This summer, we've been working on some new plans for Strange Notions, and one of the ideas is to launch a new series of interviews with leading atheists.

We've interviewed a handful of skeptics in the past, including Bob Seidensticker, Chana Messinger, Dr. Michael Ruse, and Doug Shaver, but we'd like to hear from many more.

These interviews would be purely inquisitive. We're not looking to surreptitiously convert them through the questioning, or start a debate. They're friendly, casual, and simply provide a chance for everyone to learn more about what today's atheists believe (or don't believe.)

But we need your help to make this happen! Please let us know:

Which atheists would you like us to interview?

Leave a comment below with your recommendation(s). Also, try to be realistic: Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins or Neil deGrasse Tyson probably won't give us the time of day, but if you have an email address, contact info, or any connection with the person, please note that, too. It's often hard to connect with people online, especially if they have a high profile, so any leads or help you can offer would be appreciated.

Thanks so much!

In his newest book, Proofs of God: Classical Arguments from Tertullian to Barth (Baker Academic, 2016), leading theologian Matthew Levering presents a thoroughgoing critical survey of the proofs of God's existence for readers interested in traditional Christian responses to the problem of atheism.

Beginning with Tertullian and ending with Karl Barth, Levering covers twenty-one theologians and philosophers from the early church to the modern period, examining how they answered the critics of their day. He also shows the relevance of the classical arguments to contemporary debates and challenges to Christianity.

Today, I sit down with Dr. Levering to discuss some of the thinkers highlighted in his book and whether it's possible to actually prove God exists.
 

 
BRANDON: Let's start with a basic question. Why this book? And how would you classify it? Is it apologetics? Theological history? A little of both?

DR. MATTHEW LEVERING: I wrote this book because I know personally the pain of not merely not knowing whether God exists, but not knowing what the word 'God' is supposed to mean. For many people whom I knew during my childhood, 'God' has just as much meaning as 'the Great Pumpkin'. In case the reference needs explaining, in the 'Peanuts' comic strip authored by Charles Schultz, the character Linus believes fervently in the existence of the Great Pumpkin who each year, according to Linus, rewards the most sincere pumpkin patch by manifesting himself there. There is no way to disprove the existence of the Great Pumpkin, nor is there really any way to speak rationally about him—one either believes or one does not.

My view from experience is that many atheists see belief in God as precisely such a belief for which there is nothing rational to say. It is for this reason, I think, that serious discussion of whether or not God exists is now almost completely absent from elite universities, and is largely missing from the philosophy and theology departments of even many Catholic universities and colleges.

If one reads such publications as The New York Review of Books or other journals of elite culture, books that argue for the existence of God are generally not to be found, whereas a number of high-culture (and low-culture) figures weigh in with admiration of atheism. I notice that a number of recent high-culture books on death, for example, simply take it for granted that the universe is an absurdity and death an annihilation. Thus, it seemed important to examine the arguments for God's existence.

In my book, I examine the Western tradition of arguing for and against the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God. So I'd say that the book is neither apologetics nor theological history, because the goal of the book is to survey clearly and accurately the demonstrations (or counter-demonstrations) of God's existence set forth from 21 great thinkers, many of whom were philosophers.

In my introduction, I treat the Greco-Roman philosophical arguments about God, and then turn to the biblical witness (including Wisdom of Solomon and Romans). I then show that the first Christian theologians—the Fathers of the Church—were proponents of certain fundamental arguments for demonstrating the existence of God. I move from there through the centuries, treating not only proponents of the proofs but also philosophical critics such as William of Ockham, Michel de Montaigne, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger.

The purpose is to encourage students of theology as well as educated readers in general to think seriously about this topic. And the purpose is also to show that belief in the existence of God is rationally justifiable

BRANDON: You titled your book Proofs of God. What do you mean by "proof"? Is it really possible to prove God exists?

DR. LEVERING: When we think of 'proof', we often think of mathematics or of natural science. In these ways, of course, one cannot prove that God exists. But there are demonstrations that begin with the finite or limited modes of existence that we see around us, and then reflect upon what is needed in order to be able to account for the existence of finite things, both in themselves and in their orderly relations. I will not rehearse these arguments here, but they are quite powerful ones.

I show in the book that Montaigne and Hume have to rely upon an absolute skepticism—the view that our intellects simply cannot know what is real about things—in order to undermine the arguments for God's existence. Unfortunately, modern scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins do not have any idea what the classical arguments for God's existence were, and they present these arguments in laughably ignorant ways.

Even a great thinker such as Immanuel Kant is cut off from the classical tradition and misrepresents it gravely, despite the fact that his skepticism about our ability to know anything in itself (as distinct from in our minds) would have meant that he would not have accepted the demonstrations. Kant, however, does argue that God's existence is necessary for the working of practical reason, and this argument is not as negligible as some might think, though it is certainly not the most persuasive path.

It should be said that the kind of demonstration of God's existence that succeeds does not define or 'comprehend' in an exhaustive sense: God always remains transcendent mystery, even though we can demonstrate that he exists.

BRANDON: Many people dismiss proofs like these because they attempt to prove only a thin slice of God, the God of "classical theism" or the so-called "God of the philosophers." But do some of the arguments prove more?

DR. LEVERING: To know rationally 'that God is'—namely that an infinite cause and source of all things exists, that sheer infinite To Be (something we cannot conceive) is at the root of everything finite—is to know the 'God of the philosophers'. This God is testified to in Scripture both in Wisdom 13 and Romans 1. In this sense, the 'God of the philosophers' is biblically attested. There is nothing wrong with knowing even a very little about God. It is actually quite exciting. So I wouldn't say that the demonstrations reach only a 'thin slice of God'. They reach the living God, since if there were a 'God' who is not infinite To Be (pure, unrestricted, simple actuality), such a 'God' would merely be another finite thing in the cosmos or multiverse of finite things.

The arguments do not establish a personal relationship between us and God, and so in this regard they are tantalizing but far from enough. If we knew that God existed but this God never reached out to us, never personally acted so as to make himself intimately known, we could only be in a state of deep frustration.

Fortunately, there is no reason to think that the 'God of the philosophers' is not also the living God who has revealed himself as supreme love and supreme mercy.

BRANDON: What can we know about God solely from reason? For what do we need revelation?

DR. MATTHEW LEVERING: We can know that God exists and that God is not composite in being or restricted in being in any way. God is infinite, perfect, the fullness of actuality and thus infinite wisdom, goodness, life, eternal presence, and so forth. We need revelation to know that God is one infinite 'essence' in three distinct Persons and thus is perfect communion, without ceasing to be supremely one (not 'one' among many, but 'one' as undivided). We need revelation to know that God the Trinity is the provident Creator who makes all things with the Incarnation as the guiding pole: that is to say, God the Trinity from the outset wills to draw creatures into union with his very own life of Trinitarian communion.

Humans are not meant to live apart from an unfathomably rich personal sharing in the divine life. The generosity of this God is utterly stunning. Even more so when we consider that we are 'bent' away from God, insofar as we often really don't want anything to do with God or with anything but a self-serving love that is not truly love at all. We sometimes imagine that the amazing vastness of space and time shows that 'God', if he exists, could not really care this much for us.

But what the vastness of space/time and the incalculable multiplicity of creatures actually confirms is the wondrous generosity of God; he loves so much into existence. Material existence requires material decomposition, but God has not made all this for everlasting nothingness. His love meets our personal yearning for communion—our yearning to be known and loved and to know and love—and goes further than we would ever be willing to go.

The universe superabundantly manifests the greatness of God, but so does the smallest human cry for interpersonal communion. The truth is that we are always underestimating God, because we try to measure God on our scale, when we can't even measure the universe or even the complexity of a living organism on our scale.

BRANDON: When Christians and atheists debate proofs for God, they often focus on a small group of prominent thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. But your book widens the discussion, offering a panoramic view that includes many other figures. Who are some of the thinkers who often get ignored in this discussion?

DR. LEVERING: The early Church Fathers deserve mention, because one sometimes finds an absurd dichotomy between (for example) the Greek East and the Latin West, or between the patristic period and the scholastic period, as though the latter in each pair had succumbed to rationalism. Indeed, Aquinas's best arguments are all found in Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus, so it is a mistake to jump from Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas. Sometimes the demonstrations of God's existence are thought to be a distinctively Thomist enterprise, and that is an error. If one is dealing with philosophical skepticism (i.e. in cases where the contention that we can know the real in itself is a non-starter), then Blaise Pascal and John Henry Newman provide helpful ways for getting out of the morass.

To my mind, it is important to actually know the arguments of Hume and Kant, especially Hume. One will then be able to see their weakness and the way in which they prop up the arguments of the more serious atheistic philosophers today.

BRANDON: In the book, you explore nearly two dozen approaches to proving God's existence. Which do you consider to be the strongest proof for God? What are some common objections to it?

DR. LEVERING: I think that Aquinas's five ways are the strongest proofs for God, but in saying this I should repeat that they are found already in the Greek Fathers. Objections to the five ways include the notion that 'being' is not real but rather is a mere predicate of an essence. To appreciate why Aquinas approaches 'being' as he does, one needs to consider two things: first, something cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time (this shows that 'being' refers to a reality not merely to a nominal predicate); second, the things we see around us are intrinsically analogous in their modes of being (a rock 'is' in a lesser way than a living tree, a tree 'is' in a lesser way than a living and self-moving frog, etc.). Aquinas's reflections on why finite things must have a non-finite source of their being are priceless, as are his reflections on the order found in non-rational things.

BRANDON: You don't just focus on theistic arguments in your book. You also cover major critics of these arguments such as David Hume. Why did Hume take issue with traditional arguments for God? Do his criticisms hold up?

DR. LEVERING: For an adequate presentation of Hume's views, I should point the reader to the book itself. But Hume's arguments depend upon denying that every effect has a cause. In Hume's opinion, we see effects that seem to have causes, but we have no grounds for extrapolating from this and deducing that all effects must have causes. Hume is aided in this opinion—which at bottom means that we know nothing about anything (radical skepticism) since all we know are the appearances of things—by a merely logical view of being, which allows him to get away with not analyzing what the deepest relationship of an effect to its cause involves.

BRANDON: You devote considerable space to thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, you describe it as "disproportionate treatment...by comparison with the other eighteen centuries." What are some of the key proofs from this period?

DR. LEVERING: The great thinkers of the first eighteen centuries are fairly well identified, or at least representative figures can be chosen. But it is in the last two centuries that atheism and the response to atheism emerges in full force within mainstream culture. In the last century, furthermore, it became fashionable among theologians (Catholic and Protestant) to dismiss demonstrations of God's existence as wrongheaded and not helpful.

So I found it important to direct attention to a relatively wide array of perspectives from the last two centuries, including influential but forgotten Catholic perspectives (Maurice Blondel and Pierre Rousselot, who argue that Aquinas's five ways would be enhanced by starting not with mere finite things but with the experientially known dynamisms of volition and intellect). Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Barth have been so incredibly influential among theologians that they had to be treated. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, though now generally seen as the pillar of a discredited preconciliar theology, restates Aquinas's five ways in a clear and intelligent way in critical dialogue with modern thinkers, and so he also deserved attention—especially since I think that the five ways remain the most persuasive paths.

BRANDON: What's the one message you hope readers take away from your book?

DR. LEVERING: God is worth thinking about. Don't be an atheist without pursuing every rational discussion of God, not with the goal of resolving all mystery but with the goal of testing the mind's true limits and the possibility that reality is greater than the empirical.
 
 

Ever since the seventeenth century, the celebrated “Galileo affair” has been one of the featured items on the list of dark moments in the history of Catholicism. That the Church mistreated the Italian astronomer—or at least misjudged his claims concerning the structure of the solar system—seems clear. Pope John Paul II, for example, apologized for the Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1992. No one now disputes the fact that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around.

For anti-Catholic historians and polemicists the episode is but the most obvious instance of the supposedly perennial conflict between religion—often enough Catholicism specifically—and science. The seventeenth-century battle, in the conventional view, pitted clergymen, who relied on revelation, against scientists, who relied on empirical observation.

But what if this typical portrayal of the heliocentric debate is almost entirely wrong?

That’s the claim of Dr. Christopher M. Graney in Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). Graney, professor of physics at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky, credits a question from one of his students with propelling him into an exploration of the history of heliocentrism and its skeptics. He corresponded recently about his surprising findings.

 
CARL OLSON: One of the blurbs on the back cover calls it “the most exciting history of science book so far this century.” I took that as hyperbole—until I read the book. It has the potential to overturn some important and entrenched narratives in the history of the relation between science and religion. To understand how, we need to know a little bit about the central character, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, whom you seem determined to rescue from obscurity. Who was he and why is he important?

DR. CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY: Your comment about obscurity reminds me of my wife dubbing me “Riccioli’s agent.” He was an Italian Jesuit priest who worked in Bologna. He was born at the turn of the seventeenth century, so he was a very young man when Galileo was making big discoveries with the telescope in the 1610’s. Riccioli was bitten by the science bug, and eventually obtained permission from his superiors to devote time to science. He did a lot of physics experiments, including some of the first experiments to precisely study gravity. His results were quite good (he was very “detail oriented,” maybe to the point of being a little obsessive about it). He made a lot of astronomical observations with the telescope; he and his fellow Jesuit Francesco Maria Grimaldi gave the features on the moon the names we use today. Readers may recall that Apollo 11 landed in an area on the moon called “Tranquility.” Riccioli gave it that name. He wrote a huge book on physics and astronomy, called the New Almagest, published in 1651, that became a standard reference book. He was a prominent opponent of the heliocentric theory and was well-known in his time.

CARL OLSON: One of your main contentions is that even though in the long run Copernicus would be proven right by science, considering what was known at the time Riccioli actually had the stronger scientific case. Can you describe some of the problems that heliocentric theorists in the early seventeenth century had no good answer for?

GRANEY: There were two main problems. They take some space to explain fully, as I do in the book, but in short, one problem was Earth’s rotation in the heliocentric system. Fathers Riccioli and Grimaldi figured out that projectiles such as cannon balls should be affected by Earth’s rotation. Today we know that they were right. The effect is called the Coriolis Effect, and it is part of the reason why weather patterns rotate around a “high” or “low.” But it is a subtle thing, and at the time it had not yet been discovered. So Riccioli said that since the effect was not there, the Earth could not be rotating and heliocentrism must be wrong.

The other problem was star sizes. Heliocentrism required the stars to be huge—to utterly dwarf the sun. Today we know that stars come in many sizes: some do dwarf the sun, but many others are similar to the sun in size, and actually most are “red dwarfs” and smaller than the sun. But as I explain in the book, heliocentrism seemed to require every last star to dwarf the sun. Riccioli (and others) thought this was nuts. By contrast, in a geocentric universe everything fit neatly into a consistent size range, with the moon being the smallest and the sun the largest. That seemed much more reasonable.

Interestingly, many heliocentrists didn’t try to argue about the star sizes. They just said, “Hey, God can make huge stars.” One fairly prominent heliocentrist even explained that the stars were so huge because they were God’s warriors—the guards at the gates of heaven. He backed this up with scripture. Riccioli basically said, “Well, no one can deny the power of God, but this idea won’t satisfy prudent people.” It took a long time for scientists to discover that the apparent size of the stars is false, and stars are not all so huge. Explaining why that is takes up quite a few pages in the book.

CARL OLSON: The most stunning passage in the book (p. 104) is where you cite a series of quotations from scientists and historians, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. All accuse Riccioli of excessive reliance on theology and imply that Galileo and the other champions of the Copernican revolution had science on their side. In light of the evidence you’ve produced in this book, it hardly seems possible that so many authorities could be so wrong. How could such an erroneous view be so widespread and so durable?

Graney: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer. This stuff was not hidden away—Riccioli’s New Almagest is old, and rare, but not that rare, and it was well known in its day. Many copies exist today in libraries and private collections. Other people of that time also wrote about the star size problem (like Tycho Brahe, a very prominent astronomer) and their books are available, too. Moreover, in at least the early nineteenth century you could find the scientific case against heliocentrism, namely the star-size problem, being mentioned even in an encyclopedia article. So the information is in libraries, and it used to be at least somewhat broadly known. I find it particularly weird that the Catholic world forgot this history: prominent work, done by one of its own, that has a bearing on one of (to use your words) the dark moments in the history of Catholicism.

CARL OLSON: The story of the heliocentric debate, you conclude later in the book (p. 145), “does not look so much like a morality play about brave reason and villainous superstition, about ‘science vs. religion,’ as it looks like a battle between two scientific theories, about ‘science vs. science,’ with a little ‘religion vs. religion’ thrown in as well.” Are you optimistic that your book will significantly change the common historical view of the Copernican Revolution? Or popular perceptions concerning the incompatibility of Christianity and science? How do you expect the book to be received?

