As Christmas and the holiday season draw near, it is time to take a pause and think deeply about the benefits that Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has conferred upon Western civilization. As a non-Westerner and non-Christian who has no ax to grind in this issue, I believe I can offer a fairly objective assessment of the impact that Christian ideas (some of which had pagan/Jewish precedents) have had on the evolution of Western civilization and their key role in the West’s spectacular ascent to scientific and technological supremacy in the past millennium. This brief essay shall throw light on some of these ideas, which are now taken for granted but are intrinsic to the Christian tradition.

One spurious idea, which continues to have a strong hold on the views of so many, is that Christianity functioned as an impediment to scientific progress and that only when the West threw off the “shackles” of Christian dogma, did it rise to towering heights in science and technology and achieve global preeminence in virtually every intellectual endeavor. In his scathingly anti-Christian book The Antichrist, the famous 19^th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche charges that Christianity is antithetical to science, reason, life, and reality: “A religion such as Christianity which never comes once in touch with reality, and which collapses the very moment reality asserts its rights even on one single point, must naturally be a mortal enemy of the ‘wisdom of this world’—that is to say, science” (51). In his equally critical Letter to a Christian Nation, American philosopher Sam Harris asserts that “the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science” (63).

Both of these views are clearly off the mark. Far from constituting a handicap to scientific activity, Christian presuppositions encouraged exploration of the physical world and aided scientific progress. The Christian conception of God and of His physical creation has proved immensely conducive for the flowering of science. How so? Christianity conceives of God as a rational and benevolent creator who brought into existence a universe endowed with rationality, order, and purpose. God’s handiwork is not dominated by chaos or mystery or randomness, nor is it too complex for human comprehension. Rather, it functions in accord with invariable, consistent, and rational laws that are accessible to the inquiring mind and to observation. Since God created man in His own image, human beings are blessed with the gift of reason and are possessed of the ability to investigate and understand the rational, fixed, and divinely set patterns according to which the universe operates. Indeed, as Dr. Peter Hodgson, the late lecturer of nuclear physics at Oxford and an avowed Roman Catholic, once said, “Christianity provided just those beliefs that are essential for science, and the whole moral climate that encourages its growth” (Young 144).

Hence, it should come as no surprise that some of the greatest scientists in history, including the stars of the Scientific Revolution, were devout Christians, some of whom wrote on theology as well as science. Suffice it to mention medieval theologian-natural philosophers such as Robert Grosseteste (died in 1253), Albertus Magnus (died in 1280), Thomas Bradawrdine (d. 1349), Jean Buridan (1295-1363), Nicole Oresme (1325-1382), as well as Nicolaus Copernicus (died 1543), Johannes Kepler (died in 1630), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Robert Boyle (1627-1691), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Michael Faraday (1791-1867), Gregor Mendel (died in 1884), and countless others. Max Planck, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918 for his work on Quantum Theory, believed faith and science were in partnership rather than at loggerheads: “Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against scepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: ‘On to God!’” (156).

Another key Christian idea that facilitated the West’s success is related to the concept of time as linear rather than cyclical; history is suffused with purpose because it moves forward rather than round in circles. Christianity, in other words, is a progressive and forward-leaning religion. Dominican preacher Fra Giordano encapsulated Christian belief in progress when he said in 1306 that “[n]ot all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them [my emphasis]” (Grant’s Foundations of Modern Science 160). Centuries before, St. Augustine celebrated the "wonderful—one might say stupefying—advances human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation!" (117). In light of this belief that great inventions lie ahead, there is no wonder that the medieval Catholic Church did not express any opposition to the use of new technologies such as eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, telescopes, microscopes, and printing press, etc. Christian belief in progress was not confined to technology but extended to theology as well. Augustine was certain that human understanding of God’s will would increase over time, stressing that although there were “certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp…one day we shall be able to do so” (Stark 9).

In contrast, the ancient Greeks viewed the universe as eternal, uncreated, and “locked into endless cycles of progress and decay” (18). Such a view renders history meaningless; decay or decline is bound to follow progress. Aristotle, indisputably the greatest Greek philosopher, believed that “the same ideas recur to men not once or twice but over and over again” and that everything had “been invented several times over in the course of ages, or rather times without number” (19). In the words of American sociologist Rodney Stark, Aristotle reasoned that ”since he was living in a Golden Age, the levels of technology of his time were at the maximum attainable, precluding further progress. As for inventions, so too for individuals – the same persons would be born again and again as the blind cycles of the universe rolled along” (19). In the same vein, the Stoics thought that the “difference between former and actual existences will only be extrinsic and accidental; such differences do not produce another man as contrasted with his counterpart from a previous world-age” (19).

Christianity has faith in man’s ability not only to unlock the secrets of the universe but also to reach universal moral truths, distinguish between right and wrong, and decipher the hidden meaning of Scripture, unaided by revelation. This remarkable idea looms large in St. Paul’s following assertion: “Even when Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, instinctively follow what the law says, they show that in their hearts they know right from wrong. They demonstrate that God’s law is written within them, for their own consciences either accuse them or tell them they are doing what is right” (Romans 2:14-15).

The Christian belief in free will has rescued man from sinking into fatalism, encouraged him to be active, and instilled faith in one’s ability to alter his destiny and take matters into his own hands. Augustine affirmed that human beings “possess a will,” adding that “from this it follows that whoever desires to live righteously and honorably, can accomplish this” (Stark 25). Similarly, the great theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) said: “A man can direct and govern his own actions also. Therefore the rational creature participates in the divine providence not only in being governed but also in governing” (25).

A key Christian concept that has figured prominently in Western, rather Eastern, Christendom is the separation of church and state. This separation derives from Jesus’ ingenious reply to the Pharisees: “[G]ive to Caesar what belongs to him. But everything that belongs to God must be given to God” (Matthew 22:21). Christianity views the secular and ecclesiastical authorities as two distinct and independent entities with their own separate jurisdictions. True, medieval popes and emperors often jockeyed for domination, but they recognized that in principle each reigned over separate realms. This distinction between the secular and religious enabled the legislation of both civil and ecclesiastical laws, and more importantly, set the stage for the creation of a free domain in which science could be practiced relatively unhindered by secular or religious constraints. In the words of historian of science Edward Grant, the separation of church and state in the West

“proved an enormous boon to the development of science and natural philosophy. The church did not view natural philosophy as a discipline that had to be theologized or made to agree with the Bible...[the separation of church and state] made numerous institutional developments feasible that might not otherwise have occurred. Indeed, the very separation of natural philosophy into the faculty of arts and the location of theology in a separate faculty of theology reveals an understanding that these are different subject areas that require very different treatment. The great benefit for science and religion is that each was left relatively free to develop independently of the other, although every individual scientist or theologian was free to incorporate ideas and concepts from the one area into the other” (Science and Religion 247-8).

One common misconception is that Christianity is an inherently otherworldly religion that encourages its adherents to turn away from the material world, to renounce worldly possessions, and to give precedence to spiritual pursuits at the expense of worldly concerns. It is grossly simplistic to refer to the monks and their ascetic lives in order to corroborate the fabrication that Christianity is inimical to earthly life and material progress. In addition to prayer, religious contemplation, and of course charity, the monks in the early Middle Ages transcribed the priceless manuscripts of the Greco-Roman legacy, thus saving it from oblivion. Monastic orders in the countryside turned into centers of learning and scholarship, with the monastery of Vivarium (founded by Cassiodorus) translating Greek works into Latin and teaching the seven liberal arts, including a surprisingly large number of pagan texts. From the sixth century onward, the monasteries of Ireland devoted much attention to classical pagan authors and the mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Medieval monks also engaged in manual labor and agricultural activity, which had an enormously beneficial impact on their physical surroundings. Moreover, they made stunning technological achievements (in metallurgy) and even invented champagne.

