Novak’s sophisticated theology

As an atheist who regularly writes blog posts on religion, one of the things I find most frustrating is the enormous amount of effort devoted to “sophisticated” arguments for and against the existence of God. My main purpose in writing about religion is not so much to conclusively settle the question of whether God exists and what the physics or metaphysics of such a God might be, but rather to relentlessly point out that the metaphysics subscribed to by the adherents of the world’s largest religions is false and misleading. Thoughtful people on both sides of the theism/atheism divide would do well to acknowledge that whatever the range of possibilities for the existence of the “supernatural”, the visions espoused by the Bible and Koran are way outside the range.

It requires some understanding of biology and many other subjects to determine whether intelligent design offers a plausible account for the origin of life. It would certainly be possible for somebody who has not studied evolution (and even for somebody who has) to come to the conclusion that intelligent design, rather than evolution, explains the origin of life. A conclusion favoring intelligent design of biological organisms is, in my view (and that of the vast majority of scientists and scientifically informed people) false — but it is not obviously false. On the other hand, acceptance of these theories lends little credence to any specific religious doctrine. In particular, accepting the broad contours of the intelligent design argument lends little concrete support for the Virgin birth of Jesus, Immaculate Conception, Transubstantiation, Armageddon or any of the common flood myths.

It also requires a considerable understanding of physics to even comment intelligently on the question of whether the current understanding of cosmological constants provides evidence for or against a cosmic designer of some sort. But whether or not you believe that it does, this provides little evidence for biblical, Koranic, or Hindu conceptions of the origins of the universe. In fact, even agreeing to enter this debate would entail giving up on a literal interpretation of all religious accounts of human origins.

Novak’s sophisticated theology versus religion on the ground

One of the proponents of sophisticated theology is Michael Novak, a self-described Roman Catholic. In a lengthy review of recent “New Atheism” books by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, Novak lays out the viewpoint of “serious Christians” and argues that the “New Atheism” books caricature these views.

Novak pokes fun at the New Atheists and rural Georgians for being so stupid as to actually believe that the Bible is to be interpreted literally:

It was, then, a huge disappointment to me to find that Dennett, Harris, and especially Dawkins paid no attention to the actual conversion experiences and narratives of fidelity, which are so common in the prison literature of our time. Moreover, none of them ever put their weak, confused, and unplumbed ideas about God under scrutiny. Their natural habit of mind is anthropomorphic. They tend to think of God as if He were a human being, bound to human limitations. They are almost as literal in their readings of the Bible as the least educated, most literal-minded fundamentalist in Flannery O’Connor’s rural Georgia. They regale themselves with finding contradictions and impossibilities in these literal readings of theirs, but the full force of their ridicule depends on misreading the literary form of the Biblical passages at stake, whether they be allegorical, metaphorical, poetic, or resonant with many meanings, for the nourishment of a soul under stress. The Bible almost never pretends to be science, or strictly literal history.

If only! Novak ignores both current polling data and historical facts. Gallup polls over the last 20 years consistently demonstrate that between 25% and 35% of Americans claim to believe that the Bible is the “actual word of God, to be taken literally.” Sam Harris mentions these polls repeatedly in the book that Novak has reviewed, so Novak should be aware of these polls. In the poll linked to, 31% claim that the Bible is the “actual word of God, to be taken literally” while a (disjoint) 47% claim that the Bible is “inspired by the word of God.” Since the people subscribing to the Judeo-Christian tradition constitute about 90% of the American population, this means that about one-third of people in this tradition claim to believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. This isn’t an absolute majority, but it is not a minority either, and it certainly is not just a couple of uneducated rural Georgians.

Further, other polls that do not include the intermediate response option “inspired by the word of God” report much higher percentages of people who claim the Bible to be literally true. This suggests that many who don’t believe that the Bible is literally true still find it closer to “literally true” than the opposite, so the Gallup estimates of 30% are, if anything an underestimate. Consider a 2005 Rasmussen poll that found that 63% of Americans believe the Bible to be literally true, as opposed to 24% who categorically disagree. A 2006 poll found the proportion of literal believers in the Bible to be as high as 75% in Alabama and Arkansas.

Moreover, specific Biblical predictions fare just as well in the popular American imagination. A Pew poll finds 41% of respondents believing that the Second come of Jesus will probably happen over the next fifty years. This isn’t merely a function of people believing that strange events are highly probable (though that’s part of the story) — only 31% believe that an asteroid probably will destroy the earth. Another Pew poll indicates that 36% of Americans, 51% of Black Americans, and 63% of Evangelical White Americans, believe that Israel fulfills the Biblical prophecy about the Second Coming.

If the ordinary masses are just too ignorant of real religion, perhaps their holy books fare better? Actually, no: the Bible (as well as the Koran) condone violence, misogyny, and mass murder.

So what about the current religious leaders? The movers and shakers of religious opinion? In the recent past, the Pope has claimed that Hell is to be taken literally (though there have also been some instances of repudiation of such claims — like most politicians, the Pope needs to satisfy the needs of multiple constituencies), and religious leaders in the United States have helpfully created a video primer on Hell. Exorcism conferences continue to be organized by Catholic bishops. Fringe subsects of Christianity fare no better: here is the Jehovah’s Witnesses website explaining that God’s Kingdom is literal and awaits us, and the Mormon FAQ on God (where people explain that God is literal, human, and loving). And who can forget Timothy LaHaye’s apocalyptic end-of-the-world Left Behind (see also the Wikipedia entry), which has sold well north of 50 million copies?

So here we have: statistical evidence on what people (claim to) believe, the contents of religious texts, and the words and actions of a large number of religious “leaders” and movers and shakers of religious opinion. I obviously don’t claim that an absolute majority of self-identified Christians believe in the literal truth of the Bible. But all the strands of evidence suggest that at least a third of Christians come pretty close to taking the Bible literally, or at least claiming to do so.

I cannot locate polls about the Bible in European, African, or Asian countries that have significant Christian populations. However, making the not unreasonable assumption (backed by cross-state comparisons within the US) that a literal interpretation of the Bible correlates generally with a lower degree of knowledge and understanding of science and less exposure to modern technology, it seems unlikely, at least prima facie, that Christians in, say, Nigeria are less likely to take the Bible literally than Christians in the United States.

If Novak has issues with the Gallup, Rasmussen, or Pew polls (many of which Sam Harris references), the violent tone of the Bible, or with the statements emanating from religious leaders, he does not raise them in his long essay. Rather, he tacitly assumes that his own sophisticated serious version of Christianity (whose adherents he calls “serious Christians”) is shared by almost everybody else who identifies as Christian:

All this taken into account, it strikes me that the only way to proceed is to lay out, on one side, the way in which young questioning minds in American universities are repelled by the atheism that is the lingua franca of nearly all classrooms and academic discussions, and, on the other side, a very brief confession of what exactly that Christianity is that Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins find distasteful, evil, dangerous, and disgusting. Despite their disrespect, Christianity manages somehow to be highly attractive to approximately one-third of the population of the world (just over two billion persons), and is still today the fastest growing of all religions. It is important to explain that attraction before addressing their specific objections.

After being so dismissive of at least a third of his co-religious compatriots to the extent of treating their views as non-serious, Novak then turns around and accuses Sam Harris of being arrogant in his book Letter To a Christian Nation:

The letter that Harris claims is intended for a Christian nation is in fact wholly uninterested in Christianity on any level, is hugely ignorant, and essentially represents his own love letter to himself, on account of his being superior to the stupid citizens among whom he lives.

Actually, no, Sam Harris penned his short book as a response to the large number of letters that Harris has received from people of all faiths, some of whom have also sent him death threats due to which he needs bodyguards.

Let’s look a little more closely at Novak’s own theology.

Crimes in the name of atheism

Novak makes an all-too-typical argument against atheism and also claims that the argument goes unaddressed in the books he references:

Alas, it is extremely difficult to engage on the same level with Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins. All of them think that religion is so great a menace that they do not have much disposition for dialogue. The battle flags they put into the wind are Voltaire’s Ecrasez l’infame! Meanwhile, all three pretend that atheists “question everything” and “submit to relentless, almost tedious, self-criticism.” Yet in these books there is not a shred of evidence that their authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism. Self-questioning about their own scholarly indifference to their subject; about the horrific brutalities committed in the name of “scientific atheism” during the 20th century; about the restless and mercurial dissatisfactions in atheist and secular movements during the past hundred years; and about the demographic weaknesses thereof–all such questions are notable by their absence. Moreover, although an atheist zeitgeist dominates university campuses in America, it has not proved persuasive to huge numbers of students, who hold their noses and put up with it. Why does atheism persuade so few? Our authors never ask.

This is grossly inaccurate, because it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of atheism, both in theory and practice.

Atheism simply means one of two things, depending on who’s using the term: (i) the absence of faith in God, (ii) the belief (held to varying degrees of certainty) that there is no God. Some people who fall under (i) identify as agnostic, while others choose to identify as atheist, while most people under (ii) identify as atheist. Atheism has no holy books or defining doctrine.

It is possible to argue (as Novak tries to do) that atheism itself is causal in the evils of specific atheistic doctrines. However, this needs to be argued, not merely asserted. To take an analogy, if crimes are committed in the name of a particular non-Islamic doctrine, then it would be unjustified to conclude that “non-Islamism” was the problem. On a similar note, just because very few people worship Poseidon today, it cannot be concluded that “aPoseidonism” has any causal role to play in events (positive or negative) in the world today. Unfortunately for Novak’s case, his favorite example — that of communism — fall flat. Although Karl Marx was an atheist, there is little evidence that atheism was a driving force in his vision. My best understanding of the matter is that atheism is a consequence of communism — though other socialistic redistributive visions are found in religious doctrines too, including various interpretations of Jesus’s own teachings.

Novak then makes another argument:

In other words, delusional atheists are not really atheists. Would Harris accept a claim by Christians that Christian evildoers are not really Christian? The real problem is not that tyrants reject the “dogma” of religion, but that they splash around in the bloodshed permitted by the ultimate relativism of all things. And they are comforted by the “natural law” that they imbibe from old-fashioned Darwinism: that the strongest must survive, and the weak must perish.

Well, actually, Harris makes clear in his books and elsewhere that crimes committed by Christians are not the same as crimes committed in the name of Christianity. Rather, Harris looks at crimes committed in the name of Christianity by people who claim to be following explicit Christian doctrine, for which there clear support in the Bible and/or in the explicit teachings of widely acknowledged religious leaders. The analogue for atheism doesn’t exist, because there is no such thing as atheist doctrine.

Second, Novak’s idea that the chief source of evil is relativism is laughably untrue. Hitler was not a relativist — he had a clear vision of what societies and what people are superior to what others. The extent and nature of Hitler’s relationships with religion aside, it’s clear that communist leaders derived their power, not from moral relativism, but from a very clear, absolutist, and false moral vision — see here for a discussion of the role of moral relativism.

Second, Novak offers no statistical evidence of any sort that atheists are more morally relativistic than their religious brethren. This is particularly ironic considering that the New Atheists whom he engages have written consistently against moral as well as cultural relativism. A review of Harris’s book for the New York Times contains this paragraph:

“The End of Faith” is far from perfect. Harris seems to find “moral relativism” as great a sin as religious moderation, and in the end he singles out Islam as the reigning threat to humankind. He likens it to the gruesome, Inquisition-style Christianity of the 13th century, yet he never explains how Christianity became comparatively domesticated. And on reading his insistence that it is “time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development,” I couldn’t help but think of Ann Coulter’s morally developed suggestion that we invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert their citizens to Christianity.

Since then, Harris has written a whole book outlining his view of a non-religious basis for morality.

Of course, it’s possible that Harris and ilk aren’t representative of atheists at large, but Novak offers little evidence for this.

Our authors may dismiss the argument that atheism is associated with relativism. Nonetheless, the most common argument against placing trust in atheists is Dostoevsky’s: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” There will be no Judge of deeds and consciences; in the end, it is each man for himself. To be sure, some individual atheists “of a peculiar character” and academic distinction, brought up in habits inculcated by the religious cultures of the past, can go on for two or three generations living in ways hard to distinguish from those of unassuming Christians and Jews. These individuals continue to be honest, compassionate, committed to the equality of all, and firm believers in “progress” and “brotherhood,” long after they repudiate the original religious justification for this particular list of virtues. But sooner or later a generation may come along that takes the metaphysics of atheism with deadly seriousness. This was the fate of a highly cultivated nation in the Europe of our time.

I’m not sure what “highly cultivated nation” Novak is referring to. If he’s talking about modern European nations, then Novak seems unaware of the fact that these nations, while generally poorer than the United States, are still among the richest countries in the world, that most of them have lower crime rates than the United States, and that much of the incidence of crime and abortion in these countries occurs among immigrant Muslims (and to a lesser extent, fundamentalist Christians). Here’s what Novak’s AEI colleague and Somali-Dutch-American ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali says in her book Nomad about the Netherlands:

The spokesperson on health for my political party showed me the number of sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS, and which populations they most affected. The gay community was most affected; so were immigrants. Within the gay community, those who were immigrants were hit the hardest. We looked also at the number of abortions performed every year. The number of native Dutch women who were having abortions was declining steeply, except in small pockets of radical Christian communities, whose attitude toward sexuality is somewhat comparable to that of many Muslims.

