The loudest objections of the New Atheism were not its strongest. Its strongest objection quietly undercut itself.
For about a decade they were everywhere. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett — the so-called Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. The books sold millions. The God Delusion. God Is Not Great. The tone was new: not just unbelief but contempt, faith treated as a virus to be eradicated, the believer as either stupid, wicked, or insane.
The cultural moment has cooled, but the arguments still circulate in comment sections and dorm rooms, and a young believer can be knocked flat by them if he has never heard them answered. So let us take the three biggest swings seriously — and notice that the hardest one for the Christian to answer turns out to be the hardest one for the atheist to live.
“Who Designed the Designer?”
This was Dawkins’s centerpiece. If complexity requires a designer, he argued, then God must be even more complex and would Himself need a designer — so God explains nothing. It sounds devastating until you examine the assumption underneath it. The argument assumes God is a contingent, assembled thing — a being inside the universe who needs a cause like everything else.
But that is not who God has ever claimed to be. The cosmological argument does not say “everything has a cause.” It says everything that begins to exist has a cause. The God of Scripture does not begin. He is the uncaused ground of all being, the One who simply is — “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Asking who made the unmade is like asking what is north of the North Pole. The question dissolves once you understand the category. Dawkins answered a god no theologian was defending.
And the deeper question still stands, the one materialism has never closed: why is there something rather than nothing? A universe that might not have existed does not explain its own existence. It points beyond itself.
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
Romans 1:20 (NASB1995)
“Religion Poisons Everything”
This was Hitchens’s drumbeat, and he made it with real force — the wars, the abuses, the cruelties carried out under religious banners. A Christian should not flinch from any of it. Much evil has been done in God’s name, and Jesus condemned the religious hypocrites more sharply than anyone else ever did.
But watch what the argument requires. To say religion is evil, Hitchens needed a fixed standard of good and evil to measure it against — a real, objective moral law that stands over all of us. And that is precisely what his own worldview cannot supply. If we are, in his colleagues’ words, just rearranged atoms and selfish genes, then “evil” is only a feeling some primates evolved to have. Cruelty becomes a matter of taste, not a violation of anything. Hitchens spent his career borrowing a moral ruler he insisted did not exist, then using it to indict the very worldview that could account for it.
That moral law he could not stop appealing to is exactly what Paul says is written into every human being, atheist and believer alike.
“…in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them.”
Romans 2:15 (NASB1995)
The atheist’s outrage at injustice is not evidence against God. It is evidence of the image of God in him, protesting against a world that he claims is morally silent. His own indignation testifies against his own theory.
“Faith Is Belief Without Evidence”
Harris and Dawkins repeated this constantly: faith is what you have when you do not have reasons. But that is not the Bible’s definition of faith, and it is not how the faith spread. Christianity did not advance on blind leaps. It advanced on a claimed historical event with named witnesses, and it staked everything on whether that event happened.
“…and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain… and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.”
1 Corinthians 15:14, 17 (NASB1995)
That is not the language of belief-without-evidence. That is a man inviting falsification. Paul names the resurrection witnesses, including five hundred at once, “most of whom remain until now” (1 Corinthians 15:6) — go ask them. The historical core that even many skeptical scholars grant is striking: Jesus died by crucifixion, the tomb was found empty, the disciples were utterly convinced they had seen him alive, and they went to their deaths insisting on it. People die for what they sincerely believe; almost no one dies for what they know to be a lie they themselves invented. The New Atheists rarely engaged this evidence at all. They asserted that faith is irrational and skipped the one event the entire faith hangs on.
The Real Issue Was Never the Evidence
Here is the honest conclusion. The New Atheism was a powerful mood more than a powerful argument. It was loud, witty, and morally earnest — and that moral earnestness was its quiet undoing, because it kept reaching for a standard only God can ground. Scripture has a name for the deeper problem, and it is not a lack of data.
“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”
Psalm 14:1 (NASB1995)
Note the location — “in his heart,” not in his head. Atheism is rarely first a conclusion of the mind; more often it is a posture of the will, and the arguments are recruited afterward. Which is why the Christian’s job is not to win a sneer-off. It is to answer honestly, point to the God who is already evident, and do it with the posture Peter commanded:
“…but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence.”
1 Peter 3:15 (NASB1995)
Ready, reasoned, and gentle. The New Atheists asked the believing world to choose between faith and reason. The gospel never accepted the terms. It has always claimed both — and it still asks the unbeliever the question his own conscience keeps asking him: where did you get the ruler?
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist