New Atheism: The Opiate of the Masses
ARTICLE • The New Atheism, while rejecting God, clings to his gifts: purpose, meaning, morality, and hope—offering hollow, synthetic substitutes that mimic the very “delusion” it critiques.
Read time: 12 min
Jewish by birth, Lutheran by upbringing, and atheist by conviction, Karl Marx came to see religion as a man-made crutch for coping with suffering and to justify social inequalities. He famously quipped:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the masses” (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844).
"Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes”—faith in God is the analgesic, the pain-numbing, feel-good fantasy of people who can’t cope with reality. Hold this in mind for later.
Why Atheists Exercise Faith
It’s often rightly pointed out that atheism alleges an impossible task: to disprove a universal negative—namely, that "God does not exist." Unlike denying the existence of a particular object in a specific place, denying the existence of a being who is by definition transcendent, omnipresent, and immaterial requires a very different kind of knowledge—namely, exhaustive knowledge of all possible reality.
To assert with certainty that God does not exist would require omniscience—that is, complete knowledge of all time, space, dimensions, and metaphysical possibilities. The atheist would need to search not only the known universe but all potential realms of being in which God could exist. But since no finite being can possess this kind of comprehensive awareness, the claim “God does not exist” cannot be proven empirically or logically without becoming self-defeating. In a twist of irony, only a being with God's attributes could confidently declare the non-existence of God. Thus, the claim to know that God does not exist inadvertently assumes the very thing it denies.
For this reason, many honest skeptics retreat to a more modest position known as agnosticism, which simply states that God’s existence is unknown or unknowable. However, dogmatic atheism—insisting with certainty that there is no God—commits a logical fallacy by pretending to possess knowledge that is epistemologically inaccessible to any finite mind. In philosophical terms, it is an assertion of a universal negative without the necessary epistemic vantage point to verify it. This leaves atheism, not as a position of proven certainty, but as a belief held in the absence of exhaustive evidence—ironically making it a kind of “secular faith” in its own right.
But What If Atheism Is Actually True?
Let’s be generous to our committed atheist friends. Suppose it is true. What then? Like King Midas who got his wish only to regret it, “success” for atheism would be a hollow victory, indeed. After all, what kind of world is a godless world?
Perhaps the result of there being no God is best described by well-known atheists themselves:
Bertrand Russell (Atheist Philosopher): “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving... his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms... All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction... The whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” — “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903)
Albert Camus (Atheist Philosopher and Novelist): “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” — “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942)
Jean-Paul Sartre (Atheist Existentialist Philosopher): “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself... There is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it... Man is condemned to be free.” — Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
Peter Singer (Atheist Ethicist): “We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation made in the image of God, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing an immortal soul.” — Practical Ethics (1979)
Thomas Nagel (Atheist Philosopher): “Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that’s nothing to worry about... But we can’t help thinking how ridiculous our lives will seem from the cosmic point of view... It wouldn’t matter if we had never existed.” — What Does It All Mean? (1987)
Stephen Jay Gould (Atheist Paleontologist and Evolutionary Biologist): “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy... because comets struck the earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance... We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer—but none exists.” — Wonderful Life (1989)
Richard Dawkins (Atheist Biologist and Author): “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” — River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995)
William Provine (Atheist Biologist and Historian of Science): “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me... There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.” — “Darwin Day Keynote Address,” University of Tennessee (1998)
Julian Baggini (Atheist Philosopher): “If there is no single moral authority... we have to in some sense ‘create’ values for ourselves... there is no natural morality, just as there is no natural language.” — Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (2003)
Alex Rosenberg (Atheist Philosopher of Science): “What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto. Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?... Is there free will? Not a chance!... What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.” — The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011)
Sam Harris (Atheist Neuroscientist and Author): “There is no functionally important difference between you and a dead body that is now rotting. The only difference is that your brain is still doing a few things. When it stops, it will be exactly the same as a dead body.” — Waking Up (2014)
A bleak picture, isn’t it? Others have pointed out a longer list of values for which “the masses” long but which are ultimately impossible if atheism is true. These are precious commodities that—in turning to gold by the atheist’s touch—arguably become incalculable losses for humanity:
No Eternal Justice: Evil and injustice go unpunished. There's no ultimate reckoning beyond this life for even the most heinous injustices that occure.
No Life After Death: Consciousness ends at death we cease to exist forever. There is no resurrection of the body.
No Redemption: There is no ultimate healing or restoration for human brokenness and pain. Suffering may be temporarily alleviated but not redeemed for any ultimate good.
