Has New Atheism Failed? Alister McGrath vs. Alex O'Connor · 2023

Alister McGrath — New Atheism has failed: 73/100

Published strengths

• McGrath established a clear motion-level metric by contrasting New Atheism’s early promise of a new age with its later fading from ordinary public awareness.
• His scientific-underdetermination examples gave concrete substance to the narrower corrective that popular appeals to science can conceal genuine second-level judgments among empirically equivalent theories.
• The twelve conversion cases were carefully calibrated as demonstrations of possible counterproductive influence, not inflated into unsupported claims about prevalence or net religious movement.
• He repeatedly favored intellectual humility at difficult moments, most notably accepting the need to check the Leviticus citation rather than manufacturing an immediate textual defense.

Published weaknesses

• The covenant answer addressed whether ancient law binds Christians now but missed O’Connor’s central burden: explaining why the same morally perfect God could formerly permit slavery.
• McGrath’s tentative suggestion that slavery may once have been morally permissible supplied no historical facts or moral principle, deepening the internal problem instead of resolving it.
• His published characterization of Leviticus 25 as prohibiting slavery was confronted by contrary chapter language, and the debate ended with only a promise to investigate.

Alex O'Connor — Critical reassessment of New Atheism: 83/100

Published strengths

• O’Connor’s distinction between popular success and philosophical fruitfulness gave the motion a disciplined framework and prevented fading cultural visibility from proving comprehensive failure.
• He consistently separated criticism of Dawkins and New Atheism from criticism of atheism, preserving positive arguments from evil and hiddenness without defending every movement excess.
• The internal moral critique was exceptionally precise: an atheist need not first ground objective morality to test whether Christianity’s own God-grounded ethic can accommodate slavery.
• His exact Leviticus comparison produced the debate’s strongest evidential moment, directly matching McGrath’s published words against the chapter’s authorization of inheritable lifelong slaves.

Published weaknesses

• The reverse-causation account of secularization driving New Atheist popularity remained a plausible suspicion rather than an evidenced causal finding, weakening his attribution of popular success.
• His explanation of abrasive rhetoric through evangelical media culture made the style understandable but did not answer McGrath’s claim that shame was ineffective and socially harmful.
• The hiddenness argument shifted between divine existence and goodness and relied heavily on personal nonexperience without fully specifying expected revelation under competing hypotheses.

Rise, goals, and competing measures of success

04:25-10:34

Alister McGrath — section score 72/100

New Atheism’s disappearance from public awareness and failure to inaugurate its anticipated new age show that its original cultural promise went substantially unrealized.

Strongest feature: The contrast between extraordinary initial excitement and present obscurity supplies an intuitive, motion-level measure of failure, directly connecting the movement’s fading visibility with its unrealized promise of historical transformation. Principal limitation: The excerpt offers recollection rather than comparative evidence, never specifying the promised outcomes, relevant timeline, cultural indicators, or whether declining prominence means failure instead of successful normalization. Live burden: McGrath still needed to distinguish publicity cycles from intellectual influence and answer O’Connor’s later separation of popular success from philosophical fruitfulness with concrete evidence about membership, belief, institutions, or lasting discourse. Locked score: 69; logicalCoherence 72, evidenceWarrant 50, responsiveness 78, relevanceBurden 82, precisionClarity 69, calibrationCharity 64.

Alex O'Connor — section score 78/100

New Atheism chose the easier, burden-avoiding task of finding holes in religion, yet criticism need not construct a complete worldview to remain worthwhile.

Strongest feature: O’Connor candidly concedes that burden-free fault-finding is easier than developing a worldview, while preserving the important distinction between an incomplete intellectual project and an illegitimate critical enterprise. Principal limitation: Personal intellectual development substitutes for a fully articulated standard explaining when criticism alone becomes philosophically insufficient, and the excerpt does not identify which omitted constructive burdens materially damaged New Atheism. Live burden: He needed to specify what positive commitments atheists must defend, why internal criticism remains probative without them, and how this qualified methodological deficiency should affect the motion’s broader judgment of success. Locked score: 77; logicalCoherence 82, evidenceWarrant 64, responsiveness 78, relevanceBurden 75, precisionClarity 83, calibrationCharity 87.

