Atheist astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted, “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” I did my best in 140 characters to show how this sentiment is the exact of opposite of profound. I said, “@neiltyson ‘Rationalia’ is as useless as ‘Correctistan,’ or a country whose constitution says, 'Always make the correct decisions.'"

Obviously, public policy should rationally consider all the relevant facts and circumstances. But it is naïve to think that all it takes to create a just society is a scientific mindset that “follows the evidence where it leads.”

That’s because the “evidence” we need includes not just facts Dr. Tyson and other scientists can confirm in a laboratory but values that help us interpret those facts and come to correct conclusions. In fact, a tragedy that took place last week perfectly illustrates how we can’t solve every problem with a facile appeal to scientific reasoning.

The Driverless Car Dilemma

Shortly after Dr. Tyson's tweet, Joshua Brown became the first fatality in an accident involving a car using autopilot mode. This won’t spell the end of driverless cars any more than the very first automobile crash kept the horse and buggy in business, but the technology does raise important questions related to ethics and highway safety regulations. For example, a recently published article in the journal Science revealed the attitude of 2,000 people towards this dilemma:

"A driverless car is about to run over ten people, and there is not enough time to for the car to stop. The only the way the car can avoid killing the pedestrians is to swerve into a wall, which will probably kill one or more of the vehicle’s passengers. Should driverless cars be programmed to save as many lives as possible in an accident (utilitarian programming)? Or should they be programmed to do what is necessary to protect their passengers?"

The survey revealed that 76 percent of people believe it is more moral for a driverless car to receive utilitarian programming. In other words, most people think it’s better if a car’s computer sacrificed the vehicle’s passengers in order to save as many lives as possible. But the survey also revealed that 81 percent of respondents would not purchase a driverless car with such programming. Instead, they would prefer a car programmed to protect them and their passengers at all costs.

This brings us back to Dr. Tyson’s suggestion that we follow “the weight of the evidence.” How should Rationalia’s transportation authority deal with the problem of highway fatalities? Should it mandate utilitarian programming in driverless cars in order to achieve the goal of reducing highway fatalities? Or should it allow drivers to choose which programming they want in order to achieve the goal of respecting civil liberties, even if it causes an increase in traffic fatalities?

The “evidence,” or facts and statistical relations, can support both policies, so an appeal to facts alone doesn’t tell us what we ought to do. The “Rationalia” approach won’t resolve dilemmas like this, because ethical disputes tend to be about the values people hold and not just thefacts they observe. This means Rationalia’s anemic constitution cannot resolve societal disputes any more than your GPS unit can resolve a fight your family has over a summer vacation.

In both cases science can give us facts that describe what is, but only philosophical reflection can tell us what we ought to do.

The Myth of Objectivity

In a video, Dr. Tyson explained in more detail why something like Rationalia is necessary. He said, “It is unstable to build a government on a belief system.” [Audience applauds] “What you want is objectively verifiable truths, that we can all agree—that’s what you build your economic system on, your government system.”

What does he mean by “belief system”? In the video Dr. Tyson is clearly referring to religion. He says those kinds of belief systems are unstable, because religious people disagree with one another. Instead, we should build public policy on “objectively verifiable truths,” which are apparently secular in nature. I agree that public policy should not simply mirror what is found in divine revelation (something natural law theorists like St. Thomas Aquinas have known for millennia). But the materialistic, utilitarian thinking that motivates scientists like Dr. Tyson is not exempt from this critique.

Many people, religious and nonreligious, disagree with that belief system. Furthermore, the truth of this value system can’t be “objectively verified” with a scientific instrument. In other words, you can’t build a political philosophy, even one as simple as Rationalia’s, out of something like the periodic table of elements. You need objectively true values or moral facts that can be known only through nonscientific means like intuition or ethical reflection. Since God is pure goodness itself and can be known through reason, we can build equitable societies on moral principles derived from the natural law that compliment the special moral principles we receive from the same source in divine revelation.

There’s nothing wrong with someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson encouraging us to be rational when we debate important social issues. What is objectionable is the claim that because some scientists are successful at solving practical problems we should adopt their personal value systems. We should instead critically examine these value systems and apply nonscientific (but equally valid) philosophical tests to see if they support just societies and affirm the intrinsic dignity of the human person.

On June 4, a few thousand atheists gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for an event they dubbed the “Reason Rally.” Due to health reasons, Richard Dawkins could not be there in person to address the audience, but he did send a video message, the transcript of which has been passed around via atheist blogs.
 

 
In it, Dawkins highlights how atheists are mistreated in the U.S., especially when religious people ask them the incredibly insensitive question “What church do you go to?“ According to Dawkins:

"The question is presumptuous to the point of rudeness, yet informant after informant tells me how often it’s thrown at newcomers to certain neighborhoods in America, as casually and automatically as a comment on the weather. That the newcomer might not attend a place of worship at all simply doesn’t cross the friendly neighborhood mind."

