About twenty years ago, four writers made the case against God in plain view. They were Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, the so-called Four Horsemen. I think they dismantled that case. They did for me.
Before Dawkins I called myself agnostic. Now I can say with conviction that I am an atheist, though, like Dawkins, not a pure 7 on his scale of theistic probability. God is very improbable, and I live on the assumption that he is not there.
Yet belief barely moved. Americans with no religion rose from about 7 percent in 1991 to 29 percent, and that rise has paused since 2019. Belief in God or a universal spirit still stands at 83 percent. Michael Hout and Claude Fischer found that most who left were “unchurched believers”: they left the pews, not the sacred.
The drift came mainly from generations, each less religious than the last, and partly from politics. As religion fused with the right, liberals left fastest. Their Christian share fell from 62 to 37 percent since 2007. New Atheism named a change it did not cause.
That fits what I think about changing minds: arguments rarely do it, and norms, messengers, and institutions do. What wearies me is that so many learned readers did not budge either. Intelligence and reflection are separate, and the models installed in childhood stick like velcro. I think Pinker’s Better Angels met the same unfair resistance from smart people. The best-argued reply came from Ross Douthat, whose 2025 book Believe argues that everyone should be religious.
So those of us the Horsemen convinced should say so openly, and build on their work. One question they left open still matters. Churches gave people community, ritual, and shared meaning, and nothing secular has matched them yet. The pull toward something larger is evolved, so it will not vanish with belief. It needs secular homes.