TO AN ATHEIST FRIEND
Novak, Michael
To a _9 Friend I MAGINE THAT THIS IS ONE RESPONSE in an exchange of letters, about issues that have been argued over for centuries. Borrowing from the device of a dialogue that has proved very...
...He wills it all into being, and sustains it in being...
...At this point, I strain to see what they are looking for when they say "objective" evidence...
...Arguments about the real facts of history usually take the parties too far afield, and end inconclusively...
...9 The Christian claim is that God is just...
...The evidence of our senses in the material world is not likely to help, because God is spirit, not matter, according to the philosophical traditions of ancient (and perennial) bodies of thought...
...So I close this section on no doubt too simple a note...
...Even when my eyes were clouded...
...He read a sign wrong...
...The revelation brought by Jesus confirms this vision...
...Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" (Job 13:15...
...Other good arguments have come from Jewish and Christian teachings...
...Adam and Eve at the dawn of paradise hold before our eyes just this possibility...
...However, even here the form through which the experience is NOVEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 TO AN ATHEIST FRIEND brought about is by now "traditional" and the words to describe it are also "traditional...
...Yet when such an experience is widely shared with hundreds of millions of others, and in awayhighly scrutinized by a long tradition, the word "subjective" is not quite the right word...
...God does not will it "in advance...
...Such pagan philosophers saw it as an error to think of such a remote and awesome God anthropomorphically...
...for the proposition that God wills it to be true...
...Isn't the same God responsible for the bad, as well as the good...
...When Heather uses her freedom to go the store, then God ratifies her freedom and her choice...
...He did not mention councils of the church, popes, cardinals, or the Holy See as an independent state among states...
...Borrowing from the device of a dialogue that has proved very helpful in the history of philosophy, I will call my interlocutor "7-Ieather," in honor of J Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, who _9 sparkedan intense andlong-running debate with one short article in The American Conservative (August .28, 2006...
...We would not have such insight into God's nature if he had not pulled back the veils on it...
...He could scarcely have been more clear about that...
...Chesterton, Arnold Lunn, and Romano Guardini in more recent times, these evidences are steadily advanced, for those who seek them...
...Or trying to find God in all the futile categories...
...God is just...
...That is why Christians proffered evidences for the truth of revelation, to be weighed by each seeker, and accepted or rejected...
...We are talking pure philosophy here, not yet about matters of any particular revelation or church tradition...
...By "most astute" philosophers, I mean those who not only give you an account of their own moving viewpoint, but can also give a very good account of other moving viewpoints not their own...
...What may we hope...
...I Cr e@aTr'- i ", ,I-I] att%r MOc Donald...
...From his vast power come many creatures more imposing than man-the Alps, the seas, the horrific storms filled with lightning and thunder and merciless winds...
...I have had conversations with people who call themselves atheists, and who also say that they would like to believe in God--if only they could find some objective evidence for his existence...
...The religious experience of most of us is more like "give us this day our daily bread," a more ordinary and vanilla-plain awareness...
...For him, all is simultaneous...
...This was a required course at almost every university that the founders attended...
...From Augustine and Aquinas to Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, through writers such as John Henry Newman, C.S...
...Correlatively, when atheists insist upon "objective" evidence, one must ask what are the criteria of The evidence for God's existing and ever-present sustaining power, in short, lies in one's own cognitional life, as this can inter-subjectively be understood...
...Heather is not wrong to claim that often God seems to her, from watching the world as it is, criminallypassive, callous, cruel, monstrous...
...But even when they suffer terribly, some find his judgments just and kind...
...Yet insight is one thing...
...Contrary to what Heather thinks Christians do, Washington saw the hand of Providence in his greatest defeats, sufferings, and losses...
...This drive is the dynamic spring of reason itself, and it seeks the infinite...
...He left an immense array of concrete details to human ingenuity and initiative...
