Mariano Grimbank (aka. True Free Thinker) is a Christian who for years has fought the new atheism on the internet. In the above video, Grimbank presents evidence for the decline of online interest in atheism, naturalism and materialism. From this evidence, we cannot conclude anything about whether the number of atheists have increased or decreased, but certainly we can conclude that the online interest (i.e. the interest shown by people who connect themselves to the internet in order to search information about atheism) has decreased in comparison with previous years.
In my opinion, there are a bunch of factors which could explain this phenomenon:
1-The extremely bad and sophomoric philosophical arguments of the new atheists.
In their self-contragutalory, arrogant, ego-centered, "smarter-than-you" kind of mindset common among atheists, specially among the new atheists, they didn't realize that taking a public stance in favor of atheism (in a world in which over 90% of human beings are theists of a kind or another) could backfire: Leading and sophisticated defenders of theism would appear to defend theism and expose the sophomoric fallacies of these new atheist "intellectuals".
The result has been that the main arguments of the new atheists have been shown and exposed to be clearly fallacious and even destructive of science itself (if such arguments were consistently employed), not only by theists, but by sophisticated atheists too. Consider Richard Dawkins' main argument against theism:
2-The moral poverty of atheism as a worldview:
Most people, including atheists, have not reflected objectively on the implications of an atheist worldview for topics like morality, consciousness, free will and so forth. They simply take for granted that all of these phenomena are independent of a God-based worldview (this underlies the common sophomoric objection that "You don't need to be religious to be good", or "atheists can be good too", which is clearly irrelevant and not in dispute: What is in dispute if whether the non-personalistic, purely mechanistic-materialistic and blind naturalistic Darwinian worldview of contemporary atheism can ground person-relative properties and phenomena like free will, rationality, consciousness, objective moral values, moral responsability and so forth, which are clearly spiritual in nature and hence in home with theism but strongly at variance with the naturalistic-materialistic metaphysics of atheism).
And this is NOT an insight discovered by theists or "religious" people, but something fully recognized and conceded by atheists themselves (when they are not doing public relations or propaganda for atheism), as I've shown with irrefutable evidence.
So, you can watch (and expect) that Richard Dawkins will concede not having non-arbitrary moral grounds for rejecting rape:
The transcript of the above video:
Justin Brierley: When you make a value judgement don't you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say that the reason this is good is that it's good. And you don't have any way to stand on that statement.
Richard Dawkins: My value judgement itself could come from my evolutionary past.
Justin Brierley: So therefore it's just as random in a sense as any product of evolution.
Richard Dawkins: You could say that, it doesn't in any case, nothing about it makes it more probable that there is anything supernatural.
Justin Brierley: Ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.
Richard Dawkins: You could say that, yeah
.
End of the transcript.
Sophisticated atheist philosophers have articulated Dawkins' insight in a more careful way. So, atheist philosopher of science Alexander Rosenberg comments: "One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours)... Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. Alex Rosenberg, in his article "The Disenchanted Naturalistic Guide to Reality". Emphasis in blue added
3-The public debates in colleges and universities (and made public on the internet) among atheists and theists have shown not only the extremely bad arguments of atheists, but the intellectual sophistication of theists, who tend to win those debates.
Theistic debaters like William Lane Craig, John Lennox and others tend to win clearly their debates against the new atheists and other atheist professors.
Craig for example has debated all of the new atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Wolpert, etc.), and in some cases has forced them to make painfully ridiculous objections and concessions which reveal their pseudo-intellectualism, irrationality, moral deficiences and dishonest sophistry, for example:
Or (look at Wolpert's arrogance and self-assurance while defending a clearly stupid, inept, mentally retarded argument, which was instrumental in my discovery of Jime's Iron Law):
Or:
How can you expect that such kind of atheists would pose a serious challenge for sophisticated forms of theism? They simply have not the intellectual level nor competence for matching it.
Since most people, including some atheists, are smart enough to realize these expressions of intellectual and moral poverty, many have begun to question the basis of their atheism, or at least, if the "new atheists" are the best representatives of the atheistic worldview. So, the decline of online interest in atheism is not surprising.
If you (like me) think that atheism is false and morally dangerous, you have an ethical obligation to help to support this anti-atheistic cause (regardless of your spiritual or religious beliefs). You have to help that these kinds of atheistic charlatanism, pseudo-intellectualism, irrationalism and sophistry be exposed and widely rejected.
The best way to help this cause is sharing in your blog or website the internet debates between leading atheists and the best theistic debaters, and let the people to draw their own conclusions.
They will see by themselves the intellectual and moral poverty of contemporary atheism.
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