No Eternal Relationships: Loved ones lost in death are gone forever, and relationships are permanently severed.
No Transcendent Hope: Hope is confined to this life and its temporary circumstances.
No Divine Love: There is no personal Creator who knows, loves, and cares for individuals.
No Sacred Value to Human Life: Human worth is not rooted in being made in God’s image, but—as mere advanced animals—in biological complexity or social utility.
No Foundation for Human Rights: Rights are subjectively conferred by society, not endowed by a Creator, and can be taken away as easily as given.
No Soul: Human beings are just matter and energy. There is no immaterial aspect of human nature that endures beyond the grave.
No Ultimate Purpose: Life has no objective reason for existing. Purpose is self-assigned, subjective, and futile.
No Ultimate Meaning: The universe has no inherent meaning. Nothing ultimately matters. All meaning is temporary, personal, and futile.
No Ultimate Destiny: There is no final goal or destination for humanity or the universe. Humaity will end with the eventual firey contraction or cold expasion of the universe.
No Absolute Morality: Right and wrong are human constructs, shaped by culture and evolution, not by any divine standard. Might makes right, and good and evil are fictitious constructs.
No Cosmic Story: History has no overarching narrative or divine plot. It is random and meaningless.
No Ultimate Reason for or Resolution to Suffering: Suffering is senseless and accidental, not something that will ever be redeemed or woven into a greater story.
No Eternal Significance of Good Deeds: Acts of love, sacrifice, or heroism are ultimately pointless, fleeting, and forgotten.
No Objective Calling or Vocation: Work may feel meaningful, but at the end of the day it is just a mode of survial that will be eternally snuffed in due time.
If you managed to read through the atheistic quotations and the list of atheistic inevitabilities, you can see from one vantage point that atheism forfeits much more than anything it provides. It cuts the legs out from under our deepest longing, severing humanity from God to float endlessly and aimlessly into soulless oblivion.
New Atheism: the New Opiate of the Masses
In response to the bleak implications of atheism articulated by earlier thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others already mentioned, a new wave of atheists has emerged with a bold mission: to rescue morality, meaning, and human value from the wreckage of a godless cosmos. Often referred to as the New Atheists, figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett have not only rejected religion but sought to argue that atheism can offer a robust framework for human flourishing.
Purpose, Ethics, and & Existential Significance?
These public figures recognize the universal human longing for purpose, ethics, and existential significance—but unlike their predecessors, they believe these values can be preserved without divine grounding. Science, reason, and evolutionary psychology are invoked as tools to explain and justify moral behavior, while subjective meaning is embraced as a sufficient replacement for transcendent purpose. In doing so, New Atheists attempt to assure modern people that a godless universe is not a hopeless one. However, the question remains: can these foundations uphold the crushing weight of justice, purpose, meaning, immortality and the rest? Or is this simply a secular retelling of the very myths they once sought to demolish? Can they have their cake and eat it too?
The Godless Delusion?
Daniel Dennett (Atheist Philosopher and Cognitive Scientist)
"There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination." — Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995)
"That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul." — Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006)
Richard Dawkins (Atheist Biologist and Author)
"Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing." — The God Delusion (2006)
Sam Harris (Atheist Neuroscientist)
"Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain." — The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010)
Christopher Hitchens (Atheist Author and Polemicist)
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it." — God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
"We're told that we wouldn't know a right from wrong action, wouldn't be able to tell, let alone to perform one, if we were not already the property of a celestial dictator, whom we must love and fear at the same time." — God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
The New Synthetic Opiate: How New Atheists Argue for the Things We Can’t Live Without
The New Atheist movement seeks to reclaim traditionally theistic values such as purpose, meaning, morality, justice, and hope within an atheistic worldview. Rather than dismiss these concepts as illusions, they attempt to ground them in human experience, reason, and science.
Meaning and Purpose
According to Dawkins and Dennett, meaning and purpose need not be anchored in a cosmic plan. In contrast to old atheism that was nihilisticaly self-aware and denied that meaning was a possibility in a godless universe, in Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins writes that science itself can inspire awe and personal meaning—personal meaning in the face of ultimate meaninglessness. Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, argues that evolution does not destroy meaning but can explain the emergence of our capacity for it. Purpose is thus redefined not as something given by a deity but as something created by conscious beings reflecting on their own existence—personal purpose in the face of ultimate pointlessness.