...T HE BIGGEST DISAGREEMENT between us, in fact, arises out of our different conceptions of the Christian God...
...It meant that some would choose malice, ill will, and deliberate evil...
...9 God foresees events such as the death-dealing accident in Los Angeles that Heather reports, in which a car missed a stop sign, ran head on into a train, and two died, and two were crippled...
...Conservatives should approach questions about human nature and destiny, God, and the choice of their own community of "ultimate concern" with the best reasons they can present to a candid world...
...Far from describing himself as just, the God who 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 MICHAEL NOVAK parts the veils in Scripture to reveal himself gives countless warnings about how unjust, in the eyes of humans, his justice will seem...
...They just can't follow its " logic or discern its sense...
...We are told, in fact, to pick up our cross, and get ready to bear trial and suffering, as Christ did...
...If this is what God does to his son, Scripture seems to suggest, we should not expect better treatment for ourselves...
...However, I sometimes think she must have been more exposed to a very sentimental, sweet type of Christianity, and not read much in the Scriptures or in the classic commentators for herself...
...Often enough, the good suffer, while the evil are rewarded...
...God is not jerking her strings around or forcing her to act contrary to her own will...
...Sometimes they are, and such opinions are likely to be brushed aside by others...
...Heather notes that the father driving the car that hit a train in Los Angeles read a sign wrong, and paid for it with his life...
...He is there in the days of narrow escape from evil and the full enjoyment of dreams come true...
...The real achievements of evangelical Christians like the Baptists on behalf of religious liberty in the United States have seldom been given the credit they deserve...
...E'n la sua volontate d nostrapace," as Dante wrote, "In his will, our peace...
...It is in coming to understand our own identity that we come face-to-face with the God who summoned us into being, and propels us onward...
...When Jesus established an ordered community that he said would continue until Religious conservatives nowadays should more frequently express publicly their respect for those who do not believe in God...
...S UPPOSE THAT THE PROPOSITION were put this way: Would you count as evidence a proposition that listed some of the classical characteristics of what the most astute philosophers count as "knowing that God exists...
...We still have a lot of bran@ to drink together, Heather...
...So I ask her just to entertain this next section for consideration, even if her good habits of mind lead her to reject it...
...Some pagan philosophers reasoned to the notion that the deity is outside Time, existing in some kind of timelessness that they called the "realm of the unchangeable," the world of simultaneity without time, "eternity...
...All this takes mutual patience, and willingness to circle round and round together, narrowing the issues...
...Against that point there is the fact that both empiricism and pragmatism rest upon certain background assumptions about nature and history, but without subjecting these silent assumptions to criticism (the proper task of metaphysics...
...Augustine's finding, as he moved from a very secular philosophy into belief in God, and then into a specifically Catholic belief...
...Such evidences need to be communicated through reasoned discourse, if nonbelievers and believers are to meet on the same ground, at least initially...
...The evidence is public and accessible to all, not simply private and individual...
...They Just look what happens to Jesus, God's own son, in his passion and death...
...In a backward-glancing reflection upon our own active life of inquiry, that is the ultimate Light that we can dimly catch sight of...
...The main point is not particularly Christian, but philosophical...
...Much of this knowledge was reached before Judaism or Christianity entered into human consciousness...
...Very few pagan philosophers during most of Western history thought that the world was absurd, random, lawless, purposeless...
...The believer does not believe that this drive is in vain...
...For us, all is sequential...
...Thus does he make good on the Scriptural promise of human liberty...
...It is best if these reasons are not merely from subjective experience or personal faith...
...a judgment that the insight is true is another...
...Our own consciousness nudges us to cross that boundary...
...Let me begin with the third point...
...These last two points, on God's cruel kindness and on his empirically unjust justice, are not matters of reason...
...One of the best things about friendship is lifelong disagreement on some basic things...
...The saccharine faith that some atheists encounter in Christians is a shallow, sentimental, and much too prettified version of the faith...