Christianity has contributed a host of other values such as equality and freedom. Certainly, wrongs have historically been committed in the name of the faith, but these should not blind Westerners, irrespective of whether they still believe in the tenets of the faith or not, to the eminently salutary influence Christianity has had on their magnificent civilization.

Works Cited

Grant, Edward. The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

____________. Science and Religion 400 BC- AD 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus. The John Hopkins University Press, 2004. Print.

Harris, Sam. A Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to Faith. Bantam Press, 2007.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist: A Criticism of Christianity. Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. 1895. Barnes and Nobles, 2006.

Saint Augustine of Hippo. The Essential Augustine. Edited by Vernon Joseph Bourke., Hackett Publishing Company, 1974.

Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. The Random House Publishing Group, 2005.

The Bible. Gift and Award Edition, Tyndale House Publishers, 1998.

Young, John. Teach Yourself: Christianity. Hachette Livre UK, 2008.

NOTE: We recently kicked off a new series of posts, each introducing a popular argument for or against God, followed by open-ended discussion. The goal is not to offer a thorough defense or refutation of the argument in the original post, but to unpack it together, as a community, in the comment boxes. The first argument we discussed was Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument for God, then we looked at the kalam cosmological argument. Today, we'll look at the moral argument for God.
 

The moral argument is one of the oldest and most-discussed arguments for God. Here's a short video from William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith ministry explaining it:
 

 
The video presents the argument like this:

Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

As with the kalam cosmological argument, the argument appears deceptively simple. The logic is clear and airtight—I'm not aware of any philosopher, theist or non-theist, who denies the logic.

Most of the discussion, therefore, centers on three elements: the meaning of "objective moral values and duties", the truth of premise one, and the truth of premise two. Most critics who reject this argument take issue with one of those three elements.

For example, Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, attempts to circumvent this argument by refuting premise one. He does so by defining morality as that which contributes to the well-being (or flourishing) of sentient creatures. If it produces more flourishing, it's good. If it mitigates flourishing, it's bad. Defined this way, Harris claims, morality does not require God since science can reveal what is good by identifying things that increase or detract from our well-being.

The problem, however, as William Lane Craig and others have noted, is that Harris equivocates the meaning of "good" (and thus the definition of morality.) On Harris' moral view, something is "good" if it contributes to overall human flourishing, if it yields a positive, pragmatic benefit. But this is different than saying something is morally good. Harris' view is more like saying you made a "good" chess move or you did a "good" job on that portrait. Those examples do not refer to objective moral goodness, just pragmatic goodness. But it's moral goodness that the original argument refers to and claims is inexplicable without God.

So what do you think? Is the moral argument a sound proof for God? If not, how does it fail?

 
 
(Image credit: Reasonable Faith)

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens—these are the posterboys for what some have called the “New Atheists”.

What’s new about the New Atheists? In his book, Gunning For God, Oxford mathematician John Lennox says it’s their tone and emphasis.

The tone of today’s New Atheists is one of intensity and aggression. They are not out to merely inform. They are out to convert—to de-vangelize. In the The God Delusion, Dawkins admits:

“If this book works as I intend, religious leaders who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” (p. 28)

The fearless polemicist, Christopher Hitchens, visited the University of Toronto in 2006 and—to the roaring applause of the crowd—he rallied his troops with these words:

“I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.”

In Letters To A Young Contrarian, Hitchens writes:

“I’m not even an atheist so much as I’m an antitheist”.

These words reflect precisely the intention and emphasis of the New Atheists and their disciples: to put an end to religion, or as Sam Harris has put it:

“To destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” (Letter To A Christian Nation, p.ix)

But the New Atheists are not the only atheists out there today. Indeed some modern atheists object rather strongly to the tact of their counterparts. Atheist Paul Kurtz, founder of the The Center For Inquiry (a secular humanist organization), is cited as giving the new atheists the following assessment:

“I consider them atheist fundamentalists,” he says. “They’re anti-religious, and they’re mean-spirited, unfortunately. Now, they’re very good atheists and very dedicated people who do not believe in God. But you have this aggressive and militant phase of atheism, and that does more damage than good.” (Barbara Bradley Hagerty, “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists”)

Another skeptic who has given a critical assessment of the “anti-theist” division of popular atheists, is BBC Radio personality, John Humphrys, an agnostic. Here is how he responds to seven common New Atheist attitudes in his book, In God We Doubt (I have reconfigured the statement/response format for easier reading):

1. Believers are mostly naive or stupid. Or, at least, they’re not as clever as atheists.

To which Humphreys responds:

“This is so clearly untrue it’s barely worth bothering with. Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, was reduced to producing a “study” by Mensa that purported to show an inverse relationship between intelligence and belief. He also claimed that only a very few members of the Royal Society believe in a personal god. So what? Somebelievers are undoubtedly stupid (witness the creationists) but I’ve met one or two atheists I wouldn’t trust tochange a light-bulb.”

2. The few clever ones are pathetic because they need a crutch to get them through life.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Don’t we all? Some use booze rather than the Bible. It doesn’t prove anything about either.”

3. They are also pathetic because they can’t accept the finality of death.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Maybe, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Count the number of atheists in the foxholes or the cancer wards.”

4. They have been brainwashed into believing. There is no such thing as a “Christian child”, for instance—just a child whose parents have had her baptised.

To which Humphrys responds:

“True, and many children reject it when they get older. But many others stay with it.”

5. They have been bullied into believing.

To which Humphrys responds:

“This is also true in many cases but you can’t actually bully someone into believing—just into pretending to believe.”

6. If we don’t wipe out religious belief by next Thursday week, civilisation as we know it is doomed.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Of course the mad mullahs are dangerous and extreme Islamism is a threat to be taken seriously. But we’ve survived monotheist religion for 4, 000 years or so, and  I can think of one or two other things that are a greater threat to civilisation.”

7. Trust me: I’m an atheist.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Why?”

He adds:
“I make no apology if I have oversimplified their views with a little list: it’s what they do to believers all the time.”
 
 
(Image credit: Wales Online)

The common wisdom in many circles (most located in certain cities on the East and Left Coasts) is that religion, in general, is a bad thing, and that in the hands of "fundamentalists," the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and ultra-super-radical-Islamic terrorists, it is inevitably evil. Eliminating religion, it is then suggested or even openly argued, is a sure way to rid the world of evil. The term "religion," it should be noted, almost always refers to Christianity (or a form of pseudo-Christianity) and then, in some cases, to Islam.

An example of such thinking is the story of a film that documents the abuse of religion and the deadly bigotry that can flow from racists who twist the Bible for evil purposes. The Detroit Free Press reports on a showing of the documentary at Rochester College in Michigan and the reaction to it:

In the often-emotional discussion after the film, Rubel Shelly, a Rochester College professor who teaches courses on religion, told the crowd, "This startles me, aggravates me and humbles me. It scares the life out of me."

He said the film made him wonder about everything from the abuse of Christianity by white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to the twisting of Islam by suicide bombers. "For me, the insight from this film is that religion can become downright evil," he said.

Based on these comments, one might conclude that the film is about "white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan" or "suicide bombers" or perhaps a crazed "fundamentalist" Christian who tried to bomb an abortion clinic. But the film (which aired on PBS in Michigan) is titled "Theologians Under Hitler: Could It Happen Again?":

The film focuses on several 1930s-era Protestant theologians in Germany who encouraged the rise of Nazism, publicly praising it as a gift from God to resurrect the impoverished German people. These men also added their moral weight to the attempted destruction of Judaism.
 
Among the most infamous was Gerhard Kittel, at the time a world-famous Protestant expert on the ancient history of the Bible. Far from a marginal figure or thug, like many of Hitler's early followers, Kittel taught at the centuries-old Tubingen University, the same school that later would have Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, on its faculty.

Reading this, a couple of questions come to mind. First, was Gerhard Kittel some sort of knuckle-dragging, half-witted "fundamentalist"? No, he wasn’t. On the contrary, he was a highly regarded and well-educated New Testament scholar who produced work – the ten-volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament – that is still used today.

