For a couple of years it seemed like the new atheists were going largely unanswered. But now there are several good books rebutting their claims, among them John Lennox's God's Undertaker and Tim Keller's The Reason for God. The latest addition to this literature is Michael Novak's new book No One Sees God. It is a wise and important book.
Novak is a friend of mine and a former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute. He is known for his books celebrating the morality of free markets, notably The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. As a theologian who has written on subjects from Aquinas to existentialism, Novak is well equipped to consider the metaphysical claims of the new atheists.
One of Novak's especially attractive qualities is his ability to find common ground with his opponents. Here he begins by conceding to the atheist that "we are all in the same darkness." No one-not even Moses or Abraham-has set his eyes on God. Novak rejects the certitudes of both the religious fundamentalist and the militant atheist. He intends to explore what he calls "the dark and windswept open spaces between unbelief and belief."
For Novak, life raises bigger questions than the ones answered, and answerable, by science. Ultimately we want to know not merely how things work but also: why are we here? What is our purpose? What is our final destiny? Novak credits religion with addressing the largest moral questions, not only "what is it good to do?" but also "what is it good to be?" and "what is it good to love?"
Novak expresses admiration for some of the leading atheists, notably Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. (He seems less enamored with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.) Modern atheism has its virtues, such as an emphasis on truth over good feelings, and also on honesty and courage in facing the realities of life. Even so, Novak finds it puzzling that these atheists make so little effort to understand how God is experienced by the believer.
"For a believer," Novak writes, "It does not take a prolonged thought experiment to imagine oneself an unbeliever." The believer knows full well where the atheist is coming from. By contrast, Novak suggests, atheists like Hitchens seem to have no empathetic understanding whatsoever of genuine religious conviction. They have no sense of what belief must be like from within.
Novak's point is that this shortcoming makes them poor analysts of religion. All critical reading requires a certain measure of suspended belief. This is as true of the strange but captivating world of Dostoyevsky as it is of Shakespeare's moral universe. When we read Macbeth, for instance, we have to be able to plunge into Shakespeare's world, ghosts and all. No understanding of Macbeth is possible if we begin with rude dismissal, "Of course the whole premise is complete nonsense."
Novak is surprised to discover that in the entire literature of the new atheism "there is not a shred of evidence that the authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism." This is not simply a matter of refusing to apply the vaunted virtue of skepticism to one's own philosophy. It is also a matter of giving an account of why such a tiny minority of people in our culture have embraced vocal atheism. If atheism is so obviously convincing, Novak asks, why are so few people drawn to it? The new atheists offer no answers; indeed, scarcely any of them even raise the question.
Novak likens Hitchens to Thomas Paine, that fiery pamphleteer and partisan of the American Revolution. Novak notes, however, that despite his hostility to Christianity, Paine understood that such concepts as the dignity of man and human rights depended on man's special place in God's creation. Indeed the Jacobins of the French Revolution imprisoned Paine after he warned them that their atheism would undercut the basis of their declaration of human rights. Hitchens seems blissfully unaware of a whole tradition of scholarship, from Tocqueville to Jurgen Habermas, that identifies Christianity as the essential foundation of some of the West's most cherished institutions and values.
In a 2005 lecture in on "Religion in the Public Sphere," Habermas raises a question that is central to Novak's inquiry. Habermas shows that the very idea of toleration is a gift that religious thought has bequeathed to modern secular society. Then he asks: are secular people willing to acknowledge that toleration is always a two-way street? In other words, if religious people are expected to be tolerant of unbelievers, shouldn't secular people learn to be tolerant of their fellow citizens who are believers?
This argument has important implications. If Habermas and Novak are right, the public square should not be viewed as the property of secular citizens. Rather, it is the common ground on which believers and non-believers communicate with each other. It makes no sense to exclude religious convictions from the public sphere if secular convictions are granted full access. An uncritical "separation of church and state" must give way to a shared domain in which all citizens have the right to express their heartfelt convictions.
Reader Comments ( Page 25 of 26)
361. ::We have no set tenets that we live by.
Sure you do, calling yourself an atheist means you live by the tenet that there's no God. The problem is, you refuse to face the implications of your tenet.
Jesse at 10:27AM on Sep 25th 2008
362. ::I was born in a Catholic family, and like Ryan Anderson, my
separation was gradual.
And what moral teaching were you rejecting at the time? Now?
In your mind, would you have to give something up, morally speaking, to become a Christian again?
Jesse at 10:34AM on Sep 25th 2008
363. implications of my belief that there is no god...
There are none. And you can't convince me otherwise. You, who have no empirical knowledge or data that confirms any implication of my non-belief.
You have nothing. And for some reason that scares you.
TJ at 10:45AM on Sep 25th 2008
364. Jesse; we actually have no set tenets. There isn't even really a "we", but I'll use the term. We don't have anyone enforcing dogma. We don't have anyone telling us what it is to be a "good atheist".
