On the Twentieth Anniversary of The God Delusion: Has the New Atheism Unraveled?

On Oct. 2, 2006, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a book that would function as something akin to a manifesto for a new era of atheism. Alongside Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett (whom I hold in high regard as a philosopher, despite disagreeing with his conclusions, as his arguments are considerably more sophisticated and well thought out), Dawkins became one of the celebrated “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheism and a prominent figure among the self-proclaimed “brights” (a rather self-congratulatory term adopted by some neo-atheists). What these men had in common was their promise to expose the irrationality of religious belief and, more specifically, the alleged intellectual bankruptcy of theism.

My first real engagement with Dawkins came when I returned to university to study philosophy and theology, following my earlier studies in economics, and read The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986). I always admired Dawkins’s literary gifts, especially his ability to explain complex ideas in evolutionary biology and connect them to his atheistic worldview. But the more I reflected on his arguments, the more I began to question whether his worldview could really withstand philosophical scrutiny, let alone be lived out consistently. After all, what are we to make of a universe supposedly devoid of ultimate purpose, governed by nothing more than blind, impersonal forces? How do we reconcile such a picture with our capacity to reason, make moral judgments, seek truth, appreciate beauty, and recognize the inherent dignity of human beings? This led me to write my first article in 2014 for Crisis Magazine, titled “Dawkins’ Unholy Trinity: Incoherency, Hypocrisy and Bigotry.” It was an early attempt to expose what I regarded as the philosophical inconsistencies and rhetorical excesses of Dawkins’s increasingly militant atheism. Now, I ask myself, 12 years later, and 20 years after The God Delusion: Has anything fundamentally changed?

The Philosophical Poverty of the New Atheism

One of the most ironic characteristics of the New Atheism was how little of it was really new. Its novelty lay primarily in its rhetorical approach and the considerable media attention it attracted. In contrast, sophisticated philosophical atheist thinkers such as A.J. Ayer, Antony Flew, Theodore Drange, Kai Nielsen, and Thomas Nagel grappled seriously with questions concerning metaphysics, epistemology, consciousness, and morality. Similarly, more recent atheist philosophers such as Graham Oppy and J.L. Schellenberg have continued in a similar direction.

Upon closer examination, the arguments advanced by Dawkins were often remarkably weak, particularly when he ventured beyond his own domain of evolutionary biology into philosophy and theology. Although Dawkins attempted to refute several traditional arguments for God’s existence, his treatment of them attracted criticism from a formidable array of thinkers. William Lane Craig challenged his philosophical reasoning, particularly his treatment of the design argument and the alleged improbability of God. Alvin Plantinga identified significant weaknesses in Dawkins’s philosophical reasoning, going so far as to suggest that many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. Another valuable and complementary critique can be found in The Dawkins Delusion (2007), written by former atheist Alister McGrath, together with his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, which exposes the weaknesses in Dawkins’s understanding of religion and the relationship between science and faith.

Probably the most interesting criticism came from intellectuals who did not share theistic commitments. The agnostic mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski, notably in The Devil’s Delusion (2008), challenged the sweeping metaphysical conclusions drawn from modern science. The breadth of these criticisms clearly demonstrates that one need not be a believer to recognize the philosophical and theological shortcomings of the New Atheism.

Interestingly, despite the initial popularity of the New Atheism, analytic philosophy of religion has really blossomed in the past 20 years. Thus, far from disappearing, philosophical arguments concerning God’s existence, divine attributes, rationality, morality, and the ultimate explanation of reality underwent extensive development. The same is true of the interdisciplinary work that has continued to develop between science and theology.

The Scientific Questions That Refuse to Disappear

Let us take into consideration developments in molecular biology, origin-of-life research, and consciousness studies over the past 20 years. Far from favoring Dawkins’s scientific materialism, advancements in these fields have raised new questions and strengthened old difficulties. In Return of the God Hypothesis (2021), Stephen C. Meyer, for instance, examines discoveries in cosmology, physics, and molecular biology, particularly the remarkable functional information encoded in DNA. He forcefully argues intelligent design provides a better explanation for these phenomena than the materialist alternatives like Dawkins’s.