...The Internet replies to Heather, pro and con, were plentTful...
...But one does have to work out for oneself, at least in practice if not in a theoretical statement, a conception of God that allows for liberty, contingency, and all the hazards as well as triumphant moments in history...
...This is a double standard...
...viz., "I searched for thee everywhere, my God, but when I found thee thou wert within...
...Instead, it seems, God allowed the human story to be one of weakness, betrayal, and evil by the free choice of many, and severe trial for the good who are also tempted by evil (seeing all its rewards on this earth...
...Would you count it as evidence, that is, if someone laid out the characteristics involved in saying "I know that God exists," and you came to see that you, too, could fulfill those characteristics in your own rational mind...
...He does not spoil us...
...Whence do our i relentess inquiries spring...
...Some critics found her inexcusably ignorant of what religious people actually believe, and of their reasoned arguments for these beliefs...
...It is a category mistake to hold that God "foresees" future events...
...A person moved to gratitude for the full Light that is foreshadowed in my own questing little searchlight of mind and heart...
...In fact, and here the conception is philosophical, not based on Christian data: God dwells in a simultaneous present...
...To pursue like a hound this movement of the mind is, I think, to plumb what being objective and in a backward-glancing reflection upon our own active life of inquiry, that is the ultimate Light that we can dimly catch sight of...
...Look at what he allowed to happen to his son...
...Many rationalists argue that God must be a bumbler...
...Why, then, did Jesus instruct us to pray to our Father for our humblest needs, as well as for grand and seemingly impossible things...
...Therefore, it is not only "conservative values" that can be reached through the use of reason alone, but also knowledge about God...
...There is no need to be religious, she avers, in order to be good and to effect moral progress in human society...
...Heather's man in Los Angeles, alas, was permitted to be more careless than his responsibilities to those in his car with him required...
...Nnally, she holds that "Western society has become more compassionate, humane, and respecO~ as it has become more secular" during recent centuries...
...NOVEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15 TO AN ATHEIST FRIEND Some of the ancient "pagan" philosophers were able to figure out that this world is too filled with intelligibility and great beauty for there not to be some trans-human power of great intellectual capacity, i But there remains much that is hidden about the divinity, much that is behind veils...
...That is to say, God has in mind for all of us not contentment, nor a state of constant pleasure, nor ease, but a time of trial...
...I f this is what God does to his son, Scripture seems to suggest, we should not expect better treatment for ourselves...
...The experiences of Christians are not always merely "subjective...
...Let me just mention three assertions she and others make about the Christian God that seem to me to be wide of the bull's eye (even though she hears them from Christians...
...Then, again, Catholics (and some other scholars) tend to make a different factual case from what one gets in the standard history course in our universities-about the Crusades, the Inquisition, the "two powers" of church and state in modern European history, the French Revolution, etc...
...They were not born robots, but free agents...
...Adam and Eve at the dawn of paradise hold before our eyes just this possibility...
...It might be that the X which Heather chooses to do is to disbelieve in God...
...We bow our heads before him, trusting in his ultimate kindness...
...If you hold that all the beauty, intelligence, justice, love, and truth that are found here in fragments in this actual created world of o u r s - i f you hold that all these spring from the creative energy of the Creator, then you gain some idea of the beauty, justice, and benevolence he has within him...
...Third come several real objections to the religious rhetoric in the American air...
...Is the deity benevolent or hostile, too great to be bothered with us, indifferent, totally controlling of human fate...
...All this extra insight is from Jewish and Christian revelation...
...But sometimes certain experiences share certain qualities with those well recognized in a long tradition, and otherwise meet certain criteria that lift them from the merely "subjective" into what might be called the "inter-subjective...
...In short, reason alone figured out quite a lot about God, gathered together as settled knowledge in the "philosophy of God," or "natural theology," as it was called at the time of the American founding...
...It is simultaneous with it...
...They know that God does not owe them anything, and has in fact given them everything they have...
...So here also something more than the purely "subjective" is going on...
...9 Christians only exclaim about God's providence and goodness when good things happen to them...
...They are as the tradition predicts, and have met the typical criticisms designed over the centuries to "test their spirit...
...It may be that the whole point of evangelical religion is to stir in the listener a strong, emotional experience of the forgiveness of God...
...Yet he felt even at such times "in the hands of a kind Providence," and warned himself to keep a steady keel...
...A person moved to love Him who has always been within...
...The drive to ask questions is infinite, and would carry us beyond everything in creation that we know, or can ever know, if we give it free rein...
...They can imagine a far more perfect world...
...Often the background of such persons has been the sciences, and so one can see that what they are looking for are "testable hypotheses...
...Thus, we keep coming back to St...
...But when she does will something, God is present to sustain her liberty in action...
...NOVE~v'~ER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21...
...Yet in that one same instant, God's eternal vision sees our prayers as part of the texture of events that unfolds itself in time...
...objective...
...the end of time (which then seemed more imminent than it turned out to be), he did not specify how it should be organized, ensure its own continuity and fidelity to his word down the generations, teach, preach, educate the young, prepare its leaders...
...Such a world would have to be constructed so as also to allow for the wild contingencies of an open world order...
...Is the deity benevolent or hostile, too great to be bothered with us, indifferent, totally controlling of human fate...
...rational and questioning really means, all the way down...
...It is ironic and tragic-and yet, withal, a comedy...
...They were repulsed by stone idols, and did not really admire the antics of the gods of Greek and Roman myth...
...Here my point is not to persuade, but to clarify...
...Within certain limits, of course, religions are created by human beings...
...I repeat, there are philosophers who have written about such consolations, brought to us through philosophical reflection-for one, Boethius of the sixth century after Christ, in The Consolation of Philosopby...
...Lewis, G.K...
...The Psalms of David, the Book of Job, and countless other texts present the opposite of a pretty picture of God...
...But this expectation supposes that God is just one other item in the universe among other items, of the same sort as those others that are subjected to testable hypotheses...
...Most such persons have in my experience been sophisticated people, and have been by no means logical positivists of the earlyA.J...
...More perfect in what respect...
...What should we do...
...Even though it is merely a taste of God, when the mind glimpses, however darkly, all that it was made for, the resonance is very sweet...
...One sort of believer comes to believe in God by trusting his own drive to question, which first awakened him from his slumbers, shook him into awareness, and kept sending out questions, infinitely, like radar into the dark...
...Not in the Christian Testament...
...The Creator didn't promise us a rose garden...
...Religions do not come directly from God but from man...
...As Jefferson writes in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, "Almighty God hath created the mind free...
...Who are we under these stars...
...But even when they suffer terribly, some find his judgments just and kind...
...Since by contrast we are in time, we must speak of past, present, and future...
...But they did showpietas toward the traditions of their ancestors...
...Humans have to fill out the conditional "If Heather does X...
...Whence do our relentess inquiries spring...
...he pays workers in the vineyard the same wage even though some have worked all day, and others only an hour...
...But, for reasons which escape us, he did not...
...N OW A DIFFERENT LINE OF THOUGHT, but bearing on the same point about human liberty...
...Only after the "death of God" that Nietzsche announced did the world also come to seem absurd, random, and purposeless...
...Most people are not philosophers but, rather, want to get some of these answers in a way that comports with common s e n s e - a way that fits with their working knowledge of how the world works, and what spoken words actually mean...
...If to him everything is present instantaneously, isn't the deal already NOVEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17 TO AN ATHEIST FRIEND done...
...The reverse is also to be desired...
...Would she really prefer that all of us were robots who could never err on our own, never fail, never come to grief...
...The Creator didn't promise us a rose garden...
...Who are we under these stars, with the wind on our faces...