Graney: Historians of science have been saying for a while now that the heliocentric debate was not like the common or popular perception of it, but that perception still sticks around. Everyone likes a “good guy/bad guy” story more than a story about the scientific process at work! So I’m not expecting much there, unless it comes from the science world, which has been very receptive to Riccioli and the star size problem.

It’s hard to predict how the book will be received, but the science world has been very receptive toward this general topic. Physics Today and Scientific American both published articles I wrote on Riccioli. Nature twice featured the star size problem prominently on their web page. It may be that scientists sense a particular relevancy in this story. Today rejection of science is a growing problem, as recently was brought to attention through a measles outbreak.

People have this image of science as an endeavor in which powerful forces cover up the truth for their own agenda. The stereotypical “Galileo Affair” story feeds that image, to science’s detriment. But the nature of science is actually such that it is hard to cover up truth, because different people get interested in a problem and start attacking it from different angles. Riccioli’s work and the star size problem tell us that what was going on in the seventeenth century was not the brave and reasonable Copernicans against powerful forces arrayed to cover up the truth, so much as it was the scientific process at work: a vigorous debate, with good arguments and careful observations on both sides, as each worked to figure out what the truth was.

So if this book does change broader perceptions, I think it will be because what it has to say about science at work could have some broader appeal in the science world.

Originally published in Catholic World Report. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Catholic World Report)

Dr. Edward Feser is one of today's foremost Catholic philosophers who specializes in Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. He's an associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College and the author of several published articles and books, including The Last Superstition, Aquinas, and Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide). He's also written several articles here at Strange Notions.

Dr. Feser's newest book, which I'm discussing with him today, is titled Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editions Scholasticae, 2014). The book offers a general overview of Aristotelian/Thomistic ideas like causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, and teleology, and has already been hailed as an important contribution to the understanding of Scholastic thought.
 

 
BRANDON: The title of your book is Scholastic Metaphysics. How do you define "Scholastic", and how is "Scholastic" metaphysics distinct from others?

DR. EDWARD FESER: As the term was originally used, a “Scholastic” was the master of a school in the Middle Ages. The label came to be applied to professors in medieval universities, and, ultimately, to anyone who adhered to the way of thinking that dominated the medieval universities.

That way of thinking is difficult adequately to adequately and concisely summarize, but essentially it involved the development and application of ideas and arguments derived from classical, and in particular Platonic and Aristotelian, philosophy. The aim was in part to provide a philosophical statement and defense of Christian theology, but medieval Scholastics were (and contemporary Scholastics are) naturally also interested in philosophical and scientific issues for their own sake. In some Scholastic thinkers, such as St. Anselm and St. Bonaventure, Platonism as filtered through writers like Plotinus and St. Augustine was the dominant tendency. In other and especially later thinkers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, Aristotelianism took center stage. Methodologically, Scholastic writers also came to value precision in the use of language, rigorous argumentation, and systematic thinking.

This emphasis on linguistic precision and argumentative rigor differentiates Scholastic thinking from more literary and unsystematic approaches to philosophy and theology. It also makes Scholastic thought comparable in some respects to contemporary analytic philosophy. On the other hand, the emphasis on classical, and especially Aristotelian, metaphysical ideas differentiates Scholastic thinking from most contemporary philosophy. There is, to be sure, a revival of interest in Aristotelian metaphysical ideas -- concerning the nature of causality, essentialism, substance, and so forth -- even in contemporary mainstream analytic philosophy, and that is in fact one of the themes of my book. But it is still at this moment a minority tendency.

BRANDON: Who did you write this book for? Is it a book for absolute beginners or those with some philosophical background? Would atheists benefit from it?

DR. EDWARD FESER: It is not a book for absolute beginners. The aim of the book is to introduce key Scholastic ideas and arguments in metaphysics to those who have some familiarity with contemporary philosophy, and also to introduce the neo-Aristotelian tendencies in contemporary mainstream analytic philosophy to those who have some familiarity with Scholastic thought. As I show in the book, Scholastic ideas and arguments are not only defensible within the context of modern analytic philosophy, they are to a large extent in fact already being defended by contemporary philosophers who have no theological ax to grind. The ideas are being rediscovered because they are essential to making sense of what we know from modern science and to the solution of philosophical problems that secular thinkers, no less than religious ones, are interested in.

Atheists with a taste for philosophy -- and any serious atheist had better have a taste for it, because the dispute between theism and atheism is at bottom a philosophical dispute and not a scientific one -- would definitely benefit from my book. You cannot properly understand the arguments of thinkers like Aquinas -- whether they are arguments for God’s existence, or for the immortality of the soul, or natural law arguments in ethics, or whatever -- unless you understand the background metaphysical ideas about the nature of causation, the nature of material objects, what it is for a thing to have an essence or nature, and so forth, that the arguments presuppose. Most atheist critics of Aquinas and other major theistic philosophers have no familiarity with these background metaphysical ideas, and so they usually badly misunderstand the arguments they are criticizing.

To be sure, my book does not have a lot to say about arguments for God’s existence, or about the soul or ethics. I have addressed those issues elsewhere, such as in my books The Last Superstition and Aquinas. What the new book does is set out the metaphysical background ideas at far greater length and in much greater depth than I have elsewhere.

BRANDON: In the book's opening chapter, titled "Prolegomenon," you write, "The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potency provides the [book's] organizing theme." What is this theory, and how do we know it's true?

DR. EDWARD FESER: Well, chapter 1 and indeed the book as a whole provides the answer to that question! But, very briefly: Pre-Socratic thinkers like Parmenides and Zeno put forward some very odd but also clever arguments purporting to show that change and multiplicity are illusions. The arguments assume, among other things, that change would require a transition from non-being to being, from sheer nothingness to something. Aristotle pointed out that that’s not the case. For there are two kinds of being: being in actuality (as when an acorn is actually small) and being in potentiality (as when an acorn, though actually small, is at the same time potentially a very tall tree). And change involves, not a transition from nothingness to something or non-being to being, but rather from one kind of being to another, namely from potentiality to actuality.

Scholastic writers argue that there is no way to account for change other than by recognizing that potentiality is as real a feature of the world as actuality, and they also argue that the existence of change cannot coherently be denied. Hence we know that actuality and potentiality are both real features of the world. Now, the implications of this are many and wide-ranging, as I show in the book. The theory of actuality and potentiality determines the correct way to think about causation, teleology, the nature of material substance, what it is for a contingent thing to exist, etc. It also forms the starting point for one of Aquinas’s key arguments for God’s existence, namely the First Way.

The vast majority of contemporary atheists know nothing at all about the theory of actuality and potentiality. That is one reason they generally deeply misunderstand the arguments Aquinas and other Scholastic writers present for the existence of God, and many other arguments as well.

BRANDON: You spend several pages engaging scientism. How do you define this notoriously controversial term? Why is scientism popular today, and why do you think it's self-defeating?

DR. EDWARD FESER: This too is addressed in the book at length. Briefly, scientism is the view that science alone gives us knowledge of reality. Of course, that just raises the question of what we mean by “science.” One problem with scientism is that if you define “science” narrowly -- so that it includes physics and chemistry, say, but not philosophy or theology -- then scientism ends up being self-refuting, because it is not itself a scientific claim but a philosophical one. On the other hand, if you define “science” broadly enough so that it avoids being self-refuting, then it becomes vacuous, because it now no longer rules out philosophy, theology, or pretty much anything else adherents of scientism want to be able to dismiss without a hearing as “unscientific.”

A second problem with scientism is that science cannot in principle give us a complete description of the world, both because science takes for granted certain assumptions it cannot justify in a non-circular fashion (such as that perception is reliable, that there is order in the world that is really there and not just projected onto it by the mind, etc.), and because the methods of science of their nature can obscure as much as they reveal. For example, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell -- who was no friend of Scholasticism or of religion -- often emphasized, the methods of physics give us only the abstract mathematical structure of physical reality, but do not and cannot tell us the intrinsic nature of whatever is the underlying reality that has that structure.

A third problem is science cannot in principle provide a complete explanation of the phenomena it describes. Science explains things by tracing them down to ever deeper laws of nature. But what it cannot tell you is what a “law of nature” is in the first place and why it operates. It really is amazing how unreflectively atheists and advocates of scientism appeal to the notion of “laws,” given how deeply philosophically problematic the very notion is. Earlier generations of scientists were aware of the philosophical puzzles raised by the nature of scientific explanation, and some contemporary scientists (such as Paul Davies) are also sensitive to the puzzles raised by the very idea of a “law of nature” (which is actually a holdover from an idiosyncratic theology to which Descartes and Newton were committed, but which Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophers reject just as much as atheists do).

