The New Atheists

“I was at this time of living, like so many Atheists or Anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.” C.S. Lewis

Who are the new atheists?  Unlike the traditional atheists of the past, the new atheists are a movement loosely organized around a host of websites and celebrity leaders.  They are very evangelistic and spend a large amount of time and money[i] propagating their faith, which they vehemently deny is a faith, though their movement seems to be increasingly taking on the characteristics of a religious cult.  Their purpose as a group seems to be to destroy faith in God and all religion, which they believe is evil.  So in essence, they believe they are angels of light, taking a message of freedom to the world, a freedom from a faith, which they believe poisons everything.  However, are they really angels of light?

The new atheists seem to be nice guys like any group which has little power.  However, when given power as in Russia and China, atheists behave no better than any other group or maybe worse.  In fact, they have the propensity to use force, especially state power, to spread their ideology and oppress others.  In other words, they behave very much like the thing they hate, i.e., organized religion.

They also represent the narrowest of belief systems, which a person can have, for they must reject  every religious belief system and argue for a total materialist world view.  In contrast, the Christian faith believes that it is the true and the most complete faith; but it also believes that there are many truths to be found in other faiths.  The new atheists are truly narrow people, and their thinking is one-dimensional and resembles the thinking of a fundamentalist religionist.  It is not surprising that their superstars resemble the TV evangelists.

They also share in other characteristic of religion, which is judgmental attitude and a critical spirit. Atheists embrace a naturalistic world view which, if they were being consistent, would eliminate all morality and all moral judgments.  Yet we find them making moral judgments on religious people all the time.  In fact, one of their spokesmen has recently published a book in which he even sets himself up as the moral judge of God.  The book is entitled God Is Not Good.  However, the title is misleading, for most of the book is about the failures of religion over the last few thousand years.  He seems to have missed the obvious observation that religious people are just people and people do bad things when given too much power, like the atheistic Communists of Russia and China, which he conveniently overlooks.

Because the new atheists believe that their unbelief is grounded in science, they have the tendency to elevate science to a place it ought not to hold.  For many atheists, science seems to be like a religion, which they guard as the fundamentalist religious person would guard his holy books.  This is understandable since atheists believe that science is proof of their ideology. Of course, the truth is that science does not support their faith and any true science would be the first to test and challenge any human knowledge, even atheism.  True science dictates that doubters doubt their own doubts. This might suggest that atheists are even poor skeptics.

To the new atheists, science is the proof that there is no God.  Yet the consensus of science is that science proves no such thing.  The US National Academy of Sciences has gone on record with the following statement: “Science is a way of knowing about the natural world.  It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes.  Science can say nothing about the supernatural.  Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.”  If this is the consensus of science, why do the new atheists keep appealing to science to justify their atheism? And why do they keep propagating the very opposite of the consensus of science?

However, no matter what the consensus is, the new atheists continue to line up behind the rebel scientists who want to use science to prove their atheism.  This simply means they are either ignorant or dishonest.  It is also strongly evident that science has little to do with making people atheists.  To read more on what makes people atheists read my paper “The Making of a Fundamentalist Atheist.”

Are the new atheists angels of light[ii]?  I don’t think so.  I personally think they are a group of people who are very angry at an existence, an existence, which to them seems meaningless and without purpose.  The only meaning in life, which they can find is to be free from anything that might restrict their appetites and to convert people to their way of viewing life.  My response is, “No thank you.”  A life without limits and meaning is not worth living.

[i] I have often asked the new atheists where they get their funding for the organized efforts to support their evangelism.  I have never received a response.  However, I believe it is highly possible that some of their funding comes from Communists like George Soros.  The Communist Party of the United States has funded attacks on religion for a century.  They know that America will never become completely Communist as long as it is religious.

[ii]  An honest unbeliever, Dr. E. Wengraf once confessed, “Every piece of anti-religious propaganda seems to me a crime.  I surely do not wish it to be prosecuted as a crime, but I consider it immoral and loathsome.  This not because of zeal for my convictions, but because of the simple knowledge, acquired through long experience that, given the same circumstances, a religious man is happier than the irreligious.  In my indifference and skeptical attitude toward all positive faith, I have often envied other men to whom deep religiosity has given a strong support in all the storms of life.  To uproot the souls of such men is an abject deed.  I abhor any proselytizing.  But still, I can understand why one who believes firmly in a saving faith tries to convert others.  But I cannot understand a propaganda of unbelief.  We do not have the right to take away from a person his protecting shelter, be it even a shabby hut, if we are not sure we can offer him a better, more beautiful house.  But to lure men from the inherited home of their souls, to make them err afterward in the wilderness of hypotheses and philosophical question marks, is either criminal fatalisms or criminal mindlessness.”