Heather MacDonald: November 2008 Archives

Dear Michael:

Thank you again for this exchange, Michael; I am grateful that you took the time to teach me with such patience and tolerance.

In all honesty, I can't follow your subtle discussion of the relationship between natural laws and Divine Providence. The fault is mine. I think you are saying that miracles and divine intervention are consistent with the laws of nature. In any case, I am perfectly happy to grant you miracles for the sake of argument. The question I have been trying to pursue is rather an epistemological one: How do we tell a true act of God from a false one? Do you, Michael, approach the claims of other faiths with the same expectation of plausibility as you would a non-religious claim?

Dear Michael:

Thank you so much for your candid and probing response; it is most illuminating.

Before addressing your final question, I am going to risk characterizing your presentation of religious faith. Some of our readers, if not you yourself, may find this presumptuous; if so, I accept their criticism.

It seems to me that your version of religion is a highly intellectualized one--admirably reflecting your own passions. But those aspects of faith which you label "kitsch," Michael, are as central to many believers' experience of religion as a drive to ask questions. The Church itself has not discouraged--one might even say it has authorized--such manifestations of kitsch as relic worship, rosary counting, and saint idolatry (see, for example, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe). Papal Rome has even done its own brisk business in "buying and selling."

These manifestations of "peasant piety," as you call them, suggest to me that for many people, religion is as much about providing an amulet against misfortune and a shelter from fear and death as it is about intellectual inquiry.

Dear Michael,

It is an honor to discuss these profound matters with you again. I couldn't hope for a wiser or more generous interlocutor.

I would like to take up your invitation to locate the "exact areas of disagreement" between believers and unbelievers. While we could proceed at a fairly general level--debating, for example, whether the prevalence of a belief is a marker of its truth--I propose starting from the concrete. Nonbelievers find themselves surrounded every day not just by abstract statements about, say, the compatibility of reason and faith, but also by quite specific claims about God's attributes and effects in the world. I would appreciate learning how you would counsel a nonbeliever to approach such claims, since they are part of religious faith no less than metaphysics.

Perhaps, Michael, you share with me a certain despair at the gullibility of seemingly educated Westerners towards New Age quackery.