Epistemic standards, evidence, and appeals to science

11:16-22:35

Alister McGrath — section score 72/100

New Atheists allegedly define religion vaguely, select convenient evidence, and exempt their own beliefs and evaluative standards from the scrutiny imposed upon religious claims.

Strongest feature: McGrath unifies three objections—conceptual vagueness, selective evidence, and unequal scrutiny—under epistemic asymmetry, directly challenging O’Connor’s description of criticism that assumes no constructive burden. Principal limitation: Calling religion a social construction and Dawkins a master cherry-picker does not identify the omitted evidence, contested definition, or specific atheist commitment protected from equivalent examination, making the criticism sweeping and insufficiently charitable. Live burden: McGrath needed a matched comparison showing the same evidential criterion applied differently to structurally similar religious and atheist propositions, while addressing O’Connor’s positive appeal to evil and hiddenness rather than treating atheism as one undifferentiated belief system. Locked score: 69; logicalCoherence 75, evidenceWarrant 52, responsiveness 74, relevanceBurden 81, precisionClarity 73, calibrationCharity 57.

Alex O'Connor — section score 80/100

Criticism of organized monotheism can accompany a positive atheistic case, principally from evil and divine hiddenness, despite New Atheism’s acknowledged shortcomings.

Strongest feature: O’Connor prevents criticism of New Atheism from becoming criticism of atheism by identifying evil and divine hiddenness as affirmative considerations supporting his continuing rejection of popular monotheistic truth claims. Principal limitation: Naming two arguments is not equivalent to developing them, and the excerpt acknowledges that there is not much more without explaining their premises, evidential force, or relationship to alternative conceptions of God. Live burden: He needed to show why these arguments survive theistic replies, how strongly they support atheism rather than agnosticism, and whether New Atheism itself presented them responsibly enough to inherit their credibility. Locked score: 72; logicalCoherence 75, evidenceWarrant 54, responsiveness 79, relevanceBurden 80, precisionClarity 73, calibrationCharity 70 overall consequentially.

Morality, scripture, and internal critique

32:37-43:02

Alister McGrath — section score 66/100

The new covenant leaves most Old Testament law nonbinding, so ancient slavery codes do not prescribe present Christian conduct under Christianity’s different hermeneutical scheme.

Strongest feature: McGrath clearly states the Christian hermeneutical distinction between covenants and explains why Old Testament slavery legislation does not function as presently binding instruction for Christians. Principal limitation: Present applicability is not O’Connor’s central historical challenge, because discontinuing a rule does not explain why the same continuous God previously authorized or tolerated it; the exception for the Ten Commandments also receives no governing rationale. Live burden: McGrath needed to defend the former moral permissibility, explain principled continuity and discontinuity, and show how a benevolent divine character remains coherent across covenants rather than only correcting Dawkins’s claims about contemporary practice. Locked score: 69; logicalCoherence 69, evidenceWarrant 66, responsiveness 64, relevanceBurden 74, precisionClarity 80, calibrationCharity 66.

Alex O'Connor — section score 89/100

Even without objectively grounding slavery’s wrongness, an emotivist atheist can test whether Christianity’s God-grounded morality accommodates Old Testament authorization of slavery.

Strongest feature: O’Connor carefully distinguishes external condemnation from internal consistency testing, allowing an unsettled emotivist to ask whether Christianity’s own objective, God-grounded morality can accommodate divinely authorized slavery. Principal limitation: His tentative metaethical position complicates the rhetoric of moral criticism, while the excerpt initially assumes rather than textually establishes the character, scope, and divine status of the relevant Old Testament commands. Live burden: He needed to prove the scriptural authorization, address contextual or progressive-revelation accounts, and specify whether historical permissibility contradicts divine goodness, moral immutability, Christian interpretation, or merely contemporary believers’ intuitions. Locked score: 85; logicalCoherence 89, evidenceWarrant 75, responsiveness 85, relevanceBurden 90, precisionClarity 86, calibrationCharity 90.