But most contemporary scientists tend not to have the general education that figures of the generation of Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg did. They don’t know philosophy well, and they also don’t know what they don’t know.   This goes double for the more aggressively atheistic ones among them -- people like Lawrence Krauss, Peter Atkins, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne. Hence they repeatedly commit very crude philosophical mistakes but also refuse to listen or respond when these mistakes are pointed out to them.

Anyway, the main reason scientism has the following it does is probably that people are, quite rightly, impressed with the technological and predictive successes of modern science. The trouble is that this simply gives us no reason whatsoever to believe scientism -- that is to say, it gives us no reason to believe that science alone gives us knowledge. To draw that conclusion you need to assume that if something is real, then it will be susceptible of a precise mathematical description that will make strict prediction and technological application possible. Now that is itself a philosophical or metaphysical assumption, not a scientific one. But it is also an assumption that there is not only no reason to believe, but decisive reason to reject, as I argue in the book.

What the mathematically-oriented methods of modern physics do is to focus on those aspects of nature which can be strictly predicted and controlled and to ignore anything that doesn’t fit that method. As a result, physics tends brilliantly to uncover those aspects of reality that fit that method, and which can therefore be exploited technologically. But it simply does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality. To think otherwise is like the drunk’s fallacy of assuming that his lost car keys must be under the street lamp somewhere, because that is where the light is.

BRANDON: Many atheists maintain that contemporary science -- specifically quantum mechanics and special relativity -- has refuted Scholastic metaphysical concepts like cause and effect. Is this the case?

DR. EDWARD FESER: It is not the case, and the arguments for this claim tend to commit the same fallacy I just referred to, of assuming that if something is left out of the description of things that physics gives us, then it is not real. That is like a pencil artist saying that since he cannot capture color in the black and white artistic materials he has available to him, it follows that color is not real. Again, physics captures what is susceptible of capture via its mathematical mode of description. If something is real but not susceptible of capture via such methods, physics will not capture it. That merely reflects the method, though, not the reality the method is only partially describing. The trouble is that, as the historian of science E. A. Burtt once pointed out, advocates of scientism have fallaciously confused method with metaphysics. Instead of judging their method by reference to reality, they judge reality by reference to their method.

There are other problems too with the claim that physics has somehow undermined the notion of causality, and I discuss them in the book. For one thing, people who make this claim often confuse what is really just one kind of causality -- deterministic causality -- with causality as such. They also fail to realize that the only way we can make sense of the idea that observation and experiment give us a rational justification for believing physical theory is if we suppose that our perceptual faculties are causally related to external reality (which is something else that Bertrand Russell emphasized). And so forth.

BRANDON: You argue that, for the Scholastic, "metaphysics is prior to epistemology." What does this mean and why is it important?

Metaphysics is the rational investigation of the general structure of reality and the ultimate causes of things. Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge and of its scope and foundations. Modern philosophers have often criticized specific metaphysical ideas and even the very possibility of metaphysics on the basis of epistemological assumptions. They have claimed that the way knowledge actually works rules out our having the kind of metaphysical knowledge that Scholastics and other traditional metaphysicians say we have. Advocates of scientism essentially take this view.

The trouble is that this gets things precisely backwards. All epistemological claims make metaphysical assumptions -- assumptions about what a mind is, how it is connected (or not connected) to external reality, and so forth. Criticisms of metaphysical claims put forward in the name of epistemology themselves thus implicitly presuppose various metaphysical claims. Metaphysics is absolutely fundamental -- the most fundamental discipline of all, more fundamental than epistemology, physics, biology, or any other philosophical or scientific discipline. Attempts to show otherwise always implicitly confirm this, insofar as they always surreptitiously presuppose some metaphysical position, rather than eliminating metaphysics or relegating it to a secondary status.

BRANDON: How is the Scholastic metaphysical framework helpful for defining God or demonstrating his existence? Is it true that the old Scholastic arguments for God have been mostly refuted?

It is not only helpful but absolutely crucial, because the key traditional arguments for God’s existence all rest on certain specific metaphysical analyses of cause and effect, change, the nature of material substances, and so forth. And these analyses begin with what any possible natural science must take for granted, so that they deal with a level of reality that is deeper than science and untouched by it. And no, the old Scholastic arguments for God’s existence have not been refuted. As I have said, most people who criticize them don’t even understand them, because they know nothing about the metaphysical ideas that underlie them. Among the things my book does is to show how these metaphysical ideas are not only still defensible today, but in fact are being defended (sometimes unknowingly) by contemporary academic philosophers who have no interest or stake in the theological applications Scholastic writers made of the ideas.

We've posted several recent interviews with Catholics like Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, atheist convert and professor Dr. Holly Ordway, and theologian and convert Dr. Stephen Bullivant.

Although we have featured interviews with atheists in the past, such as with Dr. Michael Ruse and Chana Messinger, many commenters wondered when we would see more atheist interviews. Therefore, I issued a (still-standing) invitation for any atheists interested in being interviewed.

The first to heed that invitation was Doug Shaver, a frequent and insightful commenter here at Strange Notions. Doug has an eclectic professional and intellectual background. He was born a few months after the end of World War II to parents who were theistic but religiously uncommitted. Initially a religious skeptic, he was converted to evangelical Protestantism at age 12 and two years later became a Oneness Pentecostal. Over the next decade, his personal research into the origins of religion in general and Christianity in particular led him first into liberal Protestantism and, by his mid-20s, to atheism.

Meanwhile, Doug acquired extensive training in electronics during 6 years of service in the U.S. Navy. After his military service he earned a BA in sociology from the University of North Florida and began a career in newspaper journalism. He has also at various times been a social worker and worked in various trades including construction and auto repair. He is widely read in the history of science and technology, and in 2012 graduated from California State University, San Bernardino, with a BA in philosophy. He writes regularly at DougShaver.net.

Doug agreed to chat with me about his religious experiences including his journey from faith to unbelief.

 
BRANDON VOGT: You were a skeptic from a pretty young age, but then found your way into a self-described "fundamentalist" church and then a Pentecostal community. What was your religious experience like growing up?

DOUG SHAVER: Practically nonexistent. Religion was almost never discussed in our home, but that was due more to indifference than any hostility. Neither of my parents was an atheist, but they had little interest in any organized religion, and none at all in trying to instill whatever beliefs they had in their children. I never saw the inside of a church until my conversion.

What scant knowledge I managed to acquire about religion was from incidental references to it of the sort that one cannot avoid hearing in everyday life. From such references, I got the idea that there were several varieties of it, that in most of the world's countries one of those varieties was dominant over the others, and that they were generally based on various beliefs about a supernatural being known as God. I knew that I knew that in the United States, that dominant religion was called Christianity, its founder was a man called Jesus Christ, and the Christmas holiday had some connection with stories about his birth. I was unaware of any connection between Easter and Christianity. I noticed that calendars often had notations about things like Passover, Lent, Yom Kippur, and the like. I had no idea what those names meant, and for some reason it never occurred to me to ask anyone.

I came to understand, in a vague sort of way, that many people believed that praying to this God would sometimes make things happen that otherwise would not happen. It became apparent to me, probably by the time I was 8 or 9, that this was a kind of superstition, not relevantly different from believing that certain things would bring good or bad luck. And, if belief in this God was, as seemed apparent to me, what religion was all about, then religion was just another superstition. It seemed to be, in some sense, more respectable than other superstitions. I could see no reason why it should be, but in various ways I learned very quickly that any expression of skepticism about religion was likely to get a very negative response.

BRANDON VOGT: What were some of the strongest reasons you were drawn to Christianity?

DOUG SHAVER: Initially, it was almost purely a case of taking Pascal's wager. I was told that if I didn't accept Christ as my savior, I was destined to burn in hell forever. I could not help thinking, "What if it's true?" I was 12 years old and, for various reasons including a very dysfunctional family, I was an emotional basket case. I figured I had better at least act as if I believed, following Pascal's advice even though it would be years before I ever heard of Pascal or his wager. And it worked. Within a matter of days, or a few weeks at most, I was no longer just acting. I was believing everything I said.

After that transition, was sustained me was a conviction that it all really did make good sense. It just seemed obvious that because we were the creation of a perfect God, doing what he wanted, living as he wanted us to live, was not only the right thing to do but also the smart thing to do. It was the way to be happy, and nothing about my life outside the church was making me happy.

