Christmas Atheists

Over the last two weeks, leading American atheists have registered complaints about all the attention given to Christmas in the United States. These atheists have issued three challenges. First, they insist that being atheist does not mean being immoral. Second, they want other people to see that atheists are law-abiding, compassionate, and generous to others—that one does not have to be Christian or to feel “the Christmas spirit” to care for the poor and the needy. Third, they insist that monotheists have a harder time being tolerant of others than atheists do. Atheists, they think, are more humble, tolerant, and sweet-tempered; since monotheists think that they “have” the truth, and know God’s will, they are more stiff-minded. In my own experience, though, many different belief systems are found among people who call themselves atheists. Here is just a small collection:

One. Those rationalists who believe in science, rationality, and truth, and who abhor relativism and nihilism, and who have very firm moral principles grounded in reason itself — but who see no evidence for the existence of God, neither for the theism of the ancient Greeks and Romans nor the personal God of Judaism and Christianity. They might wish that they could believe in God, but their intellectual conscience will not allow them to.

Two. Those relativists and nihilists who do believe, as Nietzsche warned, that the “death of God” has also meant the death of trust in reason and science and objective rules of morality. Such atheists, therefore, may for arbitrary reasons choose to live for their own pleasure, or for the joy of exercising brute power and will. This is the kind of moral nihilism that communist and fascist regimes depended upon, to justify the brutal use of power. It appears, also, to be the kind of atheism that Ayn Rand commended.

Three. Those who do not believe in the personal God who heeds prayers, and is concerned about the moral lives of individual human beings — the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. Instead, some who call themselves atheists actually do recognize a principle of intelligent order and even awe-inspiring beauty in the natural world. They also believe in a kind of primordial energy or dynamic power, which pushes along, for example, evolution and the potentiality of human progress. They are at about the same stage in thinking about morality and metaphysics as the ancient Greeks.

Four. The “Methodist atheists” — those who maintain all the qualities of niceness and good moral habits and gentle feelings associated with the followers of Wesley down the generations, but do so without believing in God. In other words, they remain indebted to inherited Christian moral sentiments, even while they seldom or never darken church doors. They have come to think that believing in God is a little like believing in Santa Claus. They have outgrown the metaphysics, but not the ethics.

Five. The merely practical atheists — that is, those who by habit remain members of a religious faith, and who share a certain pietas regarding their family gods, and continue going to church according to the old routines, but whose daily behavior and speech show that they actually live as if God does not exist. Their religiousness is formal, routine, empty — or very nearly so. Indignantly, they may insist that they are not atheists, a term they probably associate with #2 above.

Six. Those like Friedrich von Hayek, who wished he could be religious but confessed that he seemed to have no “ear” for it, just as some people have no ear for music. He felt he was an atheist by defect.

Some years ago I read a book on atheism, by a devout atheist (if that is the right word), who had found to his surprise that a large majority of those Americans who call themselves atheists actually believe in some more-than-human power, force, intelligence in all things. This is a position not altogether unlike the ancients (and the moderns) described in #3 above. The ancients did not call such persons atheists, but held them to be theists, albeit under a vague and unclear sort of deity, but intelligent and powerful and drawing all things toward the good.

Richard Rorty, acclaimed at his recent death as America’s most famous public philosopher, sometimes called himself “a nihilist with a smile.” That is, he had rejected classical rationalism, such as that described in #1 above. He recognized that our minds do aspire to rationality. Yet we find that the world of our experience, when looked at “all the way down,” is undeniably chaotic, sometimes cruel, and most of all meaningless. The world has no rational foundations. It just is. A bit of a “tale told by an idiot.”

On the other hand, in his ethical commitments Rorty never could shake the Christian dreams of his forebears. Not so long before his death he spoke of his hazy vision of the future and his sense of the holy. “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that someday my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” Thus, Rorty is a prime example of #4 above; except that his utopia is a bit rosier than the evidence for Original Sin will allow most Christians to indulge in.

In any case, there seems to be a high proportion of atheists today whose lives are as nice and moral as Hallmark greeting cards. Some of them may dislike Christianity intensely. As the world goes, however, the ethical practices of a certain number of them — all the way up the scale from mere sentiments, to effective personal help to the poor, and to heroic self-sacrifice — are more in tune with Jewish/Christian ethics than with any other on this planet.

Thus, in answering the challenges put to Jews and Christians by atheists this season, we may concede that nonbelievers may well find in the law “written in their hearts” and recognizable by reason alone a quite decent moral code, and in ancient and modern moralists among pagans some good guidance for living rather good moral lives. Not, for the most part, saints, just good people; though among them, for sure, are some “secular saints,” of the kind observed by Albert Camus in his novel The Plague.

We may concede, even, that some atheists live better moral lives than some of those who attend Christian churches. Some of the latter may live “as if there is no God” to a greater degree than some atheists.

The only kind of atheist whose morals all of us have a right to suspect are those in #2 above: the nihilists. These are people who, as Samuel Adams wryly noted, have no first principles to prevent them from betraying their spouse — or their country. Whatever they need to do is their first principle. These are the ones of whom Dostoevsky wrote: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” G. K. Chesterton is often quoted as saying of such persons: “Those who say they do not believe in God do not believe in nothing. They believe anything.” They seem especially prone to the latest cultural hoaxes, such as imminent global freezing (“nuclear winter”) or imminent global warming.