Yikes! Better not ask people where they go to school, work, or celebrate the holidays on the off chance you’re speaking with a dropout, an unemployed person, or a Jehovah’s Witness. Or, maybe atheists and everyone else can save their indignation for something that is truly offensive (like signs from the last Reason Rally that compare religion to male genitalia).

Do you believe in Magick?

Dawkins also mocked any exercise in critical thinking that leads to the conclusion that God has a real causal effect on the physical universe:

"'God did it' can never be an explanation for anything. It is sheer intellectual cowardice. If you’ll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock designer, you might as well magick an unexplained peacock and cut out the middleman."

But notice the irony in what Dawkins says just a few seconds later:

"It’s like when you see a really brilliant conjuring trick. You have to smack yourself and say, 'No!' However largely my senses and my instincts are screaming 'miracle,' it really isn’t. There is a rational explanation [emphasis added]. In the case of the conjuring trick, we know it’s not a miracle. And honest conjurers like Jamy Ian Swiss, James Randi, and Penn & Teller tell us so."

That, my friends, is called the principle of causality or the principle of sufficient reason. Just as we wouldn’t accept the magician’s answer to be, “The rabbit just appeared in the hat without a cause,” we shouldn’t accept the answer that any object, be it a unicycle or an entire universe, simply “popped” into existence without a cause. Some explanations must be ultimate or final, because if they weren’t you would have an infinite number of explanations that don’t explain anything at all.

The atheistic philosopher Gregory Dawes critiques Dawkins’s demand for such an explanation in this way:

"[Dawkins’s idea is] that religious explanations are unacceptable because they leave unexplained the existence of their explanans (God). Dawkins apparently assumes that every successful explanation should also explain its own explanans. But this is an unreasonable demand. Many of our most successful explanations raise new puzzles and present us with new questions to be answered." (Theism and Explanation 16)

Moreover, God is not more complex than the universe he explains. Theologians since Aquinas have argued that because God has no moving parts and does not fragment his thoughts like we do, he is absolutely simple. Atheist Erik Wielenberg says that Dawkins has given us no reason to think that a designer must be as physically complex as the thing he creates and thus himself need a designer. The universe’s designer could just be an immaterial mind that cannot fail to exist. Wielenberg writes:

"The central weakness of Dawkins’s Gambit, then, is that it is aimed primarily at proving the nonexistence of a being that is unlike the God of traditional monotheism in some important ways. . . . In light of this, I must side with those critics of The God Delusion who have judged Dawkins’s Gambit to be a failure." (“Dawkins’s Gambit, Hume’s Aroma, and God’s Simplicity”)

A Simple Retort

Dawkins does seem to be aware of the critique of his arguments that he doesn’t understand God’s simplicity and so his atheistic argument from design doesn’t succeed. In his video for the Reason Rally, Dawkins said this:

"Some of our best theologians pathetically tried to argue that, far from being complex, God is simple. . . . The effrontery of it is beyond astounding. This supposedly simple God had to know how to set the nuclear force 10³⁹ times stronger than gravity. He had to calculate with similar exactitude the requisite values of half a dozen critical numbers—the fundamental constants of physics. . . . God may be almighty, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, but the one thing he cannot be, if he’s even minimally to meet his job description, is 'all-simple.' The statistical argument against the divine designer remains intact and inescapably devastating."

The problem with Dawkins reply is that he still doesn’t understand divine simplicity, which, in spite of its name, is not an easy concept to understand. Essentially, divine simplicity means that God is one, or he is the perfect and infinite act of being. Not even God’s attributes are divided; so, for example, God’s power is identical to his goodness, which is identical to his knowledge, which is identical to his existence, which is identical to all his other attributes.

St. Anselm of Canterbury said, “[T]here are no parts in you, Lord: neither are you many, but you are so much one and the same with yourself that in nothing are you dissimilar with yourself.” God is just ipsum esse, the act of being, or the great I AM. God knows all things because he sustains them in existence, not because he is a giant cosmic person who inexplicably knows more than we do.

Humans speak of God as if he had different parts because our own minds are limited. We have to do this in order to sensibly talk about God, just as scientists use figurative language to explain imperceptible realties like electrons or black holes. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity” (CCC 43).

Finally, using simpler entities to explain more complex ones is common in science. For example, Maxwell’s equations (which describe electromagnetism) could fit on an index card, whereas a description of their effects would fill a chapter of a textbook. An explanation does not always have to explain everything, and a designer can be simpler than the thing he designs.

Since God is the simplest being imaginable, or infinite undivided being, it’s not necessary to ask who designed God. Any explanation for the universe must have a stopping point, and it’s more rational for that point to be unlimited being that exists by necessity, and therefore has an explanation, and not just an unexplained universe or Big Bang singularity.

