Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 21:2 (Fall 2024)
Article: The 2007 Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum: Whatever Happened To The New Atheism?
Author: Alister E. McGrath

The 2007 Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum: Whatever Happened To The New Atheism?

Alister E. McGrath

Alister McGrath recently retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford.

I have long been an admirer of the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum, which has done so much to encourage evangelicals to engage with debates and discussions in wider culture. Under the visionary leadership of Dr. Robert Stewart, fourteen conferences were held between 2005 and 2017 at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, serving two important functions for evangelical leaders and pastors. In the first place, it allowed them first-hand knowledge of potentially significant theological or cultural trends outside the evangelical community; in the second, it explored how evangelicals might respond to these developments with integrity, offering the evangelical community important resources for preaching, teaching, and ministry.

In February 2007, the Forum engaged a movement that had unexpectedly exploded onto the cultural scene the previous year. The “New Atheism” captured headlines throughout North America in 2006, as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris published bestsellers asserting the irrationality and propensity toward violence of religious belief. This was followed in 2007 by Christopher Hitchens’s rhetorically turbocharged God is Not Great, which used ridicule and rhetoric where an older generation of atheists had preferred reasoned argumentation.1 And it worked. Breezy slogans proved far more effective than carefully considered

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evidence. Those who believed in God were depicted as mad, bad or sad—and probably all three. For a while, these caricatures were seen as plausible accounts of the moral character and intellectual ability of religious people by those working in the secular media.

It seemed to many popular commentators that the place of religion in American culture was being called into question with unprecedented intensity. While academic critics of the New Atheism expressed concern at its simplistic take on complex scientific and theological issues, religiously alienated sections of the wider public welcomed and embraced its excoriating criticism of faith in modern American life and the godless vision of the future that it enunciated.2 So what, many Christians wondered, could be done to engage its ideas and challenge its cultural influence?

Robert Stewart rose to the challenge. Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) and I had debated the themes of Dennett’s “New Atheist” manifesto Breaking the Spell at the Royal Society of Arts in cent...