In “Why the New Atheist Movement ‘Collapsed,’ philosopher of science Steve Meyer talks with Michael Knowles about the reasons:

[0:53 min] Meyer: I have a colleague in the UK Justin Brierley who’s written a book called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God [2023] And he tells the story of the demise of the new atheist movement people like Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (1942–2024), Lawrence Krauss and others.

Part of the story is that they overplayed their hand. Part of it is that they linked their wagon to Darwinism. And the famous quote from Richard Dawkins, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Well, what if leading evolutionary biologists are starting to say, “We need a new theory, a new non-Darwinian theory of evolution”? What happens then to your atheism? Is it is it properly grounded any longer?

Published by Tyndale Elevate in 2023.

I think a number of atheists themselves, leading atheist apologists, think that the arguments of the new atheists were really weak. They typically avoided discussing the evidence from cosmology suggesting that there was a creation event of the universe. They typically avoided talking about the fine-tuning problem except for invoking the multiverse which has been exposed to be an inadequate counterargument to the design argument. And they certainly don’t like to talk about the complexity and inner workings of the living cell and the problem of the origin of life. origin of the first life, which has been a lot of the focus of my work.

And so I think I think the scientific case for intelligent design and indeed for God as the designer has grown ever more strong even as they kind of overplayed their hand.

I think also in Britain in particular, where I spent a lot of time. there’s a sense that there was something a little bit unsavory about these very overt attacks on religion and the sense that maybe they very much over overplayed their hand there. In virtue of that, you see that Dawkins is now describing himself as a cultural Christian at least: “I’m not so bad. I’m not a terrible guy. I’m at least a cultural Christian. I like hymns and cathedrals, you know.” 14:40 min/July 18, 2026

The video clip above is excerpted from a two-hour discussion, “Atheists Have a Serious Problem,” here (April 25, 2026)

So how is religion doing in general?

Not as badly as some have predicted. Here are a couple of stats to follow up on:

● According to Ryan Burge, a Washington University professor, “77% of folks raised as religious are still religious as adults.” It works the other way too. Only 26% of people raised as non-religious will convert.

● At universities, he says, the most religious students are in finance or nursing and the least religious are in environment studies or English. He offers lots of charts and graphs.

So you will meet fewer atheists at the bank or in the ER than at poetry readings.