...B UT THE MAIN ISSUE that stops Heather cold, she keeps reminding us, is the most difficult one for Ithe believer-but for all that, most frequently addressed: The problem of why a good and just God allows so much evil and injustice to metastasize in this world...
...The evidence for God's existing and ever-present sustaining power, in short, lies in one's own cognitional life, as this can inter-subjectively be understood...
...God did not have to make the world this way, but he did...
...Frederick II had built a Muslim university in Naples, and the encroachment of Muslims was being felt everywhere around the Mediterranean basin...
...Rare are "ecstatic" experiences among the ordinary run of people, like ourselves...
...I f Heather had reported a case in which a man with his children and mother died in a hurricane, we would not have said that he was careless when he should not have been, but that he was overpowered against his choice by the fury of the storm...
...V~'rst, "the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies," ~j~ho openly support American values, including conservative family values...
...which draws men to the deity by his beauty...
...Religious conservatives nowadays should more frequently express publicly their respect for those who do not believe in God...
...These should be addressed bythe methods of reasoned historical inquiry...
...Perhaps, though, that is too Catholic a point of view...
...One last point deserves attention...
...Heather does not pretend to have studied theology, even of the natural, philosophical, non-biblical kind She only reports what she has observed: In the face of a tragedy averted, "believers decipher God's beneficent intervention with ease...
...I am not trying to persuade, but simply to clarify...
...It is aplayworthy of an Aeschylus, a Dante, a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Goethe...
...Like Feuerbach, many atheists today assert that religions are created by human beings, to meet human needs felt by some people (but not all...
...As Washington did, taking every act of Providence as meant for his own instruction...
...One quality that I especially cherish in a certain kind of atheist, including Heather (a type almost oldfashioned to post-modernist eyes), is that she has not given up on reason, even though the idea of God-or at least the Christian God, as she understands the term-makes no sense to her...
...Not by human standards...
...We can come back after a time and see whether each of us has learned something more in the interim...
...Nothing wrong with protesting...
...The Almighty might have made the world different-without human liberty, for instance...
...One other place closer to home in which to learn how Christians understand Providence is to chart George Washington's usage of the term...
...But there remains much that is hidden about the divinity, much that is behind veils...
...All humans could do was bow to the will of God...
...It is not a prettified morality play...
...Yet those who love him thank him when they are spared from suffering, or enjoy success...
...Who am I? I am the questioning being who participates in the infinite capacity of the Creator to question and to understand everything that is...
...IfI were an atheist, I would certainly draw that conclusion...
...I f the Creator in fact better loved the contingencies and happenstances of this world as we see them, in its absurdities and tragedies, and if he took pleasure in the whole ("He saw it, and it was good"), then he had to allow a great deal of rope to human liberty...
...Moreover, there is parable after parable about how unjust God is: He hugs the prodigal son while turning his back on his dutiful, hardworking, selfdenying brother...
...I f Michael chooses X, then God permits X to be done...
...He is in fact a God who in the full view of humans acts in a manner cruel, unfair, and terriblytrying...
...The unrelenting, inexhaustible drive in us to ask questions leads us gradually to catch a glimmer of the boundary line between finite and infinite...
...and " " &sa reements about "'": I~Y ~I'~H~,EL NOVAK J 14 THE AMERI~ANSPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 'Sb FAMOUS JESUIT ONCE SAID t h a t i t o f t e n t a k e s A ~ e n t drinking a case of brandy together to achieve disagreement...
...So the question becomes, what sorts of "tests" would they count as yielding evidence...
...He understands it all, and he wills it all...
...Alas, free deeds have consequences...
...Certain Islamic writers of the time of Aquinas or earlier saw the world as predetermined by Allah, so that there was not really liberty in which humans might act...
...and many other such stories...
...rather, a sovereign Governor of the universe not trimming his will or his wisdom to meet human measurements or expectations...
...And find there stillness, and also strength...
...Simultaneously...
...No use searching for God if you are searching in all the wrong places...
...Or not...
...God is not bound by that constraint...
...Those who love God attend to every event and every new direction, in order to discern what wisdom they can glean from it...
...Further, they can show why their own viewpoint comfortably explains alarger body of data than any known alternative, makes a greater number of helpful distinctions, even predicts specific outcomes from certain courses of action or certain patterns of belief...
...Ayer type...
...The ratifying act of God's will does notprecede human action...
...The deity, of whom we know so little, "transcends" not only the human world but all things, and dwells in a wholly other dimension, not shrunk to our size...
...Others cheered Heather on...
...At that point, one often concludes, "Well, on this one we will just have to disagree...
...A human who foresaw and did not prevent that cruel suffering would be charged with criminal passivity...
...Only in such a world could humans help to determine the course of history...
...That same fire keeps breaking out in human history, as the root of the religious quest, at the boundary of the infinite...
...Just look what happens to Jesus, God's own son, in his passion and death...
...Or you reject the scriptural concept of God, and go elsewhere...
...The full stories of other particular traditions have also not been adequately told...
...in him there is no time...
...The Jewish and Christian reply to this question of the soul is that humans are made in the image of God--not in the sense of being a painting or an icon of God, but in the sense of having inner capacities (insight, judgment, love) that are shared with him...
...As I see it, one sort of atheist gives up trusting in intelligence at this point, and finds the whole of existence absurd, based upon chance, random, 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 MICHAEL NOVAK undirected, meaningless...
...Yet many millions suffer more than is easy to witness, and endure it nobly, and praise God for what they have...
...T HE GOD OF THE PHILOSOPHERS, like the God of Judaism and Christianity, is not over-protective...
...Nothing wrong with wrestling against God...
...Even though in another sense, his 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 MICHAEL NOVAK will is that she not do that...
...Metaphysical methods, they say, are not congenial to American empiricism and pragmatism...
...As Job did...
...As a Christian, I ask any searcher to examine the evidence for the truth of the Christian faith commonly advanced by the best Christian minds in generation after generation...
...He is always present, in all things...
...They are not simple-minded materialists...
...He has made his will clear, but he is also committed to sustaining a world of human liberty...
...Past, present, and future are all present to him in one vision...
...I didn't mean to give a sermon...
...Here are some points on which an unbeliever and a believer are probably in agreement...
...The reverse is also to be desired...
...God's self-descriptions in the Bible often forewarn that this is the way it will seem, even to those who know and love him...
...But that is simply contrary to what we actually see...
...In that case, "subjective" may be an appropriate term...
...Disagreement is to be expected, but alot ofmutuallearning can take place...
...For them, the gate to rationality is no longer so narrow as it was in the 1940s...
...y ET ALONGSIDE THESE AGREEMENTS there remain strong disagreements...
...Most of what seem to be "disagreements" are actually the result of misunderstanding each other, and are not so much real disagreements at all, just weeds to be ified, uprooted, and set aside...
...Socrates gave intimations of this route, when he began his inquiries with the imperative "Know thyselff' The atheist has avery different sense of who she is...
...I thank you for the invitation...
...Clearly, he could have created a simple paradise of goodness, mutual cooperation and trust, and peace on earth...
...Speaking metaphysically then, such an order God did not base on geometric logic, but on schemes of probabilities, unique occurrences, and wide-open spaces for various chains of probability to work their way out...
...He "forsook" him...
...Praising the "skeptical conservatives"who "~ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral arguments," Miss Mac Donald made four main points...
...It does not compare very well when held up against the whole of the Christian intellectual tradition...
...He found God's ways inscrutable and almost impossible to bear...
...He sees it as good, and he loves it...
...For him, the presence of Providence kept him from too much elation in victory, and too much despair in defeat (of which he suffered more, sometimes through stupid blunders or character flaws of his own...
...Heather marshals good arguments concerning why she cannot accept a God of this sort...