It seems to me you think your "ace in the hole" is that you believe absolute morals cannot exist without god and that somehow that paints atheists into a corner. You are wrong. Simply replace "god" with "society" or "culture" in your reasoning for the existence of absolute values and you'll see (not likely) that it's the same exact thing. Oh, except they are not absolute, but that's fine because they never were, not even in your old testament.
Ryan Anderson at 10:45AM on Sep 25th 2008
365. Jesse: "And what moral teaching were you rejecting at the time? Now?"
No offense, but this is stupid. I gave up none of my moral values when I realized Christianity was based on falsehoods. I simply realized I didn't need a church or imaginary friend to be moral.
Ryan Anderson at 10:48AM on Sep 25th 2008
366. Maybe it's time that the atheists here clarified what their true positions are. It seems that some by their own admissions are technically not "atheist", but rather could be agnostic, ignostic, ietsist, deist, pantheist, pandeist, or pastafarian. The nuances get so fine, I can't even decide.
Mokele Mbembe at 11:41AM on Sep 25th 2008
367. Why is it always lawyers (Greenleaf & Stroeble) who supposedly set out to disprove the gospels and then miraculously have a conversion?
And yet hundreds, if not thousands of secular biblical scholars are ignored.
also, remember in Miracle on 34th Street, Fred Gailey successfully argued in court that Kris Kringle was in fact Santa Clause. I know it's fiction, but so is the bible...
Ryan Anderson at 1:42PM on Sep 25th 2008
368. ::No offense, but this is stupid. I gave up none of my moral values when I realized Christianity was based on falsehoods. I simply realized I didn't need a church or imaginary friend to be moral.
Ryan, I din't say YOUR moral values. What moral values of Christianity did you turn your back on?
As I put it in the first place, "would you have to give something up, morally speaking, to become a Christian again?"
Jesse at 2:18PM on Sep 25th 2008
369. ::There are none. And you can't convince me otherwise. You, who have no empirical knowledge or data that confirms any implication of my non-belief.
::You have nothing. And for some reason that scares you.
TJ, your unbelief in a good God condemns the life of every human being to purposlessness and worthlessness; purposelessness because purpose is an end in itself, and the only end in itself is happiness, which the tragedy called death, misery, disease, etc., (and yes, sin) guarantees we won't achieve; worthlessness because without an eternal God who is pure Being itself, there is no objective standard by which to say my conviction that human worth and dignity are inherent to human beings is any more real than Hitlers conviction otherwise. You may hide from your own implications till your eyes are so accustomed to the darkness that they'll never again perceive light, but logic is logic, and there's a reason an atheist will not visit a nursing home bringing the light of his message...
Jesse at 2:33PM on Sep 25th 2008
370. ::We don't have anyone telling us what it is to be a "good atheist".
And that's the point! Given your viewpoint, everyone who's ever existed has been a good atheist...
Jesse at 2:36PM on Sep 25th 2008
371. Jesse; do we need people telling us what to believe? I know I don't.
And that's what I'd be giving up if I became christian again. Morally, I'd be lying to myself which is just about as bad a thing as you can do.
Ryan Anderson at 2:48PM on Sep 25th 2008
372. Jesse; "your unbelief in a good God condemns the life of every human being to purposlessness and worthlessness"
This is 100% untrue, but I get the feeling it's all you have. In the end, it was the only argument PV had. We make our own purpose and worth.
Ryan Anderson at 2:49PM on Sep 25th 2008
373. Jesse; "And that's the point! Given your viewpoint, everyone who's ever existed has been a good atheist..."
It's my opinion that everyone who's ever lived was truly deep down an agnostic.
Ryan Anderson at 3:09PM on Sep 25th 2008
374. ::And that's what I'd be giving up if I became christian again. Morally, I'd be lying to myself which is just about as bad a thing as you can do.
With due respect, Ryan, you haven't answered my question. The Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Christ, the Trinity; these are articles of faith, objects of revelation, which means they cannot be reasoned to strictly given the data of the senses. But I'm not asking you about that. I'm asking you about moral doctrines. You're not open to the possiblity that Jesus, as the Second Person of the Trinity, came to save us because there's something you would have to give up, or start doing, in the moral realm in order to be really open. What is it? Be honest with yourself, and answer that question -- at least to yourself.
Jesse at 6:51PM on Sep 25th 2008
375.
::This is 100% untrue, but I get the feeling it's all you have. In the end, it was the only argument PV had. We make our own purpose and worth.
We either imagine purpose and worth and project it, which just so happens to coincide with the wishes of our ego, or we recognize purpose and worth and are bound to conform our actions accordingly, which is painful to our egos.
Jesse at 6:55PM on Sep 25th 2008