As for the charge that those who believe in one God, the Creator who fashioned the laws of nature (“the laws of nature and nature’s God”), find it more difficult than the atheist to be tolerant, three replies are available. The first is this: Have you ever measured on the Hatred Scale the way in which atheists speak disdainfully of “deluded” Christians and Jews? Tolerance? Many do not grant even the basic respect due all intelligent and responsible human individuals — the respect of dealing with an intellectual equal.

Second, the two regimes in our time that tried totally to control thought and conscience, and were the most intolerant in history, called themselves — and were — atheist regimes.

Third, those humans who can see that some things belong to Caesar, and some to God, have an iron-sided reason to resist the tyranny of the State, on one hand, and to resist the overweening ambitions of any priestly caste, on the other. Also, seeing clearly the infinity of God’s wisdom and the puniness of their own, Jews and Christians have every reason to be humble of mind, and respectful of the truth in the mind of others, since all humans are made in the image of God, each a partial refraction of his infinite wisdom. As Reinhold Niebuhr counseled Christians: Recall that in your own truth there is always some error, and in the errors of your current opponents, some truth. Each believing Jew and Christian has solid religious grounds for being respectful of the truths uttered by others, and humble about the degree of knowledge each of them has so far attained. No one of us “has” the truth. All of us, with very limited minds indeed, are held accountable under its infinite light.

The Christmas season is a good time, then, for atheists and believers alike to meditate upon their own limitations, and to listen more respectfully to one another; each has something to learn from the other. It is a suitable time for this, because the greeting of Christmas peace was intended for all who faithfully seek the good, as best their conscience shows it to them.

Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis: Peace on earth to all humans of good will!

Published in National Review Online January 4, 2009

Truth and Freedom

Human liberty depends on an accurate grasp of the human condition, not as we might like it to be, but as it is: “The truth shall set you free.” Let us suppose, for instance, a situation in which truth is rendered servile by some contemporary enthusiasm. If truth is held captive by a powerful force of attraction, can the human beings who live under that force ever find a way to liberty? Only by luck, great courage, and long perseverance.

During the past hundred years, ideologies have often trumped the unimpeded search for truth. Here is where the sentence from Orwell becomes pivotal. “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

To seek the true reality while everyone around you is applauding what many know to be false is to act as a grown woman or man. It is to show a mind that distinguishes reality from the prevailing prejudices of the age. In fact, a mind committed to finding reality—despite surrounding unreality—is the only free mind.

This is what Thomas Jefferson was suggesting in his classic argument for the Statute of Religious Liberty in Virginia:

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds, that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his Supreme will that free it shall remain, by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint: That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone.

The creator so made us that only one thing would oblige us to bend our knee: the evidence grasped by our own minds. This is what Jefferson (and other founders) meant by truth: what the evidence of our own minds enables us to embrace.

John Adams, our second president, added a second point in a letter to a friend:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

Why is this? Because if there is no truth, no argument is possible in the light of evidence. Under a regime that spouts lies, there is no way to protest in the name of truth. Where truth doesn’t count, conversation is empty. Where truth doesn’t count, persuasion can be no more than seduction or intimidation. Power rules.

Put another way, when power, wealth, and position threaten to tyrannize, people must be able to appeal to truth. Only when truth is cherished as an imperative does civilization becomes possible. Only then can human beings enter into rational conversation with one another. For civilization is constituted by conversation. Barbarians bully; civilized people persuade.

One more point. Being ruled by evidence requires all the habits and dispositions necessary to act with self-mastery. To be free does not mean for humans what it means for the other animals. Two cats that frisk, run, bat each other, roll over, and run again may seem to be free, but they are in fact only following their instincts. Cats do what their instincts tell them, when they tell them. They do what they want, when they want. The trouble is that humans have a far more complicated set of instincts. One of these instincts pushes humans to reflect on their own past actions and future situations in order to judge their realism and ethical value.

Reflection and judgment are the capacities that enable humans to discern what they ought to do. Human beings are the only animals that can choose to reflect on what they ought to do and then to choose to do it. This is what the great historian of liberty, Lord Acton, grasped when he defined liberty as the ability to do not what one wants, but what one ought.

Let me offer concrete examples. George Washington was a model of this type of liberty, as were many other founders: Franklin, Madison, Jefferson, and, four generations later, Abraham Lincoln. These were men who went through many struggles but came out at the end men whose word you could trust; whose commitments you could count on; whose judgments about men and affairs were shrewd and often (for all their plainness of statement) startlingly apt. Their deliberations showed the work of reason in a great repertoire of movements and a great range of mood and observations; and their decisions hewed closely to enduring truths about the human person.

Thus, our argument has come full circle. One thing a free person is not free to do—unless in betrayal—is to turn his or her face against the evidence. Evidence binds us, and also makes us free from all else. This, at least, is how I read Jefferson, who implies that our minds must be free from every coercion except one; the coercion effected upon the mind by evidence. The mind that is coerced by nothing but the evidence is free. The mind coerced by anything but truth is unfree.

The rationale for defending liberty is to come closer to the truth. The rationale for defending truth is that its light shows us the way to freedom.

Without widespread commitment to the moral habits that make liberty and truth more than words on paper, it is hard to see how a republic can long endure. Our rights are not protected by words on a paper. They are protected by habits that exhibit respect for truth and a love for self-mastery. If I may again paraphrase George Orwell: In an age of deceit, seeking truth is a liberating act.

