The rise of the "New Atheism", normally dated to 2006, has rekindled interest in the God-question throughout western culture. Alister McGrath has been one of the leading critics of the "New Atheism". Welcoming the questions that it has raised about religious belief, and the new interest in Christianity that leading New Atheist writers have created, McGrath nevertheless raises some fundamental questions about the reliability of its critique of the Christian faith, and the viability of the alternatives that it proposes.

McGrath's first major engagement with what would become the "New Atheism" dates from 2004, when he published a major study of Richard Dawkins's views on the relation of science and religion. Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life (2004) established McGrath as an informed interpreter of Dawkins. Dawkins himself was kind enough to comment that this book "does a fair and sophisticated job of summarising my position". Although this book was an attempt to understand Dawkins, not to criticise him, it acted as the basis of McGrath's critical engagement with Dawkins's views on science and religion, especially the basis of his "scientific atheism".

McGrath's first public comment on this question was a lecture entitled "Has Science eliminated God? Richard Dawkins and the Meaning of Life", given at Cambridge University on 9 November 2004. An audio recording and full text of the lecture can be accessed here. This lecture, attended by over 500 people, led to similar invitations to speak on this theme throughout the world.

The publication of Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006) led McGrath to respond to some of its main themes in a response, with the provocative title The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (2007) , which became an international bestseller, and was widely translated. Click here for the British edition, and here for the North American edition. It is widely regarded as the best of the many responses to Dawkins which appeared around that time.

McGrath turned his attention to Dawkins's appeal to Darwinism as a weapon against religion in several subsequent publications. A paper written in 2007 argued that Dawkins and his colleague Daniel Dennett had turned Darwinism from a provisional scientific theory to a worldview, which excluded religious belief as a matter of principle. See McGrath,  “The ideological uses of evolutionary biology in recent atheist apologetics” in R. Numbers and D. Alexander (eds), Ideology and Biology: From Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 329-49. More significantly, McGrath dedicated his 2009 Hulsean Lectures at the University of Cambridge to exploring the relation of Darwinism and religious belief, calling into question both Dawkins's notion of "universal Darwinism" and some of its associated hypotheses, such as the "meme". These lectures were published in an expanded version as Darwinism and the Divine (2009). At present, this is one of the most detailed and thorough investigations of this question.

Finally, McGrath marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of Dawkins's God Delusion with a critical engagement with all four writers of the "New Atheism" - Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Having debated Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens at various locations in the United States and the United Kingdom, McGrath offered an assessment of the present state of the "New Atheist" movement, engaging with both its leading representatives and the wider "New Atheist" virtual community. Why God won't go away (2011) is a witty and accessible critique of the movement, which aims to move the conversation on, and build further on the resurgence of popular interest in the "God-question". Click here for the British edition, and here for the North American edition.

 

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