The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we've been watching the demise of the New Atheist for some time now. It doesn't necessarily mean that atheism is going away, but there seems to be some changes. Justin Brierley talks about this in his new book and in his article^[1]. He says,

I knew something had changed when, in 2018, I received an unexpected email from atheist thinker Peter Boghossian. I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.

At the time, Boghossian was a professor of philosophy at Portland State University. When he joined me for a podcast debate on faith in 2014, he had been as anti-religious as they come. His book A Manual For Creating Atheists (Pitchstone Publishing) was a set of strategies for talking religious people out of their beliefs, which he claimed were akin to a mental delusion.

However, four years later, when Boghossian responded to an invitation to a fresh dialogue, he told me that he was no longer participating in debates against Christians. Indeed, he now felt quite differently about people of faith: “You might be surprised at how much I have in common with you now”, he wrote. His focus had shifted to countering a far more pernicious threat . . .

Boghossian’s change of heart is one among many stories. The culture wars have shifted the ground in the dialogue between Christianity and atheism in recent years.

A couple of things to talk about here. We did a podcast several years ago on Peter Boghossian dealing with his definition, or we should say faulty definition, of faith and the street epistemology that several of his followers were doing. But the pernicious threat Justin mentioned is the leftist control being forced on universities and colleges. Boghossian and several of his colleagues thinks it's insanity and are more in line with Christians on fighting it. I know that universities have always been accused of being left and liberal, but do you think it's particularly vehement now?

DR. CRAIG: That's what you read in all the media – that at our university campuses today speech control and thought control is so extensive that it really is infringing upon the civil rights of the students and the faculty significantly on those campuses. Justin Brierley in his new book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, is arguing that as a result of these cultural conflicts that many former atheists are much more sympathetic to Christian belief than they were in the past because they recognize that we are allies in the battle for freedom of speech and freedom of religion and free thinking.

KEVIN HARRIS: Justin’s show Unbelievable? in the UK was ramping up in the mid-2000s about the same time our podcast was growing. You've been on his show a couple of times. Justin writes about this time,

[I began hosting the faith discussion show Unbelievable? on Premier Christian Radio in the mid-2000s just as] New Atheism was gathering steam. It was a movement that saw several high-profile figures spearhead a newly hostile approach to religion. The bestselling books of the ‘four horsemen’ – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens – painted faith as ignorant and dangerous.

. . .

The conversations I hosted in those years were primarily combative debates between ardent atheists and Christian thinkers, which matched the boisterous and dismissive attitude of New Atheism in general.

Do you ever think about the timing of Reasonable Faith as an organization, and the growth of the New Atheism?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I certainly do think about it, and it pained me to see this movement arising on my watch, so to speak. It was frustrating. I felt helpless to stem the tide. I've been doing all that I can to try to combat this threat. I think its decline is not due to me, but I think to these broader cultural forces and currents that are now turning against it. This is a very gratifying and a very welcomed development.

KEVIN HARRIS: Justin continues,

But, as the years progressed, the conversations changed and the atheists and agnostics who appeared on the show were keen to distinguish themselves from New Atheism. “I’m not a Richard Dawkins type of atheist” became a common refrain. Guests increasingly seemed to share more common ground on cultural and social issues, even if they didn’t share the same faith.

. . .

Meanwhile, the New Atheist movement itself began to experience an internal meltdown.

. . .

The controversies multiplied. Many of the chief voices in the movement fell out with each other, resulting in atheist conferences being cancelled as speakers refused to share a stage. In 2021, Dawkins himself was stripped of his ‘Humanist of the Year’ award by the American Humanist Association for critiquing transgender ideology (something the biologist has doubled down on in recent months).

It seemed that once the New Atheists had agreed that God didn’t exist and religion was bad for you, they couldn’t agree on anything else.