Keeping the meaning of truth and liberty clean and clear, like white stones in a sparkling stream of the Colorado Rockies, is the task of every generation. It is the most important part of moral ecology. The final law of morality, Pascal wrote, is to seek the truth.

Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Published in First Things Online January 2, 2009

The Complementarity of Man and Woman

The brilliant lay philosopher of Judaism, Dennis Prager, has written lucidly about the utter distinctiveness of Judaism among the nations of its time in its understanding of human sexuality. Prager writes:

The gods of virtually all civilizations engaged in sexual relations. In the Near East, the Babylonian god Ishtar seduced a man, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero. In Egyptian religion, the god Osiris had sexual relations with his sister, the goddess Isis, and she conceived the god Horus. In Canaan, El, the chief god, had sex with Asherah. In Hindu belief, the god Krishna was sexually active, having had many wives and pursuing Radha; the god Samba, son of Krishna, seduced mortal women and men.

In the temples of its neighbors near and far, Israel saw that ritual acts of prostitution and sacral couplings between religious leaders and women (or men) were routinely performed. Sexual activities were placed at the core of worship ceremonies in virtually all cultures, even including pre-mosaic Israel. Only in Israel did the prophets rail against these activities, and repeatedly drove them from the temple. The ancient world considered sexual “normality” to be fulfilled in the ungoverned sexuality of males, to which women were merely instrumental. In many of the cultures surrounding Israel, sexual acts between males were given equal or even superior value to those between males and females. In those cultures, little differentiation was made between homosexuality and heterosexuality. The important difference to people then lay in who did the penetrating and who was penetrated, not in which gender played which role.

Against this common vision of sexual normalcy stood the towering Moses. He taught Israel, virtually alone, to embrace a new standard for human sexual life. This standard gave its blessing solely to sexual acts between a man and a woman in the covenanted relationship of monogamous marriage. What a great channeling of sexual energies this provision achieved. What a great concentration of energies it brought to the world. What great, non-instrumental dignity it gave to women.

Many elites in other cultures continued to exhaust their energies in polymorphous sex. They expended whole days on the arts of pleasure—the smells, the scents, the music, the languorous bodies of dancers. And in this sexually saturated world, women remained mere instruments. As Norman Sussman wrote, “The woman was seen as serving but two roles. As a wife, she ran the home. As a courtesan, she satisfied male sexual desires.” When sensory pleasures are considered the highest aim of life—not study nor inquiry nor civic virtue—economic and cultural development is heavily retarded.

Is sexual activity the highest end of life? For Moses and the people of Israel, it assuredly was not. It was of course a great good, and one essential to the perpetuation of the human race. Sexuality was not meant to be repressed. But it was meant to run—and to run deep—in only one channel.

From this sublimation there arose two great social consequences. First, women achieved sexual equality with men in the holy union of marriage. “In His image [God] made them, male and female He made them” (Genesis 1:27). This text says clearly that the divine radiance in human life shines through the marital union of man and woman. Therein, each person finds completeness. Only together, fully one, does the married couple bear the image of the Creator.

The second great consequence is to channel immense energy into society through its fundamental unit, the family—and not just energy, but also a continuity of consciousness, and the dream of a more perfect future. Thus Judaism gave birth to the idea of progress. Judaism introduced the ancient world to the reality of progress. Judaism sees itself as always unfinished, always unsatisfied. “Next year in Jerusalem,” when “the lion will lie down with the lamb” and the Messiah will at last appear. Each family, at the family table, carries these hopes forward into the future. Making progress is always, in time, an unfinished business.

It is worth noting that the fundamental energy of the family, in this vision, is spousal love. This love is not a sentimental feeling or a passionate desire, but a firm commitment to the good of the other. Not “her good” as you wish it were, nor even the good as she wishes it were, but her objective good as identified by reason. Thus, the point of even sex is realistic love. Not mutual self-indulgence, but the growth in adulthood and virtuous living that raising a family entails. (There is no point in getting married if you don’t want to hear the truth about yourself—especially all those truths you don’t really want to hear—from your spouse and your children.) Those who live closely together come to shed their illusions about each other, and to love in each other the better self that each would like to become. This is realistic love.

Further, man and wife, though assuredly equals in marriage, are not identicals. The one sex is opposite to, not identical to, the other. In this difference lies dynamic complementarity. (The great English journalist G.K. Chesterton once marveled during his first long stay in America, that Americans can seek divorce “on the grounds of incompatibility.” “I would have thought,” he commented dryly, “that incompatibility is the reason for marriage.”)

Thus, the complementarity between a man and a woman in covenantal marriage—a privileged image of God—is designed to increase the best of all forms of happiness among human beings: growth in the ennobling habits of the heart, in virtue, in honesty, and in mutual caring, “until death do them part.” This complementarity is also designed to generate productive, creative, and ever-advancing societies, driven by dreams of perfection yet to come (and never to be fully realized).