...As Nietzsche first saw, the death of God meant the death of reason, and the birth of the random and the absurd...
...The insight finally dawns upon him, or her, that to say "God" is to say the Subject that awakens the restlessness within me and fires the infinite drive to ask questions...
...Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and most recently (with ffana Novak) the author of Washington's God (Basic Books...
...Many of Christ's own disciples found his sayings hard, left him and went elsewhere...
...Everything that happens to us is for our good, even when we cannot see how that can possibly be true...
...Only a few in any generation manage to do this well, under terrible trials and misfortunes...
...Secondly, these skeptics "find themselves mystified by the religiosity of the rhetoric that seems to define so much of conservatism today...
...One does not have to be a Christian or Jew in order to come to such wisdom...
...This meant freedom to be noble or ignoble...
...W HAT I AM ABOUT TO WRITE may seem s o preposterous to Heather and many like her, who reject metaphysical thinking...
...For him the willing is simultaneous...
...For example, the humanistic atheism of many in the Anglo-American world needs to be sharply distinguished from the bloody and coercive atheism imposed by Communism and Fascism early in the 20th century...
...It is the witness of a public visible community, not merely subjective...
...It is our endless drive to raise questions that is, generation after generation, the active fire in us that leads us beyond the immediate world of our experience...
...There are souls whose integrity leads them to kick and bite in protest against this world, and also against its Maker...
...As Jefferson saw it, "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time...
...He sees the whole world of Time and all of this creation in one instant...
...There are others who simply say, "Thy will be done...
...For Washington, God is sovereign...
...Indeed, almost everyone sometimes feels the urge to protest at ear-shattering volume: "This is not fair...
...He wills the whole all at once...
...It hardly occurred to the philosophers of old that the deity is a judge of consciences, invites humans into his friendship, forgives sins, offers eternal life...
...Questions like Heather's have haunted humans for many, many centuries...
...Why not God, too...
...He asks us to be grownups, with tip-top attentiveness, and with a reliable force of character...
...It is] the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, Who being Lord both of body and mind, yet [he] chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as it was in his Almighty power to do...
...He is not the plaything of our desire...
...Yet those who love him thank him when they are spared from suffering or enjoy success...
...One does not hear them call the tragedies, absurdities, and horrors of life providential...
...So thought Jefferson, for instance...
...They were passive instruments of God's will...
...You either accept it as rational and verifiable in lived experience...
...It is worth trying to imagine what those characteristics might be...
...But they seem silent about the unnecessary human suffering we encounter every day...
...Many humans experience that as the death also of modernity, or at least of its hubris...
...When she does that, he sustains her liberty to do so...
...Clearly, he could have created a simple paradise of goodness, mutual cooperation and trust, and peace on earth...
...God as he reveals himself to Jews and to Christians has somehow imagined this earth as a great stage, an immense drama, a drama of liberty, and of the misuse and noble use of power, and of love and also betrayal...
...Because, contrary to her assertions, the Christian vision of God (and also the Jewish) is quite the reverse from the picture she draws...
...They even reasoned to the conviction that this unseen deity is spirit, not matter...
...Some conservatives prefer one of these routes over the other, some put both together...
...No one forced him to do so...
...And yet, if the Christian church is simply a human invention, and has not really received its mission from God, the Christian church is a fraud...
...Since it is rare in American life today to conduct public argument at this depth, and since such arguments are crucial to our national life, I wanted to seize this precious opportunity...
...are in this sense matters of faith...
...He is there in the most evil, senseless, and horrific moments of human life...
...At least for now...
...The principle that Aquinas used in refusing to go down that intellectual route, runs like this: I f Heather chooses to go to the store, then God wills that she goes to the store...
...The arguments for conservative values can proceed on reason alone...
...Even if we understood everything there is to know about the material world in which we live, our spirits would still raise questions...
Vol. 39 • November 2006 • No. 9
