A few weeks ago, The Telegraph published a Letter to the Editor from around 50 leading atheists in England, predictably including such names as Philip Pullman, Peter Tatchell, Polly Toynbee, Anthony Grayling, and Evan Harris.

It began as follows: “Sir – We respect the Prime Minister’s right to his religious beliefs and the fact that they necessarily affect his own life as a politician. However, we object to his characterization of Britain as a ‘Christian country’ and the negative consequences for politics and society that this engenders…. Britain is not a ‘Christian country’. Repeated surveys, polls and studies show that most of us as individuals are not Christian in our beliefs or our religious identities.”

One name, however, among those listed beneath the Letter was conspicuous by its absence: that of the most famous atheist of them all: Richard Dawkins. How come?

Well, a few days ago, we got the answer, in the form of a declaration (reported by The Telegraph under the headline “Richard Dawkins: I am a secular Christian”) made at the launch of the first volume of his memoirs, An Appetite For Wonder. In response to an American Protestant minister in the audience who claimed that he no longer believed in miracles or that Jesus was resurrected, but still considered himself a Christian and preached the teachings of Christ, Dawkins made this reply: “I would describe myself as a secular Christian in the same sense as secular Jews have a feeling for nostalgia and ceremonies.” He then made this perceptive comment to the liberal Protestant who had questioned him: “But if you don’t have the supernatural, it’s not clear to me why you would call yourself a minister.” In other words, why consider yourself a Christian at all?

Of his own atheism, Dawkins explained that he had an “Anglican upbringing” but chose atheism in his early teens after learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

This reminded me forcibly of my own early history: for I, too, in my early teens decided I was an atheist, and on joining the British Humanist Association at the age of 17, sent off for a small pile of books from its catalogue, including Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, and C M Beadnell’s A Picture Book of Evolution, which would, I was led to believe, explain to me why atheism was inevitable.

Well, here I am today, as a Catholic, because I realized that atheism didn’t work. What interests me is Professor Dawkins’s “nostalgia”, a word signifying a wistful affection for the past. That could mean (as I hope it does) that he is searching, perhaps unconsciously, for lost Christian certainties.

Back to evolution. One reason I came to the conclusion that the theory of evolution, even if true, implied no reason to reject the existence of a God was that very few people within the Church who had seriously studied the issue had ever seen any dissonance between evolution and belief. In my own study of the 19th century (which as a PhD student became my period of particular interest), I discovered that although it was certainly the case that some 19th-century intellectuals lost their faith as a result of reading On the Origin of Species, by no means all of them did, nor was the theory of evolution rejected by most Christian theologians as I had supposed (and as most people still think today). It was rejected by literalist fundamentalists, maybe: but they were in a minority then as they still are (they have always been an essentially protestant phenomenon).

An interesting example was the conservative Anglo-Catholic theologian Henry Liddon, a Canon of St Paul’s, and an admirer of Dr. Pusey, who was prepared seriously to consider Darwin’s theory as far as it went, but simply observed that it didn’t address the real question of our ultimate origins: he, like many ,continued to believe that man was created by God: but that evolution may well have been part of the Creator’s modus operandi. From the pulpit of St. Paul’s he addressed the question of Darwin’s conclusions about the beginnings of human life, by saying that, "We cannot forget what our faith teaches us about its origin, its present purpose, and its coming destiny… For our part, as we contemplate the human body, we cannot forget its author. Even if evolution should win for itself a permanent place in our conceptions of the past history of man, it would still leave untouched the great question of man’s origin…”

There was no automatic rejection by mainstream Christian thought of Darwinian evolution. Early contributions to the development of evolutionary theory were made by Catholic scientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel.

For nearly a century, the Holy See came to no publicly enunciated conclusion about Darwin’s theory. In the encyclical Humani Generis (1950), Pius XII declared that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces.

I think that Professor Dawkins ought now seriously to consider the uncertainties of his own great hero, Charles Darwin: in particular he might ponder on the absurdity of concluding that there is no God, having merely read On the Origin of Species, when that was very far from being Darwin’s own conclusion from the process of having written it.

