The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

Edward Feser is a philosopher working in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition who decided to take the New Atheists seriously enough to dismantle them. The Last Superstition is the result: a book-length argument that Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris are not merely wrong about God, but wrong about the metaphysical foundations of reason, morality, and science itself.

Feser's central claim is that the modern rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics — final causality, formal causality, the act-potency distinction — did not free Western thought from superstition. It destroyed the only rational basis for natural law, objective morality, and even the intelligibility of nature. The New Atheists inherited this wreckage and built their arguments on it without realizing the floor was missing.

The tone is polemical and deliberately provocative. Feser writes like a man who has read every word his opponents have published and found it wanting. The philosophical arguments are rigorous. The insults are earned. Roger Kimball called it "a serious and passionately engaged challenge to the latest effort to impose a dehumanizing orthodoxy by religious illiterates."

Essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of religion, classical theism, or the intellectual collapse of the New Atheist movement.

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