Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett made atheism fashionable. Their arguments, examined by secular philosophers, are philosophically thin. Dawkins's central argument does not entail its conclusion. Hitchens borrows moral capital from the Christian worldview he rejects. Harris's scientism is self-refuting. Dennett commits the genetic fallacy.
Key claims
—Dawkins's central argument: the conclusion "God almost certainly does not exist" does not follow from his six premises
—Craig: demanding explanation of the explanation leads to an infinite regress that destroys all scientific reasoning
—Michael Ruse (atheist): "The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist"
—Terry Eagleton: Dawkins has no more theological knowledge than a student with the Book of British Birds has of biology
—Alister McGrath: "atheism rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis... increasingly circular, tentative, uncertain"
—Dennett commits the genetic fallacy: explaining the causal origin of a belief does not establish that it is false
—Hitchens borrows the moral framework Christianity provides while denying the metaphysical foundation that grounds it
Between 2004 and 2008, four books by four authors — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett — became international bestsellers and transformed the public conversation about religion. The movement they represented was called the New Atheism, and its advocates were labeled the Four Horsemen. They were confident, combative, and enormously influential in popular culture.
They were also, on examination, philosophically thinner than their confidence suggested. This is not merely a Christian assessment — it is the assessment of serious secular philosophers who found the New Atheists' arguments inadequate even on their own terms.
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Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist of genuine accomplishment. His popular science writing — particularly The Selfish Gene (1976) — has been enormously influential, and his contributions to evolutionary biology are real. The God Delusion, however, is not biology. It is philosophy — and in philosophy, Dawkins's performance has been widely criticized by secular philosophers as well as theologians.
Dawkins's central argument, which he calls "the central argument of my book," appears on pages 157–58 of the first edition:
One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics.
We should not give up hope of a better explanation arising in physics.
Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
The argument is remarkable for what it does not contain. The conclusion — "God almost certainly does not exist" — does not follow from premises 1–6. Even granting every premise, the most Dawkins has shown is that the design argument from biological complexity is unsuccessful (because Darwinism provides a better explanation). But the conclusion that God almost certainly does not exist is compatible with all six premises being true and requires additional argument that is not provided.
William Lane Craig, who has debated Dawkins extensively, identifies the core fallacy:
In order to recognise an explanation as the best, one doesn't need to be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognise that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.
The "who designed the designer?" objection, which Dawkins regards as devastating, is actually a standard logical fallacy: it demands that any proposed explanation must itself be explained before it can count as an explanation. Applied consistently, this would destroy all explanation everywhere. We do not require an explanation for the Big Bang before accepting the Big Bang as an explanation for the universe's current state. We do not require an explanation for the laws of logic before accepting them as the foundation of rational thought. Explanations can be genuinely explanatory without themselves being explained.
Moreover, God by definition is a necessary being — one whose non-existence is impossible, who exists by his own nature, who has no cause external to himself. The "who designed the designer?" objection applies to contingent, complex physical objects that require external explanation. It does not apply to a being that is uncaused by nature.
Dawkins's other arguments in The God Delusion received equally sharp criticism from secular philosophers:
The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist. The arguments are so bad, the understanding of philosophy of religion so minimal, the attitude toward religion so crude and dismissive, that I find it hard to believe this is the book that has been held up as the great atheist manifesto of our time.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they casually write off.
Alister McGrath — who holds three Oxford doctorates, in molecular biophysics, theology, and intellectual history, and who was himself a committed atheist before converting to Christianity — wrote the most substantive scholarly response:
Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain. The case for atheism, I now saw, was more about faith than reason. Dawkins's arguments, far from being the devastating intellectual weapons he claims, are actually quite weak when subjected to careful philosophical scrutiny.
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Christopher Hitchens and 'God Is Not Great'
Christopher Hitchens was a journalist, essayist, and literary critic of genuine brilliance. His prose style was among the finest of his generation, and his moral seriousness — his outrage at clerical abuse, religious hypocrisy, and the use of faith to excuse violence — was real and often deserved. God Is Not Great is worth reading as a work of polemic journalism. It is not worth reading as a work of philosophy or history, because in both domains it is unreliable.
Hitchens's central thesis is captured in his subtitle: "How Religion Poisons Everything." This is examined in detail in Section 09, where the historical record is weighed. The short version: Hitchens's case rests on selecting the worst episodes from religious history while ignoring both the immense positive contributions of Christianity to civilization and the vastly greater atrocities of explicitly atheist regimes in the 20th century.
