Secularism and the New Atheism

Psalm 14:1 is the verse Christians most often reach for when they meet an atheist, and it is very often misused. 'The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."' Read carelessly, it sounds like a debating insult: anyone who denies God is stupid. If you use it that way, you will lose every honest conversation you have, and you will also have misread the psalm.

The Hebrew word for fool is nabal. It does not mean a person of low intelligence. It means a person who is morally and spiritually closed, who refuses what he owes to God and his neighbour. The clearest picture is the man named Nabal in 1 Samuel 25, a rich and harsh landowner who insults David after David's men have protected his flocks. His wife Abigail says, 'he lives up to his name: His name means Fool, and folly accompanies him' (1 Samuel 25:25). Nabal was not stupid. He was proud, ungrateful and cruel.

Notice too where the fool speaks: 'in his heart.' Psalm 10 describes the same man: 'In his pride the wicked man does not seek Him; in all his schemes there is no God' (10:4), and 'He says to himself, "God has forgotten; He hides His face and never sees"' (10:11). This is not mainly a theory about the universe. It is a decision about how to live: no one is watching, so I may do as I please. The psalm goes straight on to what such people do. 'They are corrupt; their acts are vile' (14:1). They 'devour my people like bread' and 'frustrate the plans of the oppressed' (14:4, 14:6). The psalmist's concern is the poor who are crushed by people who think God will never call them to account. That kind of practical atheism is found in palaces, in markets and in churches. Many people who would never deny God with their lips deny him in their hearts every day.

And then Paul quotes the psalm in Romans 3:10-12 to show that 'There is no one righteous, not even one' and 'there is no one who does good, not even one.' He applies it to Jews and Gentiles alike, after a whole chapter warning the religious person who judges others while doing the same things (Romans 2:1). Psalm 14 is not a description of them. It is a description of us, of every human heart apart from grace. Use it that way first. Then, with humility, you may say to an unbeliever that scripture sees the denial of God as a matter of the heart and not only of the head, and ask him whether that has been true of his own journey. Many sincere atheists have reached their conclusion with real thought and real honesty, and they are owed the respect 1 Peter 3:15 commands. The lesson Gentleness and Respect applies here more than anywhere.

The most important book on unbelief written in recent decades is A Secular Age (2007) by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. It is very long, and you do not need to read it, but some of its ideas will help you understand the people you are talking to. A more readable guide is James K. A. Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular (2014).

Taylor distinguishes three meanings of secular. In the first sense, public life, government, business and education, has been emptied of reference to God. In the second, fewer people believe in God or practise religion. Taylor's main interest is a third sense: the conditions of belief have changed. Five hundred years ago in Europe it was almost impossible not to believe in God. Today belief is one option among many, and even believers know that their neighbours, colleagues and children may sincerely see the world another way. Everyone, believer and unbeliever, now believes in a world where belief is contested.

Taylor rejects what he calls subtraction stories, the common account that says science came along and religion simply faded away, leaving the natural human outlook behind. He argues that secular modernity is not what remains when faith is taken away; it is a new and positive construction with its own history, much of it growing out of Christianity itself, including its emphasis on ordinary life, individual conscience and the reform of society. He describes the modern person as living within an immanent frame, a way of experiencing the world as a closed natural order that can be explained from within, which may be held open to something beyond or held shut. He contrasts the porous self of earlier ages, open to spirits, powers and God, with the buffered self of modern people, who feel themselves sealed off from such influences. And he says that many people today are cross-pressured, pulled between the sense that the world is all there is and moments of what he calls fullness, beauty, love or awe that seem to point beyond it.

Two things follow for the apologist. First, secularism is not only a Western problem. The buffered self is found among university students in Accra, office workers in Manila and young people in São Paulo, often sitting next to grandparents with porous selves, and the previous lesson's world of spirits and this lesson's world without them may be in the same family. Second, many secular people are not hostile to God so much as unable to imagine him. They have not rejected an argument; they live in a frame in which the question rarely arises. For them the first task may be not to win a debate but to open a window: to ask about the moments of fullness, the longing that Ecclesiastes calls 'eternity in the hearts of men' (3:11), and to let them feel the cross-pressure honestly.