Published in First Things Online December 26, 2008

Science and Religion

According to the conventional narrative, science and religion have been at war for some three hundred years. But the reality is deeper and more complex. The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his Science and the Modern World (1925) that without devotion to the God of Israel, modern science would not have come into being. When humans learned that the God of Israel was the fountain and origin of all that is, and of all the stunning intelligibility within every part of creation, they had a motive for dedicating their whole lives to unlocking the secrets hidden in creation. More important, they had great confidence that this search would not be in vain. Pursuing these convictions down the centuries, Jews and Christians expected that the Creator had paid loving attention to every detail of the inner life of the molecule, and to the giant, bursting stars of distant galaxies. In the cultures shaped by the Bible, human beings had confidence that all questions can be answered if diligently pursued. They had confidence that all those disparate answers would point to a coherence and almost mathematical beauty that is breathtaking to contemplate. Further, the Bible names this intelligent Creator Truth—the Truth that is the unifying beauty and energy that moves every entity in time and space (and perhaps, in other worlds). Those who reflected on the Bible were taught to expect that the universe of human experience may have had its origins in chaos and nothingness. They were taught to expect that this universe of space and time came into existence in one complex, unifying burst of intelligence, the logos in whom, by whom, and with whom all things were made, and that makes all things (no matter how humble) intelligible. They were taught to expect, as it were, a “Unified Field Theory.”

Of course, many today hold that all this talk about God, Creator, Prime Intelligence, and the Act of Existence is gibberish. Yet even they must admit that it was to their good fortune that, in a small family of cultures, a decisive number of inquirers, scholars, and copyists of ancient manuscripts did learn to expect pervasive intelligibility in the universe because of their faith in an ordering Intelligence. That is why they were willing to invest most of the hours of their humble lives in preparing the way for modern science.

In other words, the belief shared by (at first) a few million of the Earth’s inhabitants that a light emanates from the Creator of the world, and suffuses all things, gave them a strong motivation for devoting their lives to scientific efforts. They wanted to learn more about God by studying the world He made. (The great scientist Johannes Kepler held that two books teach us about God: the Book of Nature and the Book that reveals what we otherwise could not learn about God.) Down the centuries, Westerners enjoyed the sheer pleasure that they found in inquiring, gaining insights, and making well-founded judgments. Judaism and Christianity taught them to think of these acts as participations in God’s own inner life. Why?

At its root, the notion of one single Creator who knew what He was doing “before time was,” and then chose to do it at the time and in the way of His choosing, enabled some humans to know by anticipation that human inquiry is good. Human inquiry is noble, and just, and with high probability will be rewarded by trustworthy knowledge. If God is good (and the Torah taught us that He is), then it is good to labor diligently to deepen our knowledge of His entire created world, and all things in it.

The proposition that all things have been made by one Creator has a corollary. The Creator transcends the world. He is not identical with the world, nor with any creature in it. He actively sustains all things, but is not the sum of all things. This transcendence teaches us that no creature, no earthly thing is divine. No idol within space or time is to be put in His place.

This idea of a transcendent Creator assures us that in examining and experimenting with nature, we are violating no taboo, and not defiling God. It is through experimentation that we come to understand and to appreciate the work of His creative genius. By contrast, those peoples who identified their God with some creature within creation—the serpent, the jaguar, the rain—were afraid, lest by inquiry or experiment they might arouse His anger. It is by experiment that, today, many who do not believe in an intelligent Creator encounter the intelligibility that suffuses all things. Even unbelievers, by their actions if not their words, show their confidence in the unified intelligibility of all things. This confidence is the cultural patrimony bequeathed them by generations of believers.

Today, roughly half of all scientists are atheists. Yet, insofar as they are scientists, they share the same confidence that the sacrificing of one’s whole life to the pursuit of asking questions is a noble and worthy vocation. In this conviction, they act as if they believed in God. Perhaps some of them see this old belief in a Creator as a scaffolding that was necessary for building up the edifice of science, but that we can now safely kick away.

But they would do well to recall that poignant passage in Nietzsche, in which Zarathustra hears that God is dead. Contemplating what the death of God means for the death of reason, Nietzsche writes, “Zarathustra wept.”

If God is dead, so is reason. The ultimate meaningless of everything is assured. Zarathustra wept.

Published in First Things Online December 18, 2008

How to Ready Oneself to Pray

I am not very good at prayer, although I try to be praying all the time, like breathing. (In fact, I have at times asked God — when I am too ill or too tired to think in words — to take my breathing as a prayer.) It is an inner conversation, wordless often, marked just by attentiveness. Every detail of every event is speaking. It comes forth from the creative insight of God. When I want to ready myself to think about God, I place myself quietly and humbly in His presence. I try to shut out other thoughts, and then quietly think about the most beautiful and ennobling and stunning things I have seen in life — all my favorite things. There are two views in the Alps — in Grindelwald and in Bressanone — that I have especially loved. The peacefulness of an ocean on a quiet day, the blue water barely rippling, never fails to move my heart. And the sunsets — in Iowa, in Wyoming, on the seacoast of Delaware — and that most peculiar green sunset on the plain above Mexico City where the sun drops over the edge of the plain before it disappears behind the earth, so that the light during that interval is eerie and prolonged and unforgettable.

I think then of favorite music of mine, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Vivaldi, Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, the most beautiful of all, written after the sudden death of his much loved daughter. I think of favorite paintings from the Pitti and the Uffizi, and the convent walls painted by Fra Angelico. And sculptors. And poets. And philosophers and other writers whose work has thrilled me. (One of my most unforgettable moments as a young man was reading Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry; it was so beautiful I had to get up and take a long walk down to the lake, almost speechless in silent wonder.) For several years, every Easter I have read one of Dostoevsky’s long novels, followed in later years by War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I think of God as the Creator of all these great minds and artists. I wonder how much greater than they is God’s own mind and sense of beauty. I would love to share in contemplation of such works and such persons for all eternity. And all the more so in His beauty.

