Michael Novak is a friend of mine and a former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute.  He is known for his books celebrating the morality of free markets, notably The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.  As a theologian who has written on subjects from Aquinas to existentialism, Novak is well equipped to consider the metaphysical claims of the new atheists.

One of Novak’s especially attractive qualities is his ability to find common ground with his opponents.  Here he begins by conceding to the atheist that “we are all in the same darkness.”  No one—not even Moses or Abraham—has set his eyes on God.   Novak rejects the certitudes of both the religious fundamentalist and the militant atheist.  He intends to explore what he calls “the dark and windswept open spaces between unbelief and belief.”

For Novak, life raises bigger questions than the ones answered, and answerable, by science.  Ultimately we want to know not merely how things work but also: why are we here?  What is our purpose?  What is our final destiny?  Novak credits religion with addressing the largest moral questions, not only “what is it good to do?” but also “what is it good to be?” and “what is it good to love?”

Novak expresses admiration for some of the leading atheists, notably Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.  (He seems less enamored with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.)  Modern atheism has its virtues, such as an emphasis on truth over good feelings, and also on honesty and courage in facing the realities of life.  Even so, Novak finds it puzzling that these atheists make so little effort to understand how God is experienced by the believer. 

“For a believer,” Novak writes, “It does not take a prolonged thought experiment to imagine oneself an unbeliever.”  The believer knows full well where the atheist is coming from.  By contrast, Novak suggests, atheists like Hitchens seem to have no empathetic understanding whatsoever of genuine religious conviction.  They have no sense of what belief must be like from within. 

Novak’s point is that this shortcoming makes them poor analysts of religion.  All critical reading requires a certain measure of suspended belief.  This is as true of the strange but captivating world of Dostoyevsky as it is of Shakespeare’s moral universe.  When we read Macbeth, for instance, we have to be able to plunge into Shakespeare’s world, ghosts and all.  No understanding of Macbeth is possible if we begin with rude dismissal, “Of course the whole premise is complete nonsense.” 

Novak is surprised to discover that in the entire literature of the new atheism “there is not a shred of evidence that the authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism.”  This is not simply a matter of refusing to apply the vaunted virtue of skepticism to one’s own philosophy.  It is also a matter of giving an account of why such a tiny minority of people in our culture have embraced vocal atheism.  If atheism is so obviously convincing, Novak asks, why are so few people drawn to it?  The new atheists offer no answers; indeed, scarcely any of them even raise the question.

Novak likens Hitchens to Thomas Paine, that fiery pamphleteer and partisan of the American Revolution.  Novak notes, however, that despite his hostility to Christianity Paine understood that such concepts as the dignity of man and human rights depended on man’s special place in God’s creation.  Indeed the Jacobins of the French Revolution imprisoned Paine after he warned them that their atheism would undercut the basis of their declaration of human rights.  Hitchens seems blissfully unaware of a whole tradition of scholarship, from Tocqueville to Jurgen Habermas, that identifies Christianity as the essential foundation of some of the West’s most cherished institutions and values.

In a 2005 lecture in Poland on “Religion in the Public Sphere,” Habermas raises a question that is central to Novak’s inquiry.  Habermas shows that the very idea of toleration is a gift that religious thought has bequeathed to modern secular society.  Then he asks: are secular people willing to acknowledge that toleration is always a two-way street?  In other words, if religious people are expected to be tolerant of unbelievers, shouldn’t secular people learn to be tolerant of their fellow citizens who are believers?

This argument has important implications.  If Habermas and Novak are right, the public square should not be viewed as the property of secular citizens.  Rather, it is the common ground on which believers and non-believers communicate with each other.  It makes no sense to exclude religious convictions from the public sphere if secular convictions are granted full access.  An uncritical “separation of church and state” must give way to a shared domain in which all citizens have the right to express their heartfelt convictions.

In Today's News - Whatever Happened to the Great “Stem Cell Debate?”

Vice Presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) recently brought up embryonic stem cells in the campaign, stating in response to the public’s support for Sarah Palin giving birth to her son Trig, who has Down syndrome:

I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?

Biden really meant, “why don’t you support embryonic stem cell research,” since no one has ever objected to the significant advances being made in adult stem cells and other regenerative medical alternatives to destroying embryos in the quest for medical treatments and new scientific understandings.

Biden’s comment was one of the first times that the issue of embryonic stem cells has been raised in the entire presidential campaign—which if you were Rip Van Winkle and just awakened after a one year nap, would seem odd. After all, last year ESCR promised to be one of the most cutting with Democrats promising to hang President Bush’s federal funding limitations around the neck of the Republican candidate. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) defensively said that he, too, would reverse the Bush policy, although he has since added a significant hedge to that statement.

