There was a time when the so-called New Atheists were getting a lot of attention online and in the media. The main reason for the interest was famous people with claims to empiricism, people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, leading the charge for the New Atheists. Famous people can focus public attention on just about anything and when those famous people have credentials people are conditioned to respect, then those famous people can lead public debate.

The movement ran out of steam for a few reasons. One is Richard Dawkins found out that he could bash Christians as much as he liked, but when he moved onto other religions the priests of the New Religion took exception. In Britain, you cannot mock Islam and nowhere are you allowed to mock Judaism. Although it is unlikely that he ever figured it out, the truth is Christianity in the English-speaking world has come to mean “white” and the New Religion is antiwhite.

Sam Harris, the another famous New Atheist, was largely undone by his own weirdness, which you can see in this old debate. He looks like someone you would see in a documentary about serial killers. Persuasion is as much about how the arguments are presented, as about the facts and reason, and Harris presents as a psychopath who you would not buy a car from much less an argument about God. It turned out that Harris was the best argument against atheism.

The main problem for atheists, of course, is that they do not have an affirmative argument to make in support of their claims. You cannot prove a negative, which means there is no way to prove God does not exist. The best they can do is attack the arguments in favor of the existence of God. This not only makes them sound like jerks, but it can never work for the simple reason that people do not abandon their beliefs when they stop making sense, only when they find a better belief.

The other problem for atheists is that they engage in a form of argument that is inherently dishonest in its form. They start with the assertion that their claim is one of however many valid claims. Therefore, if they disprove the other claims, that means their claim is the right one by default. It is why atheists spend all of their time attacking what they claim are the arguments in favor of God, rather than putting together an argument in favor of their godless universe.

This is the Intelligent Design argument in a nutshell. Since there is no way to prove that God got drunk one night and created the platypus, they spend all of their time “disproving” evolution or asserting that “Darwinism” is a religion. It is entirely possible everyone is wrong, and we live in a simulation and the ID’ers are mistaking what they see for the hand of providence, for what is really just the work of bored child of a race of superbeings in another dimension.

That aside, the biggest problem for atheists, however, is that our moral framework as a civilization rests on the assumption that right and wrong, ought and ought not, are backstopped by something that lies outside the reach of man. This has always meant God, the gods or the shaman who communicates with the spirit world. Often, this supernatural element is bound up in tradition, which is just a handy word for agreed upon ways of acting over a long period of time.

If you rip out God from the equation, then all things are permitted unless you can find a reasonable argument against it. You can see the problem here in this video of Harris being interrogated by a young YouTuber. It quickly becomes clear that the new moral framework Harris proposes makes no sense, not even to Harris. He is reduced to endless equivocation and restatement. Depending upon your perspective it is either sad or amusing to watch him struggle.

Of course, the main problem for Harris in his quest to create a new reason-based morality is that such a thing is not possible. Every human society has a morale code, a list of things you ought and ought not do. These collective beliefs in what is and is not ethical are either based on tradition or in the supernatural. One of the cornerstone beliefs must be that there are bits of this code that are off-limits to questioning, as they are too important to put to a vote.

This is the problem for late-empire America and the West in general. Once the medieval Christian conception of God was removed, the entire moral superstructure of the West began to faulter. Liberalism itself rests on a priori beliefs that are rooted in the Western Christian tradition. The reason liberal democracy looks like despotic anarchy is that the thing it requires to remain rational has been removed. The result is a Hobbesian moral universe that often appears suicidal.

This brings us back to the atheists. The main reason their project has always failed is that you cannot replace a set of beliefs with nothing. People will believe in something similar until a better option is found. Belief in the supernatural solves a problem, which is why humans share this one quality. For Western man, the zenith of belief was late-medieval Christianity. The long arc of the West that has reached the current state is the struggle to replace that belief with nothing.

In a way, the rise and fall of New Atheism gives us an insight into what lies ahead for the Godless world we have created for ourselves in the West. It is the image of the last atheist stammering his way through basic questions which he cannot answer because how we ought and ought not live lies in the thing he seeks to destroy. Ironically, it means the reality of belief will once against reassert itself because reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

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