More fundamentally, Hitchens never resolved a tension at the heart of his project. He was morally outraged by religion — by what it did to people, by the suffering it caused, by its hypocrisy and its violence. But his own philosophical commitments, if taken seriously, provided no basis for moral outrage. On the materialist account that Hitchens held, moral values are human constructions — there is no objective standard by which religious violence is actually wrong rather than merely disliked. Hitchens was, in effect, borrowing moral furniture from the Christian worldview — the conviction that human beings have inherent dignity, that their suffering matters, that cruelty is genuinely evil — while denying the metaphysical framework that makes that furniture possible.
Hitchens is outraged by what religion does to people. But outrage requires a standard — a conviction that things ought to be otherwise. That standard, on Hitchens's own account, is a human construction, no more binding than any other human construction. He is borrowing moral capital he cannot earn on his own account.
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Sam Harris and the limits of secularism
Sam Harris is the most philosophically careful of the Four Horsemen, and his arguments deserve more careful engagement than Dawkins's or Hitchens's. His central position in The End of Faith and subsequent works is that religious faith — defined as belief held without sufficient evidence — is uniquely dangerous, and that a purely secular, science-based morality can replace it.
Harris's moral philosophy is developed in The Moral Landscape (2010), where he argues that science can determine human values by identifying what maximizes conscious well-being. This is a significant improvement over simple moral relativism, but it faces two serious problems.
First, the claim that science can determine values assumes that well-being is the relevant value — that maximizing conscious well-being is what morality is about. But this is itself a value claim, not a scientific one. Science can tell us what maximizes well-being once we have defined well-being and agreed that it matters. It cannot tell us why well-being matters, or whether anything else matters more. The foundational value commitment is imported from outside science.
Second, Harris's epistemological position — that evidence is required for rational belief, and that religious belief lacks sufficient evidence — is itself not a scientific claim. It is a philosophical claim about the nature of rational belief. Why should we accept it? If Harris says "because the evidence supports it," he has argued in a circle. If he says "because it's self-evidently true," he has made exactly the kind of non-empirical claim he claims to be excluding.
Harris's own brand of scientism — the view that science is the sole arbiter of truth — is examined in detail in Section 03. The short version is that it is self-refuting.
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Daniel Dennett and the explanation that explains too much
Daniel Dennett is a genuinely distinguished philosopher — a professor at Tufts, a leading philosopher of mind, and a serious thinker. Breaking the Spell is the most philosophically sophisticated of the Four Horsemen's books, and its argument deserves careful attention.
Dennett's project is to give an evolutionary explanation for why religion exists — why human beings, as a matter of natural history, came to hold religious beliefs. His answer draws on cognitive science of religion: religious beliefs are byproducts of cognitive systems that evolved for other purposes (agent detection, theory of mind, coalition building).
This is a plausible and interesting research program. But it does not do what Dennett claims it does. Explaining why people hold religious beliefs does not establish that those beliefs are false. An evolutionary account of why humans developed logical reasoning does not show that logical conclusions are wrong. An evolutionary account of why humans developed pattern recognition does not show that the patterns we recognize are illusory. Similarly, an evolutionary account of why humans developed religious belief does not show that God does not exist — it shows only that religion has a naturalistic causal history.
Dennett's argument is a genetic fallacy: judging the truth value of a belief by its causal origin rather than by its evidence. The causal origin of a belief is irrelevant to its truth. This is a basic point in epistemology that Dennett, as a philosopher, ought to know.
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The secular philosophers who broke with the New Atheists
The most significant criticism of the New Atheists came not from theologians but from secular philosophers who found their arguments philosophically embarrassing.
Thomas Nagel — professor at NYU, committed atheist and secular philosopher — wrote a devastating critique:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.
Nagel's admission is remarkable: he acknowledges that his atheism is not purely a response to evidence — it is partly motivated by a desire that God not exist. He calls this "the cosmic authority problem." This is a significant concession from within secular philosophy: the recognition that atheism is not simply the rational default arrived at by following evidence, but a position that carries its own psychological motivations and metaphysical commitments.
In Mind and Cosmos (2012), Nagel went further, arguing that the materialist neo-Darwinian account of the universe is "almost certainly false" — a conclusion he reaches not from religious conviction but from philosophical analysis of what materialism cannot explain: consciousness, rationality, and value.
Michael Ruse, an atheist philosopher of biology at Florida State University, expressed similar frustrations:
The New Atheism is not just a set of arguments. It is a secular religion. It has its own dogmas, its own evangelists, its own excommunications. It is as intolerant of dissent as the religions it claims to oppose.
These are not Christian voices. They are secular philosophers and scientists who found the New Atheism philosophically shallow, historically inaccurate, and epistemologically self-serving. The collapse of New Atheism as an intellectually serious movement — acknowledged by many of its former adherents by the late 2010s — is a significant data point in the evaluation of atheism as a worldview.