Appropriately, it was not the Christians who devastated the so-called New Atheists, but the Objectivists.
In his article for The Objective Standard, “The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists,” Alan Germani reviews the ethical theories of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins.
In brief, Hitchens holds that ethical knowledge is innate and Harris clings to intuitionism, while Dennett and Dawkins turn to evolutionary programming. The first set of ideas collapse to personal subjectivism, while the evolutionary claims collapse to social subjectivism. For details and key quotations, please read Germani’s entire article.
The Christian critics of the New Atheists point out, quite correctly, that without God they are unable to formulate an objective ethics. Of course, with God all the Christians can formulate is an ethic that combines deistic, social, and personal subjectivism. Ultimately, it is a grand clash of subjectivists of different stripes.
What is needed is a morality rooted not in the alleged pronouncements of God, nor in the arbitrary pronouncements of men, nor in the alleged insights of some inner sense or intuition. Instead, we need a truly objective morality rooted in the facts of human life.