The question thus is why has the issue barely made a ripple in the campaign? Answering that query requires that we explore two related questions: “What happened,” and “What didn’t happen?”
The answer to “what happened” is “induced pluripotent stem cells. IPSCs are pluripotent stem cells—that is, they are theoretically capable of being transformed into every tissue type in the body—which are manufactured from normal cells such as those found in the skin. They have even been made from extracted wisdom teeth.

What is amazing about IPSCs is that they provide everything that scientists have claimed they wanted—not only from ESCR, but also therapeutic cloning—that is, tailor made, patient specific pluripotent stem cells. And unlike embryonic stem cells, they have already been made from patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease allowing the disease to be studied in ways that scientists dreamed of from cloning—all without manufacturing or destroying a single embryo. With this scientific breakthrough hitting the headlines last November, the air came out of the stem cell controversy, robbing the issue of campaign potency.

Next, we have to look at what didn’t happen. Two things stand out. First, embryonic stem cell research has not progressed very far. Specifically, embryonic cells cannot be used in human beings because they cause immune rejection in animals as well as tumors—the later problem also being a potential problem with iPSCs, but not adult or umbilical cord blood stem cells. Second, human cloning has not been successfully accomplished, at least not to the point that scientists were able to obtain embryonic stem cells for study or therapeutic use.
With so few advances occurring on the embryonic stem cell front, the public may have grown cynical of all of the promises for cures. Realizing this, the politicians have moved onto greener pastures.

Wesley J. Smith

Keeping the faith: tothesource interview with Michael Novak

tothesource: You are no stranger to personal tragedy, with your wife enduring cancer and your brother having been killed as a missionary. Does the presence of gratuitous evil and suffering undermine your belief in God? If not, why not?

Michael Novak: If God willed for his own Son what Jesus endured, that seems to be a very good heads-up for the rest of us. Do not be dismayed by gratuitous evil or much suffering. By God’s grace, evil is transformed into good. That is a crucial part of the Good News.

tothesource: Why are we hearing so much from atheists today? Are there more of them, or are they simply more emboldened? Why has atheism become an option for people in a way that it wasn't in the past?

Novak: Actually, the percentage of atheists in America is infinitesimal, about three percent, and that low number seems to bother the new preachers of atheism. What gave them a fresh opportunity were the vivid evils of 9/11. The New Atheists take two steps. Number One: these extremists were motivated by religion (they certainly surrounded themselves with religious language), and not by a totalitarian imperial ideology. Number Two: All religions are the same, all are equally delusions, all are poisons administered to human life.

Why is atheism an easy option now? In public life, the default position of the media elites, intellectuals and artists is irreligion. They set the tone. It takes little courage to float on that stream. In actual fact, many members of these elites are privately religious persons, but give few signs of that in public. And more than ninety percent of Americans believe in God; fewer than ten percent are atheists plus agnostics. Even half of all agnostics and one-fifth of all atheists actually believe in God , the God of the philosophers, ancient philosophers as well as modern. Not the biblical God in full. But as the Source of all the intelligence and forward thrust of all things in the cosmos, as shown us by science and common sense.

tothesource: What do you find to be uniquely true or insightful about Christianity? If someone were to say to you, "But you only follow Christianity because you were born Christian. If you were born Muslim you'd probably be following Islam today." Are there any grounds for supposing this, as opposed to that, religion to be true?

Novak: I have sometimes asked myself if my being Catholic is based solely on being born into a thousand-year family chain of families. I have tried to put myself in the position of an atheist of good will, who is genuinely trying to find out who he is, and what his life means. My reasoning went like this. There must be one true religion, if God is thought of as Light and Truth. Some religions may be closer to Truth than others, but still there can be much shared in common across some religious lines.

One criterion of the true religion, it seemed to me, is that it must seek earnestly to be universal, since it is intended for all humans. In this search, Islam and Christianity emerge as the two preeminent examples. (Judaism does teach that there is One Creator, one Almighty Father of all, but it is not really a proselytizing religion.) For me, contrasting the lives of the two founders, Jesus Christ and Mohammed, was one more test. A third test was comparing the teaching of the gospels with the teaching of the Koran, not in detail but in their main principles. A fourth was examining the effects of both religions in history (“by your fruits you will know them.”). A fifth was measuring the degree of charity called upon and their reasons against using force or violence.

These tests sufficed. Even though there are other tests that might be thought of.

tothesource: What to you is the biggest difficulty that Christians face in defending their faith? How can we prepare young people better to meet the objections routinely launched against their religion?

Novak: The best defense of Christian faith is to live it seriously, and constantly to study it more deeply. Attackers against Christian faith have often called forth some of most brilliant insights and formulations in history. In Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Irenaeus, Augustine and others from the very beginning, for instance. Sharp critics are a gift to the church.

Young people need to be taught to take reason and questioning seriously. Our hunger to ask questions is unlimited. That is our first experience of the infinite: everything finite we can question. Thus, the root of the religious impulse in us is the irrepressible drive to question. Christian pastors should regard questioning as faith’s best friend.

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