The Collapse of New Atheism and the Rise of Godless Culture

Why atheists should rehabilitate “Satanic” ambition

There used to be something called a new atheist movement. The members were united in their opposition to the antimodern religiosity that had reared its ugly head in the 9/11 attacks.

Then new atheism was drawn into the American culture war, which politicized the movement and divided atheists according to the yin and yang of American politics, hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity. These cultural forces metastasized in the totalitarian gestures of progressive cancel culture, and in the grotesqueries of authoritarian Trumpian trolling.

Specifically, the more feminine atheists hold out the goal of being fully “woke” — which means enlightened not just in seeing through obsolete myths, including the modern myth of objective truth, but in recognizing the wisdom of progressive values. Meanwhile, the more masculine atheists were drawn to the emerging intellectual dark web. They distinguish themselves by valuing what they call empirical truth, more than political correctness.

Thus, feminine atheists prioritize the fight for social justice, whereas masculine atheists are philosophical in that they defend truth regardless of the social consequences.

This is the balanced, objective assessment of what happened. If you ask an atheist who was active in the movement in its heyday, you’re likely to get a one-sided (feminine or masculine) take on the matter.

Here, for example, is a feminized, “progressive” interpretation of the breakup that personally attacks and seeks to “cancel” a host of leading male new atheists, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Michael Shermer. And if you asked those leaders or the atheistic denizens of the dark web, they might say the movement was hijacked by extraneous politics. Each side blames the other for the breakup.

The Social Breakup of New Atheism

In trying to clarify and to learn from this outcome, we should understand that what happened to the media creation of the new atheist movement has nothing to do with atheism. Evangelical Christians may crow about the disintegration of new atheism in the mainstream media, but that only shows they’re practiced in the perpetration of fallacies. This shouldn’t even need to be said, but the breakup of “new atheism” doesn’t affect atheistic arguments or show that God exists.

On the contrary, if internal conflicts in a social movement shows there’s necessarily something wrong with the movement’s core ideas, theology must be the emptiest discipline of all because religions are infamous for their internal divisions. Think of the Eastern and Western churches, Protestantism and Catholicism, Sunni and Shia Islam, Reform and Orthodox Judaism, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, and so on.

Clearly, social organizations are united or divided for social reasons, so unless an organization’s purpose happens to be about showing how groups can stay united, the merit of a group’s ideas is independent of how the ideas were arrived at or initially presented. For example, suppose a group claims to know how to achieve social cohesion, but the group breaks up after applying its techniques. Obviously, that outcome would amount to evidence against the effectiveness of those techniques.

But atheism itself says nothing about how society should be organized. Indeed, you wouldn’t expect all atheists to get along because atheism is only a negative position about the nonexistence of God, which allows for all manners of positive atheistic worldviews, including conservative and liberal ones. All that distinguishes atheists is the denial that a person created and intervenes miraculously in the universe. You can reach that negative conclusion and still disagree about everything else, although atheists tend also to value science and philosophy which can point them in certain directions.

Still, you might expect atheists to have a special problem of socially uniting themselves because the thought of God’s nonexistence might be debilitating. This is arguably the purpose of religion, as is apparent from that word’s origin (from “ligare,” meaning to bind). Historically, religious myths and traditions have stabilized and unified societies, and atheists were persecuted as subversives since their doubts upset the social order. If there’s no God, there’s likely no afterlife or divine judgment, which leaves us with the problem of convincing crafty individuals not to use the truth of atheism as an excuse to be evil.

The point isn’t that atheists are all immoral or that there’s no way for them to live together in peace; rather, it’s that, if anything, the disunity of atheists could count as evidence for atheism. Trouble dealing with the implications of God’s nonexistence would be expected if atheism were true since there would be no divine guidance as to how to deal with human intelligence and with the rest of our existential predicament.

New Atheism’s Limited Aspirations

Why, then, did new atheists get sucked into the American culture war? Partly because these atheists already achieved all they were going to achieve in terms of secularizing the culture and disempowering dangerous religious fundamentalists.