In my own book, On the Origin of Consciousness (2018), I take up what I regard as one of the most formidable challenges to atheism: consciousness itself. How do subjective experience, intentionality, rational thought, and self-awareness arise in a universe supposedly governed by nothing more than impersonal physical processes? These are hardly trivial questions, and despite considerable advances in neuroscience and cognitive science, they remain deeply contested. Indeed, the more we investigate these mysteries, the more apparent it becomes that the philosophical questions surrounding them cannot simply be brushed aside. Yet these are precisely the kinds of questions that received remarkably little serious attention from the leading New Atheists.

Twenty Years Later: The Same Old Arguments

On Oct. 2, 2026, Dawkins published a commemorative essay in The Telegraph, titled “Twenty years since I wrote the book, the God Delusion won’t die.” What surprised me was not that Dawkins maintained his atheism, but that his central arguments remained unchanged. He continued to invoke Darwin against biological design, revisited familiar objections to the theistic interpretation of cosmic fine-tuning, including arguments advanced by physicists such as the late atheist Victor Stenger, questioned the explanatory value of invoking God, and reiterated his contention that God would have to be more complex than the universe He supposedly explains.

I wondered to myself: Where was the serious engagement with Plantinga’s epistemology or his evolutionary argument against naturalism? Where was the sustained treatment of Craig’s cosmological reasoning, Swinburne’s probabilistic arguments, or contemporary challenges to materialism, such as Stephen Meyer’s work on the origin of biological information?

Even the classical doctrine of divine simplicity was treated more as an occasion for ridicule than as a serious metaphysical position worthy of careful philosophical examination. Dawkins continued to project the complexity of finite minds onto the divine intellect, without seriously engaging the classical understanding of God as a simple, non-composite being.

It is difficult to ignore the irony here. Twenty years later, Dawkins continues to proclaim the alleged intellectual bankruptcy of religious belief while trotting out the same old tired and refuted arguments, despite the rich and rigorous literature defending theism.

The Unintended Legacy of the New Atheism

There is another irony worth considering, one with far-reaching consequences. In recent years, Dawkins has expressed growing concern about contemporary progressive ideologies, particularly those associated with identity politics, gender, and what is commonly called wokeism. But can some of these developments be connected to the very scientific materialism he spent much of his intellectual life promoting? In his 2024 essay, “The Enabling of Richard Dawkins,” mathematician and philosopher William Dembski argues that Dawkins, in spite of himself, has facilitated the undermining of the very foundations of reason, truth, merit, and free inquiry that he now publicly defends. As Dembski provocatively states: “Woke ideology is not a betrayal of scientific materialism but its logical conclusion.” Even though atheism does not necessarily entail wokeism, and many atheists vigorously oppose it, Dembski’s incisive observation raises an important question about the philosophical and cultural consequences of scientific materialism.

Dawkins’s public embracing of cultural Christianity drives this point home. Even though he appreciates aspects of the civilization Christianity helped create, he still rejects its supernatural foundations, which are indispensable to the faith itself. Recently on X, Edward Feser observed that the West cannot adequately confront its civilizational challenges through secular liberalism, Enlightenment ideals, or cultural nostalgia alone; it must recover the Christian faith that shaped it. The challenges posed by woke ideology and political Islamism, particularly amid Europe’s growing cultural and religious tensions, cannot be understood exclusively in political or sociological terms. At their deepest level, they also involve competing theological and metaphysical visions of human nature, freedom, and the moral order. As Feser makes clear, Islamist movements recognize this religious dimension in ways that many Western secularists fail to acknowledge. Thus, Christianity’s theological foundations cannot be discarded. The question then inevitably arises: how can one preserve the fruits of a tree indefinitely after completely uprooting it?

What Became of the Four Horsemen?

