The “New Atheists”: Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens . . . Oh My!

i
By Kevin James Bywater

Perhaps it goes without saying that the “new atheists” have arrived.
Richard Dawkins,ii Sam Harrisiii and Christopher Hitchensiv (among others)v
have recently published volumes capturing many intellects and imaginations.
As international bestsellers, their publishing efforts are likely to produce
challenges to our faith for years to come.
These authors have superb rhetorical skills and deploy the English
language to great effect. Dawkins and Hitchens have particular appeal with
their posh British accents and witty idioms. It is not that their polemics are
novel, however, nor their arguments especially successful.
And they have not gone unanswered.vi Yet it appears they have not
always understood or felt the weight of their opponents’ objections.vii
For instance, Hitchens regularly denounces people, their beliefs, and
their actions as “immoral.” Nevertheless, within an atheist universe it is
difficult to see how such moral disdain rises above a merely emotive, “I don’t
like them/that.” After all, within that perspective, what precisely is good or
evil? Does atheism have the resources necessary to produce coherent
accusations of immorality? It is most difficult to see moral assessment as
meaningful within an atheist worldview. Worldview analysis unveils why this
is true.

Morality and Materiality

Atheists tend to suppose that what exists is only that which is open to
scientific scrutiny, that which is natural. Yet moral truths are not entities
amenable to such analysis. As one atheist perceptively observed:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities

or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else
in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would
have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition,
utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.viii

It simply is the case that one does not discover moral truths through
microscopes or telescopes. However, neither does one so discover numbers,
the laws of logic, other minds (as distinct from brains), or love. This, of
course, doesn’t keep anyone from enjoying each of these!
If moral truths cannot be scrutinized as physical entities or forces of
physics – because they are not entities or forces of that sort – then do they
exist in the naturalistic universe of the atheist? And if moral assessments
cannot meaningfully be made of such things as granite or grass or gaggles of
geese, then can they be levelled at human beings – entities that are, on
atheistic and naturalistic assumptions, merely alternate forms of the same
material stuff? Thus the moral disapproval of atheists appears to reduce to
an expression of preference or personal disapproval – nothing all that
serious, unless you desire their approval. The naturalistic worldview of
atheism is unable to account for the reality of moral truths or provide for
their meaningful expression.

Atheists and Moral Actions

Along a different path, Hitchens places great confidence in this

challenge: “name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a
believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”ix
He triumphantly proclaims that he has yet had no takers. Now, Christians
might be tempted to troll about to find that one exceptional deed on which
to pin this tail. That, however, would be a mistake for Hitchens’s challenge is
an evasive manoeuvre, a red herring.
Of course atheists can perform moral actions. They can tell the truth,
remain faithful to their spouses, feed their children, be generous with their
possessions, forgive others their faults – each of which is wholly
commendable. The problem is in making sense of the alleged morality or
immorality of actions within an atheist perspective. In other words, what
eludes atheism is an objective standard of assessment, the precondition for
deeming such actions moral and not merely preferable. Their counterfactual
worldview lacks the requisite resources for coherent moral assessments.
Again, this problem is one the new atheists so often fail to see. For
example, Sam Harris once asserted, “If religion were the only durable
foundation for morality, you would expect atheists to be really badly
behaved.”x But the argument is not, if you are an atheist, then you’ll
necessarily behave badly; rather, it is an observation that within an atheistic
worldview there appears no objective means of assessing actions as good or
bad. Additionally, atheists do pronounce moral assessments, and often
Christians agree (or at least we should). Even so, these assessments do not
appear to cohere with the atheistic worldview, a perspective that lacks the
preconditions for such moral categories.

Atheists and Innate Moral Sense

Regardless, one can’t help but suppose that since the new atheists
were raised within cultures influenced by a Judeo-Christian worldview, they
have absorbed and retained many such values. Perhaps this is no more
visible in one of Hitchens’s autobiographical anecdotes.

There is something about [donating blood] that appeals to me, and I

derive other satisfactions as well from being of assistance to a fellow
creature… Nobody has to teach me any of this... The so-called Golden
Rule is innate in us, or is innate except in the sociopaths who do not
care about others, and the psychopaths who take pleasure from
cruelty.xi
 One may doubt that Hitchens was not taught to share. He may not
recall the lesson; but it remains a pervasive one in Western culture. It is
embedded in our histories, movies, fairy tales and poetry. Our culture
rewards generosity both socially and emotionally. Thus Hitchens’s feelings
are, at least in part, a resonant with his culture.
In addition, lesser forms of the Golden Rule have been used to support
distinctly ethnocentric ends throughout history, with “the other” to whom
one should do good being restricted to members of one’s family, tribe, nation
or ethnic group.xii This is precisely the limitation countered in the parable of
the good Samaritan, a parable that likely has also informed Hitchens’s moral
sensibilities. Our neighbor in need is our neighbor indeed.
But this anecdote takes us back to our earliest suspicion, that within an
atheistic and naturalistic worldview moral assessments reduce to emotive
expressions of preference. In the anecdote above, Hitchens conflates a
feeling of satisfaction with a moral imperative. He supposes that mimicking
personal sacrifice (and it is only mimicry that he admits to, as he sees blood
donation as not truly sacrificial in that he loses nothing), he is aping
something altruistic and ethically upright.
Would it remain good to donate blood even if it had no appeal and
provided no such satisfactions? Of course it would. But would it be so within
an atheistic worldview? One is at pains to see how it would be. After all,
Hitchens does it because he likes the resultant feelings. It appears that what
we encounter here is precisely what we noted earlier: moral claims reduce to
preference claims within an atheistic world. Hitchens prefers the appeal, the
satisfaction of helping other people.

