Assessing the French Atheistic Turn

In under a decade we have witnessed a proliferation of texts on “atheism,” so much so that the term “New Atheism”1 has become a widely employed label to describe the discourse of this intellectual current, and books propounding or opposing it compete on the shelves of bookstores. Mostly, unfortunately, the tone of this discourse ranges from the patronisingly sarcastic to the irresponsibly uninformed (in the case of atheism-friendly authors) and from the wisely condescending to the virulently obscurantist (in the case of religious apologists). Most commonly associ-ated with this movement are the naturalising reductions of religion by Daniel Dennett, the militant, neo-positivist Dar-winism of Richard Dawkins, the pedantically cultured work of Christopher Hitchens and the populist, mouth-foaming Islamophobia and self-righteous outbursts of Sam Harris (these four authors are often grouped together as the “Four Horsemen” of atheism) and—to quote at least one author from the other side of the intellectual barricade—the natural theology redux of Alister McGrath. With the exception of the best moments of Dennett’s work these publications usually suffer from a deficit of philosophically informed argumenta-tion and (even in Dennett’s work) of actual engagement with the historico-theological heritage that is part and parcel of our conceptual toolbox.