New Atheism grows old

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism grew Old and Secular Thinkers are Considering Christianity Again
Justin Brierley
Tyndale House
Sept. 2023
ISBN 978-1496466778
272 pages

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Justin Brierley has hosted the popular radio show and podcast “Unbelievable” for more than a decade. Atheists, agnostics, Christians, dealing with the Big Questions: Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, have all had their turn around the table. In the discussions he has hosted with atheists and searchers he has detected symptoms of a new approach: the New Atheist dismissal of faith as childish or superstitious has given way to a respect for the faith’s countercultural stance – for what some of the discussion partners have called the “weirdness” of Christianity. Douglas Murray remarked on “Unbelievable” that a number of highly intelligent friends and acquaintances of his had converted to Christianity in recent years.

The bombastic debates between militant New Atheists and Christian apologists have become less frequent. In their place have come increasing numbers of Brierley’s secular guests who are open to the cultural and social value of Christianity. Most significantly, as the influence of New Atheism has waned, a variety of secular thinkers have been stepping forward to ask new questions about the value of religion and where the West is heading in the absence of the Christian story. Many even seem to harbour a wistful desire for Christianity to be true.

Brierley centres this book around these new thinkers. He believes that Matthew Arnold’s receding tide of faith, like most tides, will turn, and indeed appears to be on the turn. The conversation is now a different one. Symptoms he touches on are: the rise and fall of New Atheism; a new and different conversation about God; the crisis of meaning and how the Christian story is addressing it; the continuing power of the Bible; the connection between faith and science.

Atheist buses

Brierley associates the waning of the New Atheism with the day he first saw a red London bus with the slogan “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Even atheists cringed at this triumphalism, which has backfired, as Oscar Wilde would have probably predicted: after all, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, and the debate about Christianity is now unexpectedly open for business. Brierley thanks God for Richard Dawkins and friends, who spurred many Christians to re-connect with the Christian intellectual tradition. Organisations such as “Reasonable Faith”, founded by the philosopher and formidable debater William Lane Craig, and “Word on Fire”, founded by Catholic “bishop of social media” Robert Barron, have equipped a new generation of Christians with rational arguments for the reliability of scripture and the Christian worldview.

The New Conversation

Jordan Peterson is a prominent representative, and so are other even less likely bedfellows such as Peter Boghossian, who began life as a street epistemologist, talking believers out of their faith; he formerly classified religion as a mental disorder but he changed after perpetrating a famous academic hoax by successfully submitting bogus papers exposing “grievance studies” as the real woke-inspired threat to objective truth. Peterson, the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now (according to the New York Times) is hard to pin down theologically but he too has helped people to ask the question whether we can live without God at all. Peterson blends intellect, emotion and spirituality and has become a “gateway drug” to orthodox Christian faith.

Shaped by Christianity

The Christian story is important, it has helped to frame people’s day to day lives for centuries. Without it we now have a “meaning crisis”: we are left to ourselves as individuals in a world without order, unable to work out who we are, despite our well-being. Tom Holland, author of Dominion, began to realise that “actually, in almost every way, I am Christian” So much of what we regard as civilised behaviour and thought has emerged from the Christian centuries. Holland says, “I want mystery. I want weirdness. I want strangeness. That’s exactly what I want. I want everything that by and large in its public manifestations, churches often seem to be a bit embarrassed about.” If the church is willing to risk being weird once more and unapologetically tell its story of the God who became human, lived an exemplary life, suffered crucifixion, and was raised to life again, a new generation may yet find meaning in the midst of the rubble.

The “new thinkers” have also rediscovered the Bible, and read it in a new, more discerning way (Richard Dawkins himself, whose biblical knowledge has often been exposed as limited, was prepared to fund placing a copy of the King James Bible in each school, purely for its cultural value). As Douglas Murray put it, “it’s hard to think of a book of equivalent seriousness to the Bible”, a book that you can base your life on. Brierley also points to classicists and other scholars who have been struck by the clear historical nature of the Gospels, and the reliability of Biblical texts and archaeology, greater than other ancient writings. N.T. Wright describes the crucifixion of Jesus as “one of the best attested facts in all of ancient history”.

The Alternative Story of Science

Are science and religion enemies? The vast majority of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences during the twentieth century were either Christian or Jewish. Only a tiny minority identified as atheist or agnostic. The duel is a myth. Richard Dawkins acknowledged on Brierley’s podcast that his position was based more on his personal preferences than a purely scientific or rational response. He further admitted that there is no evidence that would persuade him away from atheism. Science is neutral, scientists are not: if you keep an open mind you may “discover that the progress of science provides an abundance of evidence pointing towards God rather than atheism”. The actual percentage of scientists who believe in God has remained stable over the last hundred years.

The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand. Moreover, because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. God is not explained away by scientific progress, as a God of the gaps might be. It’s not so much what we don’t know as what we do know that points to Him.

A Likely Story

We all worship something, Brierley concludes, usually something spiritual: even atheists find themselves setting up alternative “churches”. The loss of the Christian narrative in particular has caused cultural fragmentation and loss of identity. But from his conversations with many profound thinkers, reluctant converts and believing and unbelieving scientists, he figures that the reason why we are seeing a rebirth of belief in God is that the story of Jesus still makes the best sense of our own stories.