The God of New Atheism, the God of Modern Western ID, and Sunnī Concepts of Divine Action

New Atheism declares God to be “a scientific hypothesis” that can be tested like any other. An examination of their claim, and the approaches they employ to substantiate it, reveals a particular understanding of God and causality, where God’s action would entail an observable rupture of causal closure. The modern Western intelligent design (ID) movement posits very specific ID arguments, all of which, under examination, share assumptions about an external designer and the nature of the designing act. The argument from irreducible complexity entails more than an object’s irreducibility, but particularly the idea that natural causal mechanisms are inadequate to account for the complex object. Specified complexity argues that certain patterns of information cannot come about by natural processes alone. The fine-tuning argument also presupposes a lack of plausible naturalistic explanations for the universal constants identified by science. It becomes clear that they share an underlying assumption of the New Atheists’ “God hypothesis,” that a complete, natural causal account would render the resulting phenomena unconvincing as evidence for an external designer’s existence. These assumptions are compared with the concept of God’s action in the divine action models (DAMs) of the three Sunnī theological schools: Ashʿarī, Māturīdī, and Salafī. Upon examination, all three models assume a maximally active God and allow natural phenomena to be accounted for by continuous and unbroken natural causal processes. The paper concludes that Sunnī concepts of God’s divine action are immune to New Atheist critiques, particularly their manner of weaponizing science against religion, because the underlying assumptions about God are different. Moreover, the responses to New Atheism made by the Western ID movement are equally inapplicable from the standpoint of Sunnī DAMs, since those responses share with New Atheism metaphysical assumptions the DAMs dismiss.