Morality and Justice, and Hope
Morality and justice are central to Sam Harris's argument in The Moral Landscape. He claims that objective moral truths exist as facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, measurable through science. Christopher Hitchens similarly argued that morality is some how innately rooted in random evolution, asserting that human empathy, reason, and solidarity are sufficient foundations for ethics. Here, too, New Atheist stand in contrast to earlier atheists who saw both the forest and the trees.
Hope, while traditionally linked to theistic eschatology, is reframed by these secular believers in terms of progress and the human potential for self-improvement. Harris and Dennett suggest that spiritual fulfillment can come through mindfulness, wonder, and rational self-understanding, not divine revelation. Even if we are doomed to extinction and forgottenness, somehow this doesn’t stop the New Atheists from passionately telling the masses that we can flourish, and that it matters that we do so.
In sum, the New Atheists argue that although the universe may be indifferent, humans are not. Purpose and value arise not from the cosmos itself, but from the conscious, “moral” capacities of the advanced animals we self-referentially call “man the wise.” Though their arguments vary in emphasis, they converge on the belief that the human mind is both the source and the steward of the things we unavoidably cherish most—even in the absence of God.
A Theistic Response
The thinking man would be hard pressed to overlook how the New Atheists propose a new opium for the masses, inadvertently seeking out the infantile consolation that atheist psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, ridiculed when he wrote,
“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires... The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality... yet humanity cannot do without this consolation” (The Future of an Illusion,1927).
Many well-known theists have challenged the claims of the New Atheists, arguing that efforts to ground purpose, meaning, morality, justice, hope, and the rest apart from God are ultimately incoherent and superficial music-making while the Titanic sinks. Though New Atheists assert that these values can be reconstructed on naturalistic foundations, theists point out that the emperor has no clothes: such attempts are philosophically inadequate and existentially hollow—offering, at best, artificial substitutes for what only theism can truly supply.
God as the Precondition for Objective Morality
Christian philosophers like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga articulate that if God does not exist, then morality lacks any objective foundation. Concepts like right and wrong collapse into evolutionary instincts or cultural preferences completely void of obligation. Sam Harris’s appeal to the well-being of conscious creatures as a moral standard, theists contend, is ultimately arbitrary. Why should well-being be preferred, and who decides? Who is to say that Hitler’s homicidal disregard for human life is any worse that a coyote killing a herd of sheep for sport? The depot certainly was following his own innate sense of morality in the cause of Nazi superiority, was he not?
God as the Precondition for Objective Meaning
Atheists often acknowledge that their worldview entails no overarching purpose, destiny, or eternal justice. Yet, they resist the conclusion that atheism’s truth would be a hollow victory. Their answer? While there is no God-endowed meaning, there can still be self-created moments of purpose and personally defined visions of human destiny.
In a funny-if-it-weren’t-so-sad twist of irony, this mimics the very thing atheists have traditionally mocked: fictitious, groundless hope. In the end, atheism becomes the true opiate of the masses—a euphoric analgesic without which the New Atheists dare not live. Despite lacking ultimate foundations for purpose, meaning, morality, and hope, they cling to these ideals tenaciously, even while denying the metaphysical soil in which such values can take root.
As theistic thinkers like Francis Schaeffer and John Lennox have observed, this amounts to living off the borrowed capital of theism—contriving the maximum out of a worldview that, if taken seriously, yields only a silent, indifferent universe. Atheism promises liberation, but it quietly depends on the very One it denies.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, New Atheism reveals itself not as a solution to the human longing for purpose, meaning, morality, and the rest, but as a sophisticated repackaging of the very thing it critiques—an opiate for the masses. While it claims to liberate humanity from the “delusions” of religion, it constructs a secular substitute, rooted not in transcendent truth but in subjective and ultimately futile endeavors. Despite its denial of God, it clings to God’s gifts: In doing so, it offers comfort without coherence and hope without the Hope-giver. Theism, by contrast, grounds these longings in the God who made us for himself. The values the New Atheists try to salvage are not natural products of an indifferent universe, but borrowed treasures from a worldview they reject. As such, their endeavor is not just philosophically unstable—it is existentially bankrupt. The true opiate is not God. It is atheism’s illusion that we can have all of God’s gifts without God. ❖
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Footnote: Timothy J. Harris, “New Atheism: The New Opiate of the Masses,” Practical Theologian, March 4, 2025, https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/article-z9dtw-69b3c-t5hta.
Bibliography: Harris, Timothy J. “New Atheism: The New Opiate of the Masses.” Practical Theologian, March 4, 2025. https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/article-z9dtw-69b3c-t5hta.