Darwin himself said that when he wrote On the Origin of Species he was still convinced of the existence of God as a First Cause and that he was a theist. In 1879 he declared that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, and that generally “an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind”. He went as far as saying that “Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence…. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting … probabilities.”

How close Professor Dawkins is to discovering that the supernatural is a reality, I cannot say. But he may without realizing it be very close. What he needs now is a small dose of his hero’s own uncertainty; he sounds to me as though already he may be quite close to his agnosticism. From there it’s a much smaller leap to faith.
 
 
Originally posted at the Catholic Herald. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Guardian)

Sam Harris's anti-religious book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, begins with a premise that he admitted to be false in the endnotes: the idea that most suicide bombings occur because of religion generally, and Islam specifically. In fact, most suicide bombings occur at the hands of the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist ethno-political movement with no ties to any religion.

But later in the book, he makes an even more puzzling insinuation, that religion is responsible for drugs being illegal:

"The influence of faith on our criminal laws comes at a remarkable price. Consider the case of drugs. As it happens, there are many substances - many of them naturally occurring - the consumption of which leads to transient states of inordinate pleasure. Occasionally, it is true, they lead to transient states of misery as well, but there is no doubt that pleasure is the norm, otherwise human beings would not have felt the continual desire to take such substances for millennia. Of course, pleasure is precisely the problem with these substances, since pleasure and piety have always had an uneasy relationship." (Harris, End of Faith, p. 160)

Are we really to believe that the government bans crack cocaine because the Bible says to, or because they don’t want people to be too happy? Should we view the DEA (and perhaps even the FDA) as religious functionaries enforcing divinely-inspired precepts upon an unsuspecting populace? Let’s look at a few of the facts.

"As it happens, there are many substances - many of them naturally occurring..."

The "naturally occurring" clause is a bit misguided. Hemlock is naturally occurring. So is arsenic. Just because something exists in nature doesn't make it any safer than something made through human ingenuity. I'd rather drink a smoothie than hemlock any day, even though the latter is more "natural." Harris includes this "naturally occurring" detail as if to suggest, "Hey, these can't be that bad, right?" And on that note, he's just disregarding science.

But besides that, he's not just mad that naturally occurring drugs are illegal: we can tell because he says "many" of the substances in question are naturally occurring, not "all."

"...the consumption of which leads to transient states of inordinate pleasure. Occasionally, it is true, they lead to transient states of misery as well, but there is no doubt that pleasure is the norm, otherwise human beings would not have felt the continual desire to take such substances for millennia."

The truth is that even some real misery-producing drugs are popular, because of thrill seeking and/or addiction. Take, for example, this description of the effects of PCP published by the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology:

"The mnemonic RED DANES was coined by Giannini and colleagues (48,49) to characterize eight acute symptoms of PCP intoxication that may be seen at any dose: rage, erythema, dilated pupils, delusions, amnesia, nystagmus in the horizontal plane, excitation, and skin dry. It is important to note that the toxic effects of PCP may persist for days because the half-life of PCP after overdose may be as long as 3 days (50)."

Nystagmus, if you’re wondering, is involuntary eye movement. The normal symptoms aren’t “pleasure.” They’re things like rage and crazy eyes, which can be seen "at any dose." The closest things to pleasure are delusions, excitation, and amnesia.

But let's assume that PCP does create "pleasure" for its users (assuming, of course, they're not also suffering from the violent emotional swings PCP brings on). They're still really not fun for people on the road or in the path of the hopped-up psycho. A mentally ill man was recently sentenced for his PCP-induced attack where he started beating a sleeping man with a hammer. Around the same time, a guy from my home town was given 18 years for what the Kansas City Star called an "unprovoked attack." They're not kidding. The man in question simply kicked in the front door of a woman's house and began "punching, choking, and attempting to sodomize [her]."

If that's what Harris means by "pleasure" being the problem, then I suppose we agree. But somehow, I suspect that a lot of non-religious people also have a problem with this kind of recreation, for reasons which have nothing to do with religion. Pleasure at any price is just a carte blanche justification for many deplorable acts like those above.

"Of course, pleasure is precisely the problem with these substances, since pleasure and piety have always had an uneasy relationship."

