At one time, new atheism was riding a wave! Richard Dawkins, for example, was Cool.

Two decades ago, he and renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024), broadcaster Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), and neuroscientist Sam Harris were the Four Horsemen of the (New Atheist) apocalypse.

From the publisher of the book, The Four Horsemen (Random House Penguin 2007):

At the dawn of the new atheist movement, the thinkers who became known as “the four horsemen,” the heralds of religion’s unraveling—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—sat down together over cocktails. What followed was a rigorous, pathbreaking, and enthralling exchange, which has been viewed millions of times since it was first posted on YouTube. This is intellectual inquiry at its best: exhilarating, funny, and unpredictable, sincere and probing, reminding us just how varied and colorful the threads of modern atheism are.

But now there is an eerie silence that fashionable media are beginning to notice.

It didn’t help that Hitchens and Dennett are deceased. But what’s significant is that they were not replaced.

Was it just a flash in the pan that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim turned atheist, hung out with the remaining Horsemen for a while? She then became a Christian.

Something seems to have fizzled

It’s not clear that the public is more religious so something else must have happened.

Possibly, people look at the fine-tuning of the universe and realize that there is a God, whether they like it or not. That’s what converted eminent atheist Antony Flew (1923–2010) some years back and he called his subsequent book There Is a God (HarperOne 2008).

I wrote about the decline earlier this year, noting that the void is starting to be filled by people like “Professor Dave” who, unlike Dawkins and Dennett, is not a professor, nor even a Phd.

Atheism’s suicide problem

What I hadn’t run across then was that atheism also has a suicide problem, which certainly won’t help with numbers. At the Huffington Post, Staks Rosch, “a vocal atheist, humanist, progressive, and Jedi” noted, back in 2017:

Depression is a serious problem with in the greater atheist community and far too often, that depression has led to suicide. This is something many of my fellow atheists often don’t like to admit, but it is true. I know a lot of atheists, myself included, would all like to believe that atheists are happier people than religious believers and in many ways we are. But we also have to accept the reality that in some very important ways we are not.

December 8, 2017

Characteristically, Rosch blamed people who are not atheists:

There are of course many valid reasons why atheists are sometimes more prone to suicide than religious believers. Interestingly enough, one of those reasons is religious believers themselves. We live in a world dominated by people who often fervently believe ancient superstitions and who many times demonize, harass, ostracize, and disown those who lack belief in those ancient superstitions. Atheists on the receiving end of this treatment are understandably stressed and isolated. They often experience anxiety and depression as a result.

December 8, 2017

Apparently, atheism does not provide much of a basis for standing up to persecution, even in countries where many have laid down their lives for the right of others to believe whatever they want to.

Trendy media have begun picking up on new atheism’s waning

At The Atlantic, Ross Andersen writes about Dawkins’s final lecture tour of the United States this fall:

Dawkins seems to have lost his sense of proportion. Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational. His fans at the Warner Theatre didn’t seem to mind. For all I know, some of them had come with the sole intent of hearing Dawkins weigh in on the latest campus disputes and cancellations. After he took his last bow, the lights went out, and I tried to understand what I was feeling. I didn’t leave the show offended. I wasn’t upset. It was something milder than that. I was bored.

“Richard Dawkins Keeps Shrinking,”

Not Woke

But Andersen’s real concern, it turns out, is that Dawkins is not Woke. He does not think, for example, that Maori beliefs should be taught in science class. Andersen, finger in the wind, takes issue with that. The Woke, it turns out, are no more tolerant of atheists than they are of anyone else with non-Woke views. That may be what finally fells new atheism.