Morality without God?

Hitchens tries hard to retain the objectivity of morality by locating it in

evolutionary biology (something unsuccessfully attempted by others). I find
it interesting that he even attempts to retain some semblance of universal
moral standard and impulse. Perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche was suggestive
when he criticized Georg Eliot, and English atheists more generally, in
Twilight of the Idols. “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all
the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality…,” wrote
Nietzsche. “In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little
emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner
what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.”
Nietzsche continued:

We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one
pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet…
Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together.
By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks
the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands….When the
 English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and
evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require
Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the
effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an
expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the
origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very
conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the
English, morality is not yet a problem.xiii

Now, to be fair, Christopher Hitchens became a U.S. citizen on the 13th

of April, 2007. He has expatriated from Britain. Nor need one wholly agree
with Nietzsche to notice the rationality of his comments: when one removes
God, one removes the foundation for morality. The attempt to retain morality
absent the Deity is desperate and incoherent. Of course, we can be glad that
many atheists insist on recognizing a difference between good and evil. We
can be glad for their intuitions, the thoughts that arise from them as human
beings made in the image of the Deity they deny. Thankfully, that image is
permanent.
In the end, the philosophical naturalism of atheism, the fallacious
diversions, and the non-physicality of moral truths combine to show that the
“new atheists” strike an implausible pose. It also explains why their bullish
announcements of moral criticism smack of so much bluster. Having
misplaced the foundation for moral outrage, they pilfer from the Christian
worldview.
But it’s wrong to steal.

Kevin James Bywater directs the Summit Ministries Oxford Study Centre. For information on the centre, please
visit www.summit-oxford.com. Applications for the fall of 2008 are now being received.
 i
An earlier and shorter version of this essay appeared in the January 2008 edition of the Summit
Oxford Quarterly, a publication that may be downloaded from the blog at www.summit-oxford.com.
ii
C. Richard Dawkins (b.1941) holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding
of Science at Oxford University and is the author of numerous books, including The God Delusion
(Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
iii
Sam Harris (b.1967) holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and is pursuing a
doctorate in neuroscience. He is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of
Reason (W.W. Norton, 2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006).
iv
Christopher E. Hitchens (b.1949) is an ex-patriot Britain now an American Citizen (as of 13
April 2007, his 50th birthday), an awarded journalist, and an incredibly prolific author. Among his most
recent books is his bestselling God Is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books,
2007).
v
E.g., Daniel Dennett (b.1942), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(Penguin, 2006); Michael Shermer (b.1954, editor of Skeptic magazine); Victor J. Stenger, God: The
Failed Hypothesis (Prometheus, 2007).
vi
Among a heavy stream of published responses, see especially Dinesh D’Souza (b.1961),
What’s So Great about Christianity? (Regnery, 2007). There are many other very helpful responses
being published right now. I highlight this volume since it interacts with several of the significant “new
atheists,” and does so with regards to so many facets of their arguments. I would note, however, that I
see D’Souza’s work as inadequate or misleading particularly with regards to his embrace of
evolutionary theory and his attempts to downplay the tensions between this theory and tenets of the
Christian faith.
vii
This seems particularly acute in the case of Hitchens’s debate with Rev. Douglas Wilson on
the Christianity Today website: “Is Christianity Good for the World?”
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/mayweb-only/119-12.0.html (accessed 18 January 2008).
viii
J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), 38.
ix
C. Hitchens, “Introduction,” in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever,
ed. C. Hitchens (London: De Capo, 2007), xiv.
x
As quoted in, “The New Atheists,” Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, PBS, January 5, 2007;
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1019/cover.html#, accessed 18 January 2008. See also
Hitchens, “Introduction,” xvi.
xi
Hitchens, “Introduction,” xvi-xvii.
xii
This was pointed out to me by Prof. George H. van Kooten (of the University of Groningen)
during a discussion of the Golden Rule (and its many permutations) at the British New Testament
Conference at the University of Exeter in early September 2007.
xiii
Available online: http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html, accessed 18 January
2008.