Secondly, if religion is proven bad because Kittel and some other Christians supported the Nazis, what was proven by the many Protestants and Catholics—including the much-maligned Pope Pius XII—who helped save hundreds of thousands of Jews? What about Hitler’s obsessive hatred of orthodox Christianity? Is religion itself really the problem? Specifically, when someone states that "religion can become downright evil," is he saying that religion inevitably leads to evil, or religious people commit the majority of evil acts, or that the religious impulse must be severely contained (or even destroyed)?

Sam Harris thinks so. The popular atheist author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the End of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004) makes a passionate, if not convincing, case for the elimination of religion, namely (of course) Christianity and Islam. Lamenting that many people, including some public leaders, still take seriously Christian doctrine, Harris writes: "As we stride boldly into the Middle Ages, it does not seem out of place to wonder whether the myths that now saturate our discourse will wind up killing many of us, as the myths of others [terrorists] already have."

He then boldly insists that "faith" must go the way of the dodo bird: "We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. … It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs" (47, 48). It comes as no surprise that Harris’s polemic is praised by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, who advocates infanticide and euthanasia and all else in-between (yet, irrationally, Singer spent much moneykeeping alive his mother, who is stricken with Alzheimer's disease).

Professor Shelly apparently missed Harris’s book (which was well-received among those who read The New York Times Book Review—"This in an important book"—and sleep in on Sunday mornings). Still, when a professor of religion states, "For me, the insight from this film is that religion can become downright evil," one can be forgiven for wondering what they have studied and if they have ever contemplated human nature, both by considering the actions/thoughts of others and examining their own actions/thoughts. Sure, there is a sense in which "religion can become downright evil," which is because people can become downright evil. As G.K. Chesterton rightly noted somewhere (the exact location escapes me), if you think the world is in bad shape you might be shocked how much worse it would be if Christianity weren’t around. And before anyone argues that it’s a completely subjective point, do check out The Black Book of Communism.

The problem many people have today is not that they deny outright the existence of evil, but that they deny they could have anything to do with evil. Sure, evil is personal and is committed by persons—but not by me. Yes, Hitler was human—but I’m different from Hitler. Some folks aren’t even comfortable at that distance, so they create more space by conceiving of evil as something done to them or forced upon them (usually by an institution) rather than a specific attack on the good and on others that humans can freely choose to commit. Another comment by Professor Shelly from the Free Press article points toward this second option:

Without a stricter separation of church and state, Shelly argued, "we can still allow ourselves as Christians to be played by political power," just as in Germany in the 1930s. At that point, he turned to Martin and asked, "So where are the religious leaders who are strong enough to resist the stroking of political power today?"

The implication, it seems clear, is that evil comes in the form of large, faceless, and frightening institutions—usually political—that force themselves on us. Strangely enough, a common (and sometimes warranted) criticism of some "fundamentalists" is that they have a conspiratorial mindset and operate out of fear of the Big, Bad Bogeyman (the U.N., the European Union, Hollywood, etc.). But if one feature of "fundamentalism" is an irrational, conspiratorial, and highly emotional fear of beliefs and institutions that we do not understand (nor try to understand), then "fundamentalism" is hardly limited to the realms of traditional Christianity, conservative politics, or Middle America. Nor is evil the sole property of a certain religion, political party, or ideology, even if a particular religion or ideology carries fuel that feeds the thought and actions of a person bent on committing acts of evil.

Admittedly, it is often difficult to see where religious teaching ends and adherence to that teaching begins. It becomes even more difficult when the teaching appears to be ambivalent or open to different interpretations. But to say, for instance, that a priest who molests a boy does so because of his religion (or, as it is sometimes argued, the unrealistic or "unnatural" disciplines of his religion) is to ignore that Catholicism condemns such an act. In the case of Kittel, I don’t know all of the influences—either theological or political—that shaped his thinking. But I know that nearly a million Jews were saved by the actions of Pope Pius XII, who acted in accord with the religious belief that all men are created in the image of God and that murder is evil. (And yet, when many people think of Christianity and Nazism, they also think of "Hitler’s Pope," a sad testament to the reality of evil attacks on truth.)

We can see the effects of this skewed thinking when confronted with the "solution" so often promoted by educators such as Professor Shelly, which is a "stricter separation of church and state." If that is the answer, look no further than the former Soviet Union to see what happens when the ultimate separation of church and state takes place—that is, when the state essentially destroys the church (and I use "church" here to mean an authentic body of Christians who don't give lip service the state to save their skins). The result is not just the eradication of traditional religion but also the establishment of a grotesque and bloody new religion—or anti-religious religion.

In the words of Simone Weil: "Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people." Weil's remark is quoted in Raymond Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals, a classic work of political reflection on radical politics, especially Marxism and Communism. In another work, The Dawn of Universal History,Aron (1905-1983)—a French intellectual who was once classmates with Sartre but chose a far different path from the famed existentialist—has a lengthy analysis of "The Secular Religions," which include Fascism, Nazism, Marxism, and Stalinism.

Aron writes that these secular religions "related everything—men and things, thoughts and deeds—to that ultimate end [the totalitarian goals of each respective political movement], and utility in terms of that end is the measure of all values, even spiritual ones. Partisans of such religions will without any qualms of conscience make use of any means, however horrible, because nothing can prevents the means from being sanctified by the end. In other words, if the job of religion is to set out the lofty values that give human existence its direction, how can we deny that the political doctrines of our own day are essentially religious in character?" He then points out how these secular religions provide an interpretation of the world, the meaning or source of suffering, salvation and the hope of a future utopia, and the demand of sacrifice by commitment to the "movement."

Oddly enough, Harris also recognizes the religious character of certain totalitarian ideologies, although his comments suggest that his reasoning is self-serving: "Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. … Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational" (79; emphasis added). Readers are apparently expected to take on good faith that Harris is not just paying lip service to rationality, but hates religion for perfectly rational, scientific reasons.

The point is that every "ism"—even atheism, materialism, and the "pragmatism" endorsed by Harris—plays riffs based on the same tunes since man moves to a religious beat; to further the metaphor, man has music within him and longs to know the composer. He is, in other words, a religious animal who thinks religious thoughts and has religious impulses. In the words of Chesterton:

Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. (Heretics, [Ignatius, 1986], p. 205).

So, one of dogmas (either conscious or otherwise) of avowed secularists is that religion is unreasonable and almost inevitably produces evil. Another is that some form of pure secularism (often described using terms such as "education," "progressive thinking," "enlightenment," "sophisticated," "scientific," and so forth) is the much-needed answer to the problems that plague humanity.

But Chesterton is correct in observing that there "are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice" (What’s Wrong With the World [Ignatius, 1987], p. 48), and that doctrine "is a definite point," while prejudice is "a direction." Religion, especially orthodox Christianity, is despised because it is a definite and specific faith. Instead of vague platitudes about love, the Christian Faith speaks of specific suffering and a definite Cross. Instead of hazy affirmations of the goodness of man, Catholicism teaches a specific doctrine of sin and makes definite moral demands.

And instead of a general appeal to "just get along," the Church insists on specific sacrifices and definite choices between good and evil—and bluntly says that all of us are capable of evil, regardless of how non-religious our religion might pretend to be.
 
 
(Image credit: The Day)

I was recently re-reading sections of what I think is one of the best and yet most under-appreciated Catholic books written in recent decades, Faith and Certitude by Father Thomas Dubay. Fr. Dubay's book is, as the title suggests, especially concerned with skepticism and unbelief, and is an excellent examination of the intellectual premises and varied attitudes held by atheists. In a chapter titled, "Clarifying Our Concepts," Fr. Dubay writes:

"Everyone is dogmatic. The statement may startle, but it is easy to demonstrate. We human beings differ not as to whether we consider ourselves infallibly right about this or that but as to what this or that may be. ... All of us have dogmas, some with good reason, some without."