Two decades later, the intellectual and cultural terrain of the New Atheism has changed dramatically. Of the original so-called Four Horsemen, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett have died (in 2011 and 2024), leaving two surviving members: Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Harris has gone deeper into his exploration of spirituality and questions of consciousness, meditation, and Buddhist contemplative practice. The more unexpected development, however, has been the public conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, sometimes described as a “fifth horseman” of the movement. In 2023 she embraced Christianity, citing, among other reasons, its role in sustaining Western civilization and in facing the pressures of secular nihilism and political Islamism. The contrast with Dawkins is sharp: where he wishes to keep the civilizational inheritance of Christianity without its theological claims, Hirsi Ali has turned toward Christianity itself as a response to the West’s spiritual and cultural difficulties. We should take into consideration the rising numbers of conversions to Catholicism, particularly among younger people, which is dismantling the New Atheists’ earlier confidence that religious decline was inevitable. In France, for example, 13,234 adults were baptized into the Catholic Church at Easter 2026, representing a 28 percent increase over the previous year, with those aged 18–25 forming the largest group. The numbers are quite astonishing. To be clear, this is not a refutation of atheism, but it does undercut the cultural triumphalism that has often marked the New Atheism.

Beauty, Consciousness, and the Mystery of Existence

Today, I find myself in southern Spain, visiting my parents, reflecting on the profound mystery of existence and creation. As I walk through the magnificent gardens of their residential complex, surrounded by beautiful vegetation, flowering plants, flowing water, a variety of little animals, and birdsong, I am inevitably overcome by the sheer beauty and majesty of Creation. The warmth of the Mediterranean sun, the beautiful, clear blue sky, the gentle breeze against my skin, and the fragrances carried through the air create an almost paradisiacal atmosphere.

All the while, as I walk listening to music on my iPhone, the experience can be rather overwhelming and moving. There are moments when I find myself moved to tears. Not out of sadness or melancholy, but out of sheer gratitude and reverence for the extraordinary gift of existence and the privilege of participating in God’s creation.

I cannot help but think of St. Augustine, who reflected on the beauty of creation as a way of contemplating its Creator. In his Confessions, he describes the wonders of the earth, the sea, and the heavens, recognizing that their beauty points beyond themselves to the ultimate source of all beauty.

But there is something else here that has always fascinated me, particularly in my own philosophical work on consciousness. The most remarkable aspect of it all is that I am conscious of the beauty and harmony surrounding me. There is an unmistakable first-person dimension to all of this, involving what philosophers refer to as qualia, the subjective qualities of conscious experience. Why should a universe of supposedly blind, impersonal forces give rise to beings capable of experiencing and appreciating its beauty in the first place? For me, consciousness, beauty, intelligibility, and love point toward something much deeper, an ultimate ground of reality that transcends the physical world.

However, recognizing the beauty and goodness of existence does not mean that I always live in accordance with what I recognize to be good. I have my own rebellious impulses, Dionysian temptations, and the perennial struggle between what I know to be good and what I sometimes desire. Perhaps, I think to myself, this is what may make my gratitude all the more profound. Despite all of my shortcomings, I continue to encounter a world overflowing with gifts I have neither earned nor created.

And at the center of it all, I believe, is not blind, pitiless indifference, as Dawkins would have us believe, but the source of all being, beauty, goodness, and love. But Christianity delves even deeper. It makes the bold claim that this ultimate source has not remained distant or inaccessible, but rather, through the person of Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos has entered, some may say “invaded,” our universe, bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between finite creatures and the infinite ground of all being. For this extraordinary gift of existence, for the capacity to experience its beauty, and above all for the love that lies at its ultimate source, I give thanks every day.

Twenty years after The God Delusion, I find myself not less receptive to the mystery of God, but immeasurably more so. Perhaps the greatest irony of the New Atheism is that, two decades after confidently proclaiming theism’s intellectual demise, the questions it sought to dismiss remain as profound and urgent as ever.

It turns out that God, much to the chagrin of Dawkins, was never quite so easily explained away.