New Atheism is now dead
The “New Atheism” burst onto the cultural landscape in 2006. For a while, it seemed as if the movement would change the world. But it didn't, it died. Its “four horsemen” — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and later Christopher Hitchens — presented themselves as the vanguard of a new age of confident rationalism in Western culture, in which the outdated superstitions of religion and absurdities of postmodernism would be thrown aside. Yet even as the movement emerged, there were signs of anxiety about its puzzlingly aggressive rhetoric and ambition. Gary Wolf, the journalist who coined the term “New Atheism”, found its asserted certainties to be arrogant and improbable, amounting to a significant intellectual overreach on their part: People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists. Wolf could see the dangers of this overconfidence: “Even those who might side wi