The New Atheists have been widely criticized for their failure to do justice to the nature and meaning of religious beliefs. They have been accused of shoddy scholarship and of philosophical and theological illiteracy. I advance the thesis that many of the indictments of the New Atheists are valid but that these authors cannot be accused of philosophical and theological illiteracy. Rather, their work seis consistent with, and legitimated by, the dominant views and methods of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion. The New Atheists and their counterparts in contemporary philosophy of religion (both theists and atheists) share many of the same confused views about the nature of religious belief. Both groups treat God as a hypothetical object whose existence should be argued for or against, via scientific and rational evidence. Furthermore, they apply this God Hypothesis to many other areas of religious belief and practice, treating prayer and miracles as involving scientifically verifiable or falsifiable claims about divine causation. I contend that religious beliefs are not hypotheses and to treat them this way involves conceptual confusions that result in gross distortions of such beliefs. In this dissertation, I trace the origins of some of these confused views about the nature of religious belief through the history of early modern philosophical theology. I show that in their efforts to defend the faith from the looming specter of atheism, theologians in this early modern era constructed a confused notion of God as a hypothetical object to be argued for evidentially. In the process, they unwittingly gave birth to the skeptical atheism that they were attempting to stave off. In this same historical trajectory, contemporary philosophers of religion legitimate the New Atheism of today through their similar hypothetical and evidentialist treatment of religious belief. Through a critique of the God Hypothesis and its application in various areas of religious belief and practice, I will reveal the confusions involved in this approach, the distortions in understanding that this has led to, and will show a path to conceptual clarity in the study of religion.