(If you’d like to learn more about responding to Dawkins and other atheist arguments, I encourage you to check out my book Answering Atheism.)

American Atheists responded to the Pennsylvania state legislature’s designation of 2012 as “Year of the Bible” with mocking billboards, and a press release insisting that “the House of Representatives should not be celebrating a barbaric and Bronze Age book.” It’s a common argument against the Bible, that it can’t be trusted because it’s a book from the Bronze Age. Over on Twitter, Richard Dawkins extended this argument to attack both the Bible and the Qu’ran.

Bible and Quran were the best that Bronze Age desert tribes could do. But we’ve moved on. And even at the time, others were doing it better.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) May 17, 2015

Factually, the argument is wide of the mark. Despite its name, the Bible isn’t a book, but a collection of books, the majority of which were written several centuries after the Bronze Age. (The New Testament is closer in age to the foundation of the University of Paris in the High Middle Ages than it is to the close of the Bronze Age in c. 1200 B.C.). Historical inaccuracies aside, Dawkins' argument relies upon a sort of genetic fallacy, the assumption that certain beliefs can be proven false simply because they’re old. But this assumption doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We don’t reason, for example, that murder must be okay simply because people have always thought it was wrong.

Furthermore, this Bronze Age argument is circular. It assumes that the Bible is wrong because it was written by ignorant people. But this assumes, in turn, that the human authors of Scripture were limited to the knowledge otherwise attainable at that time and place, the very question in dispute in debating the authenticity of the Bible. In other words, the strength of this argument relies upon a prior assumption that the Bible is wrong – for example, in its claim to divine inspiration – and concluding from this that the Bible is wrong.

Curiously, in characterizing the Scriptural authors as ignorant and uneducated, American Atheists finds an unlikely ally: Saint Luke, the author of the Book of Acts. In Acts 4:13, he says that when the Jewish Temple authorities “saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and they recognized that they had been with Jesus.” Luke doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Peter and John, who together authored seven of the 27 books of the New Testament, were uneducated commoners. But rather than a cause for arrogant dismissal, this should lead us, as it did the Temple authorities, to a state of wonder. If the human authors of Scripture were “Bronze Aged” ignoramuses, how do we account for the credibility of the Apostles’ testimony?

Recall that the Bible isn’t, as American Atheists suggests, a single book. Instead, it’s a collection of centuries worth of religious texts, including centuries worth of Messianic prophecies. This means that, unlike the Qu’ran or the Book of Mormon, the prophecies and the accounts of the fulfillment of these prophecies aren’t coming from the same sources. This makes it all the more remarkable that the life of Jesus Christ so neatly fits the time and place foretold by the Jewish prophets.

For example, the Book of Daniel foretold that “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed” during the fourth kingdom after the then-reigning Babylonians, a timeline corresponding with the Roman Empire. The Book of Micah specifies that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem, and be of the tribe of Judah. The Books of Malachi and Haggai prophesied that the Second Temple of Jerusalem (destroyed in 70 A.D.) would be greater than the First Temple because the Lord Himself would enter it. And Psalm 22 depicted the Messiah as being executed by having his hands and feet pierced, a description eerily reminiscent of Crucifixion, despite having been written several centuries prior to its invention.

Christ meets all of these criteria: no small feat, given that none of these factors involved events within the Apostles’ control. He rose to prominence from a very particular part of the world, within a very particular time frame. A generation after His death, the Second Temple, so central to the Malachi and Haggai prophecies, was permanently destroyed. Nevertheless, these prophecies might serve as a baseline, of sorts. Anyone claiming to be the Messiah would need, at the very least, to meet these criteria. But the Apostolic message is profound, in that it goes beyond claiming that Christ fulfilled these explicit prophecies.

Instead, they view Him as so much more, as the key to revealing the deepest meanings of Scripture as a whole: “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Countless passages which, on face, don’t even appear prophetic are revealed to have a Christological dimension. To take a single example, consider John 19:32-34, “So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.”

In verse 36, John explains that this “fulfilled” the Scripture saying that not one of his bones would be broken. But that doesn’t come from an obvious Messianic prophecy; it comes from the instructions for preparing the Passover Lamb. And the water that streams out alongside the blood isn’t just a sign that Christ’s body has ceased metabolism. It’s a fulfillment of the Temple prophecies in Ezekiel. The last several chapters of the Book of Ezekiel describe a miraculous Temple from the side of which will flow life-giving waters. In John 2:21, John explains that this Temple is Jesus’ Body, and Christ applies the life-giving waters prophecy specifically in John 7:38.