This is similar to a line in G.K. Chesterton's Heretics, which indicates: "Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. . . . Trees have no dogmas." A bit later Dubay states:

"Yet despite this confusion [brought about by relativism] there lurks in the human heart a deep need for what we shall call objective truth and the secure possession of it."

Simple enough, but also profound. Those statements came to mind when I stumbled upon a piece on ScientificAmerican.com titled, "Rational Atheism," which is "An open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens," written by Michael Shermer. Shermer is publisher of Skeptic and author of Why Darwin Matters (Henry Holt, 2006). He is not too taken with the often harsh and sensational methods of attack sometimes employed by the best-selling authors he addresses his letter to; he pleads for a more calm and reasoned approach that stresses positive thoughts and action: "I suggest that we raise our consciousness one tier higher..." And:

"Promote freedom of belief and disbelief. A higher moral principle that encompasses both science and religion is the freedom to think, believe and act as we choose, so long as our thoughts, beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others."

A higher moral principle....but based on what? He refers to the "golden rule," which is, if I'm not mistaken, a religious principle made famous by Jesus Christ.

Shermer ends his letter with what can only be read as an overt dogmatic statement: "Rational atheism values the truths of science and the power of reason, but the principle of freedom stands above both science and religion." I find it interesting how some atheists tend to find something out there and above us that is providing objective guidance—a "principle" in this case—but don't imagine it could be a personal Creator.

For example, Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith, writes that there “is no reason that our ability to sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology, politics, and the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all.” If that isn’t an overt statement of dogmatic faith—in the necessity and inevitability of some sort of evolution—what is?

Harris's book is a rather fascinating read. Unfortunately, good reason and reasoning are rarely found, as Harris's favorite argument against "faith" and "religion" (mostly Christianity and Islam) is that religious people and beliefs are ignorant, foolish, backwards, insulting, intolerant, violent, insane, etc., etc. Every religion, he writes, “preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. This puts the ‘leap’ in Kierkegaards’ leap of faith.” And: “Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.”

In glancing through The End of Faith once more, I noted how much it resembles a bad magic act, with the magician (the atheist author) trying to confuse the audience with a flurry of clumsy distractions (name calling; straw men; rapid fire accusations; emoting; whining) so they won't notice how poorly he performs the "trick" (makes God disappear). It is curious, for example, that a 336-page book with extensive endnotes, written by someone with a degree in philosophy who supposedly relies occasionally on philosophical arguments—and which describes Catholic doctrine and beliefs as "suggestive of mental illness"—does not contain a single reference to Thomas Aquinas. Or John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Paul Claudel, Josef Pieper, Han Urs von Balthasar, Mortimer Adler, Hans Küng (a man I often criticize, but who wrote an 800-page book titled Does God Exist?), Romano Guardini, Richard Swinburne, Karl Rahner, William Lane Craig, Michael Novak, etc., etc. Augustine is mentioned a few times, but mostly to call him an anti-Semitic "sadist." Of Blaise Pascal: "That so nimble a mind could be led to labor under such dogma [regarding the divinity of Jesus] was surely one of the great wonders of the age."

Imagine if a theist wrote a book titled The End of Disbelief and failed to mention, say, Hume, Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Comte, and Sartre, with only passing reference to Darwin, Freud, and Singer. It would be roundly and rightly criticized...by Christians!

Equally revealing is this passage by Harris:

"Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God."

Here, again, it is the omission that stands out, especially from a student of philosophy. What are the famous words of Socrates? "Know thyself." Harris is so fixated on scientific and technological achievement and knowledge that he ignores the perennial greatness of self-examination and knowledge of man—who he is, how he thinks and feels, how he lives and should live, how he should treat others, etc. That is what the well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century knew far better than the average, self-absorbed, unthinking denizen of the Information Age. Of course, Aquinas spends much time in the Summa Theologica considering the nature and existence of God; but he also focuses on the nature and meaning of being human, the meaning of life, the goal of life, the what and why of ethics, and so forth. It is one reason that even non-Christians generally recognize him as a philosophical/theological genius (even if Harris is unaware of that fact).

As Fr. Dubay points out, there are three untenable conclusions "that necessarily flow from the atheistic choice." They are the belief in blind chance "as the origin of an unimaginably complex universe"; atheism's "lack of rationality and the ultimate nihilism to which it necessarily leads the consistent mind"; and, to the point I've just made, atheism's "inability to explain men and women to themselves."

Atheism, especially the popular sort offered by Harris, tends to spend much time explaining what it doesn't believe and why it hates Christianity. That might be enough for some people to live on intellectually and otherwise, but it's not enough for folks who are really grappling with the mysteries of life and reality.
 
 
(Image credit: TED)

The New Republic’s latest contribution to the abortion debate is remarkable, in that, despite getting virtually everything it says factually wrong, it still raises an interesting problem for pro-choicers and atheists. Here’s the Twitter teaser to the piece that started it all:

How the anti-choice platform is fighting to stay alive: http://t.co/m8kuGANs2Q pic.twitter.com/fxTeRyj444

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) April 17, 2015

According to the author of this piece, New Republic senior editor Jamil Smith, (1) the pro-life movement is struggling to survive; (2) the pro-life movement is fueled by ignorance; and (3) pro-lifers are forced to resort to “because God” in defense of their views. Each of these views is demonstrably false, but the third point actually highlights a potentially devastating problem for pro-choicers and atheists.

Is the Pro-Life Movement Dying or Gaining Ground?

Unlike The New Republic, the pro-life movement isn’t struggling to survive. But you don’t have to take my word for that. Just look at the most recent Gallup poll data on Americans’ positions on abortion:

Here’s how Gallup summarized the overall trends in 2012:

"Gallup began asking Americans to define themselves as pro-choice or pro-life on abortion in 1995, and since then, identification with the labels has shifted from a wide lead for the pro-choice position in the mid-1990s, to a generally narrower lead for 'pro-choice' — from 1998 through 2008 — to a close division between the two positions since 2009. However, in the last period, Gallup has found the pro-life position significantly ahead on two occasions, once in May 2009 and again today [2012]. It remains to be seen whether the pro-life spike found this month proves temporary, as it did in 2009, or is sustained for some period."

It noted further that “the decline in Americans’ self-identification as 'pro-choice' is seen across the three U.S. political groups.” So the last two decades have seen a shift for pro-choicers having a wide lead over pro-lifers to pro-choicers having a narrow lead over pro-lifers, to the present, in which the lead is hotly contested. And from this Smith concludes that the pro-life movement is dying? The data shows the opposite: the pro-life movement is not surviving, it’s gaining ground.

More likely, the problem is that Smith is ignorant: Gallup has also found that most Americans mistakenly believe that a majority of America is pro-choice, and that political moderates and pro-choicers are most likely to get this wrong. So Smith’s description of a political movement that is losing ground but remaining ignorantly deluded is an apt one: he’s just applied it to the wrong side of the debate.

Are Pro-Lifers Promoting Ignorance or Asking Inconvenient Questions?

But let’s talk about ignorance and science. Here’s a larger excerpt from Smith’s piece:

"The anti-choice platform survives by propagating one fundamentally flawed truth above all: Conservative politicians know more about medicine than doctors do, because God. That is an explanation that relies upon the ignorance of the persuaded and coerced.

 

Ignorance—both the kind they embrace and the kind they relentlessly promote—has always been a primary tool for conservatives in their battle against reproductive choice. […] The more of us caught up in speculating when life actually begins and questioning the rights of the fetus, the better."

