Memory is a peculiar thing. I have no idea what I was doing on September 10, 2001, but I vividly recall exactly where I was and what I was doing the morning of September 11, 2001.
I was a first-year astrophysics graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. I’d fallen sick that morning—far too sick to go to work. Bent over, my head swimming, I reached for the landline from my air mattress in my tiny, unfurnished apartment to call in sick. The administrative assistant’s response puzzled me: “Someone has flown a plane into one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York, so I’m not sure anyone’s coming in today anyway.” I instantly pictured a small propeller plane carelessly crashing into the side of one of the towers. A few broken windows, maybe, with a wrecked two-seater and debris on the ground below. Why wouldn’t anyone come to work because of that? Not in a million years could I have imagined the reality.
I crawled to the other room and turned on the TV, searching for the news. Not a few broken windows and a mangled Cessna on the ground. Smoke billowing out of a gaping 767-shaped hole near the top of the north tower. Like so many other Americans that day, my mind couldn’t process the image. Everything else fell away and the world narrowed to what was happening in lower Manhattan at that moment. Then, live on TV, another Boeing 767 slammed into the south tower.
The mental video that plays in my head, to this day, is of the towers collapsing. Two hundred and twenty floors of concrete and steel pancaking down, even as rescue personnel raced into the buildings to save their occupants. Stunned New Yorkers, frozen on the streets, their minds struggling to process the horror before them, slowly realizing they needed to flee from the massive clouds of dust and debris hurtling toward them.
That morning I watched two towers fall. In the years that followed I watched a different kind of collapse—the attempt to pull the Christian foundation out from under the civilization that had produced both the science I was studying and the country I lived in.
It would be an understatement to say that much changed after that day. American geopolitics was turned on its head. Wars began. Travel on any kind of public transportation felt like a gamble. Many feared this was just the beginning of a new America beset by international terror. And like a bitter phoenix, the New Atheist movement rose from the ashes of that horrible time. Seeking to blame religion in general for 9/11 and nearly every societal ill of civilization before and after, the Four Horsemen of the New Atheist movement—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins—thundered into the public sphere.
I was no longer an atheist in 2001. I’d become a theist the summer of 1999, but I wasn’t yet Christian. It’s been so long, it’s now difficult to recall the moment I seriously began to consider religion. Gerald Schroeder’s book, The Science of God, randomly spotted on a shelf in an Austin bookstore, ignited my interest. I began to explore the book’s premises, opening a Bible for the first time in my life to test its claims. A few years later, I emerged from that experience utterly convinced, not only that God was real, but that the Bible faithfully chronicled His deeds and relationship with us. In 2006, the same year Richard Dawkins published his landmark book, The God Delusion, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
This was before smartphones, social media, and wi-fi. Most people still had landlines, and only about half of American homes had access to the internet in the early 2000s. In the online world, blogs were king, and that’s where I spent much of my free time. Fresh with the zeal of my conversion, I hit the blogosphere ready to debate religion and atheism, especially as it related to science, naively expecting good-faith discussions about the evidence. Instead, I found myself in a realm saturated by the arrogance, over-confidence, and self-importance of the New Atheist movement. In the place of evidence, I read Sam Harris’ vacuous slogans. Rather than arguments, I was glove-slapped with Hitchens’ empty witticisms. It was tedious and annoying.
A year after my conversion, my grad student book club chose The God Delusion as our book of the month. Dawkins, the natural scientist, the author of The Selfish Gene, the unofficial king of the New Atheist movement—finally, a worthy opponent, I thought. Expecting substance, carefully-weighed evidence, and challenging arguments, what I got was boring, empty polemics. Chapter titles were promising, but one after another, they failed to deliver. Chapter 4 was the low point. Titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” it slid from discussing the appearance of design into complaints about what jerks Christians are. Utter disappointment. I felt like a fresh, young boxer finally getting to spar with one of the greats, only to find he was now all flash and no substance.
I couldn’t believe a scientist of this caliber would begin his “analysis” by carelessly lumping the great religions of the world into one “faith” group. Here was a world-renowned biologist, a person who has demonstrated care in distinguishing between things that look similar on the surface but are not the same, doing precisely the opposite. In The Genetic Book of the Dead Dawkins highlighted the example of the pill woodlouse and the pill millipede: when they roll into a ball they look almost identical. Yet one is a crustacean and the other is a myriapod. Despite their similar appearance, they have completely different body plans, ancestry, and biology. Dawkins took pains to distinguish between these tiny creatures, yet he looked at the great religions of the world and decided it was fine to dump them all into the same category.