Then I think of the loves I have known. Close friends, childhood buddies, grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins, my three brothers and one sister, my dear parents — and then Karen, whose name means what she is, Clara, the clear light of my life — and our solid, noble, and strong children and grandchildren. All these loves make me think that God’s love is more than the sum of these, of a different order entirely, and yet the source of all of them. “Where there is caritas and amor,” the old hymn goes, “there God is.” That is my favorite hymn.

Jesus asks us not only to be just to our enemies, not only to be merciful, not only to forgive. He asks us to resist evil, yes, and to be like steel against unjust aggressors — to defeat them thoroughly — but also, in the end, to be able to see that even our enemies are also children of the one Creator. When all the evil has been drained out of their aggression, we need to be ready to welcome them back into the human community.

The United States and our allies did this rather nicely, I have always thought, in regard to Germany and Japan after World War II. If there is ever to be even a simulacrum of a brotherly world — all right, at least a relatively tranquil world — even one based upon fear of greater power, reaching out in tests of amity and voluntary cooperation is a necessity of human life in our time. Here is one point at which I think Christianity has led the way. It once united all Europe in a common civilization. It has suffused the secular humanism of compassion and solidarity and individual freedom. It is helping to shape one global civilization, with respect for individual liberty, as well as for human solidarity.

If I had to pick out one human experience that for me seems most godlike — the best, the highest that I know — I would choose the experience of choosing to love Karen, and to be loved by her in return. Second would come acts of insight — those little bursts of fire that come when we are puzzling things through. In many ways, these two experiences are related, but saying how that is so would delay us too long right here. Suffice it to say that those are my choices for the best in life — the achievement of mutual love, and the firing off of insight after insight in pursuit of understanding. That eros of understanding is almost as powerful (in some ways more so) than the eros of love; yet the latter is primary, and is profoundly influential upon understanding. Understanding keeps love from erring badly, but in the dark, love often leads the way for understanding.

Adapted from Michael Novak’s latest book No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

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Published in The Catholic Thing November 18, 2008

We Have a New President

Election night, Washington, D.C. — After the astonishingly close presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, when it was necessary for most of us to go without sleep for many hours after midnight, tonight’s election has been relatively boring to watch. While the victory of Obama was not declared in the first hour or two, as some had thought possible, by 9:30 P.M. it was clear that McCain was not making a last-minute breakthrough. Obama won New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—all states that any surprise by McCain depended on. Two hours later, the race has not yet been definitely called. But the television networks are projecting that Obama has won Florida, Virginia, Iowa, and New Mexico—all states that George W. Bush had won in 2004. Clearly, although McCain came close to winning these battleground states, he in the end lost them. So what does the election of Sen. Barack Obama as the new president of the United States mean?

I will never forget the moment in January 1961, when John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president. I was watching his inaugural address in the cafeteria of the Harvard Law School, when I was startled by feeling warm tears streak down my cheeks. I was caught by surprise; I had not expected that. Yet it was so astonishing to witness a Roman Catholic becoming the public face of our nation, as presidents always do. It had seemed impossible to imagine, in this very Protestant country. In the Harvard graduate schools, a Catholic felt like a man with green hair—an oddity. But not any more, not after John F. Kennedy became president.

Thus, it is easy for me to imagine the immense jubilation in the hearts of America’s African-American population. Many eyes will be shining with joy tomorrow. Many will feel arise in their breasts a great new sense of pride, accomplishment, and public dignity. They will feel validated as never before.

That is one great blessing of this election.

What will the Obama presidency mean for U.S. foreign policy? A great nation is like a large aircraft carrier. It can change course only very slowly, a degree or two at a time. Thus, I doubt whether President Obama’s overseas actions will match some of his flights of rhetoric during the election.

Obama won the Democratic primaries by getting to the left of Sen. Hillary Clinton and all the others on foreign policy. The most activist part of the Democratic party is its most passionate left wing. Winning their hearts, Obama then gradually moved toward the center—making his views on the war in Iraq barely distinguishable in practical fact from those of Senator McCain. In any case, the foreign-policy issues that dominated the primary season dropped speedily out of sight, as it began to become clear that violence was dropping very quickly in Iraq, and something like “normalcy” came ever closer. The press virtually stopped covering Iraq. (Their passion had been to humiliate Bush; and when things turned better, they seemed no longer interested.)

Does the victory of the Left in 2008 mean that President Obama will try to make the United States more like a Euro-socialist nation? All the signs he has given us of where his heart really lies suggest that he will try to do that, within some rather severe limits. In particular, he will surely try to rush through a program of U.S. government-run and -managed health care. But under President Clinton, Hillary Clinton came to grief trying to do that.

The United States is a large nation, with an extraordinarily diverse range of populations, regions, climates, and cultural habits. Imagine trying to run one single continental health-care system that embraces Germany and Portugal, Scandinavia and Greece, and Albania through Belgium. That image suggests how difficult it will be to run one single health-care system from Washington, from Maine and Florida out through Alaska and Arizona, and everything in between. The United States is more culturally unified than Europe. But it is far from uniformly so.