This, in turn, points to the Sacramental theology latent in this passage: the life-giving waters flowing from the side of Christ signify Baptism, just as the blood signifies the Eucharist. These two Mysteries together form the Church, revealing yet another sets of Scriptures which are fulfilled: “As Eve was formed from the sleeping Adam’s side, so the Church was born from the pierced heart of Christ hanging dead on the cross” (CCC 766). In a single event, we see the meanings of several parts of Scripture, from the story of Adam and Eve to the Passover ordinances to the Temple prophecies, revealed in a radical new light as prophetic of the Messiah. Unlike the explicit Messianic prophecies, these weren’t predictions that the Apostles “had” to show as fulfilled in order to present Jesus as the Christ. And yet the Gospels are filled with events like this one, each one chock full of meaning and Scriptural significance.

Now perhaps this could be the work of a literary genius, who found a way to take the whole Jewish religious tradition, set it in the context of a single (real or fictional) human life, and combine the various prophecies and literary elements like so many instruments in an orchestra. But of course, the New Testament is no more the work of a single author than is the Old Testament, and we know from Roman sources like Pliny and Tatian that there were already Christians followers in the 50s and 60s A.D., before most of the New Testament (including the Gospels) was written. So the skeptic is left positing, not a single genius, but a cabal of geniuses, conspiring to craft a false Messianic narrative for reasons not immediately apparent. (This is precisely the direction skeptical Biblical scholarship has gone, creating ever-more complex theories about the textual origins of the Bible,)

But even if you’re willing to accept that sort of theory, it’s squarely contradicted by the charge of Bronze Age barbarism. You can’t simultaneously write off the Scriptural authors as halfwits and as too clever by half. The Bible can be primitive nonsense, or it could be an elaborate fraud, but it can’t very well be both. If Richard Dawkins, the American Atheists, and St. Luke are right that many of the writers of the New Testament were simple, uneducated folk, then it’s hard to explain away the literary genius of the New Testament as anything less than Divine inspiration.
 
 
(Image credit: The Guardian)

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)

A few years ago I was preparing to debate an atheist on the existence of God at my home church. One lady came up to me, curious about the posters she was seeing advertising the event, and asked about the individual I was debating. “He’s an atheist,” I explained. Immediately her expression tightened and a look of confusion came over her as if to say, “Why would you talk to an atheist?”

Forming opinions about the atheist community

To be honest, it’s not an unusual reaction. Indeed, in my experience Christians have a lot of negative assumptions about atheists. For many, the attitude is summarized in Psalm 14:1, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God’.” “You see?” the argument goes. “Atheists are fools!”

Alleged biblical proof-texts aside, the biggest catalyst for this negative perception may be the words of atheists themselves. The new atheists in particular have led the charge in ratcheting up the rhetoric and thereby deepening the divide between Christians and atheists.

Consider the case of Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011) who was widely lauded as one of the so-called Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. While Hitchens always called himself an atheist, he also frequently insisted that he is an antitheist. That is, not only did he disbelieve in God’s existence, but he insisted that he was positively against the idea of God’s existence. He didn’t want there to be a God.

For many Christians, the antitheism of Hitchens is the face of atheism. And this, in turn, allows the Christian to conclude that atheism is not so much an intellectual issue as a moral one: that is, atheists are simply in rebellion against God. And to come back to that lady’s look of confusion: why would you invite a rebel against God into church for a chat? Isn’t this tantamount to casting pearls before swine?

Unfortunately, it is common for Christians to form their opinions about the atheist community based on the declarations of some of the loudest and brashest atheists. But this is no better than atheists forming their opinions about the Christian community based on the declarations of some of the loudest and brashest Christians. (Who among us in the community of faith wants to be identified with Pat Robertson, for example?) In short, it’s simply unjustified to dismiss an entire community, Christian or atheist, based on a few loud voices.

Atheists who want there to be a God

In fact, Hitchens himself recognized that many atheists do not share his antitheistic sentiments. In his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books, 2001), Hitchens lays out his position as follows:

“I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.” (55)

Note that even as Hitchens stakes out his own antitheism, he also recognizes a type of atheist, he calls them “sentimental materialists,” who hope that God does exist and that something like Christianity is true. In other words, even if Hitchens is himself against God, he concedes that many other atheists are not.

This is significant for at least two reasons.

To begin with, the existence of so-called sentimental materialists means that Christians cannot dismiss atheism as always arising from a sinful rebellion against God. And that means that it is disingenuous at best to highlight the more provocative passages of antitheists like Hitchens as if they represented the true spirit of atheism.

This leads to a second point. What is the Christian to do with these so-called sentimental materialists? Philosophers of religion describe a non-theist who is not opposed to the idea of God as a non-resistant non-believer. I have met many non-resistant non-believers, and more than a few of these even bore that more positive disposition Hitchens describes of positively hoping that God does exist. So how should we think about these people?