The pro-life movement is actually very much pro-science, and science is on the pro-life side of the question of when life begins. This is from Sandra Alter’s Biology: Understanding Life, a collegiate-level biology textbook for non-majors. It explains the birds and bees for anyone still confused about how reproduction works

"To illustrate, look at the human life cycle diagrammed in Figure 18.13, which is representative of all animal life cycles. A life cycle is the progression of stages an organism passes through from its conception until it conceives another similar organism. The diploid zygote in the diagram represents that part of the life cycle during which the fusion of gametes, or sex cells, from a male and a female of the same species have produced a new individual. The female gamete is the egg, and the male gamete is the sperm.
 

After a person (or other animal) grows to sexual maturity, the sex organs begin to produce gametes by a type of cell division called meiosis (my-OH-sis). During meiosis, one parent cell produces four sex cells, but these cells are not identical to the parent cell. Each sex cell is haploid; that is, it contains half the amount of hereditary material of the original parent cell. It is a single set of genetic information – one of each chromosome. Because of this reduction in chromosome number, one sex cell from each of two parent organisms can join together in a process called fertilization to form the first cell of a new individual that has a full complement of hereditary material. This new cell is diploid. That is, it contains double the haploid amount – a double set of the genetic information, or two of each chromosome. This type of reproduction, which involves the fusion of gametes to produce the first cell of a new individual, is called sexual reproduction."

New life begins the same way in all animals, not just humans. Two gametes, sperm and egg, fuse to form a diploid. This diploid isn’t part of the mother or the father: it’s a genetically-distinct individual member of the species. That’s how we get new birds, new bees, and new boys and girls. On this point, there’s just no serious scientific question. Scientifically literate people don’t wonder, for example, if chicks are alive (or individuated) before they emerge from their eggs. So science teaches that fertilization produces new beings. In the case of humans, the fusion of sperm and egg produces a new human being.

But this doesn’t answer every question in the abortion debate, which is where we get to the most (inadvertently) interesting part of Smith’s piece.

Is Abortion Only Wrong “Because [of] God” or Can Atheists Know It, Too?

That’s an interesting claim for a few reasons. First, because he doesn’t actually quote a single person citing religion in defense of their position: he just ignores the actual reasons given, saying that their reasons are really “because God.” Second, because (Gallup again): “Americans who profess no religious identity are the most heavily pro-choice, at 80%, with 15% calling themselves pro-life.” How would Smith explain those 15%? Are they just pro-life “because God”? Smith claims that the pro-life justification for its position is simply “because of God.” Well, actually he says that it’s “because God,” and that this is why “conservative politicians” claim to know more about medicine than doctors, but that’s a bit of an incoherent mess. What he’s driving at, as near as I can tell, is that opposition to abortion can only be due to religious reasons.

But the third reason is that if Smith is right, this is a damning critique of atheism.

The pro-life argument is simple: (1) human beings are alive from the moment of fertilization, and (2) it is morally wrong (and ought to be illegal) to intentionally kill innocent human beings. The first point is a scientific one. The second is a moral and legal one, one that science can’t answer. You don’t find human rights under a microscope, and there’s no experiment capable of proving that murder is wrong.

Our scientific knowledge gets us far enough to say that abortion is the intentional killing of a human being, so we can say that if all human beings are entitled to basic human rights, then we must recognize unborn humans as having these rights, as well. But science can’t say if the intentional killing of innocent human beings is murder, or if murder is wrong, or if human rights exist.

So here’s why I say that Smiths’ piece ends up being an inadvertent contribution to the broader debate on abortion, as well as on religion. I frequently see two types of pieces from secular writers:

1. Articles declaring that we can be good without God, that atheists are just as moral as anyone else, etc.
2. Articles like this one, claiming that we can only know that killing people is wrong “because God,” in which case a truly universal respect for human rights can only come from a religious worldview.

"The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted'; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. [….]
 
No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a painting until it is done. What has that to do with morality? We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of art as irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand very well that the composition became what it is at the time when he was painting it, and that his works are part and parcel of his entire life. It is the same upon the plane of morality.There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done."

The third group of atheists simply try to have la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca (“the barrel full and the wife drunk,” Italy’s colorful take on “to have your cake and eat it, too”). But this third position isn’t tenable.

So in spite of Smith’s gross ignorance of the statistical growth of the pro-life movement, the scientific origins of human beings, and the actual arguments used by pro-lifers, he’s stumbled into something resembling an interesting point. He (apparently) thinks that only God can coherently undergird the opposition to murdering unborn children. Non-believers and pro-choicers, is he right?
 
 
(Image credit: Caffeinated Thoughts)

A few months ago, a “gun-toting atheist” and self-proclaimed “anti-theist” killed three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There's some question still about whether the killer was motivated by atheism or some other motivation. What there's no question of is that much of the secular response was predictably tasteless and exploitative. For example, the Daily Beast's Suzi Parker responded with an essay on how hard it is to be Muslim “in the most religious—and Christian—part of the country.” Somehow, in Parker's view, it was Christians who were to blame.

CNN's response was perhaps worse, lumping the Chapel Hill murders in with seven other attacks as examples of “religion's week from hell,” blaming the attacks on the “religious violence” that either “is fueled by faith or is a symptom of larger factors.” There's been a lot of talk lately about so-called “victim blaming,” and it's something of a nebulous term, but I think that blaming religious people for an atheist murdering them probably constitutes victim blaming.

The Chapel Hill murders have upset the popular “religion is what makes people violent” narrative, and both the Daily Beast and CNN's response amounted to shutting their collective eyes and repeating the “religious people are bad” mantra. So let's talk about that narrative: is it true that religion is the main cause of violence in the world? Or if not all violence, what about terrorism? Or if not all terrorism, what about suicide bombings?

Religious or Non-Religious?

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris tries to lump “religion” in with “terror,” pitting the two against “reason.” He opens with this story:

"The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. [...] The young man smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. [...] The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory."

At this point, he hasn't told you the man's religion (although his inclusion of Heaven and Hell in his story conveniently exonerate atheists). He then asks, rhetorically:

"Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy, “you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy,” to guess the young man’s religion?"

As I've mentioned before, Harris wants you to guess Muslim, an answer he claims is “you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy.” But there's just one problem with this claim, which is that it's factually incorrect. Worse, Harris knows this, but buries that fact in an endnote:

"Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be a member of the Liberations [sic] Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the Sri Lankan separatist organization that has perpetuated more acts of suicidal terrororism [sic] than any other group."

So if you bet your life on the suicide bomber being a Muslim, chances are, you were wrong. And the Tamil Tigers aren't just the deadliest in regards to suicide bombings. They're the deadliest terrorist group on earth, period. You can check out the numbers for yourself at the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database or Periscope's summary by group. Since 1975, the Tigers have killed nearly 11,000 people, and wounding nearly 11,000 more.

If you're not familiar with the Tamil Tigers, here's how the Library of Congress describes them:

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) strongest of Tamil separatist groups, founded in 1972 when Tamil youth espousing a Marxist ideology and an independent Tamil state established a group called the Tamil New Tigers; name changed in 1976.

The University of Chicago's Robert A. Pape, whom Harris cites in the endnote, is even more direct: “Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology.” Marxist-Leninist groups are hardly what you'd call “religious.” Here's what Lenin had to say about religion:

"The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. [...]

Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class."

So the deadliest terrorist group in the world, and the one responsible for the most suicide bombings in history isn't just a secular group, but one advancing an ideology that is “is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.”

Nor are the Tamil Tigers an isolated case in this regard. The 25 deadliest terrorist groups in the world are responsible for most of the terror deaths since 1975. And the Tigers are just one of several Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Communist groups on that short list. They're joined by Peru's Shining Path, El Salvador's FMLN, Colombia FARC, the Kurdistan Worker's Party, the Philippines' New People's Army, Angola's UNITA, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Spain's Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), Colombia's National Liberation Army (ELN), and Chile's Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR).

Is Religion the Chief Cause of the World's Violence?

Having seen that the world's deadliest suicide bombers and the world's deadliest terrorist group are the Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers, what about the world's deadliest ideologies? Compare the number of killings done in the name of religion to the number of killings done in the name of an anti-religious ideology.