Besides, Americans do not much respect the government-run programs that are now in place. Rather than rely on the inefficient Post Office, for important matters Americans prefer to pay a little more for the reliability, good manners, and good spirit of private carriers such as FedEx and United Parcel Service. Service is so much better and more cheerful in the business sector than in the government sector.

One thing that President Obama appears to have achieved, however, is to have broken through the near-stalemate of the last 20 years, in which “red” states (Republican) and “blue” states (Democratic) seemed locked in perpetual opposition. Obama broke through and won several important “red” states for the new Democratic majority.

The two parts of his past and his future proposals that I deplore spring from the fact of his being the most extreme proponent of abortion in the U.S. Congress. Given the fact that 35 percent of all abortions in the United States are sought by African-American women, it is surprising that Senator Obama has been such a great defender of the institution of abortion, which since 1973 has taken the lives of more than 43 million infants in the womb. For many of us, abortion is an even more grievous abuse of power over others than slavery, and to argue for “choice” to abort another human being is no more morally plausible than to defend the right to choose to enslave another.

The second worrisome fact about candidate Obama is his promise to appoint left-wing, pro-abortion Supreme Court Justices. He may have as many as three Justices (of the total of nine) to appoint during his four-year term. Their influence would weigh on our nation for 20 or more years to come.

Yet now is not the time to rehearse the grave doubts about Obama that were part of the partisan battle of the last two years. Barack Obama is now the president-elect of all of us. Now is the time to praise the brilliant, audacious, and wonderfully surprising campaign that President-elect Obama conducted. He overcame many obstacles. He held up better under fire than many of us expected him to do. He deserves much praise.

Published in National Review Online November 5, 2008

Do Atheists Reject Without Understanding?

May I offer a friendly suggestion, simply as a possibility to be explored? It may be that the ideas of God presented by atheists are so incredible that their own reputation for good sense is discounted. Whatever the reason, atheists — even when they are given control of all levels of education and free rein for proselytizing — have been unsuccessful in persuading others of their view of life. Could it be that atheists’ ideas of God are so far off that they injure the credibility of their testimony? Consider five common but misleading ways of speaking about God.

[1] God as an object of scientific discovery. He is something like a new planet, or a previously unrecognized form of energy. Just another object to be examined.

[2] God is a gap-filler in scientific theories and philosophies of science. A little like a utility infielder, God is played in whatever position he is needed, wherever the existing explanations do not suffice. Evolving explanations make God less and less necessary.

[3] God as an end to infinitely-regressing explanations. He is the answer to the question, “Where did the world come from?” An Indian sage once whimsically replaced God in this role with a giant turtle that holds the world up, lest the world plunge endlessly down into nothingness. Thus, some think of God as the plug preventing infinite regress. For others, the sage’s point is more subtle: to suppose that there is one more turtle to hold up the turtle that holds up the world, ad infinitum all the way down, is ridiculous. The bottom turtle stands on nothing at all. Absurd!

[4] God as super-man. He knows and can do more than any ordinary human being. Yet he is to be judged by the same standards as humans are judged. If he is a “father,” then he should be held to the same standards as other fathers. If he is a “creator,” then we should note the things we think he has botched up, and review his work critically, as we would review the work of any other artist.

[5] God is the object of a personal ecstatic experience, which gives its subject evidence that can scarcely be transmitted convincingly to others, if at all. You have known it or you haven’t. It’s beyond rational communication. Mute.

All these conceptions of God skip over the term “existence,” and fail to consider its nature and power. Instead, they supply concepts aimed at capturing the essence of God. A misleading concept is guaranteed to frustrate any questions concerning God’s existence. A false concept would send seekers down fruitless paths, and make failure inevitable. Further, there is a vast yawning distance between essence and existence, between the concept of a thing (its essence) and that thing’s actually springing into being, a substantive reality (existence) out of nothingness. This difference is beyond the methods of science, but is as important as the difference between a “what-is-it?” question, and a question that asks: “Is that so?” The first question forms an accurate hypothesis. The second is an act of judgment: Yes, it exists; or No, that concept has been falsified.

The problem in thinking about God is twofold: First, how should we conceive of him, that is, which hypothesis are we testing? Second: What is the method of verification—how do we judge God’s reality?

Both questions are operative in the scientific method as well as in common sense. They operate in sequence: we need to be clear about what we are looking for and where we might find it, before searching for evidence about whether the being actually exists.

Human history has particularly cherished the definition of God laid out in the Torah: “I am Who am.” That is, God is purely and completely existence. His “nature” is not that of created things. God is, always is. Whereas for fragile, fleeting creatures such as ourselves, existence is derivative, borrowed, given us from elsewhere.

For the ancients, from God’s abundance flow all other existing things, borrowing from him their existence, as many candles may borrow from a single candle to turn a darkened room into one of soft, splendid light. Perhaps better: all briefly flickering flames depend on oxygen. Should the oxygen be withdrawn, darkness. Were God’s active existing withdrawn, all creaturely existence would end.

