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One of the key questions to ask about the New Atheism is, “What makes the New Atheism new?” Before launching too far into our interaction with this new challenge, we should recognize something from the very outset: atheism is not new. David said in the psalms, “The fool says in his heart, there is no God,” (Ps. 14:1). Even that statement, however, assumes something different from what faces us today. In the ancient world and throughout most of human history, the question was never whether or not there is a God, but which god is God? Thus, in the Old Testament, one of God’s most insistent purposes is to make clear that he is the only God, and that he will tolerate no other. That is a very different question from what is being asked today.

The word atheism did not appear in the English language until the sixteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary documents the first use of the word to 1568, when it was coined (or borrowed from another language) by Miles Coverdale. In a fairly short time, the word made its way into more common usage. Even then, it was used to describe a phenomenon that was thought to be very new—the denial of belief in God. The outward, straightforward, public rejection of belief in theism was so new at that time that it required a new word. It’s interesting to note that this happened in the wake of what is now known as the Elizabethan Settlement. Elizabeth I of Great Britain decided to settle the strife of the Reformation struggles by declaring a sort of religious toleration. “I do not intend to make windows into men’s souls,” she famously said. As a result, there was loosed within English society a degree of religious pluralism that had not existed before, including some on the periphery of society—mostly limited to the intellectual elite and some cultural cranks—who denied belief in any God. These people were considered dangerous and worthy of ostracism. In fact, they were considered worthy of a new word: atheists. Yet even after the emergence of the word in the English language there were very few people who actually denied belief in God.

Unsurprisingly, it is only after the Enlightenment that atheism became a real intellectual force. The Enlightenment produced a massive shift in the conditions of belief. In the great turn to the subject, in the division between the phenomenal and the noumenal, as Kant famously construed it, even in the rise of historical analysis and modern science, there was a great epistemological shift in Western consciousness, and the result was a new opportunity for the denial of belief in the supernatural in general and the denial of a personal supernatural God specifically. Doubt came to be considered as an intellectual tool, and there arose a culture of doubt and skepticism. In the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the conditions of belief changed dramatically.

One way to understand what happened is to consider what kind of god was left in the wake of Enlightenment thought. For example, if you consider carefully the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, it is clear that he believed in God. But it is not clear at all that he believed in a supernatural, personal God—and certainly not in a God who intervenes in human history. What was left in the wake of the Enlightenment was no longer a fairly monolithic affirmation of theism, but rather a plethora of movements that also included skeptics and freethinkers, as well as Deists and pantheists.