On that basis—armed with empty mottos, bad-faith talking points, specious arguments, and cherry-picked data, and propelled by the emotional fallout of one of the worst days in American history—the New Atheists sought to change the religious landscape of the West. Their aim: to remove the foundation of our civilization that was built over long centuries. They imagined a fairytale result but had no real idea of the actual consequences. Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens passed away years ago and their influence largely passed with them. Sam Harris moved the fight onto different ground—meditation, his Making Sense podcast, and the culture war over Islamism and the American left. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 he was still talking about the second plane and his book, The End of Faith. Richard Dawkins remains but he has, in an odd sense, evolved. In 2024 he called himself a “cultural Christian” and said Christianity is a “fundamentally decent religion” in a way he does not think Islam is. When asked whether the New Atheists had thought about what would replace the faith they attacked, he answered simply: “No.” He still thinks Christianity’s doctrines are nonsense, but he has noticed—rather late—that he prefers the civilization those doctrines built over the alternatives.
Ironically, The God Delusion ended up supporting my faith. Maybe Dawkins would be appalled by this, but it’s the truth. I hadn’t realized it for most of my young life, but as an atheist, my worldview was built on a weak foundation. When I first noticed the cracks as a university student, I found little comfort from the atheist intellectuals I knew of at the time. Richard Dawkins became the reigning king in the early 2000s, and as a new Christian, I intended to look back at his body of work, not for support, but to see if my newfound faith could withstand the challenge. Reading The God Delusion was disappointing—it offered very little challenge—but it was an eye-opening experience to realize the New Atheist Goliath was really just a lumbering weakling in shiny armor.
Twenty-five years later, the dust has settled, and Dawkins’ scientific sloppiness looks even worse in hindsight. A biologist who took great care in his own scientific field was willing to treat the faith that built the universities, the hospitals, and the moral vocabulary of the West as interchangeable with the ideology that flew airliners full of people into the twin towers. The New Atheists wanted a world without religion. They helped get us part-way there: religious “nones” are now the fastest-growing religious group in the U.S., but the needle hasn’t moved on atheism—its numbers remain more or less unchanged. What they helped produce was a confused world that still has religion, but is losing its ability to value evidence and reasoned arguments, has no idea what constitutes individual dignity, and struggles to define purpose and meaning in life.
Twenty years ago, I became Christian, not in spite of the evidence, but because of it. The universe I was studying looked much more like the result of a Word deliberately spoken than a blind cosmic accident. I found the historical evidence for the divinity of Jesus Christ virtually unassailable. A civilization built on the ideals and assumptions of Christianity was more appealing to me than any other. The message of Dawkins and the other New Atheists has been highly destructive on a societal level, but in my own life it has accomplished something useful. It showed me that the loudest case against God was not a carefully-weighed argument from otherwise meticulous intellectuals. It was a reaction—understandable, human, but still a reaction—to the horrific sight of burning buildings and falling steel.
Memory is peculiar. I can’t tell you what I was doing the morning of September 10, 2001. I can tell you exactly where I was twenty-four hours later. And I can tell you what I found when I finally opened the book that was supposed to finish religion for good. The twin towers fell. The arguments for God, for Jesus Christ, and for the foundation of our civilization, when I examined them, did not.
***
Related, and worth the read:
In Memoriam: Twenty-five Years: A vivid, harrowing, and ultimately touching reflection on what it was like to live in New York City during and following the events of 9/11. By my friend, PhD biochemist and atheist-turned-Christian, Sy Garte.
Note: My workload has doubled this semester, so I’ve been less present on Notes, X, and in the comments. I’m hoping that, once I get the swing of this new schedule, I’ll be more involved.
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I likewise recall that morning perfectly, with a similar series of thoughts: my Mom, from Brooklyn, moved to WI after being kicked out of her NYC college after a McCarthy-era arrest, for picketing for a labor union (she still has a soft place in her heart for communism), —took us to the Empire State Building, when I was young; telling us of that floor still-closed, after being hit by a plane when she was 16. So working outdoors at a shopping center I thought the same, “a private plane accident”…until the second tower was hit, as shop owners reported the latest from their doors.
I was saved earlier in history and earlier in my life, at age 21 in 1980, however, after refusing confirmation at 12 in Barack Obama’s denomination, the (northern!) UCC, where my Mom, though not born again, dutifully took us, she having been a cultural Christian.