BRANDON VOGT: At age 25 you surprisingly realized, "I don't believe in God any more." Was that a sudden conviction or something that grew over time? What led you to that conclusion?

DOUG SHAVER: I'm sure it must have been growing for some time. My feeling at the time was not so much of making a big discovery as of completing the transition from asleep to awake.

What led me to it was the steady erosion over the years of the reasons I thought I had for believing in God. I don't mean specifically theistic arguments in every case, but more generally arguments for the existence of some kind of transcendental reality, for some force in the universe that was beyond empirical confirmation, or at least any direct confirmation that was not merely an appeal to one's gut feelings.

BRANDON VOGT: Atheists and Catholics alike will agree there are many bad arguments offered for God. But what do you consider to be the strongest argument for God, and why do you think it fails?

DOUG SHAVER: Keeping in mind that we're not talking specifically about the Christian God, I think there are two bases for a reasonable faith.

One is that belief in a god of some kind does seem to be almost a human universal. I am told that a few counterexamples have been documented in the anthropological literature, but even if they do exist, such outliers don't disprove the generality. Evolution does seem to have hard-wired our brains, if not for religion, then for some ways of thinking that normally produce religious belief. The hypothesis that this is because there is something true about religious belief is hard to resist, and I have a hard time blaming anyone who doesn't resist it.

I think it fails on grounds of parsimony, in that it needs to assume something special about religion. Those ways of thinking that support religion are demonstrably unreliable in many non-religious contexts, but they nevertheless are amendable to cogent evolutionary explanations. Our brains were designed by evolution to facilitate our survival by guiding our actions in an environment very different from the one in which most of us now live. So long as our ancestors took the actions necessary to stay alive, it didn't matter whether the beliefs on which they based those actions were true. This is not to argue, as Plantinga tries to argue, that the difference between true beliefs and false beliefs was always irrelevant to our survival. False beliefs would have been fatal in a great many situations. But not all situations, and in those other situations, religious beliefs could well have been advantageous even if untrue.

The other is the fine-tuning argument. There are all those universal constants that all had to be exactly what they are if we were to exist, and there is no apparent reason for them to be exactly what they are. But we do exist, and so there must have been some reason. Though this sounds superficially like just another God-of-the-gaps argument, it seems sufficiently different from the others to merit some attention. These constants are the bedrock of all other scientific explanations, and the expectation that they will be explained someday, when we have no clue as to where the explanations might come from, is not obviously any less an act of faith than that of the average theist.

As a defense of theism, I think the best that can be said is that it leaves theism on equal footing with atheism. For me, the only sensible construal of believing on faith is the acceptance of an assumption, or postulate, or axiom, or whatever you call a proposition believed without proof. We all, not excluding any atheists, believe some propositions on that basis. On that particular point, anyone who defends their theism strictly on that basis will get no argument from me.

But some axioms are more defensible than others, and I have a problem with any axiom that seems to be no more than a disguised way of saying, "We don't know." The fine-tuning argument depends for its force on the current ignorance of the scientific community regarding the origins of those constants. Because of that ignorance, those values seem to have been assigned at random: any of them, for all we now know, could have been anything else. But there is the rub: for all we now know. We most certainly do not know that any of them could have been any different. We certainly do not know that there was anything random about their acquiring the values they have. For all we do know, their apparent randomness is a measure of nothing more than the current state of our scientific ignorance.

We skeptics are sometimes accused of thinking that science has all the answers. This skeptic thinks nothing of the sort. I know very well how countless are the questions that science has not come anywhere near answering. But if it is silly to think science has all the answers, it is no less silly to think that it now has all the answers that it will ever get. The fine-tuning argument, it seems to me, is saying in effect: These are questions that science ought to have answered by now, and since it has not answered them yet, we can be confident that it never will answer them. I can see no rationale for thinking that these questions about the fundamental constants are of that sort.

BRANDON VOGT: In your experience, what's the biggest misconception Catholics have about atheists?

DOUG SHAVER: I am not aware of any misconceptions that are unique to Catholics. So far as I can tell, they are distributed pretty equally among believers of all persuasions.

I'm not sure I can pick one out as uniquely prevalent, or "biggest" in any other sense, but a good candidate would be the claim that there is something inherently nihilistic about atheism, that without God, we just have no reason to care about anything. Among those believers who acknowledge that some of us, nevertheless, do care about certain important things, I usually see one of two responses. One is along the lines of: "Yes, I admit that you do care, but you're not justified in caring. You can give me no good reason for thinking that what you care about really is important." The other is: "Yes, you care, but you learned your caring from us theists. You were born and raised in a believing society, and that is the only reason you care about anything."

On both points, obviously, I beg to differ.

Today I sit down with two Catholic scientists, Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J. and Father Paul Mueller, S.J. Both men work for the Vatican Observatory, which is based at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. And together they wrote a new book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory (Image Books, 2014).

Brother Consolmagno is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a B.A. and M.A. in planetary science. After earning a Ph.D from the University of Arizona, he taught at Harvard and MIT before eventually lading at the Vatican Observatory. There he works as the curator of the Vatican Meteorite Collection and researches the connections among meteorites, asteroids, and small bodies in the solar system. He has written more than 40 refereed scientific papers and a number of popular books, including his memoir, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist. Earlier this year, the American Astronomical Society awarded him the Carl Sagan Award for excellence in communicating planetary science to the general public.

Brother Consolmagno is also well known for his fun appearance on The Colbert Report:

Father Mueller is a philosopher of science who serves as superior of the Jesuit community at Castel Gandolfo. He holds a B.S. in physics from Boston University, an M.A. in philosophy from Loyola University of Chicago, M.Div and S.T.M. degrees in theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and a Ph.D in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago.
 

 
BRANDON: Brother Guy, as a PhD physicist, Jesuit brother, Vatican astronomer, and Colbert Report guest, you're a sign of contradiction. How did you end up a religious scientist? Do you find any contradiction between those two roles?

BROTHER GUY CONSOLMAGNO, SJ: I have no idea why you'd see any contradiction; I don't. I struggle mightily to figure out what bad assumptions people are making about science and religion when they think that! I know scientists of all religious faiths, and that should be no more surprising than to say that I know religious people who have all sorts of jobs!

Of course my scientific training shapes the habits of thought I use when I think about God, but I also know that my way of thinking about God is neither the only way to think, nor unique just to me as a scientist. And being a person of faith obviously shapes the kinds of questions I think are fun to work on, and the way that I will go about working on them. For instance, I hate the idea of hoarding data; you learn by sharing, and learning is more important to me than getting a career edge on some scientific rival.

I think the big mistake behind the question is thinking that science and religion are rival sets of "things" that must be "believed." “What do I do, if science tells me one thing but religion tells me another thing? Which do I believe?”

There’s a false assumption at the center of that question—because neither science nor religion are about “believing” in “things”. But my religious belief is not in a “thing,” but in a Person—indeed, Three Persons...the Father, Son, and Spirit as described and identified in the Creed, and in the Church that leads us to those Persons. And science is not about the "things" we call data points, but in the description we come up with to describe how those "things" work. The data points stay the same, but the description changes as science changes.

BRANDON: Fr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest, is widely considered the father of the Big Bang theory, which he introduced in 1927. Today it's the most widely accepted theory for the origin of the universe. However, Fr. Lemaître and Pope Pius XII disagreed on the theory's implications for a Creator God. What's the significance of the Big Bang and does it provide support for a Creator?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: Lemaitre himself was adamant that his theory was a nice description based on the mathematics of Relativity and the observations of Hubble, but it should never be taken as a last word... much less something infallible on which one could base one's faith. And in fact, following their conversation, it's pretty clear that he convinced Pope Pius XII of this, as well. I would turn the relationship between Big Bang and Creator around...and suggest that belief in a Creator God, who is "The Word"—the Logos...Logic...Reason—provides support for the idea that we ought to be able to understand Creation in terms of a rational, mathematical theory like the Big Bang.

BRANDON: Back in 2006, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto from planet to "dwarf planet." In the book you note the special role the Vatican played in this decision. How was the Church involved?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: We were astronomers among our fellow astronomers who debated the point. As it happened, I was on one of the (several) commissions that was involved in the discussion, and Fr. Corbally was on the committee that wrote the final resolution voted on by the IAU. But the whole topic is interesting for another reason: it reminds us that "science" is not eternal, and we shouldn't be surprised when it changes its mind in the face of new data. That's one reason why science is not a good foundation for religious belief.