Under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the US military beat down the militant Islamists, so the victims of 9/11 were avenged. Ideally, the Arab Spring would have modernized and secularized the Middle East, but that didn’t happen because modernity is a Eurocentric concept, so people in the Middle East who don’t belong to European or to Judeo-Christian traditions construe the prospect of their modernization as a colonial affront. Muslims who fight for civil rights in the Middle East should do so mainly within the confines of Islamic traditions.

As for Christian fundamentalism in the US, that’s been a sideshow since the foundational split between church and state. Most so-called religious Americans have only ever been superficially religious.

Consider whether it makes any sense to say that an intensely Christian nation could also be the world’s richest country. Obviously, true Christians would strive to live like Jesus, in which case they’d give away their wealth to demonstrate their preoccupation with God’s coming kingdom. If Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus’s ethics and lifestyle as they’re presented in the New Testament, “Christian” can be twisted to mean anything, in which case there’s no merit to being a Christian. Thus, when supporters of Donald Trump’s pseudo-presidency profess to be evangelical Christians, their pretense can be laughed off as clownery.

This is to say that new atheists had little work to do in tamping down religious fundamentalism at home in the postindustrial world. Scientific and technological advances are inherently modernizing because they’re dependent on rigorous applications of reason which are antithetical to tribal displays of religious faith. Regardless of the trolling that occurs in polls, and with some exceptions of cults and other outbreaks of religious fervor, the US has been functionally atheistic since its inception. From slavery and white supremacy to patriarchy and plutocracy, to consumerism and the military-industrial-entertainment complex, Americans (and Canadians, Europeans, and Australians) live as though God weren’t watching them.

New Atheism’s Hollow Salesmanship

But another reason for the politicization of new atheism is that this movement was, as I said, a media creation. The movement began with the success of Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith, and it snowballed with similar bestsellers and with a slew of debates between atheists and religionists that appeared on YouTube, featuring the likes of Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig. With money to be made, organizers jumped aboard scheduled conferences, and outlined agendas.

The word “atheism” itself is unenlightening to the point of being a trap. If you identify mainly as an atheist, you’ve got a lot more thinking to do. “Atheist” was a pejorative label spewed by religious people. The label takes theism to be of central importance and accuses a-theists (nontheists) of merely denying that which is semantically foundational.

“New atheism” is hardly an improvement since there’s no significant, philosophical difference between the contents of old and new atheism. The only reason for that division is to mark the historical fact that atheists rose in outrage over 9/11, using that disaster as an opportunity to spread the word that authentic theistic religiosity — the kind that’s anachronistic in the modern world — is dangerously preposterous.

Deference to this negative label obscures the more substantial characteristics that ought to unite those who reject the old religions. Modernists rejected them because of the rediscovery of Greco-Roman humanism which alerted them to the universality of our existential predicament. We’re clever creatures who know we’re going to die and who have the creativity to shame Death, as it were, to show that we rather deserve to live forever. As people rather than animals, we act as godlike creators of artificial worlds, making the most of our finitude and revolting against the tragedy that nature’s indifference has the final say on our fate.

Our secular humanism, our Promethean, Faustian, Luciferian bargain, and our love of knowledge and technological self-empowerment mean that we appreciate our existential tragedy. These convictions make for the substance of so-called atheism that unites old and new atheists, and that goes far beyond stating the obvious, namely that exoteric, literalistic theism is fallacious, preposterous, and unspiritual.

The Promethean Heart of Old and New Atheism

But new atheism distinguished itself by its politically correct salesmanship which kept these themes offstage and outside the media spectacle. After all, this substantial alternative to theistic religion has been demonized by Christians for two millennia: Christians called humanistic pride “sinful,” “satanic,” and a root of all evil. Instead of broaching the demonized substance of an atheistic worldview, many atheists took the more prudent course of trying to sell their books and speaking engagements by rehearsing the hackneyed criticisms of religious arguments.

“Old” atheists such as David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre had no such fear of exploring what you’d likely have to defend as replacements for the ancient religious traditions. So new atheism was shallow by comparison in that the business of selling the movement to consumer cultures overtook the more foundational, philosophical aim of recognizing the appalling burdens placed on us all due to what Nietzsche famously and prophetically called “the death of God.”

