New Atheism: its nature, foundations, and background

Abstract

This article deals with the New Atheism as one of the most important anti-religious currents in the present day. It came to the surface of public opinion during the first decade of this century. Its spokesmen, in the first place by popularizing the natural sciences, and then by leaning on a naturalistic worldview, and finally under the pretext of terrorist attacks and the behavior of some religious fundamentalists and religious extremist currents, launched a strong attack against religion and religious beliefs. With the same approach, they are emphasizing on the conflict between science and religion, and see the theory of evolution and its most important component, natural selection, enough to explain everything. In contrast, according to the theologies of Abrahamic religions, we can insist on the compatibility of science and religion. So we can find that these religions not only insist on the importance of the reason and intellectual thinking, but also use the achievements of the reason in natural sciences and scientific theories.

Keywords

• new atheism
• theory of evolution
• natural selection
• religion and science