In the first decade of this century four writers led a loud public attack on religion that the press called the New Atheism: Sam Harris in The End of Faith (2004), Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006), Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell (2006), and Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). Their books sold in millions and are still read, and their arguments are repeated in every university and on every phone. State their case as they would.

First, the intellectual case. Dawkins argued that God is a hypothesis about the universe like any other, and a very poor one. Any designer complex enough to make the universe would be even more improbable than the universe itself, so explaining the world by God only raises the question who designed the designer. Evolution explains the appearance of design without a designer, and religion itself can be explained as a by-product of mental tendencies that evolved for other purposes. Second, the epistemological case. Faith, the New Atheists said, is belief without evidence, or even in spite of it, and a person who believes on faith has given up the duty to follow reason. Third, and most powerfully for many readers, the moral case. Hitchens catalogued the evils done in the name of religion: wars, persecutions, the abuse of children, the suppression of women, opposition to medicine and science, and the terrorism of 11 September 2001, which had prompted Harris to write. Religion, they argued, is not merely false but dangerous, and its moral claims are borrowed from human decency rather than the source of it.

Take the moral case first, because it is the one most people actually feel. Much of it is true, and the Christian must say so. Christians have killed, enslaved, abused and covered up abuse, and some still do. Jesus himself was harsher on religious hypocrisy than any atheist: 'Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces' (Matthew 23:13). Do not defend what Christ condemns. But notice two things. First, the standard by which Hitchens judged religion, the equal dignity of every person, the special care owed to the weak, the wrongness of cruelty even when it serves the strong, has a history, and historians such as Tom Holland in Dominion (2019) have argued at length that it grew in the West largely from Christian roots: the teaching that every human being bears God's image (Genesis 1:27) and that in Christ 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female' (Galatians 3:28). Holland wrote as a historian, not a preacher. Second, the question is not whether religious people have done evil, which they have, nor whether atheists can be good, which they can, but what grounds the moral law that both appeal to. The lesson The Moral Argument set out that question and its difficulties for both sides.

Now the intellectual case. The argument about who designed the designer assumes that God is a complicated object within the universe, made of parts, that needs explaining in the way a machine does. That is not what Jewish, Christian or Muslim theology has ever meant by God. Classical theism holds that God is not composed of parts and does not depend on anything, the uncaused ground of all that exists, as the lesson Why Is There Something? explained. Critics who were not themselves conventional believers made the point; the literary critic Terry Eagleton complained in a famous 2006 review that Dawkins attacked a God no serious theologian believed in. Alister McGrath, a former atheist with a doctorate in molecular biophysics, answered at length in The Dawkins Delusion? (2007, with Joanna Collicutt McGrath), and David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions (2009) challenged the New Atheists' history. Philosophers have also noted that an explanation can be the best one available without our first being able to explain it; we do not need to know who designed an archaeologist's arrowhead to recognise that it was made.

On faith as belief without evidence: that is not what scripture means by faith. The lesson Faith and Reason showed that pistis in the New Testament is trust, grounded in testimony and in God's character and acts. Paul told Festus, 'I am speaking words of truth and sobriety' (Acts 26:25), and staked everything on a public event, saying that 'if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith' (1 Corinthians 15:14). Thomas was not rebuked for wanting evidence; Jesus gave it to him (John 20:27). Be fair here as well: some Christians do talk as though faith meant believing without reasons, and the New Atheists were answering what they had heard. Do not overclaim either. These replies show that the New Atheists' main arguments are weaker than their confidence suggested. They do not by themselves show that Christianity is true. For that you need the cumulative case of the earlier modules, and above all the evidence for the resurrection.

It is worth knowing that the movement has changed since its peak. Hitchens died in 2011. Several prominent secular writers have since spoken more warmly of Christianity's social legacy, and in 2023 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim who had been closely associated with the New Atheists, announced that she had become a Christian. None of that proves anything. It does show that the conversation is more open than it was.

The deepest secular question is not an argument but a way of life: can a person live a full, good and meaningful life without God? The honest answer is that many people live lives of great kindness, courage and purpose without believing in God, and Christians should rejoice in that, not deny it. Paul says the Gentiles sometimes do by nature what the law requires (Romans 2:14). The question is not whether unbelievers can find meaning and live morally. It is whether, if there is no God, the meaning they find and the morality they live are grounded in anything beyond their own choice.