BRANDON:In May 2014, Pope Francis said, "Imagine if a Martian showed up, all big ears and big nose like a child's drawing, and he asked to be baptized. How would you react?" What would your response be?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: I’d want to be sure they really knew what they were asking for! How could you tell? Well...are they willing to share a meal with me? To help me out if I am hurt, at the side of the road? To offer their life for me? And would I be willing to do likewise?

FATHER PAUL MUELLER, SJ: Let’s not forget that Pope Francis was mainly making a point about humans, not about Martians. He was talking about how the early Church struggled over the question of whether non-Jews could be admitted to baptism. The early Jewish-Christians saw themselves as God’s Chosen People, and saw in Jesus the Messiah who God had promised would save them. They had difficulty imagining how that salvation could be extended to non-Jews. But in the end the Church decided that all people were chosen by God, and that baptism could be extended to all. So I think that the Pope’s question was mainly about us and how we see ourselves as chosen by God, rather than about Martians.

BRANDON: You spend several pages in the book on the Galileo affair. What really happened? Could the dispute have been avoided?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: History is made by individuals; individuals could always make different decisions. What happened to Galileo and all the other people in that time and place was the result of the times and the politics and the fears and the hopes of all those individuals. It's not surprising that it happened; but it wasn't necessarily inevitable.

FATHER MUELLER: What really happened with Galileo is a long and complex story—read our book! But our book can get at only some aspects of the story. Of course the dispute could have been avoided, or could have gone differently. History is contingent, after all. And while we’re at it, the subsequent history of interpretation of the Galileo story also could have gone differently—it didn’t have to be interpreted as a great symbol of conflict between faith and science.

BRANDON: Suppose you had one minute to explain to an atheist how "the heavens declare the glory of God." What would you say?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: Go outside and look for yourself! If there's not a God they are praising, there ought to be!

FATHER MUELLER: You can see the lunch that your wife packs for you just as lunch, or as an expression of the love which she has for you. You can see the stars in heaven just as stars, or as an expression of the Love which God is. For those who believe in the God, who is Love and who is ultimate Creator of being and order, the glory of God is declared not just by the heavens but by everything else that exists: by pebbles, earthworms, and trout scales; by hornet nests, finches’ wings, and hockey players; and yes, by atheists too.

Growing up, Holly Ordway was convinced God was little more than superstition, completely unsupported by evidence or reason. She later attained a PhD in literature, traveled the country as a competitive fencer, and became a college English professor, none of which left room for God.

But one day a smart and respected friend surprisingly revealed he was a Christian. That sent Holly on a search for the truth about God, one that weaved through literature, aesthetics, imagination, and history. It culminated in 2012 when she entered the Catholic Church.

Holly recounts her probing journey in a new memoir, Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (Ignatius Press, 2014). The book debuted two weeks ago and has already soared up the Amazon charts. When I checked this morning, it was ranked:

• #1 among all religious biographies and memoirs
• #15 among all Christian books
• #30 among all memoirs on Amazon
• #353 among all books on Amazon

I recently sat down with Holly to discuss her early atheism, the role of imagination in her conversion to Catholicism, and the strongest evidence for Christianity.
 

 
BRANDON VOGT: Whenever non-believers analyze an atheist-to-Catholic conversion story, many quickly assume the convert wasn't really an atheist. Would you have described yourself that way during your early life?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: I’ve heard that claim often, and I admit, it puzzles me. Even if I hadn’t been ‘really’ an atheist, what does that have to do with whether I’m correct or not in believing Christianity to be true?

But in any case, certainly I described myself as an atheist by the time I was in my twenties. Sometimes people assume there must have been a traumatic event or a rejection of faith, but there wasn’t. It was a gradual process from being non-religious, to being indifferent, to being actively convinced that atheism was true.

I remember a conversation I had when I was about eight years old. A kid who waited at the same bus stop as I did asked me if I believed in God. I thought about it for a moment and said “I don’t know. Maybe God’s real, and maybe not.” The boy said “Oh, you’re an agnostic.” I remembered the conversation not because it seemed important, but rather because I’d learned a new word, and that was always interesting to me as an avid and precocious reader.

My family was ‘culturally Christian’ in a small way: at Christmas, there was a nativity set on display and Christmas carols on the stereo, and my mom at one point reprimanded me for the teen habit of saying “Oh-my-God” as a verbal filler. But there was no Bible or religious books in the house, and we never went to church. As a teenager, I began to be concerned with questions of right and wrong, and felt a longing for meaning and connection, but it didn’t occur to me to explore these issues in religious terms.

In college I absorbed the prevailing idea that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was just a historical curiosity, and that science could explain everything. By the time I was in my mid- to late twenties, I was convinced that there was no God (or any spiritual reality). I did not believe that I had a soul; I thought I was just an intelligent animal, and that when I died, my consciousness would simply blink out. I thought that there was no ultimate meaning in life, and that people who believed in any form of God were seriously self-deluded. It was a bit depressing, but I believed it to be the best explanation of the way the world is, and truth is better than false comfort. If that’s not atheism, I’m not sure what counts…

Sometimes I’ll hear atheists argue that “you don’t have to believe in God to be a moral person.” I agree! I know from my own experience that atheists can be moral people and do good deeds. What I couldn’t do, as an atheist, was to give a compelling reason why I had this moral sense, or to explain why I recognized that my efforts to be good always fell short of my ideals.

I also didn’t understand, then, that Christian teachings on virtue and morality were anything other than a set of rules and pious slogans – I didn’t know that the Church offered a relationship with a living Person who would, if you would allow it, actually do something to change and transform you into a new person, a fully alive person… But that was a something that took quite a while to understand, and indeed it’s only since I’ve become a Catholic that I’ve begun to fully appreciate the fullness and transformative power of God’s grace, above all through the Eucharist. It’s a completely different paradigm.

BRANDON: You followed a unique route to God, one that was philosophical but just as much literary. How did your background as an English professor fuel your conversion, and how did the imagination play a significant role?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: I wasn’t interested in hearing arguments about God, or reading the Bible, but God’s grace was working through my imagination… like a draft flowing under a closed and locked door.

To begin with, classic Christian literature planted seeds in my imagination as a young girl, something I write about in more detail in my book. Later, Christian authors provided dissenting voices to the naturalistic narrative that I’d accepted—the only possible dissenting voice, since I wasn’t interested in reading anything that directly dealt with the subject of faith or Christianity, and thus wasn’t exposed to serious Christian thought.

I found that my favorite authors were men and women of deep Christian faith. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien above all; and then the poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, John Donne, and others. Their work was unsettling to my atheist convictions, in part because I couldn’t sort their poetry into neat ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ categories; their faith infused all their work, and the poems that most moved me, from Hopkins’ “The Windhover” to Donne’s Holy Sonnets, were explicitly Christian. I tried to view their faith as a something I could separate from the aesthetic power of their writing, but that kind of compartmentalization didn’t work well, especially not with a work of literature as rich and complex as The Lord of the Rings.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask more questions. I needed to find out what a man like Donne meant when he talked about faith in God, because whatever he meant, it didn’t seem to be ‘blind faith, contrary to reason’.

The Christian writers did more than pique my interest as to the meaning of ‘faith’. Over the years, reading works like the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and Hopkins’ poetry had given me a glimpse of a different way of seeing the world. It was a vision of the world that was richly meaningful and beautiful, and that also made sense of both the joy and sorrow, the light and dark that I could see and experience. My atheist view of the world was, in comparison, narrow and flat; it could not explain why I was moved by beauty and cared about truth. The Christian claim might not be true, I thought to myself, but it was had depth to it that was worth investigating.

BRANDON: For years you trained as a competitive fencer, traveling to tournaments across the country (and winning not a few awards.) How did fencing relate to your conversion?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: Fencing related to my conversion in several ways, but most directly, through the witness of my fencing coach! It was a surprise to me, after working with my coach for about a year, to learn that he was a Christian. He was an exemplary coach, very patient (and I wasn’t the easiest student!), intelligent, and thoughtful, yet clearly a committed Christian, and thus he challenged my stereotypes about Christians as being pushy and thoughtless. So, when I became curious about what Christians really believed—when poetry had done its work!—I realized that I could ask my coach questions and feel safe and respected while having a dialogue about these issues.

After I became a Christian, fencing became an avenue for discipleship and a real-time metaphor for growing in the Christian life. “Taking up the sword of the Spirit” resonated with me!

