The term New Atheism was coined by the American journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions of some atheist academics, writers, scientists, and philosophers of the 21st century. New Atheism advocates the view that superstition, religion, and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated. Instead, they should be criticised, countered, examined, and challenged by rational argument, especially when they exert strong influence on the broader society, such as in government, education, and politics. Major figures of New Atheism include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
History
The secular humanist Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry, is often regarded as a forerunner to the New Atheism movement.
The 2004 publication of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, a bestseller in the United States, was joined over the next couple years by a series of popular best-sellers by atheist authors. Harris was motivated by the events of 11 September 2001, for which he blamed Islam, while also directly criticizing Christianity and Judaism. Two years later, Harris followed up with Letter to a Christian Nation, which was a severe criticism of Christianity. Also in 2006, following his television documentary series The Root of All Evil?, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for 51 weeks.
In 2010, Tom Flynn, then editor of Free Inquiry, stated that the only thing new about "New Atheism" was the wider publication of atheist material by big-name publishers, books that appeared on bestseller lists and were read by millions. Mitchell Landsberg, covering a gathering held by the Council for Secular Humanism in 2010, said that religious skeptics in attendance were at odds between "new atheists" who preferred to "encourage open confrontation with the devout" and "acomodationists" who preferred "a subtler, more tactical approach." Paul Kurtz was ousted from the Center for Inquiry in the late 2000's. This was in part due to a perception that Kurtz was "on the mellower end of the spectrum", according to Flynn.
In November 2015, The New Republic published an article entitled, "Is the New Atheism dead?" The atheist and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote in 2016, "The world appears to be tiring of the New Atheism movement." In 2017, PZ Myers who formerly considered himself a new atheist, publicly renounced the New Atheism movement.
The book The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution was released in 2019.
Prominent figures
Several key figures associated with the New Atheism movement include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
"Four Horsemen"
On 30 September 2007, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett met at Hitchens' residence in Washington, D.C., for a private two-hour unmoderated round table discussion. The event was videotaped and titled "The Four Horsemen". During "The God Debate" in 2010 with Hitchens versus Dinesh D'Souza, the group was collectively referred to as the "Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse", an allusion to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation. The four have been described by critics as "evangelical atheists".
Harris wrote several bestselling non-fiction books including The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, and Waking Up, along with two shorter works (initially published as e-books) Free Will and Lying. He is a co-founder of the Reason Project.
Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, and director of a Channel 4 television documentary titled The Root of All Evil?, is the founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He wrote: "I don't object to the horseman label, by the way. I'm less keen on 'new atheist': it isn't clear to me how we differ from old atheists."