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The New Atheists — the hyper-rationalist anti-religious movement of which Harris was once a star — are not new anymore. Quite the opposite. The enlightened, progressive, secular left wing has turned on them as they struggled with their own scandals of intolerance, Islamophobia, sexism, and sophist sloganeering.

“It was a bit like a balloon. Once it was pricked, it went nowhere,” said Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology at Florida State University with a focus on Darwinism, and an expert on the history and philosophy of science.

Ruse knows popular atheism’s ebb-and-flow dynamic well. He saw it at a crisis point in 1982 when, as a professor at the University of Guelph, he went to Arkansas to be an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union in a court challenge to the teaching of “creation science” in schools, along with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who is known for his view that religion and science do not undermine each other.

It was like the Scopes Monkey Trial all over again. Ruse compared this experience to “going over the top at the Somme,” and said it gives him “street credentials” in the atheism world. More recently, he has found himself using that cred to criticize those who take atheism too far, especially Dawkins, whom he compared to Donald Trump as someone who argues by “trivializing the stuff into slogans.”

Photo by Michael Stravato/The New York Times

So Ruse recognized the more recent cultural shift that befell the West in the years after 9/11, when George W. Bush was in the White House, presiding over a religiously themed clash of civilizations. Soon enough, Stephen Harper was in Sussex Drive inspiring fears of a hidden Christianist agenda, and Benedict was in Rome as the most unsympathetic and doctrinaire pope in memory. There was even another American court case on evolution in schools, again led by the ACLU, as a Pennsylvania school board tried to require teaching of Intelligent Design, a pseudo-scientific theory of biological origins that the court found to be religious, and thus a violation of the First Amendment.