Here, I think he's partially right, in one very narrow sense. Religious people often place a high value on public order, and chaos-inducing drugs threaten public order. I'm completely comfortable with that rationale. In the case of some religious people, the high view of public order is taken from Biblical texts (Romans 13:1-8, for example). But the Biblical passages reflect what most people already believe: that order is superior to chaos.

As for the relationship between religion and pleasure, it's not so much "uneasy" as "balanced," just like the relationship between authority and order and between liberty and free will. The truth is that religiously-influenced societies have long attempted to balance the human right, given by God, for pleasure, with the human need for order. The New Testament reflects this. Take the world's most popular drug: alcohol. The Bible clearly permits its use in moderation: John 2:1-11, Gen. 14:18 (here, it's foreshadowing the Eucharist, but it's still actual wine being offered to God in a way considered praiseworthy), Gen. 27:25, Neh. 8:10, Psalm 104:15, Ecclesiastes 9:7, Wisdom 2:7, Sir. 31:25-28 , Amos 9:14, etc. In Luke 7:33-34, Jesus Himself is criticized by the scribes and Pharisees for His alleged drunkenness and gluttony, just because He ate and drank in moderation, while John the Baptist was criticized for "neither eating bread nor drinking wine."

So moderate drinking is actually commended and recommended throughout the Bible. But it does not endorse drinking to excess. Drunkenness is condemned throughout the Bible, particularly in the New Testament. For example, Ecc. 10:17, Rom. 13:13, Gal. 5:21, 1 Tim. 3:3, Titus 1:7, 1 Peter 4:3, etc. In the words of Socrates, "everything in moderation, nothing in excess." A little wine makes you happy, too much wine can make you a depressed alcoholic. A little is good for your heart, a lot is bad for your liver. This is the position of Socrates and Aristotle, the position of modern science, and most important, the Christian stance, the position most relevant to a discussion on American drug laws. Since Harris says "our criminal laws," I assume he's trying to attack Christianity's alleged hatred of pleasure. But he's really only attacking a certain Puritanical excess which the vast majority of sane religious people have long fought against... using Biblical texts.

If he's arguing that some Christians advocate for total prohibition contrary to the pro-temperance Bible, he's not arguing against Christianity. If anything, he's giving another reason to hew closer to the teachings of the Catholic Church. His real problem is that some people in power enjoy controlling other people, and will attempt to do so, at times, with religious texts. But without religious texts, these same people have been just as successful—and more so, because their own behavior isn't kept in check by anything above themselves.

At the end of the day, Christianity doesn't demand the prohibition of a single drug: we're left to organize our society around prudential judgments. Should marijuana be a Schedule I drug? Schedule II? Decriminalized? Legalized? The Bible has no answer on this, Sacred Tradition has no answer on this, and the Church offers no answer on this. Certainly, they give us the tools to weigh the pros and cons (human liberty should be enjoyed, some things go to excess, the rights of third-parties should be protected, etc.), but to suggest that there's one, dogmatic, unflinching anti-pleasure position called Christian morality is patently false.
 
 
Originally posted at Shameless Popery.
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Last Easter, when I was just beginning to explore the possibility that, despite what I had previously believed and been brought up to believe, there might be something to the Catholic faith, I read Letters to a Young Catholic by George Weigel. One passage in particular struck me.

Talking of the New Testament miracles and the meaning of faith, Weigel writes: “In the Catholic view of things, walking on water is an entirely sensible thing to do. It’s staying in the boat, hanging tightly to our own sad little securities, that’s rather mad.”

In the following months, that life outside the boat—the life of faith—would come to make increasing sense to me, until eventually I could no longer justify staying put. Last weekend I was baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church.

Of course, this wasn't supposed to happen. Faith is something my generation is meant to be casting aside, not taking up. I was raised without any religion and was eight when 9/11 took place. Religion was irrelevant in my personal life and had provided my formative years with a rolling-news backdrop of violence and extremism. I avidly read Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, whose ideas were sufficiently similar to mine that I could push any uncertainties I had to the back of my mind. After all, what alternative was there to atheism?