This discussion probably makes those trained exclusively in the scientific method uncomfortable. Still, the general form of its movement – from experience through understanding to judgment – actually follows a paradigm not unlike that of science. It moves from observable experience, to a hypothesis that captures the essential features of that experience, to a judgment that the hypothesis fits the facts. From experience and reflection we come to an understanding of how to think about God. Then we judge whether that understanding meets the facts. We may form an idea about God, a hypothesis. But does God, under that hypothetical understanding, exist? Put more exactly, can we with validity and force climb out from the realm of essences and hypotheses when we speak of God, up into the realm of existents?

Adapted from Michael Novak’s latest book No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

Copyright 2008 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org

Published in The Catholic Thing November 4, 2008

A Historical Change in Guidance Systems

Some social democrats and socialists, especially in Western Europe, view the current financial crisis in America with a certain gladness. They think this may discredit “democratic capitalism,” and confirm the superiority of social democracy. This stance returns our public conversation to the questions of the 1972 electoral campaign, during which a significant number of left-wing American thinkers and activists began to rebel against statist institutions, habits, and ways of looking at things propounded by the New Left, and the many promoters of the large omnivorous state.

Looking at the state of social welfare in the United States at that time, these liberals (social democrats) were “mugged by reality.” They saw that social democratic programs did not work. Since they had begun to find socialism in all its forms unsatisfactory (and self-destructive), they sought a better guidance system. They found it in the American tradition of limited government, personal initiative, and economic inventiveness. They wanted to trim government by cutting both taxes and expenditures. They wanted to preserve the welfare state, by limiting its functions, and restoring responsibility to individuals and families. Enemies called this movement “neo-conservative.” It was actually neo-progressive. It gave primacy to the initiative, creativity, individual moral maturity, and to Aristotle’s conception of virtue. Without recognizing it, they adopted something like the Thomistic evaluation of the human person as the most noble and beautiful of God’s creatures. In their eyes, the common good meant nurturing citizens in virtue and happiness.

By 1980, many in this young movement had begun to coalesce around presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who believed that a just government had to be a great deal more limited than the government he would inherit, and that its budget needed to be greatly restrained. Mostly, he believed that the most dynamic propellants of a modern economy are the inventions and risk-taking of imaginative entrepreneurs.

Reagan recognized that more than 80 percent of new jobs in this country are created by businesses that employ twenty-five persons or fewer – and that the crucial incentives that lure entrepreneurs from the sidelines to the creative arena are marginal tax rates—which he cut from 70 to 28 percent. By also dropping the tax rates on capital gains (assets) to 30 percent, Reagan offered entrepreneurs a lure that they could not resist.

He foresaw that they would risk their capital, work as hard and inventively as they could, constantly hire new people, and keep 70 percent of their own capital gains. Under Reagan, the world experienced the passage from a Machine Age to an Electronic Age, a transformation that created whole new industries and large numbers of jobs.

More than half a million new small businesses came into being in each of the eight Reagan years, and 20 million new jobs overall. This new burst of production raised our GDP to nearly one-third larger than it had been when Reagan took office.

Reagan also opened the way to new methods of improving the welfare of the poor and the vulnerable. Not all of them were realized during his administration. An important part of it – asking millions of Americans to volunteer to help the poor – was put in place by his successor, the first President Bush. Another – welfare reform – was reluctantly accepted by President Clinton in 1996. Still other parts were extended by the second President Bush (e.g., generous aid to Africa).

The best way to grasp the new welfare approach pioneered by Reagan is to visualize it as a change in the nation’s guidance system: Aiming not at a larger, but a more limited state. It gave ample room to the dynamisms of civil society: enterprising individuals, voluntary associations, lively civic corporations, churches, and other institutions that provide aid to the poor, the ill, and the down-on-their-luck.

Today, the crisis in the home mortgage system, which has involved many other financial institutions in its toils and tangles, has raised new questions about our guidance system. Do we need another fundamental shift?

Recall that the current system failed in all three of the interconnected systems: political, economic, and moral. For a decade, my colleague at AEI Peter Wallison ( Privatizing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks) has been showing how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored buyers and resellers of mortgages, have been improperly regulated. Usually, the Republicans favor deregulation. But in this case, the Democrats led by Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank blocked attempts to regulate Fannie and Freddie, both large sources of campaign contributions and votes for the Democrats. That was the key political failure, which brought the whole house of cards tumbling down these past few weeks.

The economic system failed when financial whizzes too clever by three-quarters invented elaborate schemes for packaging mortgages, good mixed with bad, which they resold for a profit. Then they invented still fancier schemes of "derivatives" to resell for further profit. They did not examine as closely as they should have the rot running through what they sold, the levels upon levels of packaging that disguised it, and their own responsibilities.

The moral system failed when Americans who borrowed at rates unknown to their parents or grandparents and rejoiced in the rapidly rising value of their homes, did not stop and think: "Something smells. This will all come crashing down." We watched the gains pile up, and we glowed with pleasure.

No system will work without vigilance in all three sectors. Making up for a train of abuses in our time will bring some of the pains of purgatory to everyone, before the system rights itself, each part of the system vigilant over the others.

The advantage of our poor system is that it carries within it latent powers of self-correction – not without pain, yet in a way that may be relied upon better than any other.

