I pity those who enter Hell based on their acceptance of unprovable declarations and the assumptions of fools.

Thu, 30 May at 09:26

“Ithink a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate,” Richard Dawkins said in 1996 to the American Humanist Association. Ten years later, in 2006, a ComRes poll found that 42 percent of UK adults agreed with this vitriolic statement. That is, two in five were not just nonbelievers; they thought all belief in God should be deliberately snuffed out.

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This was near the height of the New Atheism movement—an angry, bombastic form of anti-religion that arose in the early 2000s. New Atheist leaders garnered millions from best-selling books and gained an influential following. At the time, it seemed that this would become the permanent state of secularism—that a lack of belief in God was necessarily joined with a bitter, trollish contempt for religion.

But things began to change. By 2015, some had begun to announce the death of New Atheism, and in 2020, 15 years after the ComRes poll, a new survey showed that only 20 percent of adults in the UK agreed that religious faith could be compared to an evil and intractable plague on society.

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Nick Spencer—senior fellow at Theos, a Christian thinktank in the UK, and one of the coauthors of the new report—said the New Atheism era spawned an unprecedented scale of animosity against religion in the general public. But he concluded in a 2022 Theos report on science and religion that “the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New Atheist movement is over,” with the UK public expressing a more balanced view of religion than during the height of New Atheist influence. Among the streams of contemporary nonbelief, more nuanced forms are on the rise.

As the New Atheist movement seemed to implode from within—due in part to its odd merger with the Far Right in the American culture wars—many secularists in the public square began to consider its leaders “a real embarrassment” who give “atheism a bad name,” says John Dickson, a Wheaton professor and public apologist who engages with atheists.

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“Basically, the world has moved on and has rather left the New Atheism behind,” said Oxford theologian and apologist Alister McGrath, author of The Dawkins Delusion? “But that’s no cause for rejoicing, because we have new problems to worry about.” That is, the decline of the New Atheists’ particular brand of hyperbolic antireligious fervor does not necessarily signify a rise in religious faith or belief in God.

There has been an increase in the proportion of non-believers in the UK—already one of the least religious countries in the world, according to Gallup International—and also in the US, where prominent New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett lived and worked.

Religion, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics The religion of usual residents and household religious composition in England and Wales, Census 2021 data.

“It doesn’t mean that religion is in a better place; it just means religion is in a different place,” McGrath said.

There are similarities and differences in how the nonreligious landscapes of the UK and the US have changed since the New Atheism era. Religion in both countries has declined over the past decade, and its recession looks poised to continue.

Although many “activist” atheists still publicly maintain staunch antireligious sentiments, a milder type of “temperate” atheist, who is more tolerant of religion overall, is on the rise. Another curious trend is the increase of “amicable” atheists, or secularists who become unlikely evangelists for the Christian worldview—including a number who eventually come to a full-fledged faith.

In England and Wales, the 2021 census showed that less than half the population identified as Christian, a sharp drop in the past decade—and over a third say they have “no religion,” making these “nones” the second-biggest religious group in the country. But Hannah Waite, a researcher at Theos, found that out of those who identify as nonreligious, only about half said they don’t believe in God. CT.