Letters

No One Agrees about God

It was an honor to have a reviewer of the intellectual talent of John Wilson, the founding editor of a splendid bimonthly review of books, Books and Culture (“Out of Darkness,” December 1). I appreciate the kind things he wrote about No One Sees God, as well as his severe criticism about what seem to him its three main “muddles.” He thinks I mix up the Christian faith with philosophy, illicitly confuse the darkness of the atheist with the darkness of the theist (including Christians and Jews), and do not protect simple believers like our grandmothers from the demands rightly made upon philosophers.

Of course, it is easy to see how my rhythmic shifting of gears between one argument and another in No One Sees God could have been experienced by many readers as a series of “muddles.” That shifting resulted from the difficulty of the task.

With more skill someone else might have better resolved those difficulties, but the difficulties themselves were unavoidable. It was crucial for No One Sees God to keep its central line of argument within the sphere of natural theology (the philosophy of God), even though this is a project that Protestant Christianity has often rejected, both traditionally and in modern times.

On the other hand, it was also crucial to rebut some of the “New Atheists’” attacks upon the Jewish and Christian God, attacks that are sometimes so naïve that they threaten even the philosophical approaches to God. Jewish and Christian conceptions of God derive from God’s own “pulling back the veils” (revelare) that hide his full nature from reason. But revelation depends on the possibility that the Author of all things can make known, to creatures capable of insight, reasoning, and judgment, truths addressed to their minds. He invites them to accept or to reject these truths, on grounds for which they are prepared to give an account. Thus, revelation implicitly affirms the legitimacy and necessity of the exercise of reason.

Add in the third difficulty. Even non-philosophers — especially non-philosophers — usually have an obscure awareness of God’s presence. That seems to be the default position of the human race, not only in the long-distant past but today. One does not expect non-philosophers to have much patience with the long arguments philosophers need to make. Still, one expects philosophy to give a good account of why ordinary, simple awareness of the presence of God is justifiable even to philosophers.

No One Sees God sets forth many road signs to guide the reader as to when the argument is philosophical, and when it must necessarily defend Christian accounts of God against unwarranted charges — unwarranted on purely philosophical grounds. I remind the reader often that the main purpose of the book is to give centrality to philosophy, not faith.

If I am allowed to live so long, perhaps I may later offer a fuller account of Christian faith. In any case, favorite authors of mine such as Romano Guardini have written such books far better than I can (see, especially, his The Lord). That is surely clear to readers of my earlier attempt to write such a book, Confession of a Catholic.

Most simple believers that I know — my mother, for instance — at some time in their lives have experienced the darkness of unknowing about which I write. But she would never have talked about it in the language of philosophers, or even mentioned it at all. I know some of the things she suffered in silence, and I saw how deeply they made her distraught even about her relationship with God. Thus, while the darkness of which I write may not be the daily bread of countless simple believers, a great many seem to have experienced it at certain crucial times in their lives.

Finally, there are in No One Sees God more pages than I wish to repeat here on the differences between “doubt” and the dark knowledge of “the cloud of unknowing.” Among us, both believers and unbelievers find it impossible to see God with our own eyes, or to detect him by any of our other senses. God is not a material object, one more piece of furniture in the universe. God cannot be reached through our senses. God does not operate on that frequency. And God is also out of range of our imagination and memory. Only little children can draw pictures of God.

As adults, when we do come to know God (in this case, whether by philosophy or by Christian faith), we can only do so by a “knowledge of unseeing,” a kind of clouded, screened-off knowing, but no less certain for that. This knowing is not the same as doubt. It is not born of confusion or uncertainty or partial ignorance. It is real knowledge, a certain knowledge, tested by long experience, knowledge one would die for rather than be unfaithful to. A most practical knowledge. Worth trusting one’s life to.

These very differences mark the divergence between the darkness experienced by the atheist and that experienced by those who sense, that is, know (not just simply “believe”) the presence of God in which they live. Both experience a very real darkness — the atheist looks, and there is no one there. When he seeks God, the atheist comes up with blanks. Often this is no torment to an atheist, only a darkness, which he interprets as a null category: “There is no God.”

By contrast, the one who knows of God’s presence soon feels the inadequacy of all human “frequencies” (of sense, imagination, and even reason) to bring the living God face-to-face. Such a one knows this unseeing as a real absence, and a very painful loss. This is all the more true in the case of someone like Mother Teresa, who staked everything on the love she bore for the unseen God. After all, this is the same love she meant to convey to the poor ones she serves. She felt cut off from her own source of the love she meant to share with them.

It is not easy for anyone to trace out the differences in the empirical experiences of darkness by the atheist and the knower of God. But the differences in the pain they feel are stark. In addition, Jews and Christians who have been well instructed know to expect this dark night, and in its worst moments to follow their North Star, which is to bear love to their neighbors — especially to those they don’t particularly like. “How can you love God whom you don’t see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you do see?”

What Jewish and Christian revelation adds to philosophy, which philosophy itself has sometimes gained a hint of but hardly dares to assert on its own, is that God reveals himself as the love that impels us to show love to one another. The fact that sometimes some atheists do this, and better than some (even many) Christians do, merely throws another lovely irony into the fire: “Judgment is mine, sayeth the Lord.”

The mysteries of what actually occurs in every human heart are not for humans to judge. On the Last Day, the Creator and Judge of all humans may draw unto himself some we think of as atheists (even some who think of themselves as atheists, but who show self-sacrificing love to others), and may cast some others who imagine themselves to be “good” Christians into outer darkness, because love for others is the very test they failed.

Michael Novak Author, No One Sees God

Put a Cap in Your Plan

Jim Manzi’s suggestion that Republicans oppose cap-and-trade in Congress next year (“You Paid What for That?”; December 1) seems a good blueprint for turning the party into a permanent minority.

Obama’s campaign rhetoric about reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent is obviously pure fluff. More likely is a modest cap-and-trade or carbon tax that may raise gas prices by 20 cents and electrical bills about $6 a month, and promise to reduce carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020. So what’s wrong with this? Manzi concedes there are reasons to worry about global warming. Passing a law to restrict carbon emissions is no more worrisome than passing a law to prevent people from littering the sidewalk. Cap-and-trade is a market mechanism originally suggested by Milton Friedman.

Conservatives should be concentrating their firepower on the liberal environmental effort to stonewall nuclear power and replace it with windmills and solar energy, because in fact nuclear power is the only technology that will ever be able to replace fossil fuels.

William Tucker Piermont, N.Y.

Jim Manzi replies: I agree with Mr. Tucker that many government-sponsored alternative energy schemes are politically motivated and economically irrational. But the Obama cap-and-trade proposal is no exception.

Mr. Tucker may choose to support a different plan that attempts to achieve only one-fourth of the emissions reductions of Obama’s proposal (though to get such a plan on the table, he’d have to accomplish a significant negotiating victory). But consider such a “modest” cap-and-trade program that raises the price of gas by 20 cents per gallon in an effort to reduce consumption by 20 percent. This would be nice if it worked, but the price of gas went up by about $1.50 over the past several years, and consumption dropped only a few percentage points. This is because the private economic benefits of burning carbon are so high. The bottom line is that it’s incredibly expensive to try to force emissions reductions through taxes or rationing, and 20 cents just won’t cut it.

As for turning Republicans into a permanent minority, resisting such a scheme might be politically damaging, but if recent events are any guide, that won’t be the case: Resisting the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade scheme this spring turned out to be one of the only significant conservative political victories of 2008.

Explanation and Apology: In our last issue, because of a technological glitch, letters with diacritical marks (such as the “e” in “café”) printed as non-Roman characters. ÖÓÞs.