Emile Cammaerts remarked that 'when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything'. This certainly seems to be the case with the new atheists. Rather than believe in God they believe that our transcendent longings should be satisfied by the very objects that occasion them, rejecting out of hand the link between an innate desire and its corresponding object of desire and thereby embracing a literally absurd worldview. Rather than believe in God they believe that mind is nothing but matter in a certain arrangement that just happened to have the (naturalistically inexplicable) qualities of consciousness and intentionality, as well as the capacity to be either true or false. Rather than believe in God they believe that their beliefs give them a true insight into the nature of reality despite being products of a mindless process that moulds behavioral 'black boxes' subject only to the pragmatic requirements of survival. Rather than believe in God they believe that no one is free to rationally investigate the God question (because no one has free will), while simultaneously blaming supernaturalists for supposedly failing to live up to intellectual obligations that can't exist if naturalism is true. Rather than believe in God they believe that there are no objective moral values (while simultaneously condemning the evils of religion) else they believe that God isn't needed to ground objective value because (contra Hume, Moore, Russell, etc.) the fact that some empirically observable states of affairs are good or bad means that good and bad are nothing but empirically observable states of affairs (thereby confusing the 'is' of predication with the 'is' of identity). As Lewis complained: 'We badly need to revive formal logic". Rather than believe that Jesus is God incarnate, they believe that Jesus probably never existed (despite all the evidence being to the contrary). Rather than believe that Jesus is God incarnate, they believe that all that 'Son of God who rose from the dead' business was made up by Christians far removed from historical ground zero under the influence of pagan mythology (despite all the evidence to the contrary). Rather than believe that Jesus is God incarnate, they believe that even if early Christian beliefs about Jesus did reflect Jesus' own claims, a first-century Jew who sincerely claims to be the divine 'Son of Man' might simply be making an honest mistake!
Having swallowed all this (and far more besides) in order to avoid believing in God, the new atheists have the chutzpah to inform us that theism is, as a matter of definition, an irrational 'delusion' held in the teeth of contrary evidence! It's very tempting to regard this assertion (which is itself made in the teeth of evidence to the contrary) classic example of psychological 'projection'. It is certainly 'a bit rich' coming from a naturalistic movement busy sawing through the branch of reason upon which it so proudly professes to perch...
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