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.
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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.
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Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She also is a recipient of 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. Ms. Mac Donald is the author of Are Cops Racist? How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans and The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society, and the co-author of The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s. Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and the New York Times.
Theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador, Michael Novak currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He is the 1994 recipient of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
He graduated from Stonehill College (B.A., Philosophy and English) and the Gregorian University (B.A. Theology). He continued theological studies at Catholic University and then at Harvard, where he received an M.A. in 1966 in History and the Philosophy of Religion. Mr. Novak has written 26 influential books on the philosophy and theology of culture, especially the essential elements of a free society. His writings have appeared in every major Western language, and in Bengali, Korean and Japanese. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, was published underground in Poland in 1984, and after 1989 in Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Hungary, Bangladesh, Korea, and many times in Latin America. His latest book is No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.
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