Does all this bring back memories of those intense times?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, my goodness! Yes! I've debated or been on the same stage with all four of those Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. I shared the stage with Richard Dawkins in a six-man debate in Mexico City at a conference. I was on the stage criticizing a paper, or responding to a paper, by Daniel Dennett at the Greer Herd Forum at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I had a debate with Christopher Hitchens at Biola University. And I also debated Sam Harris at the University of Notre Dame. So I've had the privilege of crossing swords with all of these supposed Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. But the most vociferous – the most mean spirited – of all of them was Lawrence Krauss. We did a debate tour in Australia in four different cities in the country. Krauss, at that time, was going through sexual harassment charges back in the States that eventually resulted in his being banned by Arizona State University from coming on campus. The American Humanist Association also stripped him of its award of Humanist of the Year, just as they did Dawkins, because of the sexual harassment of Krauss of female graduate students. His attacks on me were personal and vicious. It was a really difficult time to go through. So, yes, I remember very vividly what it was like debating with these New Atheists.

KEVIN HARRIS: Justin says the crux of the matter is,

Having torn down the notion of God, New Atheism offered very little with which to replace it. Science and reason alone won’t buy you meaning, purpose and value. Apart from its internal squabbles, the real reason that New Atheism stalled as a cultural movement was that it failed to give people a story to live their life by, so people went looking for a story elsewhere.

I don't know why anyone would be attracted to atheism, but is rejecting it because it fails to give meaning or a story – is it just pure pragmatism?

DR. CRAIG: I do worry about that. I think this is what you see in a thinker like Jordan Peterson where he will emphasize the need to find meaning and value and purpose in your life and that this can't be found in an atheistic philosophy. But for him it's purely pragmatic. It's not as though you think that these things are really true. It's almost a kind of “as if” philosophy – that you live as if God existed or as if Christianity were true. It's been said that if God didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. You remember Loyal Rue described this as the noble lie^[2] – that in order for society not to fall into tyranny or chaos it needs to adopt some noble lie to inspire us to live beyond self-interest and one's personal goods and needs. So I do worry about this kind of purely pragmatic justification of belief because it really leads to a sort of pretense, I think.

KEVIN HARRIS: Justin continues in this article,

In our contemporary culture, we see this most clearly in the numerous ideologies around LGBT, gender and race that have proliferated in recent years. Many people live their lives through these stories. There is no doubt that a strong sense of justice motivates such causes, but they often take on a quasi-religious significance too. To question someone’s personal identity is regarded as an act of sacrilege. Social activism has a very religious feeling, with its own sacred texts, rituals and symbols (think of the pride flag), and its heretics too (think of JK Rowling). And it’s not just the progressive left. You’ll see the same quasi-religious sentiment in conservative nationalism and right-wing conspiracy theories too.

I don’t think we should be surprised that these new forms of religions have arisen. GK Chesterton is cited as saying that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they become capable of believing in anything. To put it another way: People don’t stop being religious when they lose the Christian story, they just become religious about different things.

What do you think about Chesterton's words?

DR. CRAIG: I think he's absolutely right. I have really been shocked at the things that people will believe rather than to accept, for example, belief in God. They'll believe the universe popped into existence uncaused out of nothing. Or they'll adopt panpsychism – the view that every atomic particle has mental states associated with it in order to be able to explain the origin of consciousness or the fine-tuning of the universe. Once you give up belief in God, it's not that you believe in nothing but, as Chesterton says, it just opens the door to believing in virtually anything.

KEVIN HARRIS: Justin continues,

As New Atheism faded from view, it left behind a lot of secular people still looking for intelligent answers to life’s deepest questions. Indeed, the rise of social media and the culture wars has also hastened the emergence of a ‘meaning crisis’ in today’s generation. Despite our material comforts and technological advantages, anxiety, depression and mental–health problems are at an all-time high, especially among the younger generation. People are desperate for a better story to live by.