Conceding the existence of non-resistant non-believers and sentimental materialists in particular presents a practical problem for the theist. In short, if there are atheists who want there to be a God, we must ask, why doesn’t God reveal himself to them? Philosophers call this the problem of divine hiddenness and they have offered several responses to address this problem. (For a brief introduction to the problem see John W. Loftus and Randal Rauser, God or Godless (Baker, 2013), chapter 20.) However we propose to address the problem, at the very least, we should concede that the existence of non-resistant non-believers makes things significantly more complicated for the Christian theist.

To sum up, not all atheists are against God, and some even hope that God does exist.

Antitheism: It’s more complicated than that

But what about those atheists like Hitchens himself who endorse explicitly antitheistic convictions? Do they really hate God? Do they embody the consummate rebel of the popular Christian conception of atheism?

Maybe. But then again, maybe not. To see why it’s more complicated than that, we can return to Hitchens’ own words. Immediately after insisting that he hopes the whole religious story is false, he goes on to explain why:

“Well, there may be people who wish to live their lives under a cradle-to-grave divine supervision; a permanent surveillance and monitoring. But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque. It would be worse, in a way, if the supervision was benign. (I have my answer ready if I turn out to be mistaken about this: at the bar of judgement I shall argue that I deserve credit for an honest conviction of unbelief and must in any case be acquitted of the charge of hypocrisy or sycophancy.”(55-56)

I agree that Hitchens’ words look bad at first blush. But a closer examination calls to mind that old saying “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in, because I probably don’t believe in him either.” And once we factor that in, things do indeed begin to look more complicated.

The first problem concerns Hitchens’ uncritical anthropomorphism. In short, he describes God as akin to a Big Brother government that is engaged in permanent surveillance of its citizenry. But this crude image fails abjectly to grapple with the concept of God in Christianity, namely as the creator and sustainer of all things who is essentially omniscient from eternity. Indeed, if you really want to get technical, in the classical theist view of God as Pure Act, his knowledge of creation derives not from external observation of creation but rather from his knowledge of his own decrees. It certainly doesn’t derive from God monitoring our ongoing activity like an eavesdropping government official. Consequently, Hitchens’ analogy is a complete and unmitigated failure.

This brings us to the second related problem concerning the divine goodness. We would all rightly be unsettled by the notion of a government monitoring our activities, not least because governments are fallible and can become corrupted and even despotic. In short, a government might use information on its citizens for nefarious ends. So it is no surprise that we cringe at the thought of living out our lives in the spotlight of a “cradle-to-grave” government supervision.

But God isn’t a fallible (still less a despotic) power. Rather, he is (to borrow a line from Anselm) that being than which none greater can be conceived. The only reason we might be unnerved at the prospect of a maximally good being observing our activity is if we are behaving in a less than maximally good way. The Christian might be inclined to assume that Hitchens doesn’t want God observing him because he wants to sin with impunity behind the back of the Anselmian deity. But the fact remains that Hitchens never seriously considers God is perfectly good in the first place.

Finally, let’s turn back to Hitchens’ parting words in which he boldly opines how he would respond to God should it happen that God does exist. As he boldly puts it, he claims that he will plead his case by noting that “at the bar of judgement I shall argue that I deserve credit for an honest conviction of unbelief and must in any case be acquitted of the charge of hypocrisy or sycophancy.”

Once again, it must be said that the conception of God that Hitchens assumes in this hypothesized interaction is such a crude caricature that he hardly seems to grasp what he is really proposing. His flippant commentary at this point strikes me as akin to a ten year old boy scout who boasts to his friends around the campfire that he would boldly chase away any grizzly bear that should happen upon their camp. If an 800 lb bear did find its way into the camp, we can predict that a confrontation would be the last thing on that little boy’s mind. In short, that boy never seriously considered what he was proposing.

It seems to me that Hitchens is like that boy in that he is utterly failing to grapple seriously with the scenario he is proposing. This fact complicates things somewhat. You see, when a person doesn’t understand the significance of what they are proposing, we tend not to hold them to the commitment in the same way we would if they did fully understand that significance. For example, let’s say that I ask my friend Don to cut my grass while I’m out of town. He looks at my house, sees that I have a small yard, and readily agrees. Unbeknownst to him, I’m also expecting him to mow the vacant ten acre field beside my house which also happens to be my property. Since Don had no clue what he was getting into, it would be inappropriate to hold him to his initial commitment.

To be fair, not all commitments are qualified like this. For example, we don’t exempt folks from their marriage proposals when things get tough simply because they didn’t anticipate all that was implied by “for better or for worse”. So I’m not claiming Hitchens is not at all responsible for his flippant response. Rather, I’m simply pointing out that it isn’t obvious he is fully culpable for his words given his obvious failure to grapple seriously with what he’s proposing.