At the top of the list of the twentieth century's deadliest regimes, you'll find three anti-religious states: Communist China, the USSR, and Nazi Germany. These three alone were responsible for an estimated 130,000,000 victims, which dwarfs the number of people killed in the name of all religions throughout all of history. And that number doesn't even take into account the millions killed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rogue, the Communist North Korean regime, or the Derg (the Ethiopian Communist state, headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam).

Religion isn't the cause of most of the world's violence: it's not even close. In fact, in each of the deadliest states of the twentieth century, we see the same pattern: an aggressive campaign to neutralize or eliminate religious belief (and believers). Ross Douthat pointed this out, using the example of the Soviet Union, in a debate with Bill Maher:

Maher: “Someone once said: to have a normal person commit a horrible act almost never happens without religion. To have people get on a plane and fly it into a building, it had to be religion.”

Douthat: “I think that what's true is: to get a normal person to commit a crazy act, it does take ideas, right? But those ideas can be secular as well as religious. A lot of normal people ...”

Maher: “But mostly, in history, they've been religious.”

Douthat: “Not in the twentieth century. Not in the Soviet Union. A lot of dead bodies there, not a lot of Christians... except among the dead bodies.”

Maher: “I would say that's a secular religion.” (Maher then quickly shut down debate before Douthat could respond.)

In a way, Maher ends up conceding one of Douthat's points: that secular ideas can be just as deadly as religious ones (and in fact, have been many times deadlier). But Douthat's other point is worth drawing out: religious belief serves not only as a potential motivator for violence, but as a check against state totalitarianism.

For a totalitarian regime, religion is dangerous. As a believer, I recognize that human rights come from God, not the state or social convention. I recognize that there's an authority higher than the state to whom both I and the state leadership will someday be accountable. It's precisely this sort of belief system that serves as a check on ideology and state authority that made these Soviet and Nazi states so anti-religious: they don't want you to render unto both God and Caesar. They want you to obey Caesar alone.

That's one reason that the bloodiest regimes in history have tended to be atheistic and anti-religious. But there may be a second, related point. Maher calls Soviet totalitarianism a “secular religion,” and that's something of a cop-out. He's trying to pin all the blame for violence on religion, by labelling all potentially-violent ideas as “religious,” even (as in the case of Soviet Communism) the ideology's founder and adherents were fiercely anti-religious. This evasion would seem to turn everything, even atheism, into at least a “secular religion.”

But Maher may yet be on to something in referring to these totalitarian systems as a “religion,” of sorts. Nazism and Soviet Communism did mimic religions in certain fashions, and did hold themselves out (implicitly and, at times, explicitly) as replacements for religion. That's because there's something inescapable about religion. Michael Crichton described the phenomenon like this:

"I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people – the best people, the most enlightened people – do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious."

At its core, this is a rudimentary point. All of us operate according to our beliefs about the world. Sometimes, we're conscious of this, sometimes, we're not, but we do it all the same. And these worldviews are heavily influenced by what we believe, or disbelieve, about religion.

Christianity carries with it beliefs about every human being made in the image of God, and being worthy of dignity and respect, along with the notion that we'll be held accountable for our evil actions. If we really believe these things, these beliefs can't help but shape how we interact with the world. And when people stop believing these things, it's not surprising that something else sweeps in to fill that void. Sometimes, as in Crichton's talk, that religion-replacement is a movement like environmentalism. Other times, it's something much darker.

Which Religion?

I said in the last point that religion can either motivate you to commit violent acts (as with ISIS) or it can motivate you to resist violence and tyranny (as with the 21 Coptic Christians recently martyred by ISIS). But on the question of whether religion will spur or spurn violence, a lot depends on which religion we're talking about.

All of this brings me to my last point:  the whole question of whether or not “religion” is violent is badly-formed. People don't believe in “religion.” They believe in a particular religion, and different religions teach different things. Given this, we need to stop pretending that all religions are equally prone to violent extremism, as if a Quaker is as likely as a Wahhabist to be responsible for the next terrorist attack. That idea is both illogical and directly contrary to the empirical data (here again, I'd point you to the Global Terrorism Database or Periscope summary).

Denouncing “religion” for the sins of radical Islam is disingenuous, akin to blaming “politics” for the Holocaust. “Religion” wasn't to blame, but one particular, violent religious movement, just as the Holocaust was the fault of one particular, violent political movement. In both religion and politics, we're dealing with sets of ideas – ideas about God, morality, human dignity, and the like – and ideas have consequences. Good ideas tend to have good consequences, while bad ideas tend to have the opposite. Treating all ideas as if they're equally valid is ridiculous.

That's why it's foolish to approach this question in the way that it's typically formed – whether or not “religion” is to blame – and why it's wrong to blame all religion for the actions of a few (or one). Using violence done in the name of a particular religion to justify hating all religion is no better than the Daily Beast using violence committed by an irreligious atheist against Muslims as a stick with which to bash Christians.
 
 
(Image credit: sonias_2007 via Photobucket)

"Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all of its conquerors," wrote G. K. Chesterton.

Faith is the Christian word. Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., in his masterful theology of faith, The Assurance of Things Hoped For, writes, "More than any other religion, Christianity deserves to be called a faith". He points out that in the New Testament the Greek words for "faith" and "belief" occur nearly 500 times, compared to less than 100 for "hope" and about 250 for "charity" or "love." Which is not to say, of course, that faith is more important than love, since Paul makes it clear that love is the greatest of the three theological virtues: "So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:13).

But there is no doubt—pun intended—that faith is essential to being a Christian and to having a right relationship with God, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews states, emphatically and succinctly: "And without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Heb. 11:6).

The daunting work of defining and analyzing faith has been described, with perhaps a dose of knowing humor, as the "cross of theologians." As with hope and love, the virtue of faith can appear initially rather simple to define, often as "belief in God." But some digging beneath the surface suggests a far more complicated task, as some basic questions suggest: What is belief? How is faith obtained? Is it human or divine in origin? How should man demonstrate his faith? What is the relationship of faith to the will, to the intellect, and to the emotions?

The Catholic, meanwhile, must respond to charges against faith: that it is "irrational" or that it is the cause of conflict and violence. In recent years a number of popular, best-selling books written by atheists have called into question not only tenets of Christianity—the historical reliability of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, the Resurrection, and so forth—but the viability and rational soundness of faith itself.

One such book is The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, which repeatedly—mantra-like—uses words such as "ignorant" and "irrational" in making the case that religious faith is not only outdated, but overtly evil. Every religion, Harris muses, "preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidenc e is even conceivable. This puts the ‘leap’ in Kierkegaard’s leap of faith" (Harris, The End of Faith, 23). He adds: "Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible" (Harris, The End of Faith, 25).

Calling Christians and other religious believers stupid and unreasonable is often the default argument for Harris; it is also an approach, crude yet often effective, embraced by many who believe that religious faith is an offense to enlightened, modern man. With that basic opposition in mind, let us take up two basic tasks: defining what faith is and answering some of the charges against belief.

Do I Trust the Chair?

A witticism goes: "Everybody should believe in something; I believe I’ll have another drink." It is more accurate to say that everybody does believe in something, even if it is belief in the ability to live without belief. Of course, even the skeptic understands that life in the material world requires certain types of belief or faith, using those terms broadly and non-theologically: the belief that stop lights will work correctly, faith that I will be given a paycheck at the end of the month, the trust that my grasp of basic math will keep me on the good side of the IRS.