I know that it requires you to be pastoral but I tell you the reported increase in anxiety and depression that I've been reading about among young people is really concerning.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. What I want to comment on here is that this meaning crisis that Justin describes was predicted by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1960s. I am not a big Francis Schaeffer fan, but I must say that Schaeffer was truly prescient about the way our culture was going. What Schaeffer warned was that in a culture that is increasingly secular and that abandons belief in God, there is no longer any objective foundation for affirming the ultimate value, meaning, and purpose in life, and that this leads then finally to despair. Schaeffer attempted to show how this line of despair cuts across every layer of culture in art, in music, in entertainment and film, for example. That certainly has transpired. I look back and think that Francis Schaeffer was truly prophetic in the 1960s when he saw exactly where this kind of secularist mentality leads, and now we are bearing the bitter fruit of that secular philosophy resulting in the meaning crisis that Justin describes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next in this article Justin lists prominent names who are not professing Christians yet are fighting against the same ideologies that Christians are fighting against. He includes Jordan Peterson, historian Tom Holland, and Louise Perry. She has done research showing that traditional family is the only way to positive personal and family outcomes. Ben Shapiro has been talking about that, too. He also lists Paul Davies. I would add comedian Bill Maher and Ben Shapiro to the list. Can we view this alignment with an acknowledgement of Christian principles and values as evidence for the truth of Christianity? Justin thinks so. He writes,

It has become respectable to take the Christian story seriously again.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think so. As I indicated earlier, I don't think that this serves as any evidence for Christianity's truth. It just shows how terrible the world is if, in fact, atheism is true – if there is no God. Years and years ago a woman once said to Bertrand Russell that, “Your view of the world is so terrible,” and he said, “Madam, only when you've come to realize that the world truly is a terrible place are you in a position to come to terms with life.” So I don't think that this is positive evidence for Christianity. In my apologetic, as you know, I use this Francis Schaeffer-esque approach of arguing that if God does not exist then there is no ultimate value, meaning, or purpose in life as a kind of prelude to apologetics to awaken the apathetic person from his lethargy and get him to think about these ultimate questions about the meaning, value, and purpose of life. When we begin to think about where atheism leaves us (in meaninglessness and despair and valuelessness) then I think that can motivate us to go back to square one, begin anew, and say, “Well, wait a minute. How do I know that God does not exist? Maybe there really is a God. Maybe this is really true.” It can create a kind of intellectual open-mindedness to the Christian story that has been so wanting in some of these New Atheist types. So I see this as a kind of negative apologetic. Not a positive apologetic for the truth of the Christian faith, but as a way of awakening people from their intellectual stupor and getting them to really think about these important questions in life.

KEVIN HARRIS: Justin concludes,

Naturally, these individual stories, while encouraging, don’t necessarily mean that a Christian revival is just around the corner. The latest surveys still show a picture of terminal decline in many parts of the Church and the continuing rise of those who describe themselves as ‘nones’ (no religious affiliation). However, it’s also apparent that New Atheism failed to make many converts to scientific materialism, and that the ‘nones’ continue to encompass many ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ types who are looking for a meaningful story to be part of.

. . . These are the conditions under which I believe the tide could be turning, and the Christian story could come rushing back in.

. . . Perhaps we are indeed seeing a turning of the tide. But will the Church be ready to receive the refugees of the ‘meaning crisis’ washed up on its shore? I pray that it will.

Good job, Justin. It sounds a lot like what you've said for a long time.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think that one of the most important ministries of Reasonable Faith is not simply to try to encourage refugees to come to Christian faith from this New Atheism, to come to Christ, but also to train and disciple Christians so that they are ready to receive these refugees. It is very important that we understand the meaning crisis that they have been going through and be able to offer good arguments and evidence and to articulate an intelligent faith that they can come to and find meaning, value, and purpose in. So one of the most important things that we can be doing (in addition to evangelization) is the training and discipleship of Christians to receive this influx from secular culture.

KEVIN HARRIS: We want to thank everyone for responding to the matching grant that we have going on right now to help support the work of Reasonable Faith. A very generous donor has agreed to match whatever a person gives up to $300,000. Take advantage of that. This means that whatever you give is doubled during the month of November and December

DR. CRAIG: It's incredible. It's a great way to double the impact of your giving.

KEVIN HARRIS: Go to ReasonableFaith.org and give. We appreciate your prayers, and we appreciate your giving.^[3]