BRANDON: In Not God's Type, you recount several books that proved helpful during your exploration. What were some of them?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: I read a lot of books! C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was one of the most important ones, particularly with regard to his moral argument, but also for the way that he provides vivid images and analogies to illuminate what words like ‘faith’ and ‘repentance’ mean.

For the philosophical and historical questions, I was particularly helped by a book called Does God Exist?, a debate between J.P. Moreland (a Christian) and Kai Nielsen (an atheist), articles by philosopher William Lane Craig, and the book In Defense of Miracles, which includes David Hume’s famous argument against miracles as well as arguments for the possibility of miracles. One of the most important books I read was N.T. Wright’s magisterial scholarly work The Resurrection of the Son of God, which convinced me that the Resurrection was a fact of history.

Literature also helped me along the way. In particular, the Chronicles of Narnia helped me connect my intellect and my imagination, so that I grasped the meaning of the Incarnation and saw its importance not as an abstract idea, but as something that impacted my life.

BRANDON: Perhaps the key hinge of your conversion was when you came to believe in the historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead. What evidence led you to that conclusion?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: One of the first steps to that conclusion was my realization that miracles are both possible and rational. Since I had come (on other grounds) to believe that there is a transcendent Creator who is the source of morality, order, and rationality, then it made sense that the physical world was orderly and comprehensible, with natural causes operating in a regular way, but also that there was a supernatural dimension of reality. Just as I could allow nature to take its course in a garden, or I could act to alter the course of ‘natural’ events  by planting a tree or pulling up a seedling, it was rational to suppose that the Creator could work with natural causes or could act directly, intervening in history. So I was willing to consider at least the possibility that a particular miracle could have happened: the Resurrection.

There were many pieces of evidence that all fit together to make a convincing case for the Resurrection; I’ll mention just a couple here. One of them is the behavior of the disciples before and after the Resurrection. The Gospel accounts do not portray their behavior after the Crucifixion in a particularly flattering light. Even though Jesus had predicted his own resurrection, the disciples gave up and went away, assuming that Jesus was a failed messiah. If the disciples had made up the Resurrection story afterwards, why would they have included details that made them look disloyal and cowardly? My academic studies in literature allowed me to recognize that the Gospels were written as history, not myth or parable, and that there hadn’t been enough time for a legend to form. It began to seem like the best explanation for all these events being recounted this way, was that they really happened.

Then, after the Resurrection, there’s a complete turn-around in their behavior, and they become bold proclaimers of the Risen Lord. There were plenty of words that people in ancient times could have used to describe visions or sightings of ghosts, and indeed, such language would have gotten them in much less trouble! But they spoke of a Jesus who was alive, bodily resurrected, and in short order were willing to die for that claim.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence for the Resurrection, though, was the Church itself. If I supposed that the Church had invented the Resurrection to explain its own worship of Jesus, I had to ask, how did that worship arise in the first place? If the Church was not the result of a miracle, it was itself a miracle.

It’s important to say that there was no single, knock-out piece of evidence that convinced me; I was convinced by the cumulative claim, the way it all fit together. Historical events can’t be proved like a math problem or tested like a scientific hypothesis, and there’s always a way to form an alternate explanation. But just because an alternative exists doesn’t mean it’s is equally reasonable or likely. Speaking within my own field of literature, there are people who claim that William Shakespeare didn’t really write his plays. There are even a few legitimately fuzzy areas: for instance, a few of his plays were co-authored, and it seems likely to me that at least one passage in Macbeth (Hecate’s speech) was a later interpolation. Nonetheless, the evidence taken as whole points to Shakespearean authorship!

So, that’s what happened with my assessment of the Resurrection, except with even more convincing reasons to support the Christian claim. The evidence was best explained by concluding that the Resurrection really happened. And having come to that conclusion, I knew that there were implications in my life. I had to ask myself: “What does this mean for me? What do I do now…?”

That’s where the imagination had a role, once again: in helping me make the connection between intellect and will. Indeed, imaginative literature continues to play an important part in my Christian life. Great novels and poetry nourish me as a Catholic, helping me to grow in the faith—and to delight in it.
 

Dr. Stephen Bullivant has long been one of our most popular contributors here at Strange Notions. Atheists appreciate his respectful, fair-minded articles while Catholics value his careful articulation of what Catholicism actually teaches about atheism.

Stephen has authored two books, The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Faith and Unbelief (Canterbury Press, 2013; Paulist Press, 2014). He also just released a massive tome that he co-edited with the philosopher Michael Ruse, titled The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (Oxford University Press, 2013).

I recently sat down with Stephen to discuss his conversion from atheism to Catholicism, the role of Christianity in the rise of atheism, and what Catholicism teaches about the salvation of atheists. Enjoy!
 

Video

Watch the video here (15 minutes)
 

Audio

[audio:https://strangenotions.com/wp-content/uploads/Stephen-Bullivant-interview.mp3]
Download the interview here (15 minutes)
 

Topics Discussed:

1:32 - How did you, as an atheist, become interested in researching Catholicism?
3:16 - What role have Christians played in the rise of atheism?
6:10 - What does the Catholic Church teach about the salvation of non-believers?
10:19 - What can Christians and atheists learn from each other?
 
 
Read Stephen's many articles at Strange Notions and be sure to pick up one of his books, The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology (Oxford University Press, 2012), Faith and Unbelief (Canterbury Press, 2013; Paulist Press, 2014), or The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (Oxford University Press, 2013).
 

 

If you liked this discussion, subscribe free to Strange Notions via feed reader or email to ensure sure you don't miss future interviews.
 

In Augustine's Confessions, the first Western autobiography ever written, we discover the probing journey of a brilliant man, traveling through a maze of philosophies before emerging into the light of Christianity. The destination brought him to tears for though he sensed Christianity to be true, it was the last place he expected to turn.

Years later, when Oxford professor C.S. Lewis embarked on his own pursuit of truth, he too ended up at Christianity, converting with great hesitancy: "I gave in, and admitted that God was God ... perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

And then there was Jennifer Fulwiler. When Jennifer stood in a Catholic Church on Easter 2007, preparing to become Catholic, there was hardly a more unlikely convert. Born and raised in a skeptical home, which valued Carl Sagan more than Jesus, Jennifer developed an ardent atheism. She rejected God and joyously mocked religion.

But then she met Joe. Joe was brilliant. He had multiple degrees from Ivy League institutions and was rapidly climbing the corporate ladder. Yet, strangely, he identified as a Christian. "How could such a smart man believe something so ridiculous?" Jennifer wondered.

That led her to rigorously examine the claims of Christianity, if only to prove them wrong. She gorged on books. She frequented online comment boxes and discussion boards. She even started a blog which invited Christians to counter her atheism. This painstaking research, combined with difficult questions about meaning, death, and existence, slowly led Jennifer to believe that God existed, and even more that Jesus was God in the flesh. Though obviously troubling, she could have accepted this "mere Christianity" and moved on. But after exploring many Protestant churches, she distressingly realized that the evidence was pushing her toward a far more unsettling destination: the Catholic Church.

Like Augustine and Lewis before her, Jennifer recounts her compelling journey of conversion through a colorful and stirring memoir, Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It (Ignatius Press). The book's deep soul, humor, and addictive readability help explain why Dean Koontz admitted to enjoying the entire book in just one sitting.

I recently sat down with Jennifer to discuss how she moved from atheism to Catholicism, what books influenced her journey, and why she describes her conversion as "a discovery of a long lost home."

Watch or download our interview below:

Video

Watch the video here (10 minutes)
 

Audio

[audio:https://strangenotions.com/wp-content/uploads/Jen-Fulwiler-Interview-SN.mp3]
Download the interview here (10 minutes)
 

Topics Discussed:

1:14 - Were you really an atheist growing up?
2:57 - What was one of the first chinks in your atheist armor?
4:41 - Can you describe your first attempts at prayer?
6:51 - What suggestions would you have for an unconvinced atheist?
 
 
Follow Jennifer's writing at ConversionDiary.com and read her many articles at Strange Notions. Also, be sure to pick up her magnificent new book, Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It.
 

 

If you liked this discussion, subscribe free to Strange Notions via feed reader or email to ensure sure you don't miss future interviews.
 

As a young undergraduate at Florida State University, studying mathematics and engineering, I had no idea that one of the world's leading philosophers of science worked just a couple buildings away. Had I known about Dr. Michael Ruse then, I would have jumped at the chance to meet him. He's since become one of my favorite atheist writers, displaying a sharp mind and a good will, free of needless polemics. (He's also not afraid to tattoo extinct marine arthropods on his arm if dared.)

