Actually they aren't. The new atheists are not nearly as intelligent or intellectually forceful as the old atheists. Russel, Hume and Flew were brilliant (but wrong) and used metaphysically consistent arguments strongly grounded in logic. The new atheists are nothing of the sort. Dawkins book makes clear that he has never been schooled in basic logic at all and virtually none of his conclusions follow from his premises. (and he doesn't even attempt to quantify his premises in the first place) His, and most of the other new athiests', arguments are nothing more than angry polemics against religion. Hitchens was beaten so badly when he debated William Lane Craig that he gave up and waived his closing statement, electing to just take questions where he could fall back on his glib sophistries in an vain attempt to win back the audience who had just watched him get stomped. This too will pass and it shouldn't take long at all.
I would also note ever since the Hitchens debacle Dawkins has pointedly refused to ever debate William Lane Craig. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why.
Ben Stein's movie "Expelled" makes it clear that Dawkins is basically an idiot with a 180 IQ.