An e-mail (from a Catholic priest):

Kathryn, You were entirely too nice in your response to John Derbyshire. The heart of his argument is that belief is anterior to facts and reason. Indeed his fundamental conceit is that he and other members of the Enlightenment Project do not have beliefs that are anterior to facts and reason. Yet his cherished verification principle is just such a belief. Moreover, it is an incoherent belief, since it fails its own test—being incapable of verification itself. Its historic basis was a procedural rule of the Royal Society, that questions would not be discussed unless they could be resolved by an appeal to evidence. But there is a considerable distance from a procedural rule to a metaphysic. If the Royal Society will not discuss a question, does this mean that the question contains nothing to discuss? If I put on glasses that filter out every color but blue, does that mean the other colors do not exist? The believers that Derbyshire criticizes are not disciples of Universal Love, Compassion, and Brotherhood; they are disciples of Jesus. Their history contains shameful and criminal episodes of the misconstrual and misuse of power, but again the conceit of the Enlightenment Project is that it has no such episodes of its own. The most monstrous evils of human history were the totalitarian wars and genocides of the twentieth century, most of which were perpetrated by unbelievers, yet fellow unbelievers express neither acknowledgment nor remorse. In a patent double standard, they dissociate from their history but hold believers to be permanently compromised by their own. Pope John Paul II in the months leading up to millennium, carefully acknowledged before God the sins of the Catholic Church and expressed sorrow for them. That act did not undo the evils of the past, but it does allow for hope that these evils will not be repeated. The Enlightenment Project has done nothing similar, and indeed because of its conceits cannot. For Derbyshire the question of belief and unbelief is an foppish intellectual game. If he wanted to understand what he is talking about, he could begin by approaching the Bible, the Catechism, and the community of believers with a measure of humility and intellectual openness. As it is, he complains that he doesn’t understand a linguistic community when the deeper problem is that he refuses to learn its language. The best way to understand the Christian community is to spend time with its adepts, the people whose lives have been changed by religion: the people in 12-step programs; the people who live the meaning of natural family planning; the people who work tirelessly with limited resources in the service of Christ in his poor and his sick; the people whose lives radiate a sense of graciousness and peace because of long years of contemplative prayer. All of whom, presumably, he thinks self-deluded. And who appointed him the arbiter of doubt? Where does he get the right to ridicule the “precious, nursed, and petted ‘doubts’” of believers? “You guys,” he says. And there’s the whole problem. We guys can’t hope to share the stage with an illuminatus who has suffered like Derbyshire agonistes. Can he spell c-o-n-d-e-s-c-e-n-s-i-o-n? The reality is that his questions and accusations are entirely conventional and have been addressed many times. You were just too nice to him.