This past December we finally had the chance to meet. The occasion was a special colloquium on contemporary atheism, hosted by Dr. Ruse in Tallahassee. I joined fellow Strange Notions contributor Dr. Stephen Bullivant and several other philosophers and theologians to discuss current research on unbelief. The event also featured the launch of The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, the definitive tome co-edited by Stephen and Dr. Ruse.

As a philosopher, Dr. Ruse specializes in the philosophy of biology and is well known for his work on the relationship between science and religion, the creation-evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem in science. He was born in England, studied at the University of Bristol (1962), attained his master's degree at McMaster University (1964), and then returned to the University of Bristol for his Ph.D. (1970).

Dr. Ruse graciously agreed to answer a few questions about his experiences with faith, the debate between evolution and religion, and his favorite theologians.
 

Q: You once testified in court, under oath, that "I am not an expert on my own religious opinions." What did you mean by that?

Dr. Ruse: Basically, what I meant was that I would be very uncomfortable being pinned down to one clear statement about my own religious beliefs. It is certainly true that I do not accept Jesus as the son of God, and that, indeed, I have great deal of trouble with the whole notion of the Christian God. I think the Christian God is an uncomfortable amalgam of Jewish and Greek thought and does not withstand careful scrutiny. It does not stand up too well. I find the notion of necessary existence, which is an essential part of the Christian God, to be incoherent. I’m also very troubled by the problem of evil.

However, whether this means that I don’t believe in anything at all is something that puzzled me when I was in court and still puzzles me some 30 years later. I am inclined therefore say that existence, including humans and their consciousness, is something of a mystery. I don’t think this necessarily means that I’m going to enjoy eternal bliss. In fact, I don’t know what any of it means.

So in that sense, I’m not an expert on my own opinion. I suppose you could call me an agnostic or skeptic, who is atheistic about traditional religions. But I would not want to go much further than that.

Q: You were raised a Quaker, and often speak fondly of how that tradition influenced you. Some high-profile atheists today suggest that any religious upbringing is a form of child abuse. How does that jive with your experience?

Dr. Ruse: As I explained recently in a piece I wrote for the online journal Aeon, I feel very strongly that my Quaker background was incredibly important in forming my personality. I was shown love and attention by my parents and their coreligionists that has lasted me all of my life. In particular, I have been taught never to accept anything just because somebody told me.  I must always try to puzzle things out for myself.

At the same time I take very seriously the Quaker belief that God is in every person, interpreting this of course in a secular fashion. It has guided me through my life as a teacher, making me realize that even when I have not been particularly drawn towards certain students, nevertheless it is my obligation to treat them as being worthy of attention, no less than anyone else.

So clearly I don’t think all religious upbringing is a form of child abuse. At the same time I think sometimes it can be this.  To use an analogy, children who were brought up during the Nazi era were filled with views on Jews that I think makes this training akin to child abuse, just as much as if they had been beaten.  Analogously, I am inclined to think some views that children are taught in the name of religion are quite morally troublesome. I would include, for instance, views that homosexuality is in some sense evil, or if not evil in itself that the acts of homosexuals are evil. It seems to me that teaching this to a child is getting close to abuse. So yes I can think of some forms of religious training or indoctrination as forms of child abuse.

Q: One of your best known books is titled Can a Darwinian be a Christian? For those who haven't read it, what's your short answer to that question?

Dr. Ruse: As I say in my book, I think the Darwinian can be a Christian, but that it’s not easy. However, I also say that the more important things in life are never easy! I think one can find ways to reconcile Darwinism with Christian claims about Original Sin, the problem of evil, free will, and similar issues.

I think one of the biggest problems is the appearance of humans here on the Earth. I’m not sure that I solved the problem in my book. It seems to me that Christians have to accept that the appearance of humans was not pure chance, but that this was intended by God.  However I see a radical indeterminacy in evolutionary thinking and I am not sure that we can guarantee the appearance of any organism, including humans. I think now I would want to try to solve the problem by invoking the notion of a multiverse. Humans would eventually have evolved, if not in our universe then in some other.  Remember, God is outside space and time. So it is not as if he is waiting for any of this to happen.  Obviously this is all very speculative. As I said, I don’t think it is easy to reconcile Darwinism and Christianity.

I don’t think however that the only arguments pertinent to the truth of the Christian faith are those based on science. I think philosophy and theology also have a role.  I argue that when these are applied to Christianity, it can be seen that the overall position is not tenable.

An example of where I would see philosophy criticizing Christianity would be over the already-mentioned issue of necessary existence. I don’t think the idea of necessary existence makes sense. Hence, since it is so important for Christianity, I think Christianity has to be false. Notice, however, that an argument against the notion of necessary existence is not a scientific argument, but a philosophical argument. That is why I say that even if Christianity can be reconciled with science, it does not follow that Christianity is true.

Q: Many Christian theologians claim you as their favorite atheist philosopher. Who is your favorite Christian theologian?

Dr. Ruse: Well that’s a very big question. I think that if you are going to dig back in history, I’d probably want to put St. Augustine up top as my favorite theologian. I do have, however, a great respect for St Anselm. I only exclude St. Thomas Aquinas from this list because, to be honest, I don’t know enough about his writings to make a full judgment. Notice that I’m a philosopher and not a theologian so I’m not really at fault here.

If we take Christian theology closer to the present than I would certainly say I have great admiration for the English theologian of the 19^th century, John Henry Newman. I think his ideas about the gradual revealing of Christianity is a most valuable tool of understanding. If you were to ask me about contemporary theologians, I was personally fond of Langdon Gilkey and much in sympathy with the kind of science-and-religion-separate view that he endorsed, often known as neo-orthodoxy.

Amongst living theologians, I am proud to call John Haught (the Catholic theologian, recently retired from Georgetown University) a good friend. I don’t think I endorse his evolutionary view of theology, influenced as he has been by Teilhard de Chardin and perhaps earlier by Alfred North Whitehead. But as an individual I like John a great deal and I find altogether admirable his determined effort to integrate evolutionary thinking into Christian theology.

Another theologian of today, of whom I am personally fond and for whom I have great admiration, is John Schneider, who used to teach at Calvin College. He lost his job for suggesting that Adam and Eve are not true and that therefore we need to reinterpret or rethink the Augustinian position on Original Sin. I think John is right about the nonexistence of Adam and Eve and I greatly admire his moral courage in asserting this, even to the point where he was dismissed from Calvin College.

Q: Let's talk about The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, which you co-edited with Strange Notions contributor Dr. Stephen Bullivant. The book is a 46-chapter, 750+ page compendium of contemporary scholarship on all kinds of topics relating to unbelief. How did the book come about?

Dr. Ruse: The Oxford Handbook of Atheism is easy to explain. I was approached by Stephen Bullivant, who was looking for a co-editor, perhaps one who was rather more established than he and who did not share his deep Christian faith. I don’t know how Stephen feels about me, but I can say that, from my perspective, it was a truly wonderful experience working with him. Stephen was an ideal editor, he knew far more about the topic than I, and we always worked harmoniously together. He did the bulk of the work, but I hope Stephen would agree that I did my share as and when required. I simply could not have done this book on my own, and I feel very privileged to have been allowed to work alongside Stephen on this project.

Q: You're very well-informed about the history and philosophy of atheism, but what new insights did you learn while compiling the Handbook?

Dr. Ruse: I’m not sure whether the real insights came from compiling the Handbook alone or more from a subsequent project that I have just completed, namely writing a single-author work for Oxford University Press entitled Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know. (This is part of a general series “what everyone needs to know.”)

The thing which came through to me most strongly was that the atheism debate is not just a matter of epistemology, that is to say of factually right and wrong. It is and always has been an intensely moral issue. People who argue for or against atheism are deeply committed to the moral worth of what they claim. Obviously this comes through with religious believers defending their faith against atheism. But it’s equally true of atheists. One sees this most clearly in the writings of the New Atheists. A work like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins as much a moral sermon as anything one might get from Jonathan Edwards. After all, anyone who says Christian education is child abuse is hardly stating brute empirical facts.

So I would say, as I bring this interview to an end, it is the moral dimension to the debate about atheism which strikes me most forcibly. I can also say, quite honestly, that before I started in on the Oxford Handbook and on the book I have subsequently written, I had no idea any of this would be so. I always say that the first person for whom I write is myself and never has this been truer than in the case of my writings and editing on and around the topic of atheism.
 
 
(Image credit: The University of Queensland)