At this point it is probably also worth noting that atheists like Hitchens aren’t the only ones to make trite and silly comments about God. Christians frequently do so as well. In her book Bait and Switch Barbara Ehrenreich (who is an atheist, by the way), describes encountering a Christian man at a conference who suggested that the best way to get a job and build a business is to network with others … beginning with God! Ehrenreich was incredulous at the suggestion:

“If the Lord exists, if there is some conscious being whose thought the universe is—some great spinner of galaxies, hurler of meteors, creator and extinguisher of species—if some such being should manifest itself, you do not ‘network’ with it any more than you would light a cigarette on the burning bush. Francois is guilty of blasphemy.” (Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 139).

I don’t know if Francois is guilty of blasphemy or not. But if he is, I suspect God will go easy on him given that he never really grappled with the audacity of his advice. If God will extend some grace to Francois, might he do so for Hitchens as well?

Rethinking Atheism (and Antitheism)

I started this article with the widespread and deeply negative perceptions that many Christians have about atheists. These perceptions are often driven by a selected range of experience with particular vocal atheists. But, as I noted, judging the atheist community based on the words of a self-described antitheist like Christopher Hitchens is no better than forming opinions about the Christian community based on a fundamentalist like Pat Robertson.

Next, I noted that even in the case of the most combative of new atheists like Hitchens, the issues are often significantly more complicated than a cursory reading of their rhetoric would suggest. Indeed, in some cases one suspects that the target of their vitriol has less to do with the God of Judeo-Christian faith than a caricature of their own making. (And lest we become too smug, let us remember as well that Christians are often guilty of similar misunderstandings.)

So where does this leave us? For that I return to that debate at my church. The event went over very well. We had a packed audience of Christians, atheists, and many folks of other persuasions as well. One man at the end of the night stood and identified himself as a Hindu. He then went on to observe how his temple would never sponsor a debate like this. He then added, “Neither would the Sikh gurdwara or the Muslim mosque. But because you Christians have hosted this debate, it tells me that you really care about truth.”

Rather than allow our presuppositions about other people to settle our perception of them, it is always better to invite them into our space so they may share their perspective. Doing this values our interlocutor as a neighbor, and that man observed, it also demonstrates our commitment to truth.
 
 

 
 
(Image credit: MySanAntonio.com)

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)

A religion typically has both practical and theoretical aspects.  The former concern its moral teachings and rituals, the latter its metaphysical commitments and the way in which its practical teachings are systematically articulated.

An atheist will naturally reject not only the theoretical aspects, but also the practical ones, at least to the extent that they presuppose the theoretical aspects.  But different atheists will take different attitudes to each of the two aspects, ranging from respectful or even regretful disagreement to extreme hostility.  And distinguishing these various possible attitudes can help us to understand how the New Atheism differs from earlier varieties.

Consider first the different attitudes an atheist might take to the theoretical side of a religion.  There are at least three such attitudes, which, going from the most hostile to the least hostile, could be summarized as follows:

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all. It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.
 
2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations. But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it. Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.
 
3. Religious belief is still intellectually defensible today, but not as defensible as atheism. An intelligent and well-informed person could be persuaded by the arguments presented by the most sophisticated contemporary proponents of a religion, but the arguments of atheists are at the end of the day more plausible.

Obviously one could take one of these attitudes towards some religions, and another of them towards other religions.  For example, a given atheist might take a type 1 atheist position with respect to Christianity and a type 2 atheist position with respect to Buddhism (or whatever).  Or he might take a type 1 attitude towards some versions of Christianity but a type 2 or type 3 attitude towards other versions of Christianity.

Now, among well-known atheists, it seems to me that Quentin Smith is plausibly to be regarded as taking a type 3 attitude toward Christianity, at least as Christianity is represented by prominent philosophers of religion like William Lane Craig or Alvin Plantinga. Keith Parsons, by contrast, seems to take at best a type 2 attitude towards Christianity and maybe even a type 1 attitude.  And Jerry Coyne seems almost certainly to take a type 1 attitude, though perhaps on a good day and with respect to at least some varieties of religious belief he’d move up to type 2.  (I’m happy to be corrected by Smith, Parsons, or Coyne if I’ve got any of them pegged wrong.)

Now let’s consider three different attitudes an atheist could take toward the practical side of a religion, going again from the most hostile to the least hostile:

A. Religious practice is mostly or entirely contemptible and something we would all be well rid of. The ritual side of religion is just crude and pointless superstition. Religious morality, where it differs from secular morality, is sheer bigotry.  Even where certain moral principles associated with a particular religion have value, their association with the religion is merely an accident of history. Moreover, such principles tend to be distorted by the religious context.  They certainly do not in any way depend on religion for their justification.
 
B. Religious practice has a certain admirable gravitas and it is possible that its ritual and moral aspects fulfill a real human need for some people. We can treat it respectfully, the way an anthropologist might treat the practices of a culture he is studying. But it does not fulfill any universal human need, and the most intelligent, well educated, and morally sophisticated human beings certainly have no need for it.
 