Atheists should face the question directly: What’s so wrong with the satanic figure who goes his own way despite God’s alleged plan? What’s wrong with the demon that plays God? Of course, in the monotheistic religions God is considered real, so the devil is betraying his maker. But if God is unreal, nature is the maker, which means the question is reframed as whether we should be opposed to the mindless, amoral wilderness that includes outer space. Judging from the last several millennia of world history, with some nomadic and archaic exceptions aside, the overwhelming collective answer is that, yes, we’re alright with that opposition.

To be sure, Jews and Christians have attempted to co-opt the Promethean enterprise, calling themselves “custodians of Creation.” God allegedly gave us the natural world to master because we’re created in his image. But no mere convoluted theology can inspire such global applications of human intelligence and transformations of our natural environments. Organized religions only rationalize what we were bound to do anyway; we attempt to progress and to save ourselves with our rational investigations and technological modifications precisely because of God’s apparent absence. We build the world we prefer to live in because we can’t count on everything to work out right in a dubious afterlife.

New atheism collapsed, then, because atheists were serving up only thin gruel, the mere negation of absurd theism. A disproportionate number of leading new atheists were scientists so they can be forgiven for not reflecting on the philosophical implications of the rejection of theistic religion. But new atheists generally are responsible for holding up scientists as their leaders. Being value-neutral, science could say nothing authoritative about the split between conservative and liberal atheists, for example, thus leaving new atheism vulnerable to the Scylla and Charybdis of the American culture war. Picking a science-heavy leadership was short-sighted indeed.

Reconciling the Two Sides of New Atheism

What of “woke,” progressive atheism? Are the values of social justice part of the daring, humanistic agenda that replaces theocracy? Probably, but not for the postmodern reasons supplied by wokesters. Civil rights should be grounded in our existential plight of being relatively free, intelligent mammals struggling to find meaning in a meaningless natural order. However inferior you might think a certain gender, sexual orientation, or skin colour might be, the resulting harms of expressing those traits would pale next to the indignity and inauthenticity of being forced to live a lie, to pretend you’re not a feminine woman, say, or gay or a member of black culture.

That is, of course, just the liberal’s reasoning. But early-modern liberals like John Locke and Immanuel Kant helped themselves to Christian values, and that threatens the secular merit of liberalism, paving the way for the authoritarian backlash we see in Europe, China, Russia, and the US. Kant said we have absolute moral value because of our capacity to govern ourselves with reason. We do so freely, he said, in that our spontaneity is our essential, “noumenal” mystery. This was his philosophical way of appealing to the Christian’s immaterial spirit as the basis of our moral standing.

Consequently, that kind of narrative is duplicitous. We’re natural beings, having evolved like all the other animals. But we’re people rather than animals because consciousness, language, and creative ambition free us largely from our natural life cycle. We’re self-created, artificial beings, not slaves to natural selection. We’re anomalous not because of any hidden, supernatural essence, but because we set ourselves an antinatural mission: to rebel against the world’s evident godlessness by acting as the world-shaping gods that should have been there all along according to our ideals of poetic justice.

Aside from such unsolved mysteries as consciousness, the brain, and the origins of life and language, we’re not ontologically displaced in nature; we bring to the universe no divine spark from beyond the Big Bang. What we bring are the cunning and audacity of primates that find themselves well-placed to begin to turn the tables against the forces of nature.

Just as the condescending salesmanship of new atheists did little to rehabilitate Promethean or Satanic pride — the pride of the self-made human world that we guard against the onslaught of nature’s indifference to our welfare — the mere politics of the newly divided atheist camps can’t be expected to reveal how a viable postreligious society would work.

The secular world we have is that of consumerism — which shows every indication of being short-lived. Most consumers are complacent. We live in dream worlds to make us happy, oblivious both to the implications of nature’s godlessness and to the humanistic aims of progressive civilizations. Zealously, we rush to disfigure nature without recalling our existential obligation to keep the resistance going, to sustain our artificial worlds over the long haul. We’re not on course to fulfilling the visions of hopeful science fiction authors. Our postindustrial ambitions are reactionary and infantile, not inspired by philosophical enlightenment.

Perhaps, then, instead of refuting theistic balderdash for the millionth time, atheists should reflect more on the type of world that ought to replace religion-centered ones, and on how to bring that bold world into being.