As a teenager, I realized that I needed to read beyond my staple polemicists, as well as start researching the ideas of the most egregious enemies of reason, such as Catholics, to properly defend my world view. It was here, ironically, that the problems began.

I started by reading Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address, aware that it had generated controversy at the time and was some sort of attempt—futile, of course—to reconcile faith and reason. I also read the shortest book of his I could find, On Conscience. I expected—and wanted—to find bigotry and illogicality that would vindicate my atheism. Instead, I was presented with a God who was the Logos: not a supernatural dictator crushing human reason, but the self-expressing standard of goodness and objective truth towards which our reason is oriented, and in which it is fulfilled, an entity that does not robotically control our morality, but is rather the source of our capacity for moral perception, a perception that requires development and formation through the conscientious exercise of free will.

It was a far more subtle, humane, and, yes, credible perception of faith than I had expected. It didn't lead to any dramatic spiritual epiphany, but did spur me to look further into Catholicism, and to re-examine some of the problems I had with atheism with a more critical eye.

First, morality. Non-theistic morality, to my mind, tended towards two equally problematic camps: either it was subjective to the point of meaninglessness or, when followed logically, entailed intuitively repulsive outcomes, such as Sam Harris’s stance on torture. But the most appealing theories which could circumvent these problems, like virtue ethics, often did so by presupposing the existence of God. Before, with my caricatured understanding of theism, I’d considered that nonsensical. Now, with the more detailed understanding I was starting to develop, I wasn’t so sure.

Next, metaphysics. I soon realised that relying on the New Atheists for my counter-arguments to the existence of God had been a mistake: Dawkins, for instance, gives a disingenuously cursory treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas in The God Delusion, engaging only with the summary of Aquinas’s proofs in the Five Ways—and misunderstanding those summarized proofs to boot. Acquainting myself fully with Thomistic-Aristotelian ideas, I found them to be a valid explanation of the natural world, and one on which atheist philosophers had failed to make a coherent assault.

What I still did not understand was how a theology that operated in harmony with human reason could simultaneously be, in Benedict XVI’s words, “a theology grounded in biblical faith”. I’d always assumed that sola scriptura (“scripture alone”), with its evident shortcomings and fallacies, was how all consistent, believing Christians read the Bible. So I was surprised to discover that this view could be refuted just as robustly from a Catholic standpoint—reading the Bible through the Church and its history, in light of Tradition—as from an atheist one.

I looked for absurdities and inconsistencies in the Catholic faith that would derail my thoughts from the unnerving conclusion I was heading towards, but the infuriating thing about Catholicism is its coherency: once you accept the basic conceptual structure, things fall into place with terrifying speed. “The Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole,” wrote philosopher Edith Stein in The Science of the Cross: “If we become immersed in one, we are led to all the others.” The beauty and authenticity of even the most ostensibly difficult parts of Catholicism, such as the sexual ethics, became clear once they were viewed not as a decontextualised list of prohibitions, but as essential components in the intricate body of the Church’s teaching.

There was one remaining problem, however: my lack of familiarity with faith as something lived. To me, the whole practice and vernacular of religion—prayer, hymns, Mass—was something wholly alien, which I was reluctant to step into.

My friendships with practicing Catholics finally convinced me that I had to make a decision. Faith, after all, isn’t merely an intellectual exercise, an assent to certain propositions; it’s a radical act of the will, one that engenders a change of the whole person. Books had taken me to Catholicism as a plausible conjecture, but Catholicism as a living truth I came to understand only through observing those already serving the Church within that life of grace.

I grew up in a culture that has largely turned its back on faith. It’s why I was able to drift through life with my ill-conceived atheism going unchallenged, and at least partially explains the sheer extent of the popular support for the New Atheists: for every considerate and well-informed atheist, there will be others with no personal experience of religion and no interest in the arguments who are simply drifting with the cultural tide.

As the popularity of belligerent, all-the-answers atheism wanes, however, thoughtful Christians able to explain and defend their faith will become an increasingly vital presence in the public square. I hope I, in a small way, am an example of the appeal that Catholicism can still hold in an age that at times appears intractably opposed to it.

 
 
Originally posted at The Catholic Herald. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)