One argument posits that sitting upon a chair is an act of faith, so even atheists have faith when they sit on a chair in, say, a home they are visiting for the first time. If for some reason I doubted the chair in question would hold my weight, I could ascertain its load-bearing capabilities by asking my host to sit in it first, thereby ridding myself of concern (and likely puzzling or offending my host). The argument only goes so far when it comes to faith in what cannot be seen, touched, or proven by scientific means. It does, however, suggest what many people are reluctant to admit: that all of us have beliefs and we live our lives based on those beliefs, even if we never articulate or define them. As Joseph Ratzinger observes in Introduction to Christianity, "Every man must adopt some kind of attitude to the basic questions, and no man can do this in any other way but that of entertaining belief." (Introduction to Christianity [2nd ed.], 71)

We, as creatures, have limited, finite knowledge, and so must make decisions—practical, relational, philosophical—without the luxury of proof. We use common sense and rely on our experience and, significantly, on the experience and testimony of others. I may not know for certain that the chair will hold me, but I conclude it is rational to think it will, based on certain observations: The chair looks well-constructed; it appears to be used on a regular basis; and it is in the home of someone who isn’t the sort of person to ask guests to sit on a chair that might fall apart upon human contact. Sitting on the chair is a reasonable thing to do. Implicit here is the matter of trust. Do I trust the chair? Do I trust my host? And, more importantly, do I trust my perception and assessment of the chair?

Consider another example. You receive a phone call at work from your best friend, who is also your neighbor. He exclaims, with obvious distress, "Your house is on fire! Come home quickly!" What is your reaction? You believe your friend’s statement—not because you’ve seen a live shot of your house in flames on a Channel 12 "news flash" but because of your faith in the truthfulness of the witness. You accept his word because he has proven himself worthy of faith in various ways. Trust in testimony and witness is an essential part of a theological understanding of faith.

God’s Gift and Our Response

The Old Testament emphasizes trusting in God and obeying his utterances, which were often (although not exclusively) entrusted (there’s that word again!) to patriarchs and prophets: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, Jeremiah, and others. But while there are many men and women of faith in the Old Testament, trustworthiness and faithfulness are most clearly ascribed to God: "Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments …" (Deut. 7:9). The well-known narratives of the Old Testament are accounts of faith and faithfulness (and much faithlessness), all deeply rooted in a covenantal understanding of God’s revelation of himself to man. It is God who initiates and it is God who gives wisdom, understanding, and faith.

The New Testament places more emphasis on the doctrinal content of faith, focusing upon man’s response to the message and person of Jesus Christ. Again, faith is a gift that comes from God, accompanied by God’s promises of life. "No one can come to me," Jesus declares, "unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day" (John 6:44). Paul repeatedly states that faith is intimately linked with trust and obedience, referring to the "obedience of faith" (Rom. 1:5), exhorting the Christians at Philippi to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12), and telling the Galatians that circumcision is not the issue of concern, "but faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6). Faith is portrayed as a living, vital movement that brings man into a grace-filled union with the Father, through Jesus, in the Holy Spirit. According to James and John, while faith is distinct from good works, it is never separate from them, for they display the reality of faith: "Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith" (Jas. 2:18), and "this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us" (1 John 3:23).

Needless to say, the Old and New Testaments together present a complex and rich tapestry of understandings of faith, including elements, Cardinal Dulles writes in his study, "such as personal trust, assent to divinely revealed truth, fidelity, and obedience" (Assurance, 17).

At the Threshold of Belief

Augustine and Aquinas stressed that the object of belief cannot be seen or directly perceived, nor proven by mere logic. If you can prove it, you don’t need to believe in it. And yet, as Josef Pieper explained in his essay, "On Faith," the believer must

know enough about the matter to understand "what it is all about." An altogether incomprehensible communication is no communication at all. There is no way either to believe or not to believe it or its author. For belief to be possible at all, it is assumed that the communication has in some way been understood. (Faith Hope Love, 24)

God has revealed himself in a way that is comprehensible to man (in an act theologians call "divine condescension"), even if man cannot fully comprehend, for example, the Incarnation or the Trinity. Reason and logic can take man to the door of faith, but cannot carry man across the threshold. "What moves us to believe," explains the Catechism, "is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: We believe because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived" (CCC 156).

Belief can also rest upon the testimony of someone else, as Paul states: "But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14). Aquinas succinctly remarks: "Now, whoever believes, assents to someone’s words…" (Summa Theologiae II:2:11). Pieper points out, however, that this leads to a significant problem: that no man is superior enough spiritually to serve as "an absolutely valid authority" for another man. This problem is only solved when the One who is above all men communicates with man. This communication, of course, reaches perfection in the Incarnation, when God becomes man—that is, when the Word, God’s perfect communication, becomes flesh. And this is why, to put it simply, the historicity of Jesus Christ and the witness of those who knew him is at the heart of the Catholic faith.

Faith is ultimately an act of will, not of emotion or deduction. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting Aquinas, teaches, "In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace: Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace" (CCC 155). This submission is called "the obedience of faith" (CCC 143). Logic, reason, and recognition of authority go only so far; an act of will, dependent upon God’s grace, is required for faith to be realized. Yet this response of the will is not an impersonal act, like selecting numbers for the lottery, but an intensely personal response. "We believe, because we love," wrote John Henry Newman in a sermon titled, "Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition." "The divinely enlightened mind," he continued, "sees in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship,—the Object correlative of its own affections; and it trusts him, or believes, from loving him."

So much for understanding what faith is. What are some of the popular, common criticisms of faith that need answering?

Faith is contrary to reason. Harris puts it in this provocative form: "And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths" (The End of Faith, 72). Yet the claim, "I don’t need faith!" is ultimately a statement of faith. If reason is the ultimate criteria of all things, can the skeptic prove, using reason, that reason explains everything about reality? To say "I will only trust that which I can logically prove" begs the question: "How do you know you can trust your mind and your logic? Aren’t you placing your faith in your reason?"

Thus atheism requires belief, including faith in (choose one) the perfectibility of human nature, the omniscience of science, the equality of socialism, or the steady conquest of political, technological, and social progress. But reasoned observation shows that the "truths" produced by these philosophies and systems of thought are lacking and incomplete; they cannot provide a satisfactory answer to the big questions about life, reality, and existence. The belief in science is a good example. The Catholic Church recognizes that science, the study of physical realities through experimentation and observation, is a valid source of truth. But this is quite different from believing that science can and will provide the answers to every question put forth by man. That is a belief—commonly called scientism—that cannot be proven but rests upon the unstable premise of materialism, which is a philosophical belief, not a matter of proven scientific study. For example, Harris writes that there "is no reason that our ability to sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology, politics, and the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all" (The End of Faith, 40). If that isn’t an overt statement of dogmatic faith, what is?

Put simply, the Church believes that reason is limited and not contrary to faith. True faith is not irrational, but supra-rational. In the words of Blaise Pascal, author of Pensées, whose rational genius is difficult to deny (unless one wishes to be unreasonable about it): "Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them" (Pensées, 68). So faith does not contradict the facts of the material world, but goes beyond them.

Faith is a crutch for those who can’t handle the difficulties of life.I once worked for a delightful Jewish lady who was married to a self-described atheist. She once told me, with obvious frustration, that he would often tell her that faith in God was simply "a crutch." This is not an argument at all; it is simply of way of saying, "I’d rather trust in myself than in God." But belief in self only goes so far; it obviously does not save us from death, or even suffering, disease, tragedy, heartache, depression, and difficulties. Everyone has a "crutch," that is, a means of support we turn to in the darkest moments. These can include power, money, drugs, sex, fame, and adulation, all of which are, by any reasonable account, limited and unsatisfying when it comes to the ultimate questions: What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Who am I? Harris, for his part, spends a considerable portion of the final chapter of his book arguing that Eastern mysticism is a thoroughly rational and legitimate means for living a full life. In the end, his book says, "Religion is evil. Spirituality is good." But spirituality does not provide answers; religion does.

