Did You Hear About The Dramatic Fall Of The New Atheism?
Signs are abounding that something of a spiritual rebirth is gathering strength in the West, especially the U.S. and the U.K., and, according to Justin Brierley, and one of the prompts of this renewal, ironically, is the decline of the once-prominent New Atheism movement.
Dr. Sean McDowell, Biola University Professor of Apologetics.
“While it started in about 2005, I noticed that the conversation changed significantly … While it started as something of a kind of dogmatic anti-theistic debate around God, eventually it turned into something very different, actually,” Brierley tells Biola University Apologetics Professor Sean McDowell in the following video.
“The New Atheism in a way came and went … it fizzled out as a movement. Obviously, it still exists in various parts of the Internet but it’s not the social/cultural phenomenon it once was,” Brierley continues.
“And all of the key architects of that movement have either kind of faded from public consciousness or they started talking about different things altogether, they’re not really talking about God and religion anymore,” he says.
“But the people who are talking about God and religion in the secular space are actually having a very different kind of conversation, they’re taking the claims of Christianity a lot more seriously in my view,” Brierley observes.
Could that be true, is the secular conversing public revising how the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the transformative movement He inspired is viewed? McDowell and Brierley have a fascinating conversation about that and much more.
This video is slightly longer than an hour, which is quite a bit longer than normally appears here on HillFaith. I can assure you, however, that McDowell, the son of Josh McDowell and an accomplished apologist in his own right, and Brierley, the Brit believer who is blessed with great cultural, political and social insight, will make you wish the hour continued longer, so enjoy: