Two interesting, or even compelling, pieces on the current state of Europe. The first piece, "While Europe Slept," by Jean Bethke Elshtain, who is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, is a really striking piece about what the implications are of Europe going "post-Christian," with some intersections with the dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger recently released as The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, which I've just started reading. I also include a recent column by John Allen, modified from a lecture he gave in Dublin recently, on the current state of European Catholicism that dealt with some parallel themes. I was particularly appreciative of how he related some of what is happening in Europe to things the United States has already experienced, having been in this case a few steps ahead in the creation of an Enlightenment state that still made room for religion.

The hope of preserving the human rights tradition of Enlightenment democracy is far more tied into Jewish/Christian heritage than contemporary anti-religious dogmatic Secularism has recognized, and it is particularly compelling to hear such insights coming from atheists like Habermas or Marcello Pela in Italy as well as from Christian thinkers like Ratzinger. It is one of the most curious ironies in political philosophy that the absolutizing of an ideology of "freedom" in the mode of the New Left since the 1960s seems to actually end up destroying political freedom, reminding us once again that "freedom" is no simple reality in itself but in democratic society is in fact a difficult and complicated balance between a number of competing forces and interests.

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Some of you are philosophers at a far more professional and educated level than I, or just well-established Thomists of one sort or another, and I was wondering if I might get some help from you or anyone who might know something in this direction.

The other night while I was still babysitting my nieces, I was reading through a small book called Does Science Make Belief In God Obsolete?, which was put out by the Templeton Foundation and which I had picked up with some other material of theirs at the American Academy of Religion conference in Chicago. It's actually free and available online on their website, and made for better middle-of-the-night-bathroom-break reading than Templeton Prize winner John Polkinghorne's book Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship, which would have required me to wake up a bit more.

The book contains a series of responses by a variety of people: scientists, philosophers, theologians, writers. I was reading through the response of Christopher Hitchens, one of the "New Atheists" who I have noted in this space before. His response was characteristic of why the New Atheists have come under such criticism, even from other atheists: it is more insult than insight, trading on stereotypes and old generalizations rather than serious history or research, mostly "preaching to the choir," or persuasive to the lightly-educated in this field. When his reasons for thinking science should make theism obsolete were extracted, they boiled down to two ideas: that nature (via science) essentially explains itself without need for a God, and that if a good, all-powerful God existed there was no way such evil would exist in the world. These arguments, the two most substantial arguments ever made against belief in God, while thought very modern by some, are as ancient as theism itself. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas deals with them as classics in his Summa Theologiae as the principle objections in his brief article on the existence of God.

So here's the thing: as I was reading through Hitchen's restatement of these thoughts, I thought I noticed a problem, one that I'm not sure whether I've ever heard addressed before. It seems to me that the two objections, while notable in themselves, are incompatible. These are the notes I jotted down the next morning. I would be really interested in knowing whether this line of reasoning has been pursued before, or if anyone sees a flaw in my own midnight logic.

Presumption #1: It is better to have an ordered cosmos, uniformly following those "natural laws" observed by our scientific disciplines. This is superior to the notion of a capricious God or gods, who have to "work" the universe in response to our prayers and desires.

Presumption #2: The history of the cosmos, with its capacity for destruction, its indifference to human life, and its potential for allowing or bringing our species to the brink of extinction, cannot be reconciled with the existence of a loving God who actively intervenes in history on our behalf.

Mike: One of the presumptions could be true, but not both. Presumption #1 argues that a God intervening in history of the cosmos is a capricious and unworthy God – an object of human superstition. Presumption #2 argues that a God who does not intervene in such a history as ours is capricious and cruel.

These two arguments together therefore attempt to argue both sides of an idea as against the possibility for God's existence. But you cannot at the same time argue that a God who interferes in history is inadequate, and that a God who does not interfere in history is inadequate, and that these together make an argument against the existence of God. For Hitchens's purposes, this is a "Heads I win, Tails you lose" argument.

You must either argue one of two possibilities. The first is that God makes a consistent and logical universe that he allows the dignity of its own existence and integrity (a universe that follows "scientific laws"), and that therefore includes pain and suffering as nature follows its rules (gravity leads to car crashes, environmental poison to cancer). Or you must argue that a "scientific" universe with its own laws of nature and their painful consequences is itself an act of cruelty unworthy of a Creator God, and that God should interfere in every aspect of the world that could cause pain and suffering, even if this means the destruction or denial of any scientific law and of human freedom.

In other words, the two arguments that Thomas Aquinas identified as the primary arguments against the existence of God – that nature alone accounts for all phenomena without requiring the existence of God, or that the presence of evil in the world in itself proves the lack of an all-good, all-powerful God – are incompatible. You can hold to one or the other of these arguments against God, but not both, for they depend upon contradictory and opposing presumptions about the relationship of God to the universe: that God must and ought to intervene in its affairs (as in the "problem of evil" objection) or that God must and ought not to intervene in its affairs (as in the "problem of nature" objection).

Thoughts? Again, does this hold, or have I missed something? I haven't kept a steady reading diet in Philosophy of Religion in some years, and it seems too classic a set of issues not to have been already developed, but I haven't been able to find anything yet on it.

What a strange weekend.

Our regular gathering over at the Lloyds on Friday gave me a weird moment when Dan told me that Tim Russert had died that afternoon. I discovered Russert's Meet The Press as I began to teach at Saint Joe's, and it remains to this day on my VCR's automatic taping schedule. He stood out not just for his service in trying to be a more substantive news encounter with the political world, but he was of particular interest to my field, as well. I thought him the most important figure for American Catholic politics, and a huge figure nationally for taking the theological and spiritual seriously in national affairs. His Meet The Press sessions with major religious leaders across the spectrum were serious cultural roundtables, while the bulk of the rest of the news media would have simply panted in their anti-religious hysteria at such scenes. The panel discussion he helped lead on Catholic Politicians in the U.S.: Their Faith and Public Policy at Boston College's The Church in the 21st Century Center (which Erik surprised me with a DVD of, since I couldn't attend) was as illuminating as anything I've ever seen in speaking about religion and public affairs. He was giving the Catholic Common Ground Initiative Lecture at the end of the month, as I saw from the ads in America, and I was wishing I could attend. Just the fact that he was 58: it all added up to just more of a sense of shock than some of the more recent deaths of major figures. You just didn't assume he was going to be next; you assumed you would get years and years more benefit of his experience, enthusiasm and insight.

The rest of the night had its fun, the silliest moment being when Renée, like all the kids, having been put to bed before we started watching the half-season finale of BSG, suddenly began speaking to us over the baby monitor, which she had long since begun using as an intercom. "Momma, I'll be sad when you're gone tomorrow," which left us laughing as the show began, since Donna would be gone from all of 5am to 10am for her shift at Starbucks. But it was another thing when the same thing happened during a critical moment of the show, with Renée leaning into the microphone and us suddenly hearing, "MOMMA, I WISH YOU WERE HERE WITH ME: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE BUT I WOULD LIKE YOU TO BE; YOU DON'T NEED TO BE BUT I WANT YOU TO BE, NOT NEED YOU TO BE...." Or some seemingly-endless stream like that. Suddenly the whole living room was boiling with the tension of interrupted drama, and people were hissing, "Turn it off!" "Turn it down!" "I'm turning it down! I'm turning it down!" "What did they say?! What did they say?!" and just laughing about the whole thing. My friends certainly enjoy how cute their kids are, but even they don't always find even the cuteness to be the most convenient thing in the world....

I spent a larger part of the weekend writing an essay for a contest for America, actually, than doing dissertation work. In what seemed to me to be a response to the writings of "the New Atheists" (Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and their like, as I've noted here and there before), they were soliciting essays on the theme of "the case for God." I've always had a strong interest in apologetics, since I've been leaned on so much over the years for why I believe this whole silly thing to be true, and so I finally thought I'd throw my hat in the ring on the matter. I idly debated which of two approaches to take, and finally decided on the one that I thought had more substance, though was harder to articulate in the 2500 word limit, than the one that had more literary flair and fun (a proof for the existence of God based upon the existence of humour that I dreamt up at Notre Dame). But that seemed more potentially "fluff" to me, and as the New Atheists are more fluff writers, I thought that the serious response was the one more necessary for our times. We'll see. I'm not sure that it's the best thing I could have tried to pull off for a popular audience.

Recovering from that effort today (I had a 10+ hour writing and editing spree last night that took me into this morning), I spent some time in different parts around campus, but especially enjoying the time toward sunset while sitting by all the new roses in the Courtyard of the Fountain before the Chapel of Joan of Arc. There were various tour groups being conducted around, right up until sunset, and suddenly I heard one guide's voice behind me, saying something like, "... this is a great place to read theology. In fact, over to our right you can see my freshman Theology professor, a Notre Dame graduate and now Marquette doctoral student, hard at work and enjoying the surroundings...." I looked up to find David Kruse, one of my greats from last year, leading the group and grinning as he spoke. I saw the group laughing quietly at his "observe the beast in its natural habitat" delivery, and I complained, "I feel like I'm in a cage!," as I casually tried to hide the novel I had switched to. But they seemed a fun group, actually asking me about the two campuses in comparison, and while Notre Dame over-all beats Marquette for its beauty, which is not hard given their different locations, I have to give that spot at Marquette as being the best single "spot" between the two campuses: having an actual piece of medieval architecture like the Chapel, and the landscaping around it, beats the much vaster Basilica of the Sacred Heart, to my mind, despite everything I've enjoyed about that space. I had to pass on my thoughts about Notre Dame's team for the fall, having not given it the slightest thought until asked.

I've been impressed with this past week's May 5th edition of America, the Jesuit journal of opinion that I've praised in these pages more than once. While the cover understandably featured a fairly standard picture of Benedict XVI on his then-current tour of the eastern United States, the real meat of the issue was a five-article series of reflections upon "The New Atheism" by a panel of serious scholars – a series that deserved far wider circulation than America unfortunately would be able to guarantee. The popular buzz given to the authors called "the New Atheists" over the last year or two is more than balanced by the considered treatment of these writers, but these are less likely to be found in the pages of The New York Times, I fear.

The collection consists of:

The Madman And the Crowd
For the new atheists, God is not worth a decent argument.
By Michael J. Buckley

Called to Love
Christian witness can be the best response to atheist polemics.
By Stephen J. Pope

True Believers
Have the new atheists adopted a faith of their own?
By John F. Haught

An Evangelical Moment?
To combat the rise of atheism, Christians must first look to themselves.
By Richard J. Mouw

Catholicism and The New Atheism
By Richard R. Gaillardetz

It is a further misfortune that you cannot access all of these articles (or that I cannot post them without getting into trouble again), especially the one by Michael Buckley, S.J., author of the magisterial At the Origins of Modern Atheism, who was in the midst his academic specialty in his response to the New Atheists. His critique of the method of the New Atheists goes directly to their principle flaw, which is their evasion of rational examination while all the while dressing up in the clothes of "reason" and "science" so as to gain the rhetorical advantage of such associations:

Serious inquiry, by contrast, moves in the opposite direction: it begins with the question and then looks for the evidence or arguments that can resolve it. Concern about question and method in the discussion of the existence of God is not a pedantic nicety. It is required if one is to think carefully through the great issues raised by contemporary atheism, and it urges the directive primacy of the question and its care. The central challenge is not that someone has denied the existence of God. In one form or another that denial has been with us for millennia. The central challenge is that much of the eristic manner of interchange has so corrupted the question and the method as to make discussion impossible.

Dawkins transmutes the question of God into the question of religion, but seems to think the question of religion comprises not the beginning of universities and hospitals, nor the cathedral of Florence and the music of Palestrina, nor a pervasive care for the poor and the suffering, but instead an index of evil events and stupid choices throughout history. His selection of “examples,” however overstated, instantiates what the history of rhetoric has asserted over thousands of years: that the choice and marshaling of examples is the induction of the sophist. A thesis can be asserted, or a list constructed and examples selected to prove anything.

The whole of the article is an able demonstration of what I think is the most interesting phenomenon of the past century, and which the New Atheists demonstrate against all their intentions: that the banner of Reason seems to have entirely transfered from the Enlightenment atheists to the camp of the theists. Never since the critique of the Enlightenment shook loose much of the lazy thinking that had attached itself to Christianity has it been so easy to make a powerful intellectual case for Christianity. This seems true across the fields: from history and archaeology to philosophy and logic to the physical sciences and cosmology, much less the much-maligned science of theology, there is a stronger cumulative case for Christian faith to be made than perhaps at any point since the Resurrection of Jesus was a living memory. And I wish the full article by Buckley was available so that the simple pleasure of it could be had by all readers. Still, the publicly-available Richard R. Gaillardetz article makes for some interesting reading, as one would expect from that gifted author.

If you can find America at a newstand or a local library, I recommend making the trip to pick up this issue.

This Holy Saturday finds me tripping through notes from the noted German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a self-described “methodological atheist,” who Pope Benedict had engaged in very public conversation a few years ago before he was elected Pope. It was a funny moment in that lots of dogmatic atheists in the public sphere were crowing ahead of time about the beating that their "team" was going to give the clearly-inferior (after all, he's Catholic) Ratzinger on the question of Christianity's role in the public future of Europe, and what he had and has been arguing is the importance of acknowledging that in the Preamble to the European Constitution, along with the contributions of the Greeks and of the Enlightenment.

Then, to their surprise, the two of them engaged in very polite and accommodating conversation and Habermas did nothing of the sort, and instead very much supported Ratzinger on this point. Denying it is easy thanks to a determined effort to avoid the hard work of examining the question, he criticizes, and presents a potential threat to the foundations of our free public order. In an essay published in Italy right around that time as “A Time of Transition,” Habermas argues that Christianity, and Christianity alone, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy.

To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Some other samples:

I don’t resent it at all when I am accused of having inherited theological concepts. I am convinced that religious discourse contains within itself potentialities that have not yet been sufficiently explored by philosophy, insofar as they have not yet been translated into the language of public reason, which is presumed to be able to persuade anyone. Naturally, I am not talking about the neopagan project of those who want to ‘build upon mythology.’ Today, in the field of antirational postmodern criticism, these neopagan conceptual figures are back in fashion: a broad anti-Platonism carelessly spread by fashions inspired by the late Heidegger and late Wittgenstein, in the sense of a definitive repudiation of the universalism that characterizes the premises of unconditional truth. I rebel against this regressive tendency of post-metaphysical thought.

In the dialogical dispute among competing religious visions there is a need for that ‘culture of recognition’ which draws its principles from the secularized world of the universalism of reason and law. In this matter, it is thus the philosophical spirit which provides the concepts instrumental in the political clarification of theology. But the political philosophy capable of making this contribution bears the stamp of the idea of the Covenant no less than that of the Polis. Therefore this philosophy also hearkens back to a biblical heritage.

In the general leveling of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalized Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community’s practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete.

I also found a West Coast graduate student's paper posted online entitled, Jurgen Habermas: A Secular Atheist Changes His Mind on Religion in the Public Sphere that was engaging reading on this point.

Did anyone pay any attention to the curious story about Pope Benedict XVI and the protests at Rome's Sapienza University this past week? I think that it might become one of those episodes that becomes larger in later history, as the significance of certain events gets taken as emblematic of historical shifts taking place at a given time. In this case, I think it might become the opposite of the infamous "Galileo Affair," to which the players in this event make direct reference. The incident of Galileo's trial before the Inquisition regarding the Copernican theory of the heliocentric solar system – the sun being the center of our star system and not the Earth being at the center of things – became the great symbolic myth of the Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century, and their anti-Christian program: Galileo's trial became emblematic of obstinate, ignorant, anti-intellectual Religion being defeated by the always-wise, ever-progressive and irresistible onward march of Science into the future.

Yet anyone who does the slightest reading on the matter knows that this simplistic spin on the event was hardly the way of things. The Galileo affair was an historical footnote until it was dusted off and used for Enlightenment propaganda. Galileo was not opposing a Religious view with a Scientific one: his world did not have our later, absolute division of such things. Copernicus himself was a cleric, likely a priest: one might just as easily say that the heliocentric system was then a "priestly" theory. Galileo was not challenging the authority of Scripture as such: there was no unified theory of Scripture in his post-Reformation world to oppose in such a simple dichotomy as "science vs. religion" or "science vs. the Bible" in the way people like to put things. In fact, he appealed in such things to a far older interpreter of Scripture who had high status in theology and philosophy – Augustine of Hippo, who had died over a thousand years earlier, and who, like Galileo, dismissed simple-minded literalism as unworthy of the depths of the documents of Scripture. Galileo's actual trouble came more from challenging the Aristotelian basis of the contemporary science of his day, that is, challenging the current scientific establishment, and claiming for his own experimental results an authority they did not yet possess. It also didn't help that he got into a political mess by getting petulant with the very Pope who had been supporting and authorizing his work. No scientist today who so "jumped the gun" on claiming success for his findings would be accorded the "scientific sainthood" Galileo is: his story has been co-opted by those creating their own narrative of the Modern "conflict of science and religion," ignoring entirely the origin of Modern science in a Medieval and Christian context, not a Modern and Secular one.

Which brings us to the curious events of this past week, events which I wonder whether in the future will come to seem equally emblematic, but in a reverse way. It seems clear to me that Western science and theology, with their commitments to the idea of an objective truth, against much of the thrust of contemporary Western philosophy which has given up on truth, are inevitably going to increase in their collaboration. As the myth of a conflict of science and religion begins to fade away with the Modern worldview as we move into Post-Modernity (whatever that is), I can't help but wonder if the anti-papal fervour displayed this week – is it overstating to call it hysteria? – might come to symbolize the ignorance of the dogmatically anti-religious viewpoint that doesn't recognize the fundamental harmonies between the quests of science and Jewish/Christian religion.

What's most striking to me is the way in which the faculty and student protesters – so locked into the myth of "science versus religion" – failed to understand the clear language of support that Ratzinger used in his 1990 statement (included below). If anything, Ratzinger defended the sciences against the philosophical skewing in the Modern philosophical school of the Enlightenment that produced the great modern myth of unwavering antagonism between the two quests for truth, and attempts to cut lose the sciences from any wider contextualization in the world, including in ethics, which is not the same thing as religion, but which religion and philosophy have always included. Making science ask questions of itself should hardly be interpreted as a fundamental attack on science itself. I hope the episode will have the effect of so embarrassing the traditional reactionaries who fancy themselves the speakers for their hostile vision of "science" so that people capable of actual rational conversation will come forward in leading dialogue with theology.

Included behind the cut are articles from the week:

Ratzinger's 1990 remarks on Galileo
University students attend audience after pope cancels visit
In undelivered speech, pope urges scholars, students to seek truth
All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.: Update on La Sapienza spat
The pope, modern science, and a canary in the coal mine
Do the homework: University fiasco shows scholars miss pope's point
Tens of thousands fill St. Peter's Square to show support for pope
Rejection of Pope's speech is fear of dialogue between faith and reason, professor says
The text of the Letter of Protest

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We had a good pair of sessions on Anselm of Canterbury yesterday. I was still not satisfied with that lesson after having already taught it for two semesters. I just seemed that the students were not really getting the impact of the material, and I had a distinct feeling that the lecture portion of my class was not illuminating and empowering the discussion portion for them at all. As I thought about it, though, I really began to think that the reading from Cur Deus Homo? (perhaps most accurately translated as Why the God-Man?, but more comfortably, if loosely, in English as Why Did God Become Human?) was in fact the most difficult selection in the Department's Introduction to Theology reader. It doesn't help that you have four chapters that aren't connected – 3, 14, and 24 from Book One, and 7 from Book Two – though they represent key parts of Anselm's argument.

So I decided a much slower walk-through was appropriate for this text, starting from the assumption that they really didn't understand the text, rather than from an assumption that they would have gotten the gist of it and proceeding from there. So I had them simply try to outline the argument for their written homework, and then they opened class working in groups, comparing their various outlines and trying to come up with a stronger and more complete group summary, tempered by one another's insights and criticisms.

But there was so much that they hadn't really seen before, that even in groups, they had no words for. The fact that Anselm's philosophical argument was largely an aesthetic one was something they needed help with. What did Reason have to do with Beauty? How could one make an argument based on Beauty? With "beauty" in our culture having been reduced to a commodity – supermodels selling us washers and dryers – I had to slow down and backtrack to the relationship in classical philosophy of the areas of Metaphysics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, of dealing with questions of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and how all these were inter-related. The medieval philosophers had a much wider concept of Beauty as that "fittingness" or symmetry or harmony that one found through nature or reality. The students could see that kind of language scattered through our art, but also through our mathematics, our physical sciences, and literature. They had just never tied this altogether under the category of "Beauty," and considered what philosophical implications or usefulness the idea of Beauty might have.

Beyond that, once we had wrapped up coming to terms with the intentions of the text and the nature of Anselm's argument, I asked them the basic question out of the introduction to the chapter as to why Anselm is called the "Father of Scholasticism," even if he was before the rise of the universities and the philosophical/theological method of those of the schools. After getting them to simply do the "trivia" of defining scholasticism and refreshing themselves on the historical note – important to know as a point of historical data and contextualization, yes – I hit them with the real question: After looking at the text itself, what could we say that it showed us about Anselm's beliefs about the status of human reasoning? What was the extent of Reason's power? Reason had the power to let humanity "decode" even the actions and intentions of God: Reason could connect the finite to the infinite, to give us finite creatures access to the infinite Creator.

Perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise, but the implications of things we often say or take for granted – of words we are too used to hearing – those implications sometimes escape us if we don't go looking for them. Christianity had always taught that it was that aspect of God – the Logos in Greek, the Word, or variously translated as Reason or the Tao – that had become human in the man Jesus of Nazareth. But this medieval declaration about the power of Reason connecting God and the human mind had deeper implications. This was the great breakthrough. As any historian of science will tell you, it was this moment, this "leap of faith" that not only said Reason could help us "decode God," but also to decode the universe, God's creation. Thus Europe's intellectuals, through this act of faith, without any evidence to back them up, put in the decades and centuries of work that would become "modern science," and which would eventually start paying off in the immensely concrete benefits of the technology this version of science would produce. The irony would be that the anti-Christian philosophers of the 18th century would swoop in and claim credit for science just as it started paying off, and to create the "science versus religion" propaganda that is still with us today, casting the new science as the product of an anti-religious radical skepticism, despite the historical facts of Modern science's origins, like a teenager rebelling against his parents, or, more oddly, claiming not to have had any.

It let us end the session with some thoughts on the unity of Faith and Reason, which in our Enlightenment philosophy are taught to us as opposites, but which in reality are inextricably related. Religious faith, where "faith" means more "trust" than "belief," is like other human trusts: given through reflected-upon experience. We reason from our data and experience who it is in our lives that we will trust. Likewise, one of the Post-Modern insights into the Modern sciences has been to realize that science, too, acts on certain unprovable first principles – faith – such as the idea of the universal applicability of what we call "scientific laws," even though we have no access to almost the whole of the universe. Science as a system works because we assume that what holds true on both sides of the Earth also holds true on both our side of the universe and the opposite side, even though we have no proof at all that this is the case.

Getting past the cheap propaganda of "science versus religion" or "faith versus reason" is in many ways one of the chief goals of my class: I just want the students to slow down and ask questions. Our crappy thinking about these matters today is largely because people accept glib thinking on these matters without careful examination, whether that glib thinking is skeptical anti-supernaturalism or the superstition of much popular religion, both Christian and neopagan. If I can get the students to habitually think about this sort of thing, in the face of all the pressure our culture has to not really think, then I've won.

My journey to Wyoming was about as I had expected: less than three hours of sleep meant that I snoozed as best I could from the Delta hub in Cincinatti to the Delta hub in Salt Lake City. There I felt refreshed as I ran into Kevin himself, who was on his way back to Jackson from Santa Barbara, where he had been working with a client the two days previous. (This was not a surprise -- which in retrospect would have been amazingly funny and shocking -- Kev had given me the heads-up a few days later that we'd be on the same flight into Jackson.) Last night fulfilled my earlier wishes of a night of long talk, with a glass of wine, my goddaughter Sophie full of life and pleasantly taken with me, a warm fire in the wood stove and Kevin strumming along on his wedding-gift mandolin (which I'd helped Frannie pick, back in 2005) to the music quietly playing in the background. And it doesn't look like everything here is going to be lost in snow! They've taken a turn to the colder (Frannie said yesterday she started in short sleeves and sandals, and it was snowing by the time we arrived), but it doesn't look too bad....

I include below the cut two articles: one on the creation of 23 new Cardinals by Benedict XVI, and the other a news article on the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (a friend of Barnes' and an amazingly sharp theologian), which reports in not-very-substantial news story fashion on his critique of Dawkins' The God Delusion, part of that "new crop" of atheist writing that seems to be a last gasp of 18th-century Enlightenment propaganda more than anything else. If contemporary atheism thinks it's going to engage Christianity on a playing field of evidence and reason, Christianity is going to win handily. The Enlightenment critique only works with the presumption of evidence, reason, and the mystically-invoked "science" as being against "religion," which they dogmatically define, against all actual evidience, as being against reason and the use of evidence....

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As jucundushomo rightly noted, a well-contextualized article. (Although notably light, not surprisingly, on what I'd call news media responsibility on the persistence of certain misinterpretations. Yellow journalism tends to pop up on this subject because of the defensive secularism of the reporting caste.)

Keeping the Faith

Walk into a shop to buy a newspaper or a wurst or a Game Boy in the German city of Regensburg and your server will probably welcome you with a brisk “grüss’ Gott,” shorthand for “God greet you.” It’s the local form of hello: street-corner dudes and grandmas, everyone says it. This is Bavaria, Germany’s Catholic heartland, a region that gives the lie to the popular notion that Western Europe has tossed its Christian heritage in history’s dustbin. Bavaria is as modern as you please — a center of the European telecommunications industry, the home of BMW (as in Bavarian Motor Works) — but on any special occasion you see couples wandering around looking like Hansel and Gretel, in lederhosen and dirndls. Elsewhere in Germany, Bavarian jokes serve the same function that Polish jokes used to in the United States. Bavarians will tell you they hold to tradition, religion and antique styles of speech not out of stupidity or addiction to kitsch but because they believe these things encompass what is real and true.

The center of Regensburg is all old stone, a carefully preserved medley of medieval towers, gates and spires clustered on the banks of the Danube, and in various ways — the firmness of the material, the rigorous workmanship, the serious commitment to the past as a component of the present — you might see this clutch of buildings as a metaphor for the mind and heart of Bavaria’s most illustrious native. Joseph Ratzinger — Pope Benedict XVI — was born in a little village tucked between a ridge and a broad plain of farmland to the east, and the major events of his childhood and much of his adulthood played out around here. It was in many ways an idyllic, almost fairy-tale youth. The family home in Traunstein was an 18th-century farmhouse with a single wood-shingled roof covering living quarters, hayloft and animal stalls. The Roman Catholic Church provided both structure and spectacle: at Eastertime, black curtains hung on the windows of the village church, so that, as Ratzinger wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “the whole space was filled by a mysterious darkness. When the pastor sang the words ‘Christ is risen!’ the curtains would suddenly fall, and the space would be flooded by radiant light. This was the most impressive portrayal of the Lord’s Resurrection that I can conceive of.”

The Bavarian idyll dissolved: Nazi songs crept into the music books at school. Ratzinger entered the seminary in 1939 as Hitler’s soldiers completed the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Shortly after, at age 16, he was drafted and began his much-reported stint in the Hitler Youth, assigned to guard a BMW plant north of Munich. When the Americans arrived, they used his family home as their base and took him as a war prisoner. Throughout the Nazi experience, his father guided him to see it as an outgrowth of modern godlessness. The effect was to reinforce the idea of the church as a bulwark against darkness — against secularism and rationality run amok.

Returning to the seminary immediately after the war, Ratzinger became deeply influenced by the philosophy of personalism, which saw the basis of reality not in bloodless science but in the individual human being and whose adherents would come to include Vaclav Havel and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He looked, too, to the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger as guides, for their inquiries into “pure being” allowed for a more human understanding of the world than the scientific materialism that was rapidly winning acceptance in Western culture. But all of this was mere supplement to Catholic theology. “Dogma” wasn’t a dirty word — it was the ground. “Dogma was conceived not as an external shackle but as the living source that made knowledge of the truth possible in the first place,” he wrote in his memoirs. Ratzinger rose rapidly through the ranks of Bavaria’s intensely rigorous Catholic institutions, holding the chairmanship in dogma at the University of Regensburg from 1969 to 1976, until he was appointed archbishop of Munich and Freising and his career focus shifted toward Rome.

So the occasion of the speech that Benedict made at the University of Regensburg last September — the speech that caromed around the world and caused protests in the Middle East and attacks on Christians and churches in Iraq, Somalia and the West Bank for his seeming to say that Islam is a religion of violence — marked a homecoming, albeit an incendiary one.

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My students read the following article – a set of book reviews, actually – by my namesake Michael Novak for this past Friday, in conjunction with a lesson on the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. In general, I wanted to parallel the task of ancient and today's Christians in preparing positive articulations of the faith in response to some form of critique in their culture. So, Nicaea could be talked about in terms of a response to an Arian theology of God, and Novak's article as a response to a number of fairly well-selling books on the market currently, written from an evangelizing-atheist perspective.

I noted some response to these books before, in Peter Steinfel's New York Times column on two of them (and this other NYT Op-Ed), and the dismay by more learned atheists that atheism was perhaps being seen as best represented by these rhetorical attacks that actually lacked much intellectual punch. Because I wasn't having my students actually read the atheist texts themselves, I didn't have my students focusing so much on what Novak reported as their content (whether or not he was accurate) but instead to pay attention to Novak's attempts at coaching a stronger atheist critique of Judaism and Christianity, and what a substantial critique and dialogue would look like. In particular, I had them discuss what he laid out as Christianity's primary challenges to atheist critique: that is, what – like the Creeds – represented Christianity's actual constructive response to today's intellectual challenge. Instead of the vision of Christianity presented in its Worst Possible Terms or Representatives, Novak offered a "strong" Jewish/Christian position of the sort that an atheist today could really profitably engage, rather than playing games with "straw men" that were created just to easily knock down....

Lonely Atheists of the Global Village (3/7/2007)

ABSTRACT: "The whole inner world of aware and self-questioning religious persons seems to be territory unexplored by our authors. All around them are millions who spend many moments each day (and hours each week) in communion with God. Yet of the silent and inward parts of these lives--and why these inner silences ring to those who share them so true, and seem more grounded in reality than anything else in life--our writers seem unaware. Surely, if our atheist friends were to reconsider their methods, and deepen their understanding of such terms as “experience” and “the empirical,” they might come closer to walking for a tentative while in the moccasins of so many of their more religious companions in life, who find theism more intellectually satisfying--less self-contradictory, less alienating from their own nature--than atheism."

BOOKS REVIEWED Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 112 pp., $16.95) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Penguin, 464 pp., $16) The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 416 pp., $27) Time magazine, ever the vigilant trend spotter, has celebrated a recent wave of books by atheists--among them, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. These books have three purposes: to speed up the disappearance of Biblical faith, especially in America; to proselytize for rational atheism; and to boost morale among atheists, in part by calling attention to support groups for them. Their overriding purpose is the first one: in the words of Harris, “to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity.” But all three books evince considerable disdain for Judaism, too. Dawkins calls it “a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods, and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe.” And the God of the Old Testament, Dawkins calls a “psychotic delinquent.” And it is not as if they admire Islam; rather, they use Islam as a weapon for bashing Christianity and Judaism. Harris says to Christians, “Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God.” In truth, though, the main intention of all three authors is to praise the superiority of atheism, at least the rational atheism of professors such as themselves. In fact, there is much in atheism to praise. ( Read more... )

One of my long-ago high school students, Eileen, has always had a gift for words. In her new blog, she combines that with an eye for everyday detail: the kind of thing that Seinfeld turned into an entire comedy career. For Eileen, that everyday eye seems a little more directed to the personal aspects of life, whether in noting the difficult-to-pin-down questions of human motives or whether in the larger ebb-and-flow of how people invest themselves in broader arguments.

So it seemed in this pointed little reflection wryly entitled "Dancing Trees Are Maximally Counterintuitive" that I saw on her page yesterday, which also took me to a recent New York Times magazine article entitled "Darwin's God," which picks up on the current tussle of science-and-religion discourse. I noted here the other day the Times' Peter Steinfels musing over the lackluster reviews of bestselling "fundamentalist secularist" books currently on the market that take a pose of knowing disdain toward the very concept of religion, and yet evidence no actual academic competence in the area, instead being content to "preach to the choir," in smug atheist riffs designed simply for the approval of people who already agree with the conclusion. Thus, too often, does minor-league contemporary atheism presume to dominate the "science and religion" discussion, resting in the old rhetorical methods of the Enlightenment, content to claim to a credulous audience that the mere existence of science somehow disproves "religion" as a whole. any knowledge of religion's – or Christianity's, in particular – eternal interaction with notions of divine Reason, or the long history of western Christian thought that gave birth to the intellectual presupposition of the modern sciences, well, that kind of detail is simply dispensed with as distracting.

More interesting is the "Darwin's God" article, although my first glance seems to indicate that it falls into a quick biological reductionism of genetics and evolution being All, which is certainly convenient to the framing of the questions, but hardly seems to allow for the huge and necessary input of other disciplines. Still, it's a welcome departure from the pomp of the books grabbing popular attention today.

