A voice to answer the new atheists

The Dark Night of Atheists
and Believers

By Michael Novak.

Doubleday. 336 pp. $23.95.

Reviewed by Dinesh D'Souza

For several years a group of atheists has been attacking the claims of religion, and it seemed for a while that the arguments were going largely unanswered. But now there are several good books rebutting the claims of these new atheists. Among them are John Lennox's

God's Undertaker

and Tim Keller's

The Reason for God

. My own response was a book called W

hat's So Great About Christianity

. The latest addition to this literature is Michael Novak's new book,

No One Sees God

. It is a wise and important book.

Novak is a former colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute. He is known for his books celebrating the morality of free markets, notably

The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

. As a theologian who has written on subjects from Aquinas to existentialism, Novak is well equipped to consider the metaphysical claims of the new atheists.

One of Novak's especially attractive qualities is his ability to find common ground with his opponents. Here he begins by conceding to the atheist that "we are all in the same darkness." No one - not even Moses or Abraham - has set his eyes on God. Novak rejects the certitudes of both the religious fundamentalist and the militant atheist. He intends to explore what he calls "the dark and windswept open spaces between unbelief and belief."

For Novak, life raises bigger questions than the ones answered, and answerable, by science. Ultimately we want to know not merely how things work. We also ask even larger questions. Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is our final destiny? Novak credits religion with addressing the largest moral questions, not only "What is it good to do?" but also "What is it good to be?" and "What is it good to love?"

Novak expresses admiration for some of the leading atheists, notably Daniel Dennett, author of

Breaking the Spell

, and Christopher Hitchens, author of

God Is Not Great

. (He seems less enamored with Richard Dawkins, author of

The God Delusion

, and Sam Harris, author of

The End of Faith

.) Modern atheism has its virtues, such as an emphasis on the value of truth over that of mere good feelings, and also on honesty and courage in facing the realities of life. Even so, Novak finds it puzzling that these atheists make so little effort to understand how God is experienced by the believer.

"For a believer," Novak writes, "it does not take a prolonged thought experiment to imagine oneself an unbeliever." The believer knows full well where the atheist is coming from. By contrast, Novak suggests, atheists such as Hitchens seem to have no empathetic understanding whatsoever of genuine religious conviction. They have no sense of what belief must be like from within.

Novak's point is that this shortcoming makes them poor analysts of religion. All critical reading requires a certain measure of suspended disbelief. This is as true of the strange but captivating world of Dostoyevsky as it is of Shakespeare's moral universe. When we read

Macbeth

, for instance, we have to be able to plunge into Shakespeare's world, ghosts and all. No understanding of

Macbeth

is possible if we begin with a rude dismissal such as "Of course, the whole premise is complete nonsense."

Novak is surprised to discover that in the entire literature of the new atheism, "there is not a shred of evidence that the authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism." This is not simply a matter of refusing to apply the vaunted virtue of skepticism to one's own philosophy. It is also a matter of giving an account of why such a tiny minority of people in our culture have embraced vocal atheism. If atheism is so obviously convincing, Novak asks, why are so few people drawn to it? The new atheists offer no answers; indeed, scarcely any of them even raise the question.

Novak likens Hitchens to Thomas Paine, that fiery pamphleteer and partisan of the American Revolution. Novak notes, however, that despite his hostility to Christianity, Paine understood that such concepts as the dignity of man and human rights depended on man's special place in God's creation. Indeed, the Jacobins of the French Revolution imprisoned Paine after he warned them that their atheism would undercut the basis of their declaration of human rights. Hitchens seems blissfully unaware of a whole tradition of scholarship, from Tocqueville to Jürgen Habermas, that identifies Christianity as the essential foundation of some of the West's most cherished institutions and values.

Habermas is perhaps our greatest living philosopher. In a 2005 lecture in Poland on "Religion in the Public Sphere," he raises a question central to Novak's inquiry. Habermas shows that the very idea of toleration is a gift that religious thought has bequeathed to modern secular society. Then he asks: Are secular people willing to acknowledge that toleration is always a two-way street? In other words, if religious people are expected to be tolerant of unbelievers, shouldn't secular people learn to be tolerant of their fellow citizens who are believers?

This argument has important implications. If Habermas and Novak are right, the public square should not be viewed as the property of secular citizens. Rather, it is the common ground on which believers and nonbelievers communicate with one another. It makes no sense to exclude religious convictions from the public sphere if secular convictions are granted full access. An uncritical "separation of church and state" must give way to a shared domain in which all citizens have the right to express their heartfelt convictions.