C. Religious practice fulfills a truly universal or nearly universal human need, but unfortunately it has no rational foundation and its metaphysical presuppositions are probably false. This is a tragedy, for the loss of religious belief will make human life shallower and in other ways leave a gaping void in our lives which cannot plausibly be filled by anything else. It may even have grave social consequences. But it is something we must find a way to live with, for atheism is intellectually unavoidable.

Here, too, a given atheist might of course take attitude A towards some religions or some forms of a particular religion, while taking attitude B or C towards others.  Once again, Jerry Coyne seems to be an example of an atheist whose attitude toward religion lays more or less at the most negative end (A).  Perhaps Stephen Jay Gould took something like attitude B.  Atheists of a politically or morally conservative bent typically take either attitude B or attitude C (though I know at least one prominent conservative who is probably closer to attitude A).  Walter Kaufmann is another good example of an atheist (or at least an agnostic) who took something like attitude B towards at least some forms of religion.  Indeed, he seemed to regard religion as something that speaks to deep human needs and whose moral aspects are of great and abiding philosophical interest.

Now these two sets of possible attitudes can obviously be mixed in a number of ways.  That is to say, a given atheist might take a more negative attitude towards the theoretical side of a given religion and a more positive attitude towards its practical side, or vice versa.  And he might take different mixtures of attitudes towards different religions or forms of religion.  For instance, he might take attitudes 2 and C towards some kinds of religious belief, and 1 and A towards other kinds.  Thus we could classify atheists according to their combinations of attitudes towards the practical and theoretical sides of religion or of a particular religion—A1, B3, C2, and so forth.

An A1 atheist, then, would be the most negative sort, especially if he took an A1 attitude towards most or all forms of religion.  A C3 atheist would be the most positive.  At different times during my own years as an atheist, I would say that I tended to take either a B or C attitude towards the practical side of religion, and perhaps attitude 2 towards the theoretical side (at least until the latter part of my atheist years, when I started to move to 3 before finally giving up atheism).  No doubt I had moments when I probably came across as more of an attitude 1 and/or attitude A type atheist with respect to at least some forms of religious belief—it’s easier to remember specific arguments with people than what one’s general attitude was during a given year, say—but overall I’d say that I probably hovered around B2 territory for at least much of my time as an atheist. (Walter Kaufmann was one of my heroes in those days.  Indeed, Kaufmann’s attitude towards Christianity—which was more negative than his attitude towards other religions—influenced my own, and no doubt helped delay my eventual return to the Church.)

I find that atheists who fall on the most negative ends of these scales—A1 territory—are invariably the ones who are the least well-informed about what the religions they criticize actually believe, and the least rational when one tries to discuss the subject with them. And when you think about it, even before one gets into the specifics it is pretty clear that A1 is prima facie simply not a very reasonable attitude to take about at least the great world religions.  To think that it is reasonable, you have to think it plausible that the greatest minds of entire civilizations—Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, et al.—had for millennia been defending theoretical and practical positions that were not merely mistaken but were in fact nothing more than sheer bigotry and superstition, more or less rationally groundless and morally out of sync with the deepest human needs.  And that simply isn’t plausible.  Indeed, it’s pretty obviously ridiculous.  Even if all religious belief turned out to be wrong, it simply is not at all likely that its key aspects—and especially those aspects that recur in most or all religions—could have survived for so long across so many cultures and attracted the respect of so many intelligent minds unless they had some significant appeal both to our intellectual and moral natures.

Hence a reasonable atheist should acknowledge that it is likely that attitudes 2 or 3 and B or C are the more defensible attitudes to take towards at least the ideas of the greatest religious thinkers and the most highly developed systems of religious thought and practice.

When one considers the prima facie implausibility of the A1 attitude together with the ill-informed smugness and irrationality of many of those who approximate it, it is pretty clear that its roots are not intellectual but emotional—that it affords those beholden to it a sense of superiority over others, an enemy on which to direct their hatreds and resentments, a way to rationalize their rejection of certain moral restraints they dislike, and so forth.  In other words, A1 atheism is often exactly the sort of ill-informed bigotry and wish-fulfillment A1 atheists like to attribute to religious believers.

