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Review

There is a photograph from the evening of 30 September 2007 that captures something the transcript cannot. The four men sit around a low table in Christopher Hitchens’s Washington flat, glasses of Johnnie Walker Black within reach, each leaning slightly forward as though the camera has interrupted a thought already half-formed. Daniel Dennett’s hands are raised in mid-explanation; Richard Dawkins’s brow is furrowed in the particular way of someone who agrees with you but is already working out the next objection; Sam Harris smiles faintly, hands folded; Hitchens, at the head of the table, holds a cigarette in the V of his fingers and looks like a man who has just landed a blow he did not need to throw. The image is freighted with the confidence of a movement at its zenith, and that confidence is the book’s subject as much as its style. Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution is the verbatim record of that evening’s unscripted two-hour discussion, padded with new prefatory essays by three of the four and a foreword by Stephen Fry. It is also, less intentionally, a document of the movement’s internal frictions, its blinkers, and the peculiar way that a group of exceptionally intelligent people can, in the warmth of mutual regard, talk past the harder questions their project raises.

The book presents itself as a defence of a simple proposition: that religious claims must submit to rational scrutiny on the same terms as any other claim about the world. Dawkins’s opening essay sets the thematic frame by cataloguing the hubris of theological pronouncement—Archbishop Ussher’s dating of creation to 22 October 4004 BC, Pope Pius XII’s 1950 dogmatic definition of the bodily Assumption of Mary, the Catholic Encyclopedia’s “proofs” of purgatory—and contrasting it with the productive humility of scientists who openly admit they do not know how life began, what dark matter is, or what caused the Permian extinction. “We are not arrogant, not hubristic,” Dawkins writes, “to celebrate the sheer bulk and detail of what we know through science. We are simply telling the honest and irrefutable truth.” The point is familiar but well-made: the asymmetry between religious certainty and scientific provisionality is genuine, and Dawkins is at his best when he lets the catalogue of settled knowledge—atomic theory, DNA, continental drift, eclipse prediction—do the rhetorical work for him. His argument that atheism requires “intellectual courage” to accept a purely naturalistic account of existence, “to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity,” supplies the moral seriousness a polemic of this kind needs if it is not to become mere jeering.

Yet the essays also expose the strains that will run through the conversation itself. Dennett, in “Letting the Neighbours Know,” develops his metaphor of the “sacrificial anode”—the idea that ordinary people declaring their atheism in the new transparency of the internet age depolarise the issue and gradually shift social norms—but he takes care to distance himself from Hitchens’s contention that religion “poisons everything.” For Dennett, churches perform humane social functions that should be preserved and transformed, not abolished; the aim is an “evolution of avirulence,” rendering faith as harmless as astrology rather than eradicating it. Harris’s essay “In Good Company” pivots to the problem of evil through the story of a Brazilian woman bitten by a Zika-carrying mosquito, arguing that a single case of senseless suffering dismantles theological casuistry more effectively than abstract argument, and that future medical science, not prayer, will provide genuine consolation. But his insistence that “faith gives them bad reasons for doing good when good reasons are available” already presupposes a shared framework of what counts as a good reason, and the essay’s elegiac opening on Hitchens’s 2011 death—this is the only published record of their only four-way meeting—suggests a consciousness that the moment was already slipping away even as it was being transcribed.