Sadly, as an aside, when I’d told that same pastor that I couldn’t say “Jesus was born of a virgin” and had “risen again”, he told me “you don’t have to look at it that way!” —[Like you, in your reading of Dawkins, that helped ME lose all faith: not in atheists, but in “fake Christians,” such as were the only ones I’d met so far; or, who were, at least, the most outspoken ones in my life!]
I had been a Christian longer than you, on 911; and was already looking for signs in life that I myself might get those (controversial in our Christian world) “PROPHECIES”, that we are not to “despise”, —from outside our dimension.
As I worked, that day, doing parking lot maintenance, (for some background, I often found tools, money, and even a Luini oil painting, of two ships: a knock off of a well-known artist, a painting that still graces our fireplace)
That morning, I first found a 1/4” nut driving bit (for a hand drill or impact wrench) on the pavement. But it had no hexagonal flats inside, and was useless. Perhaps a Chinese-made manufacturing error. As I contemplated the towers disaster and walked farther, I looked down and found another 1/4” nut driving bit which was functional: and the thought came to me, given this statistical anomaly, and my heightened receptivity to any input that disastrous day, that in the tower bombing, even with thousands already thought dead, we, in this attack we had dodged a bullet, by Grace; as they were reporting the low occupancy at that hour: but that more, and deadlier things were to come. I haven’t shaken that feeling .
Yesterday, as I finally got some vacation with my wife this week in WI (pretty busy this time of year, in my outdoor work, and sorry to drive you from YOUR busy schedule , if you do read this long comment!) I was finally re-reading “The Last Battle”, by CS Lewis. My Mom, in the “fair and balanced” way of the old-school liberal, had read us all 7 Narnia books, starting when I was 8, when my physicist Dad (who didn’t attend church except Christmas) had decided it was unnatural for us kids to be glued to our B&W Motorola television for hours; and refused to take the TV to the lab and fix it one last time…No TV, for four years, was the result.
So many prophetic things about a child’s book! I think every Christian ADULT should read what WWI & WWII and The Lord had taught Lewis about Islam (ref: the Caloemenes) libertarians (ref: the Dwarfs) secular nonbelievers who wish to rid the earth of religion by stealth and syncretism, (ref: Ginger the Cat, and the Calormene General,) and also the social and political Libertarians, who wish neither God nor Satan & the state, to rule them, but wind up in a dark limbo, unable in death to differentiate good from evil, even as they’d been unable, in life, to do so. And your comment about the dissatisfaction with all religion, which followed the brief 911 “revival” of some, is so amazingly illustrated later in that book by the treachery of the secular Dwarfs, who ridicule both Aslan and Tash, [God and Satan] and turn the talking animals toward confusion and inaction.
Here is a quote from that book; so many more quotes were equally prophetic; but to keep this comment shorter I’ll only pick one: which stuck out to me yesterday, as I looked also at a Charlie Kirk comment, saying “Islam is the sword the elites are using, to cut the throat of America:”
“FOR A LONG TIME THEY COULD NOT speak nor even shed a tear. Then the Unicorn stamped the ground with his hoof, and shook his mane, and spoke.
"Sire," he said, "there is now no need of counsel. We see that the Apes plans were laid deeper than we dreamed of. Doubtless he has been long in secret traffic with The Tisroc, [an Islamic doppelgänger,] and as soon as he had found the lion-skin [Skin of the lie which will create the “Crislam” religion commensurate with “Tashlan” the antichrist Lewis figure], he sent him word to make ready his navy for the taking of Cair Paravel and all Narnia. Nothing now remains for us seven but to go back to Stable Hill, proclaim the truth, and take the adventure that Aslan sends us. And if, by a great marvel, we defeat those thirty Calormenes who are with the Ape, then to turn again and die in battle with the far greater host of them that will soon march from Cair Paravel.")
The rise of once-“conservative” influencers turncoats, who’d begun with us fighting and ridiculing the Deep State, but now, like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes (“conservative” since high school) but now slander, and shoot deadly arrows at both God’s Millenial Embassy, Israel, and the Jews & Christians who support them, surely show the “Dwarf” race to have been a piece of prophetic literary genius.
Sarah, thanks for this essay, another one I can relate to so closely, as you know. I had exactly the same reaction to God Delusion, and for the same reasons. And thanks for the plug about 911. God Bless.