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Today in class I spent some time talking about the Apostolic Fathers as the transitional generation between a living memory of Jesus, with people who had had the opportunity to hear the Apostles and eyewitnesses, and the generations that came later, that were dependent upon solely the written records produced by that first generation. We looked some at Ignatius of Antioch's Letter to the Magnesians, and considered it's insistence on order and authoritative teaching, coupled with its defense of Jesus' humanity against those Docetist or Gnostic-leaning thinkers that wanted to "correct" such ideas in Christianity for the deeper notion of Jesus merely as a spiritual being that would be tangled up in such evils as matter and the human body. The connection from Genesis' doctrine of Creation and its affirmation of the good of the material world, to the ultimate consequences of such an attitude today in our developing the sciences in Europe that flowed from Christian philosophy and gave us the wonders of our technology, is a connection that I hope goes a long way to getting past the banal narratives of "science versus religion" that are tossed out in sound-bites to the students with regularity.

I also took a moment to recall today as, traditionally, the 1804th anniversary of the martyrdoms of Perpetua, Felicitas, Saturus, and the rest of their company in the Amphitheatre of the Martyrs in Carthage. I don't have my students read that text, currently, but I'd like to work it in somehow: reading Perpetua's journal seemed to make a distinct impression even on my high school sophomores back in South Bend, and I've stayed fond of her over these years.

Habermas Writes to Ratzinger, and Ruini Responds. Allies against the "Defeatism" of Modern Reason
The famous atheist philosopher invokes a new alliance between faith and reason, but in a form different from the one Benedict XVI proposed in Regensburg. Cardinal Ruini highlights the points of agreement and disagreement. And he insists on “the best hypothesis”: to live as if God exists

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, March 7, 2007 – It was his last address as president of the Italian bishops’ conference, CEI. But for cardinal Ruini it was a new beginning instead, the full return to his first vocation: that of a theology and philosophy teacher who confronts today’s culture.

Cardinal Ruini delivered the address on the morning of Friday, March 2, before about a hundred Catholic intellectuals and scientists involved in fleshing out the most ambitious program of the CEI in the past ten years: the “cultural project.”

The general title of the meeting was: “Reason, science, and the future of civilization.” And cardinal Ruini developed his discourse by entering as a third protagonist into the dialogue on faith and reason already underway between Benedict XVI and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas, who defines himself as a “methodical atheist,” is the last great representative of the acclaimed philosophical school of Frankfurt. He took part in a memorable public debate with then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, held in Munich on January 19, 2004. The debate – which later became a book, published in various languages – revolved around the foundations of modern liberal states, and was prompted by the thesis of another German thinker, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, according to whom “the secularized liberal state lives by presuppositions that it cannot guarantee.” Both Habermas and Ratzinger –like Böckenförde before them – asked themselves what religion can offer of its own to this incompetence of modern state. And both, in a different way, proposed a renewed alliance between faith and reason.

As is known, it was precisely to reconnecting faith and reason that Benedict XVI dedicated the lecture held at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006: a lecture that cardinal Ruini has repeatedly indicated as the axis of the current pontificate.

So it was to be expected that Habermas would reply to this lecture. And this is what he did with a long article published on Saturday, February 10, 2007 in the leading newspaper of German-speaking Switzerland, the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung.”

In his discourse, presented below, Ruini makes a detailed summary of Habermas’ positions and his criticisms of the lecture in Regensburg, before analyzing and contesting them.

Here it’s enough to add that Habermas describes the impulse that drove him to study a new relationship between reason and faith in this way: “the desire to mobilize modern reason against the defeatism that lurks within it.”

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The New York Times
March 3, 2007
Beliefs
Books on Atheism Are Raising Hackles in Unlikely Places
By PETER STEINFELS

Hey, guys, can’t you give atheism a chance?

Yes, it is true that “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins has been on The New York Times best-seller list for 22 weeks and that “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris can be found in virtually every airport bookstore, even in Texas.

So why is the new wave of books on atheism getting such a drubbing? The criticism is not primarily, it should be pointed out, from the pious, which would hardly be noteworthy, but from avowed atheists as well as scientists and philosophers writing in publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, not known as cells in the vast God-fearing conspiracy.

The mother of these reviews was published last October in The London Review of Books, when Terry Eagleton, better known as a Marxist literary scholar than as a defender of faith, took on “The God Delusion.”

“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds,” Mr. Eagleton wrote, “and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” That was only the first sentence.

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This was an interesting Op-Ed to see appear in The New York Times, which is usually the bastion of Enlightenment thought in the United States. Granted, it's an op-ed, but I would be fascinated to have been able to be a fly on the wall for any watercooler talk about the column, particularly for those standard Secularists who think atheism to be a cutting-edge intellectual imperative and not something more of an Enlightenment or 19th-century holdover.

Op-Ed Contributor
Atheists Agonistes
By RICHARD A. SHWEDER
Published: November 27, 2006
Chicago

ONE of the surest ways to bring a certain type of dinner party to a halt is to speak piously about “God.” Earnest reference to sinners, apostates or blasphemers, or to the promise of salvation offered in evangelical churches, is likely to produce the same effect. Among the cosmopolites who live in secular enclaves, religion is automatically associated with darkness, superstition, irrationality and an antique or pre-modern cast of mind. It has long been assumed that religion is opposed to science, reason and human progress; and the death of gods is simply taken for granted as a deeply ingrained Darwinian article of faith.

Why, then, are the enlightened so conspicuously up in arms these days, reiterating every possible argument against the existence of God? Why are they indulging in books — Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell,” Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation,” and Richard Dawkins’s “God Delusion” — in which authors lampoon religion or rail against the devout under the banner of a crusading atheism? Books dictated or co-written by God sell quite well among the 2.1 billion self-declared Christians and 1.3 billion self-declared Muslims of the world. What explains the current interest among secularists in absolutely, positively establishing that the author is a fraud?

The most obvious answer is that the armies of disbelief have been provoked. Articulate secularists may be merely reacting to the many recent incitements from religious zealots at home and abroad, as fanatics and infidels have their ways of keeping each other in business.

