Mayb, I’m just coming in too late to all of this, but I don’t understand why everyone is so, well, snippy. JPod may be right about the dorm room philosophizing aspect of all this, but the reason those conversations go on so long is they’re supposed to be fun.

Anyway, if I may take a polite exception to the upshot of Heather’s latest contribution. She’s been arguing for a while that the traditionalist position need not be grounded in appeals to authority, tradition, the transcendent etc, because the data support the traditionalists when it comes to all sorts of issues like marriage, discipline in the schools etc. So religious conservative motives don’t matter nearly so much as the good public policies they sometimes yield. This is a perfectly honorable, serious and persuasive point of view as far as I’m concerned, firmly in the neocon tradition of The Public Interest, Charles Murray and, duh, Heather Mac Donald.

That said, I think Heather’s position that she can appreciate the pretty music Christianity helped create but that all bets are off for the rest of it is not only a bit condescending but runs counter to the larger project she’s been part of. The civilization we live in and the secular values we revere stand on a Judeo-Christian foundation. I think that’s pretty much undeniable.

Now, of course, ever since the Enlightenment we’ve been trying see how many of the religious bricks we can pull out without making the whole thing collapse. This game of metaphysical Jenga is far from over, but the damage from it is pretty obvious in all sorts of areas. Personally, I don’t know how far we can go before the whole thing crashes down — or whether it will collapse at all. But, I do believe that the sort of secular society and secular politics Heather lionizes — and which, truth be told, I do as well — is nonetheless indebted to, and sustained by, more of Christianity than simply its music.

Indeed, I always thought that it was the calling of modern conservatives in the tradition of Burke and Hayek to appreciate that we cannot know all of the ingredients in the civlizational soufflé. Our job, or so I thought, was to oppose sophisters and calculators who would attempt to clear of cobwebs of tradition and metaphysics with sliderules and unfurled blue prints.

Also, Heather writes: “I do not understand why religion should get a pass from the empirical and logical demands that we make towards other factual proposition.”

All I can say to this is she’s going to have a rough time in the theological muckraking business insofar as the truth claims of revelation and religion are always going to be slippery compared to, say, confirming the effects of illegitimacy. But I would have thought that Heather the empiricist would at least be a bit more respectful to the consequences of religious belief (a point her hero and mine, Irving Kristol, would surely make). Some religious traditions have been more successful at producing successful societies than others. Recognizing this doesn’t answer the underlying theological questions, but it does illuminate many comparative advantages between, for example, the West and the Islamic world. This sort of thing is much easier to measure (See Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, for example) and it involves a lot more than a collection of cantatas and choral works.