Science is proving Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists wrong

Twenty years ago, Richard Dawkins published his international best-seller The God Delusion, thus establishing “New Atheism” as a major cultural force. Over the ensuing decade, other authors — such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss and Daniel Dennett — seized the popular imagination with their respective arguments about why belief in the divine is untenable.

The physicists among them argued that the universe could be explained “from nothing”. The biologists argued that Darwinian explanations of “apparent design” in living organisms make appeals to an actual designing intelligence unnecessary. Thus, Dawkins concluded: “God almost certainly does not exist.”

But now, two decades on, the influence of the New Atheists has waned.