With apologies to Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists are old news. But we’ve got a bigger problem.
You remember them, don’t you? Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris? These so-called “New Atheists” drew crowds with their bombastic and occasionally clever attacks on God and theism. For a while their books were best-sellers, “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great,” for example. But as atheist and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson recently wrote, “The world appears to be tiring of the New Atheism movement.”
However, that’s not necessarily good news. Writing in the online journal “The Public Discourse,” Paul Rowan Brian and Ben Sixsmith warn of something even more insidious than atheism. Apatheism – that is, answering the “God question” with a shoulder shrug and a calm, “Whatever.”
Brian and Sixsmith write, “With roots in the practical atheism and deism of the Enlightenment, ‘apatheism’ is embodied in French philosopher Denis Diderot’s famous remark that ‘it is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.'”
They cite K. Robert Beshears of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who says the West suffers from an “unholy trinity of apatheism”: a lack of reason to believe, supposedly because of science; a lack of motivation to believe, because someone else will worry about it; and a lack of will to believe, because religion “is just too much drama.”