And here’s the thing: If there is anything new about the New Atheism, it is the greater prominence of atheists who at least approximate the A1 stripe.  In Walter Kaufmann’s day, A1 atheism was represented by marginal, vulgar cranks like Madalyn Murray O’Hair.  Now, people with similar attitudes like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Myers, and Coyne are by no means marginal, but widely regarded as serious thinkers about religion.  This is the reverse of intellectual progress.  And we know what Walter Kaufmann would have thought of it.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
(Image credit: Religion News)

Daniel Dennett, one of the “four horsemen” of contemporary atheism, proposed in 2003 that those who espouse a naturalist, atheist worldview should call themselves “the brights,” thereby distinguishing themselves rather clearly from the dim benighted masses who hold on to supernaturalist convictions. In the wake of Dennett’s suggestion, many atheists have brought forward what they take to be ample evidence that the smartest people in our society do indeed subscribe to anti-theist views. By “smartest” they usually mean practitioners of the physical sciences, and thus they point to surveys that indicate only small percentages of scientists subscribe to religious belief.

In a recent article published in the online journal “Salon,” titled "Religion's Smart-People Problem," University of Seattle philosophy professor John Messerly reiterates this case. However, he references, not simply the lack of belief among the scientists, but also the atheism among academic philosophers, or as he puts it, “professional philosophers.” He cites a recent survey that shows only 14% of such professors admitting to theistic convictions, and he states that this unbelief among the learned elite, though not in itself a clinching argument for atheism, should at the very least give religious people pause. Well, I’m sorry Professor Messerly, but please consider me unpaused.

Since I have developed these arguments many times before in other forums, let me say just a few things in regard to the scientists. I have found that, in practically every instance, the scientists who declare their disbelief in God have no idea what serious religious people mean by the word “God.” Almost without exception, they think of God as some supreme worldly nature, an item within the universe for which they have found no “evidence,” a gap within the ordinary nexus of causal relations, etc. I would deny such a reality as vigorously as they do. If that’s what they mean by “God,” then I’m as much an atheist as they—and so was Thomas Aquinas. What reflective religious people mean when they speak of God is not something within the universe, but rather the condition for the possibility of the universe as such, the non-contingent ground of contingency. And about that reality, the sciences, strictly speaking, have nothing to say one way or another, for the consideration of such a state of affairs is beyond the limits of the scientific method. And so when statistics concerning the lack of belief among scientists are trotted out, my response, honestly, is “who cares?”

But what about the philosophers, 86% of whom apparently don’t believe in God? Wouldn’t they be conversant with the most serious and sophisticated accounts of God? Well, you might be surprised. Many academic philosophers, trained in highly specialized corners of the field, actually have little acquaintance with the fine points of philosophy of religion and often prove ham-handed when dealing with the issue of God. We hear, time and again, the breezy claim that the traditional arguments for God’s existence have been “demolished” or “refuted,” but when these supposed refutations are brought forward, they prove, I have found, remarkably weak, often little more than the batting down of a straw-man. A fine example of this is Bertrand Russell’s deeply uninformed dismissal of Thomas Aquinas’s demonstration of the impossibility of an infinite regress of conditioned causes.

But more to it, the percentage of atheists in the professional philosophical caste has at least as much to do with academic politics as it does with the formulation of convincing arguments. If one wants to transform a department of philosophy from largely theist to largely atheist, all one has to do is to make sure that the chairman of the department and even a small coterie of the professoriat are atheist. In rather short order, that critical mass will control hiring, firing, and the granting of tenure within the department. Once atheists have come to dominate the department, only atheist faculty will be hired and students with theistic interests will be sharply discouraged from writing dissertations defending the religious point of view. In time, very few doctorates supporting theism will be produced, and a new generation, shaped by thoroughly atheist assumptions, will come of age. To see how quickly this transformation can happen, take a good look at the philosophy department at many of the leading Catholic universities: what were, in the 1950’s overwhelmingly theistic professoriats are today largely atheist. Does anyone really think that this happened because lots of clever new arguments were discovered?

Another serious problem with trumpeting the current statistics on the beliefs of philosophers is that such a move is based on the assumption that, in regard to philosophy, newer is better. One could make that argument in regard to the sciences, which do seem to progress in a steadily upward direction: no one studies the scientific theories of Ptolemy or Descartes today, except out of historical interest. But philosophy is a horse of a different color, more akin to poetry. Does anyone think that the philosophical views of, say, Michel Foucault are necessarily better than those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, just because Foucault is more contemporary? It would be like saying the verse of Robert Frost is necessarily superior to that of Dante or Shakespeare, just because Frost wrote in the twentieth century. I for one think that philosophy, so marked today by nihilism and postmodern relativism, is passing through a particularly corrupt period. Why should we think, therefore, that the denizens of philosophy department lounges today are necessarily more correct than Alfred North Whitehead, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion, all of whom were well-acquainted with modern science, rigorously trained in philosophy and affirmed the existence of God?

I despise the arrogance of Dennett and his atheist followers who would blithely wrap themselves in the mantle of “brightness;” but I also despise the use of statistics to prove any point about philosophical or religious matters. I would much prefer that we return to argument.
 
 
(Image credit: Gawker)

"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.
(Image credit: The Daily Show)

“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.
 
 
(Image credit: YouTube)