Introduction
In September 2001 a series of coordinated suicide attacks was launched against targets in the USA – events now invariably referred to simply as ‘9/11’. Of the four planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists, three were flown into major landmark buildings in New York and Washington, causing considerable loss of life. The impact of these attacks was massive, reflecting a widespread perception that the world had just changed irreversibly. The ‘war against terror’ became a dominant theme of the presidency of George W. Bush, and the USA and its allies became enmeshed in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Public anxiety about the deadly consequences of religious fanaticism reached new levels.
In the view of many, this last point is of critical importance for understanding the sudden emergence in the first decade of the twenty-first century of the movement now known as the New Atheism.1 Some atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins had been arguing that religion was irrational and dangerous for years, without making much headway. Suddenly these atheist arguments seemed both attractive and culturally plausible. Someone or something had to be blamed for 9/11, and Islamic religious fanaticism was an obvious possibility. In the white heat of anger against this outrage, ‘Islamic religious fanaticism’ became simplified – first to ‘religious fanaticism’ and then simply to ‘religion’.
Dawkins would play a central role in this change in cultural mood in Western liberal circles, for 9/11 confirmed everything he’d always believed: religion was dangerous precisely because it was irrational, and when it failed to win arguments it resorted to terror instead. Four days after the attack, Dawkins wrote: ‘To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.’2
Many regarded these comments as ridiculously simplistic. Others, however, saw Dawkins as a bold thinker willing to tell the truth. Religion is dangerous. It’s not to be respected but to be feared – and wherever possible neutralized. It’s a time bomb waiting to explode; a loaded gun waiting to kill people. As Christopher Hitchens put the point a few years later, with a verbal economy matched only by its emotional intensity: ‘Religion kills.’ The 9/11 attack turned out to be the intellectual and moral launch pad for the New Atheism.
If the New Atheism wanted to get a debate about religion under way, it certainly succeeded. Suddenly everyone wanted to talk about God. I and many others have welcomed this debate. The New Atheism has raised questions of fundamental importance, such as the rationality of faith, the relation of religion and science, the possible links between faith and violence and the place of religion in Western society. For many years these matters had been seen as uninteresting and irrelevant. But not now. A most interesting conversation has begun, and I’m sure the New Atheism will not mind others joining in and taking the discussion further. There’s a lot more that needs to be said.
Why? Because God just won’t go away. In the UK the influential magazine The Economist, which had been ‘so confident of the Almighty’s demise that we published His obituary in our millennium issue’, rather inconveniently found itself obliged to issue a correction in 2007. Religion is back in public life and public debate.3 Many are now wondering whether the New Atheism itself is beginning to look and sound a little stale and weary, repeating old arguments dressed up as if they were new and radical.
This book engages the ideas of the New Atheism, primarily as we find it stated in the works of its four leading representatives: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. But it’s important not to limit our discussion to these four thinkers. One of the most distinctive features of the New Atheism is the ‘virtual communities’ it has generated. How are its ideas defended and propagated through websites and blogs? How do these help us understand the agendas and anxieties of the movement and its appeal to society as a whole?
We’ll return to these questions in due course. First let us chart the rise to prominence of the New Atheism, and try to identify its distinctive features.