Bishop Robert Barron, Tucker Carlson talk rise of evil and hope of revival

By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, June 03, 2025

Failures of the New Atheism

Barron said that he is not a fan of the so-called New Atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, Ricard Dawkins and Sam Harris. He claimed their arguments fundamentally misunderstand the nature of God and have added nothing new to the intellectual discussion apart from an increased level of “nastiness.”

“The New Atheists emerged after September 11th, which is not surprising, because September 11th stirred to life again this old kind of Enlightenment idea: religion is irrational, therefore it's violent, because they can't settle things through argument, they have to settle them through bombs and guns and war,” Barron explained.

“That's an old argument, goes back to the 17th century. It was revived massively after September 11th. The New Atheists, I think, rode that wave in a big way.”

Barron went on to assert that the New Atheists drew their line of thought from thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, who Barron noted, at least acknowledged their Christian opponents as intellectually formidable.

The New Atheists, by contrast, derided their opposition as they would an “idiot child,” which Barron noted was “annoying,” but has pushed Christian churches to take up their old apologetic weapons from centuries past.

“They awakened the Christian churches in many ways. The apologetic weapons that we threw away 40 years ago, we were compelled to pick up again. So a lot of us got into the game to kind of battle the New Atheists and to draw upon the very rich intellectual tradition, especially of Catholicism. So in that way, they did a service to us,” he said.

Barron also dismissed the common atheist question regarding who created God by explaining that God’s existence is unconditioned and, therefore, self-existent, which makes Him incapable of having been created.

“If you ask that question, it means you haven't grasped the solution,” he said, adding those who ask it fail to grasp that “the argument leads towards something that doesn’t need to be created, that can’t be created, whose very nature is to be — and who, therefore, is eternal.”