One of the tired genres of discourse is people dunking on New Atheism. The latest edition was on the silly blog Bentham’s Bulldog last month (I wrote this post in December)1. I confess that I didn’t read the whole post - like many substack writers, Mr. Bulldog needs an editor and has a tendency to ramble2.
What I did read were old arguments about New Atheists (NA) not being sufficiently philosophical, esoteric probabilistic arguments about the apparent design of the universe, and Mr. Bulldog smugly calling NAs incurious.
The post itself doesn’t warrant much of a response because it’s all been said before3. The underlying irony and silliness of his post is that he clearly hasn’t read enough on New Atheism! Movements aren’t limited by their founders.
Indeed, NAs feel indifferent if not actively hostile to their founders. Daniel Dennett didn’t contribute much to the religious discourse; Christopher Hitchens was controversial for his Iraq War apologia; Californian Sam Harris doesn’t live in a culture where religious fundamentalism is an ambient threat, and so spends most of his time wokescolding; Richard Dawkins spreads Russian misinformation about trans people, among other things that reflect an incuriosity about contemporary politics that doesn’t meet the standards of the NAs.
Meanwhile, most contemporary and former NA figures don’t think religion in itself is bad or evil like they did 20 years ago. Unlike the horsemen, most have friends, colleagues, and family who are religious, and the smugness just doesn’t stick. As a result, the former NA teenage reddit goblin is more likely an adult subscriber to Alex O’Conner, Genetically Modified Skeptic, and Matt Dillahunty, than the Amazing Atheist, AronRa or Thunderf00t. If you dropped these creators into 2005, they would agree on the controversies of the time, but today the former group is much more popular and intellectually curious than the latter, yet they’d all be labeled “New Atheist.”
All of that’s to say that the “New Atheist” label is meaningless in 2025. Reasonable secular-ish people find most of their policy positions uncontroversial. The only people who use the label “New Atheist” are conservative Christians who try to malign secularists who contradict them on public policy. It’s been true for 20 years, which is why you hear the label more from evangelicals than the actual atheists they refer to.
The through line from the Dawkins/Hitchens movement to today is an opposition to Christian Nationalism, an objection to religious social ideology, and a general interest in the relationship between religion and scientific thinking in public life and policy. If you think this is uncontroversial, you’re both wrong and stand on the cultural shoulders of New Atheism.
Hate Richard Dawkins all you want, but he wrote the God Delusion so you could make money on substack writing about Shrimp wellbeing. I exaggerate, but with the public norms about religion 20 years ago, EAs like Mr. Bulldog would be even more maligned today.
New Rule: Footnotes don’t count.
I’ll put my cards on the table and say I find his blog annoying (though I don’t dislike him personally because I don’t know him) because his content is at best “isn’t for me,” while at worst, fatally flawed, only rewarded by the algorithm because it caters to a certain kind of obsessively-mathy Effective Altruist nerd that has become the apex predators of internet forums in the last decade. His ethos is “Hey I know how Bayes theorem works and so I’m smarter than many people who study particular subject matter and won’t shut up about it. I’m Bryan Caplan 2.0” Your mileage may vary, but that’s my thoughts. I have him muted, but it doesn’t stop him from popping up on my algorithm every day.
The quick response to his arguments is that half of it is a form of the Courtier’s reply. Second, I can’t speak for the esoteric probability arguments, but instead do what normal atheists do, and that’s lean on the ethos of Dr. Sean Carroll the late Dr. Victor Stenger - who basically say “nah, it’s not designed for life,” and I move on. I’m skeptical that Mr. Bulldog knows more than Carroll/Stenger in physics or probability (the latter two are PhDs and the former is an undergraduate). I think most conversations about the design of the universe are survivorship bias in disguise, and that most people aren’t equipped to understand probabilistic arguments to this degree. Most compelling to me: if there’s a scientific answer to a solution (the improbability of the universe) you’d expect there to be a paper written on it and something resembling emerging consensus, but there isn’t.