A deeper and far more unsettling answer, however, is that the popularity of the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.

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I find myself yesterday pausing in The New York Times wondering not so much about a theological issue, as my work tends to go, but about the opposite: an anti-theology, if you will. The Irishman in me loves the idea of a good row, a knock-down, drag-out intellectual duel of wits, with everyone amiably going out for a drink afterward. If you have grown up around Irish-Americans, you know that they can be fabulous insulting with one another, but would be shocked at anything that they considered intentionally hurtful being said. (It was a critical moment, for example, for me as a teacher to realize that a good number of my students--much less my friends--just didn't get the Irish "abuse-as-affection" form of language, and took words in a far different way than how they had been intended.) So when I mix in my life as a theologian into this mix, the idea of such a match of wits with contemporary atheism seems very appealing for engaging the best of intellect and expression.

The fact is, though, it doesn't usually work this way. The Big Ideas are usually held too closely to people's hearts for genial conversation, much less naked debate. Atheism is no exception to this. Although as a rhetorical strategy, particularly coming out of 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment contexts, atheism frequently wants to present itself as the clear and obvious result of basic reasoning, my own experience is that most atheists are formed out of the emotional tumult of the teen years, as are a great number of theist believers. It is a minority of atheists who have given atheism any thought beyond the dismantling of childhood versions of faith in God in the same way that it is a minority of believers who have attained any kind of theological, philosophical or historical formation beyond that of childhood.

aristotle2002 wrote some time ago of his disappointment with the current state of atheism at Oxford (I think this might have been the entry). frey_at_last's entry the other day pointed to a book on Amazon of essays touted as a learned book that would let you understand those awkward facts and arguments "your church doesn't want you to read," but then contained such howlers as arguing that the Christian fixation on "the Son of God" in fact (shock!) derived from ancient pagan Sun-worship practices (and fashionably used da Vinci's The Last Supper to "prove" the point). The fact that this argument rests on a homonym/homophone "Son" "Sun" coincidence and thereby presumes that ancient Jews, Greeks and Romans all spoke English, well, that didn't seem to be caught. It really is enough to make you despair. Atheism of any real quality depends upon an honest and detailed examination of Christianity or of whatever form of theism is being denied. I could have serious conversations with my mentor Marvin Powell along these lines because his lack of belief in God was something that he grounded in a capable reading of the evidence, as I also grounded my faith in the training in historical investigation he gave me. That allowed us to discuss facts and to extrapolate from them to conclusions. Factual discussion became the neutral ground on which we could meet, sitting in a booth at the Twin Taverns and talking for hours. In contrast to that, however, if the new atheism is merely an inherited thumbing of the nose at believers, a sort of high-brow name-calling, atheism is not in a healthy spot.

Thus I found myself a bit taken aback to read the following op-ed essay in The New York Times the other day which called for a resurgence of European atheism as a significant cultural achievement, as the way to make a stand against the violence of religious fundamentalisms. The simplistic dualism of atheism versus fundamentalism--that those are the only two positions on the scale of belief--is the first thing Zizek tries to establish. No middle ground exists: there is no "authentic" religious heritage other than that of fundamentalism, and all fundamentalisms are wellsprings of "murderous violence." That seems a bit sloppy and slipshod, whether we are talking about the recent threats against Denmark by Muslims, or whether we are talking about Christian fundamentalists in America. Would it not be equally sloppy to make a counter-argument that the two regimes in Europe in the last century which took the strongest stances against religious belief--Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany--thus prove conclusively that atheism leads to atrocities against humanity by destroying the traditional basis for any belief in the sacredness of human life and thus the notion of human rights? One might argue for such connections, but as an argument, that is a little bit hasty. And yet this is the quality of atheism required for printing in the Times? Not encouraging.

Does atheism, as such or in itself, actually create or contribute anything? Atheism, he argues, creates a safe public space for believers. But an examination of history will reveal that the idea of a religiously-neutral public sphere originated in post-Reformation Christian context. To be sure, this came out of the context of the "Wars of Religion," where the conflict between Catholics and Protestants had occurred both on the state and theological levels. The undergirding presumption throughout all of human history had been that there had to be a unity of cult and state in order for society to remain stable. America is the first major experiment in trying otherwise, and we forget how radical an innovation this was. But it wasn't brought on by Secularists trying to tame the religious in their midst. As with the rise of modern science, later Secularists have found an advantage in casting these successes as their own innovations, whereas it is not a terribly difficult piece of research to discovery these distinctly Modern phenomena arising in explicitly religious contexts. Christianity got past such conflict on its own. Likewise, religious ethics, it is here argued, flow from a desire to earn God's favour, whereas atheists do things simply because they are right. Ignoring the obvious philosophical problems in declaring actions to be either right or wrong in atheistic perspective, it should also have been a simple matter to discover that the Christian tradition, at least, from the very root of Jesus' teaching, dismisses such notions of ethics. Doing the right thing is to be done because it is right, and it is the metaphysics undergirding ethics that allows us to understand what it right and wrong and how it is that some things can be right or wrong.

So I'm disappointed in what seems to me to either be sloppy atheism, or worse, deliberate misrepresentation. I am not alleging that in this case: I don't have any evidence to support that conclusion, but the evidence is abundant to think this a poor representation of the kind of case that could be made in the public sphere against religious belief, and particularly against Christian belief. I was about to end these thoughts with a wish that if we are going to have atheists representing atheism in the media, could we at least have serious, factually-grounded atheism to deal with? But then I remembered the kind of Christianity that is usually given attention in the media and I realized that perhaps the medium in general is not an easy one for the best voices of any persuasion to be heard.

The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Defenders of the Faith
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
March 12, 2006
London

FOR centuries, we have been told that without religion we are no more than egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality that of a pack of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?

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