The transcript itself opens with the charge that these four men are “strident,” and the first hour is largely a collective attempt to diagnose why religion enjoys an exemption from the criticism routinely levelled at politics, art, or the pharmaceutical industry. “Somehow we’ve all bought into it, whether we’re religious or not,” Dawkins puzzles. “And some historical process has led to this immunization of religion, this hyper-offence-taking that religion is allowed to take.” The discussion ranges quickly: Hitchens recounts his offence at Tariq Ramadan’s demand for a mere moratorium on the stoning of women rather than its abolition; Harris notes that religious moderates congratulate themselves for insights religion never produced—“Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions, and moderates argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith… Whereas it’s been enlightened from the outside; it’s been intruded upon by science.” The exchanges have the live-wire quality of intelligent dinner conversation, and when the four hit their stride—Dawkins proposing a thought experiment in which offence-taking is quantified across football teams, political parties, and creeds, Hitchens recalling H. L. Mencken’s plain mockery of Methodist believers as “the most successful anti-religious polemic there’s probably ever been in the modern world”—the reader glimpses why New Atheism felt exhilarating to its adherents. There is a genuine pleasure in watching four agile minds test an idea from multiple angles.

That pleasure, however, is inseparable from the book’s central weakness: the conversation’s format privileges rhetorical force and shared assumption over systematic argument. Hitchens’s claim that no religious figure has ever made a falsifiable prediction—“No religious person has ever been able to say what Einstein said – that if he was right, the following phenomenon would occur off the west coast of Africa during a solar eclipse. And it did”—is a fine line, but it glides past centuries of theological debate about what exactly prophecy is supposed to do. The more damaging slide occurs when the discussion turns to Islam. Hitchens calls it “the most alarmingly stated” totalitarianism because it claims to be the final revelation requiring no further inquiry, and Harris concurs, emphasising the absence of a reforming papacy. When Hitchens insists that argument against jihadism is “of no relevance” and that jihadists must be “extirpated” rather than debated, the other three grow quieter. Dawkins says he wants to focus on whether the claims are true; Dennett’s evolutionary approach cuts against the civilisational clash framing. The tension is never resolved—it is simply that Hitchens has the floor, and the transcript preserves the asymmetry. A reader coming to the book cold might reasonably conclude that the “conversation” about the most consequential political question the four address is effectively a Hitchens monologue with murmurs of assent.

This is where the book becomes a more interesting historical document than its celebratory packaging quite admits. The four diverge on genuinely significant matters. Harris, alone among them, insists on reclaiming “spiritual” and “mystical” language for the numinous experience, arguing that the felt sense of self-transcendence is a legitimate object of investigation and should not be ceded to the supernatural claims of religion. Dawkins and Dennett are visibly uncomfortable with the terminology—Dawkins later returns to Bach’s sacred music to make the point that beauty survives perfectly well without belief in the propositions behind it, that “nobody would ever say you’ve got to believe that this person existed or that the sadness that you feel really reflected something that actually happened.” Hitchens, for his part, closes the evening with the verdict that the secularists are “on the losing side politically and on the winning side intellectually,” and that the civilisation struggle may require the 82nd and 101st Airborne to confront theocracy—a position so “eccentric,” as he himself calls it, that it effectively concedes the argumentative project has failed on its own terms. These are not minor disagreements; they are fault lines that run through the whole New Atheist enterprise. The book’s real value is not in the answers it supplies but in the fact that it inadvertently preserves the questions its protagonists could not settle among themselves.

The prefatory essays, read against the transcript, deepen the picture. Dennett’s sacrificial-anode theory—that publicly declared atheism, amplified by the internet’s “hall of mirrors of mutual knowledge,” will gradually depolarise opinion—is elegant, but it takes no account of the backlash dynamics that the subsequent fifteen years have made impossible to ignore. The same internet that lets atheists find one another also supercharges identitarian religious mobilisation; the “transparency” Dennett celebrates has produced polarisation at least as often as it has produced persuasion. When he writes that the four’s “only shared dogma… is our trust in truth, evidence and honest persuasion,” the formulation is attractive but begs the question of why persuasion so rarely works in the way the model predicts. Hitchens, to his credit, is the only one who seems to sense this: his desire that the dialectic continue indefinitely, his insistence that a world wholly without faith is neither achievable nor desirable, his frank acknowledgment that he feels himself on the losing side politically—all of this cuts against the triumphalism that the book’s packaging projects. Fry’s foreword, with its Musketeers conceit and its genial framing of the conversation as a civilised alternative to “heated, sophomoric and ultimately futile conversations” of one’s student days, sets a tone of clubby good humour that papers over the genuine intellectual stakes.