Social legacy, polemics, and religious harms

44:35-55:13

Alister McGrath — section score 73/100

New Atheism’s arrogance, overstatement, and stridency created cultural pressure that pushed believers toward society’s edges and discouraged candid discussion of their faith.

Strongest feature: McGrath identifies a plausible social mechanism linking polemical rhetoric to believers’ reluctance to disclose faith, and connects contributors’ reported reactions to his desired restoration of respectful public discussion. Principal limitation: The move generalizes from reported feelings, Marilynne Robinson’s formulation, and book contributors without measuring prevalence, establishing causation, distinguishing criticism from exclusion, or considering believers who experienced greater openness. Live burden: McGrath needed comparative testimony or social evidence showing that New Atheist rhetoric materially produced marginalization, then explain why this cultural cost outweighs benefits from making religious authority more publicly contestable. Locked score: 73; logicalCoherence 76, evidenceWarrant 56, responsiveness 81, relevanceBurden 82, precisionClarity 74, calibrationCharity 64.

Alex O'Connor — section score 79/100

Shaming believers is ineffective, yet New Atheism’s abrasive style partly reacted to forceful evangelical media and the incentives of compressed broadcast confrontation.

Strongest feature: O’Connor unequivocally rejects shame as ineffective while reconstructing the abrasive style as a comprehensible response to evangelical polemics, media forcefulness, and short-form broadcast incentives rather than gratuitous hostility. Principal limitation: Explaining a tactic’s origin does not justify it or answer McGrath’s alleged cultural harm, and the North American media examples may not characterize most believers, scholarship, audiences, or the movement’s broader output. Live burden: He needed evidence that reactive context materially shaped New Atheist rhetoric, plus an account of whether understandable mimicry mitigates responsibility when the tactic remains strategically ineffective and socially exclusionary. Locked score: 77; logicalCoherence 83, evidenceWarrant 62, responsiveness 77, relevanceBurden 74, precisionClarity 82, calibrationCharity 90.

Conversion narratives, religious experience, and hiddenness

1:04:22-1:14:25

Alister McGrath — section score 79/100

Twelve varied cases show New Atheism catalyzing movement toward faith, without claiming prevalence, and suggest that its strident tone sometimes defeated its intended purpose.

Strongest feature: McGrath carefully limits the evidential claim, presenting twelve varied cases as demonstrations of possible counterproductive pathways rather than pretending they establish population-level conversion rates or net effects. Principal limitation: Selected case studies cannot reveal typicality, causal prevalence, selection effects, competing conversions toward atheism, or whether tone rather than stronger counterarguments produced the reported changes. Live burden: He needed a transparent selection method, comparison cases, and process evidence distinguishing catalyst from background causes, while explaining how occasional reversal bears upon overall failure when he expressly disclaims quantitative judgment. Locked score: 82; logicalCoherence 84, evidenceWarrant 72, responsiveness 82, relevanceBurden 81, precisionClarity 87, calibrationCharity 93 overall.

Alex O'Connor — section score 85/100

Dissatisfaction with Dawkins no more refutes atheism than harmful parental Christianity refutes Christianity; such conversions target one culturally declining version of atheism.

Strongest feature: O’Connor’s symmetrical parental-Christianity analogy cleanly exposes the scope error: personal failure by one presentation can undermine that presentation without refuting the larger worldview it represents. Principal limitation: McGrath explicitly framed the cases as catalysts and illustrations rather than a deductive refutation of atheism, so describing the book as an “attack” risks answering a stronger claim than the excerpt establishes. Live burden: O’Connor needed to acknowledge the narrower counterproductive-impact thesis, then show why Dawkins’s prominence and style were insufficiently representative of New Atheism for those reversals to count materially against the movement. Locked score: 88; logicalCoherence 90, evidenceWarrant 79, responsiveness 92, relevanceBurden 89, precisionClarity 89, calibrationCharity 89 overall overwhelmingly effective.