The actual writing on the wall was "Mene, mene, tekel, Parsin". The first parts mean "God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting." This passage from Daniel in the Hebrew Bible has been a longstanding idiom in the English language, but our idiomatic use does not capture the occasion of the original utterance. Darius the Mede had arrayed his armies against Belshazzar, the king of Babylon. Belshazzar hardly needed a prophet to know that his end was at hand. His response to his immanent doom was to throw a wild orgy: we refer to it tamely as "Belshazzar's Feast". The king of Babylon was determined to go out with a bang.

The New Atheists are in a parallel situation. Their arguments are threadbare and their history is tainted. They are a sound and fury signifying failure. You don't need to seek out a Christian apologist for rebuttals: not even mainstream secularity is impressed. In his review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, John Holt says

"Dawkins's avowed hostility can make for scattershot reasoning as well as for rhetorical excess"

and

"Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins's failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience."

Even the mockers of South Park recognized the absurd hypocrisy of Dawkins' hostility in an episode where—in a future devoid of religion—rival sects of scientists engage in Holy War, crying out things like "in the name of Science".

This crusading, dogmatic expression of atheism is an old throwback to Enlightenment Rationalism and that ship has sailed. As Richard Shweder observes in his article yesterday, Enlightenment predictions have failed to find fulfillment. Religion did not fade under the might of Reason. The 20th century body count proves that secularity is not a cure for the so-called "wars of religion". Our reasoning has not exhausted the big questions of meaning, purpose, or even existence. The gap between what we know and what can be known—not to mention how we know—should lead us to expect many reversals of intellectual fortunes.

I'm all for sustaining a debate and dialogue between belief and unbelief, but the New Atheists are hardly worthy of rebuttal.