The secular humanist answer, at its strongest, is that meaning is made, not found, and that this is not a loss but a mark of maturity. We do not need a cosmic guarantee to love our children, seek justice and enjoy a sunset; these things are good in themselves, and grown people take responsibility for them. Morality rests on human flourishing, empathy and agreement, and it has improved over time without needing God. That is a serious view, and many thoughtful people hold it.

Some unbelievers have seen more starkly what is at stake. Friedrich Nietzsche, whose madman in The Gay Science (1882) announces that God is dead and that we have killed him, did not think this was a small change. He mocked the English writers who gave up the Christian God but kept Christian morality, arguing that the morality would not survive the loss of its foundation. Bertrand Russell, in A Free Man's Worship (1903), said that if the universe is what science describes, the soul's dwelling can be safely built only on the firm foundation of what he called unyielding despair. Ecclesiastes had already explored the same ground under the sun: 'I found everything to be futile, a pursuit of the wind' (2:11). Yet the Teacher also saw that God 'has also set eternity in the hearts of men' (3:11), and he concluded, 'Fear God and keep His commandments, because this is the whole duty of man' (12:13).

So the apologist's question to a secular friend is not you cannot be good, which is false and insulting. It is a genuine invitation: you live as if love matters, as if cruelty is really wrong, as if your life is going somewhere. I think you are right. What makes you right? Paul's words at Athens fit here: God 'is not far from each one of us' (Acts 17:27), and 'in Him we live and move and have our being' (17:28). The secular person already lives in God's world. The goal is to help him notice the meaning he is already living by and ask where it comes from.

In recent years many Christians, especially young people who grew up in evangelical, Pentecostal or charismatic churches, have described themselves as deconstructing their faith. The word was borrowed loosely from the philosopher Jacques Derrida, but in church conversation it usually means taking apart what you were taught and examining each piece. The triggers vary: abuse by leaders and its cover-up, churches tied to political parties, prosperity preaching that did not come true, questions about science, suffering, hell or sexuality that were met with anger rather than answers, or simply growing up and finding that the faith one inherited was thinner than it looked. Deconstruction is common in the West, and it is increasingly common among young people in the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America who have seen the failures of the churches they grew up in.

Christians disagree about how to view it. Some see deconstruction mainly as a fashionable path out of the faith, often driven by a wish to escape biblical teaching on sin or sexuality, and point out how many who begin it end by leaving Christianity altogether. Others see it as a painful but often necessary pruning, the testing of a faith that had mixed the gospel with things that were never the gospel, and point out that many come through it to a deeper and more honest faith. Both observations are true of different people, and sometimes of the same person at different times. The wise pastor does not decide in advance which kind of person is in front of him.

What scripture says is clear enough. 'Have mercy on those who doubt' (Jude 1:22). Jesus did not drive away the father who cried, 'I do believe; help my unbelief!' (Mark 9:24). When many disciples left him, he asked the Twelve whether they wanted to leave too, and Peter answered, 'Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life' (John 6:68). That is often where a deconstructing believer is: unsure about much of what he was taught, but unable to let go of Jesus. Begin there.

So listen first. Ask what was taught, what hurt and what question was never answered. Separate the questions, which may need real answers from the earlier modules, from the wounds, which need confession, justice and time. Where a church or a leader did wrong, say so, and do not defend it for the sake of the institution; Ezekiel's indictment of shepherds who 'have not strengthened the weak' and 'ruled them with violence and cruelty' (Ezekiel 34:4) is in the Bible for a reason. Distinguish between what the gospel is, the faith Jude calls once for all entrusted to the saints, and the extras that were added to it. And keep pointing to Christ himself, who is not the same as the church that failed. Many who deconstruct are not leaving Jesus; they are looking for him beneath what was piled on top of him.

Your practical step this week. Read Psalm 14 and Ecclesiastes 1 to 3. Then, in your notebook, write out the strongest objection to God you have heard from a secular person where you live, as that person would put it. Underneath, write a reply of no more than half a page that begins by saying what is true in the objection, answers it with one argument from this track, says honestly what your answer does not prove, and ends with a question you could ask in return, such as: What do you think makes cruelty really wrong? If you know someone who is deconstructing, do not argue with them this week. Ask them to tell you their story, and listen to all of it.