The 2008 presidential primaries saw religious fundamentalism take center stage. Yet in recent years, books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer and Daniel Dennett that explicitly reject religion and faith have become bestsellers, and conferences by secular and skeptic groups fill huge meeting halls. These new atheists favor reason and science, civil liberties and, to a growing extent, free markets.
Ed Hudgins, executive director of The Atlas Society, will argue that the new atheists’ principal weakness is in moral theory. Objectivism offers a moral standard—the life of man-qua-man—that is consistent with and necessitated by their views on objective reality, reason, and respect for the individual. Further, Objectivism offers a perspective on morality that is consistent with recent insights about human evolution and psychology.
The growth in the secular and skeptic movements offers opportunities for Objectivism (the alternative to the nihilist cultural left and the religious/traditionalist cultural right) to itself become an even more important influence on the state of the culture.