Michael Novak: November 2008 Archives

Dear Heather,

I really enjoy the way you conduct a path through our disagreements. You are tough, but open to differences. As we have agreed from the first, to achieve real disagreement is a long-term task; it takes a lot of brandies sipped slowly together (so to speak) to get past the misunderstandings that masquerade as disagreements, in order to find the deep place where the two parties (amicably) part ways.

Some atheists do invent a heroic image of themselves, but maybe that generation has passed. Bertrand Russell compared himself to Prometheus, Camus to Sisyphus, and Dylan Thomas raged, raged against the night. If I may say so, even you find distasteful the believing peasant's use of "amulets." Note, though, that there are village atheists, too. What do they have, those who are unlearned, to rebuke their belief in magic and superstition? I have noticed - have you? - that the more secular our universities have become over the last few decades, the larger have become the sections of bookstores devoted to witchcraft, Ouija boards, astrology, and pet rocks. Christian believers are told that such things are sinful, idol-worship, the deification of silly human fetishes.

You say (and I agree) that the world is awash with meaning.

Dear Heather:

There are many aspects of popular Catholic faith that have sometimes shocked me and turned me away. Yet I well remember visiting the great Catholic shrine at Czestechowa, in Poland, where once almost a million people turned out for Pope John Paul II when he first pierced the Iron Curtain to visit his homeland. On my visit, I was a little sickened by all the kitsch and the "buyers and sellers in the Temple ." And also by all the outer devotion of peasant piety, the jostling, the seeming lack of silence and reverence (Anglo Saxon ways are not those of all the parts of the church), the ostentatious fingering of rosaries and the sometimes loud praying. Then the thought hit me: These are the people who defeated Communism. These were the hard rocks of resistance.

Neither do I like the "pills" with written words in them. However, many petitions for canonization are received by Rome every month, and the process of declaring any one person a saint, as you can see from the case you cite, may take two or more centuries to complete.

Dear Heather,

I'm looking forward to this conversation. As you know, we have covered some of this ground in earlier talks, but just to bring our new friends up to date, I'd like to offer a bit of information on my background and my perspective on this issue, and why it seems to me that belief in God is not contrary to reason, but, indeed, seems to grow out of it.

I was born in the year that Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, and have never been able to blink away the horrors of the newsreel footage I saw at Saturday matinees during my youth: concentration camp fences; emaciated figures in ragged striped uniforms; stacked dead bodies pitched into trucks like sacks of sand. Hegel wrote somewhere: History is a butcher's bench.

By age twelve I knew that human life can be far more horrible than I was at first willing to face, and I wondered whether unbelief, kicking back at the darkness, would be the most honest way. In the writings of atheists, I have often recognized some of my own bleak feelings. It is from this shared darkness that believers and unbelievers would do well to proceed.

An observation important to my own thinking about God is that knowledge of God's presence, even though unseen, is the default position of the human race. For most of the human race in past history, and also today, the knowledge of God's presence is part of daily awareness.