The book’s genre identity as a dinner-table transcript carries a further consequence that the participants themselves do not fully examine: the near-total absence of voices that are not Anglo-American, male, and institutionally secure. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally scheduled to be a “fifth horseman,” appears only in retrospective citations; the four discuss the suffering of women under Islam at length, but no woman is in the room to speak about it. Dawkins catalogues the Islamic “control-freakery” over women with real outrage, and the point about gender subordination is well-taken, but the frame is invariably that of Western men analysing a foreign pathology. The would-say-about extraction captures this: the four argue that the Israel-Palestine conflict is driven by religious claims to sacred territory, “than which no belief could be more insane,” and Hitchens names it as the likely trigger for a nuclear civilisational conflict—but the analysis treats the material facts of dispossession and occupation as epiphenomena of bad theology. This is a characteristic move of the New Atheist mode, and the book’s format, by excluding the voices of those who might push back on it, allows the move to go unchallenged. A critic could fairly observe that the conversation’s treatment of colonialism and empire is simply null, a blank in the extraction that reflects a genuine gap in the participants’ framework.

Where the book succeeds most fully is in its insistence that the numinous and the aesthetic inheritance of religion must be rescued from the supernatural rather than abandoned to it. The recurring invocations of Bach—Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, the Christmas carols, the sheer sound-world of the sacred—serve as proof that one can be “totally moved to tears” by a work of art without believing the doctrines it was composed to serve. Larkin’s “Church Going,” Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” the Parthenon without the cult of Pallas Athena: the examples accumulate into what the four call the “great cultural project” of a secularism that does not leave the world “all chromium and steel.” This is the strongest thread in the book, not least because it points toward a positive vision rather than a merely negative critique. Harris’s defence of spiritual language, Dawkins’s insistence that biblical literacy must be preserved even as churches empty, Dennett’s call to transform rather than abolish religious institutions—these are the moments when the four sound less like a firing squad and more like people trying, however imperfectly, to imagine a world worth wanting.

Placed in its canonical context, Four Horsemen sits squarely within the rationalist and materialist traditions, drawing on the analytic epistemology that treats falsifiability and peer-competitive evidence as the gold standard for knowledge claims. Its debts to the empiricist lineage are explicit in Dawkins’s catalogue of scientific achievement and Hitchens’s invocation of Eddington’s 1919 eclipse confirmation. The book’s targets—the fine-tuning argument, the first-cause regress, the self-sealing epistemology of faith—are the standard targets of this tradition, and the arguments the four deploy (the designer is more improbable than what it explains; faith converts absence of evidence into evidence) are recognisable from Hume and Kant forward. What the book does not do is engage with the traditions that have challenged the analytic framing on its own ground—the pragmatist and phenomenological critiques of the very idea of evidence as a neutral arbiter, the genealogical accounts of how “religion” was constructed as a category in the first place. This is not a defect of the conversation so much as a boundary condition: the book is a record of four men working within a specific idiom, and the idiom’s limits are the conversation’s limits.

The weakest passages are those in which methodological modesty is abandoned in favour of sweeping historiography. Hitchens’s claim that monotheism is inherently totalitarian because it posits “The Creator whose will can’t be challenged… That is the origin of totalitarianism” is a provocative aperçu, but it treats the vastly different political theologies of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Khomeini as a single phenomenon with a single cause. The extraction’s characterisation of this as “speculative” is generous; the claim does the work of an epigram, not an argument. Similarly, when Hitchens invokes Huntington’s “Islam has bloody borders” with approval, the gesture imports an entire contested framework without acknowledging the decades of scholarship that have dismantled the clash-of-civilisations thesis. A reader who comes to the book for rigorous analysis of the relationship between religion and political violence will find memorable sentences but not sustained inquiry. The source-quality assessment—credentialed authors, extensive footnotes, but the “conversational format privileges rhetorical force, personal anecdote, and selective quotation over systematic evidence-gathering”—is exactly right, and it points to the central tension of the book as a book: the very qualities that made the evening compelling make the published record argumentatively porous.

