New Atheism

The New Atheism refers to a recent (21st century) movement or development of philosophical aspects of atheism. The name that is coined, often pejoratively, to the series of six best-selling books by five authors that appeared in the period 2004-2008. The authors are notably, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor J. Stenger and Christopher Hitchens. All these authors and the supporters of New Atheism movement are hard-line critiques of religion. They think that atheism backed by recent scientific advancement has reached to a certain point that it is time to take a far less accommodating attitude toward religion, superstition and religion based fanaticism than had been exhibited in previous years by moderate atheists, secularists or even non-believing scientists.

History

In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason which became a major bestseller. This marked the first of series of bestsellers that took a harder line against religion than has been the custom among these authors. Motivated by the event of September 11, 2001, which he laid directly at the feet of Islam (Harris describes as being a "cult of death), Harris did not leave Christianity or Judaism off the hook, nor did he compromise with ‘religious moderates’. Harris also wrote another book in the following year of 2006, namely Letter to a Christian Nation, which was also a severe criticism of Christian faith. In the year of 2006, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion (2006), which stood in the New York Times best seller list for fifty one weeks. In the same year Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (2006), God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Goes Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger (2007), and God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christoper Hitchens were published and the books were in the best seller list. These authors have been recognized today as the leaders of a movement called New Atheism.

New Insights

The new atheists write mainly from a scientific perspective. However, unlike the previous philosophers, many of whom thought that science was indifferent, agnostic or even incapable of dealing the "God" concept, Dawkins in his book argues that "God Hypothesis" is a valid scientific hypothesis . He maintained that this idea of God is a valid hypothesis, having effects in the physical universe, and like any other hypothesis can be tested and falsified. Other prominent new atheists such as Victor Stenger also insists that the personal, Abrahamic God is a scientific hypothesis that can be tested by standard method of science. And they conclude that the hypothesis failed the test. They also try to show how naturalism is sufficient to explain everything we observe in the universe from the most distant galaxies origin of life and species or even to the inner workings of the brain that result in the phenomenon of mind. Nowhere is it necessary to introduce God or the supernatural to understand the reality. Many of the new atheists disputed the claim that science has nothing to say about God and argues that absence of evidence is evidence of absence when evidence should be there and is not. They rather conclude, The Universe and life do not look at all designed (by God or by any supernatural being), in fact, they look just as they would be expected to look if they were not designed at all.

The New Atheists are particularly critical about two non-overlapping magisteria(NOMA), the view advocated by Stephen Jay Gould that a “domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution.” In Gould’s proposal, science and religion should be confined to different non-overlapping domain : science would be limited to the empirical realm, including theories developed to describe observations, while religion would deal with questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. The new Atheism leaders think that NOMA does not describe empirical facts about the intersection of science and religion. In his 2006 bestseller The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins shows that the Abrahamic religions constantly deal in scientific matters. Many other researchers have noted that Gould attempted to redefine religion as moral philosophy. Not only does religion do more than talk about ultimate meanings and morals, science is not proscribed from doing the same. After all, morals involve human behavior, an observable phenomenon, and science is the study of observable phenomena. There are indeed a lot of scientific research on evolutionary origin of ethics and moral.

The new atheists are convinced that the world will be a better place without religion.

See also

• Atheism
• Antitheism
• Continuity thesis
• Freethought
• Lists of atheists
• Psychology of religion
• Rationalist movement
• Sociology of religion
• Theory of religious economy