Michael Novak On The Recent Atheist Books

WHAT are we to think about the recent apologia for atheism? We mean Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. How does a believer deal with these withering critiques of religion? Michael Novak, RMC Chappie, has crack at answering them in National Review.

He uses his daughter to make his strongest argument. She went off to university at Duke as an atheist, but the professors there cured her of it.

What got to her most was the affectation of professors pretending that everything is ultimately absurd, while in more proximate matters putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation.

It’s an interesting paradox, isn’t it? You do your research and your science with an admirable faith in reason. But you believe the world is ultimately absurd. What do you call that? Religion?

Anyway, Novak’s daughter now calls herself an “agno-theist.”

There’s a lot more, including a quick Apology for Christianity in four parts:

A Theology of the Absurd (to counter the Duke professors)
The Burden of Sin (you know, the things you know you shouldn’t do)
The Bright Golden Thread of Human History
The Point of the Cosmos is Friendship

Atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett are all very well, and they are excellent fellows, writes Novak.

To be sure, some individual atheists “of a peculiar character” and academic distinction, brought up in habits inculcated by the religious cultures of the past, can go on for two or three generations living in ways hard to distinguish from those of unassuming Christians and Jews. These individuals continue to be honest, compassionate, committed to the equality of all, and firm believers in “progress” and “brotherhood,” long after they repudiate the original religious justification for this particular list of virtues. But sooner or later a generation may come along that takes the metaphysics of atheism with deadly seriousness. This was the fate of a highly cultivated nation in the Europe of our time.

He means Germany, for those of you who are historically challenged.

And in Britain, close by the spires of Oxford where Professor Dawkins lives and works, there are plenty of people taking the metaphysics of atheism seriously.

It’s all very well for the academic elite to be pleasantly aware of the absurdity of life. But for most of us, the strain is intolerable. We must know that our life on earth has a purpose.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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