Faith is the source of superstition, bigotry, and violence. We’ve all heard variations on this theme, mouthed by the increasing number of people indoctrinated to believe that nothing good ever came from Christianity and that every advance in human history has been due to the diminishing influence of Christian thought, practice, and presence. Never mind that the bloodiest and most savage century in human history was dominated by forms of atheistic Marxism (e.g., the Soviet Union) and neo-pagan Fascism (e.g., Nazi Germany), accounting for the deaths of tens of millions. Harris insists that Communism and Nazism were so bad because they were religious in nature:

Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: Although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. … Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational. (Harris, The End of Faith, 79)

This is actually quite true, and provides further evidence that every "ism"—even atheism, materialism, and the "pragmatism" endorsed by Harris—is religious in nature. History readily shows that man is a religious animal who thinks religious thoughts and has religious impulses. As Chesterton wrote in Heretics:

Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. ("Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy")

Chesterton suggests elsewhere that if you wish to be free from contact with superstition, bigotry, and violence, you’ll need to separate yourself from all human contact. The choice is not between religion and non-religion, but between true religion and false religion.

Christian faith, then, is not contrary to reason. Nor is it merely a phantasmal crutch built on pious fantasies. Neither is faith the source of evil. Faith is a supernatural virtue, a gift, and a grace. Faith is focused on God and truth; it is the friend of wisdom. "Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion," wrote Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, "The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and faith" ("Man and Mythologies"). The challenge for every Catholic is to give assent and to have faith, while the Catholic apologist must strive to show that such assent is not only reasonable, but brings us into saving contact with the only reason for living.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers.
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“We have to make this planet as good as we possibly can and try to leave it a better place than we found it.”

The crowd, gathered to hear Richard Dawkins debate the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, responds to the trite apothegm with unsurprising applause. But off-stage, after the cameras are turned off, the proverbial devil of the details rears his ugly head.

A weary Dawkins—one almost gets the sense that he’d rather not talk to anybody at all—kneels besides a disabled woman in a wheelchair, handing her a signed copy of his book and forcing a smile for the camera. The woman looks ecstatic to meet her hero; Dawkins seems to still be busy pummeling on Pell in some dusty corner of the same restless mind that gave rise to The God Delusion almost a decade ago.

We see this all play out in the 2013 homage to the New Atheism, "The Unbelievers", a sort of promotional travelogue which follows Dawkins and fellow atheist Lawrence Krauss around the globe to—like two real-life Hazel Moteses—spread the gospel of unbelief.

But Dawkins recently admitted something about people who, like this particular fan, suffer from a lifelong disability: it would have been better for them to have never been born.

Contemplating over Twitter what a woman pregnant with a Down Syndrome child ought to do, Dawkins said: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” The controversial and callous remark—certainly not the first from Dawkins—was not so much walked back as walked forward in his formal apology.

Dawkins is not the only New Atheist that has been mired in public controversy in recent years. From Krauss' cringe-worthy debate with a Muslim scholar to Sam Harris' recent comments about Islam on Bill Maher's show, bizarre, off-color public statements from the New Atheists—often made, or at least said to be made, because of an unflinching commitment to naturalism—are resulting in charges of brutality, misogyny, bigotry, and the same kinds of unflattering associations Dawkins had hoped to keep squarely on God’s head.

Of course, no mountain of personal controversies could discredit the claims of these self-styled “brights” or of atheists more generally. To suggest otherwise would be to engage in the very ad hominem attacks of which some of them are all too fond. But these headlines are, in their way, a visible symptom of what seems to be the diminishing traction and declining vitality of the entire New Atheist movement.

To put it in no uncertain terms: the New Atheism, if not already dead, is quickly dying.

This is first evident in a very literal way, in their fallen ranks. The “fifth horsemen” of the New Atheism, Victor Stenger, passed away a few months ago, but the loss of their leading horseman Christopher Hitchens in 2011 immediately comes to mind.

With Hitchens’ death, the New Atheism lost its scintillating, seductive flair. The wittiest, most likeable new atheist may not have converted as many as he would’ve liked, but certainly won the attention and admiration of many in the Christian community. In one of the first articles at Strange Notions, titled “Why I Loved to Listen to Christopher Hitchens,” Father Robert Barron confesses:

“I think I watched every Hitchens debate that I could find on YouTube; I subscribed to Vanity Fair largely because Hitchens was a regular contributor; I read every one of his books...No one wrote quite like Christopher Hitchens. Whether he was describing an uprising on the streets of Athens, or criticizing the formation of young men in the British boarding schools of the 1950s, or defending his support of the Iraq war, or begging people to let go of what he took to be their childish belief in God, Hitchens was unfailingly intelligent, perceptive, funny, sarcastic, and addictively readable.”

If Christopher Hitchens was the most stimulating New Atheist, the erudite Santa-lookalike Daniel Dennett was always the most scholarly. But, like Saint Nick himself, the philosopher has vacated the public eye so suddenly as to cast doubt on his very existence. Dennett has made no new enemies, inflamed no Twitter wars, and penned no blog screeds about the stupidity of faith. Instead—perhaps with an eye toward securing his legacy as a serious philosopher—he’s been sitting down with respected Christian thinker Alvin Plantinga for a civil, serious dialogue about science and religion.

And here, we see the root cause of the New Atheism’s decline: its lack of a sturdy philosophical foundation. Any organization can withstand its bad press if it’s grounded in something human, something wise, something timeless. But all along, scholars have grumbled that—unlike the writings of a Nietzsche, Sartre, or Russell—the New Atheism lacked intellectual depth and was doomed to self-destruction.

And they were right. Krauss looks like a farm team player brought up to revitalize a crumbling organization, trying (and failing) to recreate Hitch’s signature rhetorical jukes. Meanwhile, Dawkins is resorting to odd trick plays which never get off the ground. (His bizarre mutations of the mind art show comes to mind.) Nothing is meshing the way it used to, and the overcompensation on the part of the remaining leaders—and pushback from their rank and file—is telling.

Meanwhile, less vociferous unbelievers are gladly rushing in to fill that profitable cultural space. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, has rightly been accused of bungling the history of the Church with relation to science in his new "Cosmos" series—but he’s also quick to admit that he doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to God. “The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist,” Tyson says in a Big Think interview. “What is my stance on religion, or spirituality, or God? I would say if I’d find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic...Atheists I know who proudly wear the badge are active atheists. They’re like in-your-face atheists, and they want to change policies, and they’re having debates. I don’t have the time, the interest, the energy to do any of that. I’m a scientist.”

Then there is Thomas Nagel, a renowned philosopher who—going beyond Tyson—is an avowed atheist. Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False drove fellow atheists up the wall, not only for its defection from the creed of naturalism, but for its alignment with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga—the same Christian enemy who has been sitting down with Dennett for tea.

Lastly, there’s physicist and atheist Sean Carroll who—going even beyond Nagel—is committed to the materialist conception of nature. Carroll penned an insightful piece recently titled “Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things About Philosophy.” While men like Dawkins, Krauss, and Stephen Hawking routinely dismiss philosophy as obfuscating gibberish that only serves to embolden the theologians, Carroll acknowledges that philosophy adds quite a lot to the modern scientific project. “The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works,” Carroll writes. “Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway...It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest.”

This, happily, is the new tenor of the conversation. The apparently intramural rivalry between two fundamentalist spins on the world looks increasingly at odds with the problems and possibilities an open-minded majority face on the ground, and warriors from each side are deigning to say to the other, like Pound to Whitman:

I have detested you long enough...
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

That’s not to say that passionate disagreement has ended—it hasn’t, and never will. But the tone and style of "The Unbelievers" seems a decade too late; the moment has passed. As celebrities like Bill Pullman and Cameron Diaz offer public support for this un-dynamic duo, and Krauss proudly holds up a tweet from Miley Cyrus with his picture and the quotation “forget Jesus,” the only real message that gets across is that intellectual fashions, like all fashions, come and go.

And as things continue to change where philosophical substance is concerned, the New Atheists and their readers will either change too, or fade away, raging against the dying of the brights.
 
 
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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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