What, then, is Four Horsemen for? It is not a systematic defence of atheism, nor a work of original philosophy, nor a reliable guide to the geopolitics of religion. It is a historical document of a particular intellectual subculture at the moment of its greatest public visibility, and it is valuable precisely as that. The book shows four skilled polemicists doing what they do best—marshalling evidence, turning an opponent’s logic against itself, finding the phrase that sticks—and it also shows, often inadvertently, what they do less well: listening to dissent from outside their circle, reckoning with the material and structural conditions that give religious identity its stubborn grip, acknowledging the possibility that rational argument alone might be insufficient to the political tasks they set themselves. Hitchens’s closing admission that he is “on the losing side politically and on the winning side intellectually” is the book’s most honest moment, because it concedes that winning the intellectual argument and winning the political struggle are not the same thing, and that the relationship between them is not straightforward. The other three do not quite answer him, and the transcript moves on. A reader in the 2020s, living through a period in which the political fortunes of secular liberalism have hardly vindicated the confidence of 2007, may find that the silence speaks louder than the conversation it follows.

Notable Quotes

The rules of all intellectual activity – whether scientific or non-scientific – spin down to one golden precept: the testing of assertions on the anvils of logic and verifiable fact.

Fry's foreword, on the rules of intellectual engagement — reason, evidence, intellectual standards

The dogma relayed from the Vatican by the cardinal in his palace, dogma that keeps Félicité on her knees, the palace stocked with wine, and the populace plied with nonsensical edicts and eschatological threats… well, that is fair and necessary game.

Fry distinguishing between the individually devout and institutional religion — religion, power, compassion, institutional critique

Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn't have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points.

Dawkins on the arrogance of presuming cosmic significance for human conduct — religious hubris, cosmic narcissism, anthropocentrism

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

Dawkins contrasting scientific and theological responses to ignorance — epistemology, science, theology, honesty

It isn't that theologians deliberately tell untruths. It's as though they just don't care about truth; aren't interested in truth; don't know what truth even means; demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations, such as symbolic or mythic significance.

Dawkins on how theological reasoning works regarding the Assumption of Mary — theology, evidence, truth, belief

As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you'll never see your dead loved ones again. There's no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what's right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult.

Dawkins arguing that atheism demands intellectual and moral courage — atheism, courage, mortality, dignity

The human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have 'just happened'. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.

Dawkins on the emotional difficulty of accepting naturalism — reason, emotion, naturalism, intellectual courage

We can now see further, faster, and more cheaply and easily than ever before – and we can be seen. And you and I can see that everyone can see what we see, in a recursive hall of mirrors of mutual knowledge that both enables and hobbles.

Dennett on how the internet enables atheist visibility, analogous to the Cambrian Explosion — technology, transparency, social change, mutual knowledge

Will an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly benevolent God muster the slightest defence? Not even a breeze. The mosquito's proboscis pierces her skin immediately. What are the faithful to believe at this point? One suspects they know that their God isn't nearly as attentive as he would be if he actually existed.

Harris on the problem of evil, imagining a woman bitten by a Zika-carrying mosquito — problem of evil, theodicy, suffering, prayer

Is there a distinction between believing things for good reasons and believing them for bad ones? Do science and religion differ in the degree to which they observe this distinction? Put this way, the debate is over before it even begins.

Harris on the core epistemological issue separating science from religion — epistemology, faith, reason, science vs religion

I came to realize that it's a no-win situation. It's a mug's game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude.

Dennett on how religions have made themselves immune to criticism — taboo, criticism, religious privilege, discourse

If we could make one change, and only one, mine would be to distinguish the numinous from the supernatural.

