The New Atheists

1
The New Atheists
Who are they?
2
The Principal Players
Christopher Hitchens
Richard Dawkins
Sam Harris
Daniel Dennett
3
Their Books
4
Whats new about them?

• Not their arguments but their popularityand
  their aggressiveness.
• They are speaking to a growing audience that is
  getting increasingly angry at any form of
  religion or faith.
• They are reacting against the global spread of
  religious extremism.
• They are the vanguard of a kind of atheist
  liberation movementhelping atheists to come out
  of the closet.

5
What are they saying?

• A quick summary (most agree with most of these
  points)
• Faith in God should be eradicated from human
  culture.
• God is a ridiculous and dangerous ideaa person
  like you and me, except (!) for being
  undetectable and infinite, who made everything,
  controls everything, communicates mostly through
  books written centuries ago, and demands total,
  unquestioning obedience.
• Faith is unquestioning beliefboth belief without
  evidence and belief against evidencein a
  ridiculous idea like God.
• Unquestioning belief in such a ridiculous idea
  produces terrorism and oppression.
• Faith in God can only be cured by promoting and
  defending reasonby force if necessary.
• Reason is refusing to believe anything not
  supported by science.
• Science is a very simple matter of framing
  hypotheses and testing them through observation,
  always preferring the simplest explanation.
• Anyone who does not denounce faith in God is a
  traitor to reasonthis includes religiously
  tolerant scientists and religious moderates or
  liberals.
• Moderates and liberals views on God and faith
  are dishonest and dangerous, when not irrelevant.
• Parents have no right to bring children up in
  their faith tradition.

6
Some Quick Observations

• These are all interlocking ideastheir views of
  God and faith are the result of their views of
  reason and science, and vice versa.
• Faith, God, reason and science are all described
  in ways that make extremism and conflict
  inevitable, so that nobody can win unless
  somebody else loses.
• A common ground is ruled out from the outset, so
  if you try to offer one you will be labeled a
  traitor to reason, a dishonest parasite, or an
  irrelevant academic.
• Ironically, these interlocking ideas make
  critical discussion of them all but
  impossiblethe very accusation they make against
  people of faith.