‘We are all in the same darkness’

THE DARK NIGHT OF ATHEISTS AND BELIEVERS

By Michael Novak

Doubleday, $23.95, 310 pages

REVIEWED BY WILLIAM MURCHISON

It puzzles Michal Novak, and maybe worries him a little bit, too, that the conventional tone of atheism, in its engagements with Christianity, is angry, spiteful, contemptuous. Disgusted, frankly, at the persistence of “myths” and “lies” and “delusions” that any intelligent atheist (and aren’t they all? - just ask them) could set to rest, if the nitwits would just listen!

Of course if the nitwits did listen, particular atheists — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris — would make a lot less money than they have become accustomed to in latter times, with their slashing, best-selling attacks on fools who seem to believe what they hear in church.

Mr. Novak, ever the genial, reasonable analyst, proposes “a prolonged, intelligent, and respectful conversation” between the religious and the foes of religion, who can’t admit to acknowledging an unseen God. “We are all in the same darkness,” he writes. The “unexplainedness of life” could use some explaining based on access to minds and intellects of all sorts. A genuine conversation would beat shouting any day in the week. Indeed, with Mr. Hitchens, whom Mr. Novak calls friend, it might be possible. Or maybe not, in that atheism, since the French and German enlightenments, has seemed stuck in confrontational pose. The idea of a transcendent God gives offense. Such a God makes demands incompatible with the sense of science and material investigation as the only trustworthy guides to knowledge.

Mr. Novak has taken on here a considerable chore, namely, pushing back, in a friendly spirit, against the secular presuppositions that rule so much of society. But which - here it gets interesting - seem ready to fade “at the end of the secularist age.” Entirely too many believe, one way or another, in God. Lacking “a regulative idea of truth,” or a desire to breed, or much else of a positive nature, the secularists seem “a fairly small minority in a sea of rising religious commitment.” Including the Muslim variety.

Mr. Novak himself would like to talk. The atheist philosopher Jurgen Habermas seems, by Mr. Novak’s standards, to be a wiling conversational partner. Perhaps others would come along. God knows.

However many choose to shake his outstretched hand, or to spurn it, Mr. Novak has written a genuinely useful book, notable for the unlikely combination of charity and intellectual toughness. In the reasoned defense of God and religion he won’t relent. (Did anyone expect otherwise?) Neither will he write off or dismiss with a wave of the hand those with whom he, and very conceivably God, disagree.

He thinks well enough of atheists as teachers and achievers. He takes seriously “the clarity of mind and persistent attention to evidence” displayed by a respected conservative writer I hadn’t known was an atheist — Heather MacDonald — with whom he engages in two chapters. She asks sharp questions. He responds. It is a delight to eavesdrop. With Mr. Hitchens, too, Mr. Novak is generous and attentive. I detect in Mr. Novak’s manner the tried-and-true intellectual commitment to learn from one’s adversaries and critics. (To the same end, some conservatives actually read the New York Times.)

The whole Novak enterprise here is a worthy one. Moreover, what better company than Mr. Novak himself, a towering scholar with a writing style beautifully suited to his purposes? I suppose there may be more felicitous advocates somewhere out there in the world of books. I frankly can’t think who they are. Certainly none are kinder, more understanding of viewpoints not their own. Not to feel beguiled and drawn, sitting in the presence of Michael Novak, is not to feel, period.

I sense, for all that, some structural defects in Mr. Novak’s account. There is, just below the chorus, the hum of the stitching machine: As if sentences, paragraphs, chapters had been lifted from other contexts and attached to one another by editorial art but with minimal thought for progression. There is too much topical skipping back and forth to suit me: Which could be my problem, but maybe not. We deal with Plato, Aristotle - and Darwin - at the back of the book instead of the front and middle, where Mr. Hitchens and Ms. McDonald long ago dropped in, so to speak, for a chat.

A quick historical account of atheism, and especially the enlightenment, would have set the stage. Mr. Novak meets us in media res: “Atheists Speak Out.” They just popped up? Not quite. They have antecedents. Critiques of various atheist positions emerge as discussion emerges of the various atheist positions.

I did not say loose organization spoils the book. I suggest it relieves the book of some tension and therefore of some beneficial excitement.

What makes an atheist anyway? Mr. Novak gives us some account of “blicks,” an adaptation of the philosopher R.M. Hare’s terminology referring (as Mr. Novak relates) to “an intellectual habit, the part that shapes one’s pattern of judgment concerning what is real or not real, true or false, credible or lacking in credibility. … A blick is a way of viewing reality … a rival way of seeing the world, such that some facts seem more salient, and more probably true. …”

All right. But where do “blicks” come from? And why do we have to talk about patterns of judgment, using a made-up word? A winner of the Templeton Prize for progress in religion might do a little better than that.

But he does well enough: Better than almost anyone else could have, perhaps, in setting the terms for rapprochement of sorts between two starkly different, well, blicks. And I know which side I’m on: Michael Novak’s. It’s what he does to a reader.

• William Murchison is a nationally syndicated columnist.