Michael Novak’s website is www.michaelnovak.net

(c) 2008 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org

Published in The Catholic Thing October 8, 2008

John Derbyshire Threw Down the Glove (Part II)

John Derbyshire does not trust the word of Mary the Mother of Jesus, nor the word of Luke the Evangelist. It was to Luke that Mary told the story of the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus. What she described is not according to the ordinary rules of nature; neither she nor anyone else thought so. That is the point, isn’t it? The birth of Jesus is beyond human powers. It is not contrary to the rules of nature, since its origins lie in nature’s God, adapting Himself to nature’s laws. But it is a singular event. Mr. Derbyshire’s call for proof led me to realize that the only way that most of us know about our own births is on the word of our mothers and fathers. I believe that in courts of law the testimony of a first-hand witness (with a corroborator who heard the same from that witness) counts as “evidence.” Beyond this is also the evidence of the lives of these witnesses and their community.

The narrative is not a piece of speculative science. It is heavily dependent upon the credibility of a first-hand witness. Before even assessing that evidence, however, it is worth trying to grasp the power of the narrative involved, whether one ends up believing it or not. Perhaps some people, if not John Derbyshire, can willingly suspend disbelief for about ten minutes.

Suppose that the Creator of all things wanted to choose one of His insignificant creatures on a small, insignificant planet in one of a myriad of galaxies to invite into His friendship. Suppose He wished to communicate to them to what lengths He would go to dramatize His love for them. He would come to be among humans via a human mother, and thus, as truly a man. God and man at once, in all the contingencies of time and place.

John Derbyshire has no room in his well-trained mind for this, we all know. But for a moment just stick with the narrative. This narrative suggests that Jesus is conceived of God—true God and true man.

Rubbish! Some still insist. Well, no other subject was more often painted over a span of five centuries (from 1200-1700) than the Annunciation. What is it in that narrative that so touched the minds and awed the imaginations of an entire civilization—two civilizations, including Byzantium?

The paired narratives of the Annunciation and the Nativity were brilliantly imagined, it seems to me, as a way for the Creator to reveal to ordinary shepherds, carpenters, fishermen, and others that Jesus, the Son of God, is not merely God, but also fully human; and not merely human, but also God. What has touched the minds of billions of Christians (today alone there are two billion plus) down through long centuries of human history is that God, the Almighty, the Creator, Governor of nature and nature’s laws, so humbled Himself as to limit Himself in Jesus Christ within the confines of a human body, human suffering, the whole human condition--and in circumstances of poverty and lowliness.

To Muslims, of course, this “tripling” of God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is a blasphemy against monotheism; and to devout Jews, too. Worse still, the Ineffable, Unpronounceable, Unnamable Almighty cannot possibly stoop so low as to become man.

To atheists, as well, it is nonsense.

Well, maybe all these rejectors are correct.

Nonetheless, even today the largest single body of believers in the world is made up of Christians, one out of every three persons on earth, and growing more rapidly (in Asia and Africa particularly) than ever before. All these descend from a band of Twelve fishermen. This tiny band each loved their Lord enough—and trusted what He said enough—to give their lives for Him. Some think the growth of Christianity so steadily and over so long a period (often first among the learned), mostly by the preaching of missionaries rather than by conquering armies, is almost beyond the ordinary and the natural.

****

It is easy to see why John Derbyshire and others do not believe this narrative, of course. Certain preconditions have to be met, pretty steep ones. If there is a Creator of all things, including the laws of nature; if Jesus is, truly, the Son of God, then maybe Mary’s story and Luke’s corroboration of her telling it is not impossible. I suspect that John Derbyshire’s skepticism comes down to three points, behind which there lies a huge presupposition.

- John Derbyshire does not believe that there is a Creator, Almighty God and Father;

- John Derbyshire does not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God;

- John Derbyshire does not trust the testimonies of Mary and Luke.

The preconception that leads John Derbyshire to all these denials is one of method. His definition of ‘method,’ as best I can discern it, would disallow the truth of any of these three propositions (and others in the Christian narrative). John Derbyshire can’t get there from where he is.

That may be why Mr. Derbyshire holds that his own identity, his own community, and his own destiny lie outside any participation in the inner life of the Christian community. He understands himself as standing outside it.

Well, humans have always been free to do that. Many who have encountered the Christian narrative throughout history have turned away from it.

Is Christ the key unlocking the secret to your personal identity? Saying “Yes” or “No” to this crucial question has had huge historical consequences, and continues to do so. It has dramatic consequences in individual lives, and in whole civilizations (or in parts thereof).

One consequence is that uniquely, Judaism and Christianity fix the axis of world history in the arena of conscience, in which the searching of the inquiring mind and freedom of the will are the decisive energies.

“Will you also go away?” Jesus once asked His disciples, after many in the crowd began to drift away from what He was saying. It is not news that in every generation some refuse to come into His company and others walk away. For Christianity, the golden thread of life is liberty.

The upshot is, John, that from here on it is up to you. As Thomas Jefferson put it: “the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds…Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain.” It is up to you, John, to consider the many kinds of evidence that allow you to make an important practical decision that may determine the course of your life.

I do not offer you here the sort of evidence that derives from scientific inquiry or merely philosophical reasoning. Rules concerning the credibility of witnesses, of course, do rely on practical reason and common sense usage. In this case, however, the question tilts over into the arena of that sort of trust in the word of others that may be best described as “faith.” Someday, perhaps, I will take up the profession of apologetics, which is concerned with putting forth the evidences for the Christian faith. But not in No One Sees God, and not at this moment. There are other places to search for it.

Published in National Review Online September 25, 2008