Faith and reason

IF YOU HAD TO LIST the problems afflicting America, lack of vigor in the culture wars would probably not be very high on the list. (Can any of us bear another red-state/blue-state story?) Yet two very different writers – from opposite sides of the secular/ religious divide – recently declared that there are two groups of people who ought to throw themselves into the fray with fresh energy: atheistic scientists and intellectual Christians.

In the spring issue of The American Scholar, the literary journal of the honor society Phi Beta Kappa, the science writer Natalie Angier tries to rally the skeptics – by definition a hard thing to do – in a piece called “My God Problem – and Theirs.” The inspiration for the essay, she writes, was her visits with top scientists in the course of researching a forthcoming book about “the essential vitamins and minerals” of scientific literacy.

The scientists were uniformly appalled by polls that found that 82 percent of Americans think there’s a heaven and 51 percent believe in ghosts while only 28 percent believe the theory of evolution. Please, the scientists implored, help us bump up that last figure by getting across

that evidence for Darwinism is “overwhelming” and that “an appreciation of evolution serves as the bedrock of our understanding of all life on this planet.”

But Angier detects a whiff of hypocrisy here. Sure, she writes, scientists sharpen the skewers when quizzed about “creationist ‘science’ . . . astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending.” But when asked about a different kind of supernaturalism, “they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent.” When it comes to discussing the virgin birth – “an act of parthenogenesis,” as Angier wryly puts it, “that defies everything we know about mammalian

genetics and reproduction” – or the resurrection, or the parting of the Red Sea, scientists

“don the calming cardigan of a kiddie-show host on public TV.”

But if scientists – worried about protecting their grants, perhaps – aren’t brave enough to speak up against biblical supernaturalism, she asks, why should anyone be surprised that the public opts for divine creation over Darwin when it comes to the question of how the zebra got his stripes?

If scientists should come out swinging, however, so should brainy Christians, argues the eminent Jesuit theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles, in the May 2004 issue of the conservative journal First Things, published by the interreligious Institute on Religion and Public Life.

In a piece titled “The Rebirth of Apologetics,” Dulles, a professor at Fordham University, points out that for centuries Catholic priests and theologians were trained in the art of arguing with skeptics: They jousted with Romans who thought Christians were by definition

bad citizens, and centuries later squared off against Enlightenment philosophers who

said human reason was the only lens through which to view the universe. But apologetics

has waned since the 19th century, partly because theologians went too far in rejecting

biological and archaeological discoveries, and partly because even Catholics began to sense that hyper-logical argumentation missed the point of religion. The result, Dulles contends, is that far too many intellectuals were raised to believe that faith is inherently irrational.

Classical apologetics attempts to prove the existence of God through “quasi-scientific methods of inquiry,” writes Dulles, who applauds those contemporary academic believers who engage their peers on those grounds. The Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft, for example, speaks often on what he argues are the internal contradictions of moral relativism.

But Dulles has in mind a new, more humanistic sort of apologetics, one that stresses the reasonableness of giving “free assent” to the testimony of the Apostles. All historians and journalists must judge the trustworthiness of their sources, he notes. And the plausibility of the Apostles’ accounts is enhanced by their convergence on key points (Jesus’s divinity, his teachings, his resurrection) and by the striking effect the encounter with Jesus had on the Apostles’ lives. They suffered scourging and imprisonment rather than renounce the belief that they’d met the son of God, despite beginning as pious Jews wholly opposed to such an idea.

Dulles concedes that arguments based on the persuasiveness of testimony, while more accessible than philosophy, don’t take you all the way to faith, which must still be “a gift from God, a grace.” (Angier may find especially unsatisfying Dulles’s argument that “the story of Jesus, vivid in its details and majestic in its pattern, surpasses human powers of nvention.”) Yet it provides a new avenue for believers to evangelize nonbelievers, a commitment of the current pope.

Despite the call to arms from both sides, however, one doesn’t get the sense after reading these two articles that a battle is about to be joined. Instead, worldviews seem to slide past one another like planets in orbits that will never cross. Is this progress, compared to the science-religion wars of earlier times – or an intellectual dead end?

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