Hitchens on the numinous versus the supernatural, responding to Francis Collins — numinous, supernatural, non sequitur, experience

It's just as wonderful as it seems. It's just as important. It is the best moment in your life, and it's the moment when you forget yourself and become better than you ever thought you could be, in some way, and you see, in all humbleness, the wonderfulness of nature. That's it!

Dennett on trusting numinous experiences without attributing them to God — numinous experience, self-worth, religion, awe

Religion keeps stressing how humble it is, and how meek it is, and how accepting, almost to the point of self-abnegation it is. But actually it makes extraordinarily arrogant claims for these moments. It says, 'I suddenly realized that the universe was all about me. And felt terrifically humble about it.'

Hitchens on the inverted arrogance of religious humility — humility, arrogance, religion, cosmic significance

Once you say it's good to start without evidence, the fact that you can proceed is a subtle form of evidence, and then the demand for any more evidence is itself a kind of corruption of the intellect, or a temptation, to be guarded against, and you get a kind of perpetual-motion machine of self-deception.

Harris on the self-reinforcing epistemology of faith — faith, circular reasoning, epistemology, self-deception

She writes that she can't bring herself to believe any of this. She tells all her confessors, all her superiors, that she can't hear a voice, can't feel a presence, even in the Mass, even in the sacraments. They write back to her, saying, 'That's good, that's great, you're suffering, it gives you a share in the Crucifixion.'

Hitchens on Mother Teresa's private letters revealing her unbelief — Mother Teresa, doubt, faith, irony

If you really can't defend your view, then, sorry, you can't put it forward. We're not going to let you play the faith card. Now, if you want to defend what your Holy Book says in terms that we can appreciate, fine. But because it says it in the Holy Book – that just doesn't cut any ice at all.

Dennett on how the faith card disqualifies a person from rational discourse — faith, reason, discourse, intellectual standards

Any decent argument, any decent intellect, has to begin by excluding people who claim to know more than they can possibly know. You start off by saying, 'Well, that's wrong to begin with. Now, can we get on with it?' So, theism is gone in the first round.

Hitchens on the religious claim to personal knowledge of the divine — theism, knowledge claims, revelation, intellectual honesty

They sort of knew that it was all up with the Soviet Union. Many of them had suffered a lot and sacrificed a great deal and struggled manfully to keep what they thought was the great ideal alive. Their mainspring had broken, but they couldn't give it up because it would involve a similar concession.

Hitchens comparing religious believers to disenchanted Communists who couldn't let go — cognitive dissonance, ideology, sunk costs, belief

Is there a single sentence in here that couldn't have been uttered by a person for whom a wheelbarrow would have been emergent technology?

Harris on how scripture fails the test of omniscience — scripture, evidence, omniscience, revelation

In our world, surely the worst thing that anyone can say is, 'No further inquiries needed. You've already got all you need to know. All else is commentary.' That is the most sinister and dangerous thing.

Hitchens on why Islam's claim to finality makes it especially dangerous — Islam, totalitarianism, finality, inquiry

The universe is a grand, beautiful, wonderful place, and it's petty and parochial and cheapening to believe in jinns and supernatural creators and supernatural interferers.

Dawkins on the aesthetic impoverishment of purely faith-based worldviews — wonder, science, beauty, parochialism

You can almost never foresee how many lives dogmatism is going to cost, because its conflicts with reality just erupt.

Harris on why unreason's dangers are unpredictable — dogmatism, unpredictability, stem cells, consequences

I feel myself on the losing side politically and on the winning side intellectually.

Hitchens's grim assessment of the geopolitical balance between secularism and theocracy — pessimism, civilization, theocracy, struggle

I think there's a place for the sacred in our lives, but under some construal that doesn't presuppose any bullshit.

Harris on the need for secular forms of the sacred — sacred, secularism, meaning, ritual