Sure, the totalitarian imposition of atheism, which usually comes as a package deal with many other totalitarian impositions, is a monstrous crime. But this has less to do with the character of atheism than with the violation of individual liberty and freedom of thought and expression (a violation explicitly endorsed by many parts of the Bible and Koran). Novak offers little evidence or support for the assertion that the gradual decline of atheism effected through the tools of civil (or uncivil) discourse and persuasion leads to moral relativism.

Who’s the real elitist here?

Novak seems much less informed about the popular understanding of the Bible than the New Atheists he is critical of. But even more disturbing is the fact that he himself practices the contempt and arrogance of his co-religionist that he accuses the New Atheists of practicing. Consider this telling quotation from George Washington’s address that Novak includes:

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Whether true or not, this sure sounds a lot more elitist than what Sam Harris ever said — namely, religion may be false, but people would behave too badly without it. It reminds me somewhat of neoconservatives’ hypocritical support for intelligent design so as to keep the religious faith of the masses, while accommodationists try to pretend that religion and science are compatible to sell science to a public that is too immature to reject religion.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens may come across as elitist given their forceful choice of language. But Sam Harris? Here’s a quote from a transcript of a speech delivered at the Aspen Ideas Festival

I often begin any talk talk on this subject with an apology because I think I am just going to say some very derogatory things about religion and given that we live in a country where 90 percent of people believe in a Biblical God. I think I am destined to offend some of you here. I want to assure you that’s not the point. That’s not the point of my being here, that’s not the point of my writing my books, I am not being deliberatively provocative. I am simply extremely worried about the role that religion is playing in our world. I think religion is the most divisive and dangerous ideology that we have ever produced. And what’s more is the only ideology that is systematically protected both from with in and with out. It remains to taboo, I mean you can you can criticize someone’s beliefs about on really on any subject but it remains to taboo to criticize their beliefs about God and I think we are paying an extraordinary price for maintaining this taboo. So I am going to break this taboo rather enthusiastically over the next hour and I will I will leave some time for questions and I am happy to take your criticism. I also want to point out upfront there is nothing that I am about to say that should be construed as a denial of the possibilities of spiritual experience and indeed the importance of spiritual experience and that’s a subject I will come back to at the end.

Conclusion

Novak offers a sophisticated and fascinating account of his Christan faith. I cannot make sense of much of it, but it seems quite harmless to me as a personal choice. Yet, his broader sociological claims fall flat on a number of counts. First, he makes no attempt to build even a partial case that the “serious Christians” he describes account for a nontrivial fraction of all Christians:

I recognize that the Christian horizon sketched above in broad strokes may seem preposterous to such atheists as Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. They may look in vain for empirical evidence, of the sort they are able to recognize as evidence, that this sketch of God and man can even in a minimal way be in touch with reality as they know it. On the other hand, it is not so difficult for a serious Christian to stand in the moccasins of an atheist, and to see the world as atheists see it. The four principles of the paradigm sketched above–friendship, liberty, the forgiveness of sin, the acceptance of absurdity–do not exclude the viewpoint of the atheist. In fact, one learns a great deal about each principle from the writings of atheists, including Sartre, Camus, Silone, Moravia, Dewey, Seneca, Aristotle, and thousands of others in between. It seems that Christianity is better able to account for, and to sympathize with, the contemporary atheist than the latter is able to sympathize with the Christian. If nothing else, the three books under review show how hard it is for the contemporary atheist (of the scientific school) to show much sympathy for a Christian way of seeing reality. Since just over two billion persons on our planet today are Christians–about one in every three persons on earth–the inability of the contemporary atheist to summon up fellow feeling for so many companions on the brief voyage of a single human life seems to be a severe human handicap.

This, despite the mountain of evidence (much of it referenced by Harris) about the literal-mindedness of a significant fraction of religious folk, and the quasi-literal-mindedness of many others. In addition, Novak ignores the contents of religious texts as well as the statements issued by religious leaders and authors of religious bestsellers.

Second, when making specific claims about the consequences of atheism, Novak does not adequately consider any of these: (i) the actual views expressed in the books he is critiquing, (ii) survey data on the views (philosophical or moral) of atheists, (iii) the theoretical distinction between religious doctrine and atheism, (iv) historical evidence about the correlates of the decline in religion.

Third, Novak displays an elitism and contempt for his fellow religionists, while at the same time projecting the same onto the New Atheists.

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