogan, Peterson, Shapiro) migrated into broader cultural-critique territory; the theism-vs-atheism question stopped being the central polemical axis.
Robust Christian responses, William Lane Craig / John Lennox / Stephen Meyer public-debate pattern; Alister McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion? (2007); Lennox's God's Undertaker (2007); David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions (2009); the Lee Strobel series; mass-market Christian apologetic responses substantially blunted the early-2000s atheist wave.
Antony Flew's 2004 reversal to deism, one of the most distinguished philosophical atheists of the 20th c. (the "presumption of atheism" coinage) reversed his position; There Is a God (2007) is the testimony.
Death of Dennett (2024), the last of the original Four. By the mid-2020s the unified movement is historical.

Where the energy went

New Atheism's energy did not disappear; it migrated:

Secular humanism, the more constructive, less polemical successor (manifestos I-III; the American Humanist Association)
"Spiritual but not religious", the soft-secular religiously-unaffiliated identity (the "rise of the nones")
Naturalistic Buddhism / mindfulness movements, particularly via Harris's Waking Up
Effective Altruism / longtermism, secular-rationalist communities concerned with maximizing impartial well-being
Academic philosophy of religion, including the Christian philosophy of religion enabled by Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, et al.
Online debate culture, atheist YouTubers, Twitter / X arguments, podcast-debates

Christian apologetic engagement

The principal Christian responses to New Atheism, mapped:

Cumulative-case engagement, Cumulative Case for Christian Theism; William Lane Craig's public-debate corpus
Scientific-apologetic engagement, John Lennox (God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, 2007); Stephen Meyer (Signature in the Cell, 2009; Darwin's Doubt, 2013; Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021)
Cultural-historical engagement, Tom Holland (Dominion, 2019); David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions, 2009); Rodney Stark (multiple works)
Targeted-rebuttal engagement, Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion?, 2007); Edgar Andrews (Who Made God?, 2009)
Meta-apologetic engagement, Atheism is a Belief + Atheism as Religion arguments; the Stealing from God Argument; presuppositionalist responses

See also the Atheist Objections meta-hub for the broader defeater catalog.