The "Bridge to Being" Blog

Hugh Hewitt: Welcome ….Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair columnist, author most recently of the New York Times bestseller, “God Is Not Great” … and Professor David Allen White, for more than 25 years, a professor of English literature at the United States Naval Academy, the author of the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare and most recently the “Horn of the Unicorn”. …

 

David Allen White: … Of course there have been many, many different factions, different visions that have helped keep civilization alive. But I would assign something of a special role to what I call the Christian West. In fact, it’s one of the things that troubles me about “god Is Not Great”. ….there is a sense in the book of looking at the dark side and the down side, almost exclusively, there’s a wonderful comment by Dorothy Sayers about people who only read the Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. And she says it’s a bit like visiting one of the great cities of Europe, say Paris, and only spending your time in the sewers.

 

Christopher Hitchens: (laughing)

 

DAW: If you come up above into the landscape, you’re going to see not just Notre Dame, but the Louvre filled with paintings, you’re probably going to have a fine French meal as well, which I think is part of that civilization. And the incredible diversity that Catholic culture spread throughout Europe is still fascinating and part of our legacy. Not denying the others played a role, but I would assert there is something special and extraordinarily beautiful in what the Church offered.

 

HH: Christopher Hitchens, did you go out of your way to avoid elaborating on Christianity’s gifts to civilization?

 

….

 

CH: … Look, on the point of whether one only emphasizes the bad, my book is written as a critique of religion, so I take it for granted that those who believe in the virtues of it already know what those are. Now I couldn’t be without Notre Dame, for example, nor could I be without quite a lot of devotional music. I could actually do without a fair amount of devotional painting, but who cares what my opinion on paintings are? My point would be this. We have no means of absolutely knowing for certain that the people who built and painted and composed those things were themselves believers. What we do know is that it would have been very dangerous for them not to be, extremely dangerous, and that many of them did have to write and perform in fear. We know that because of what happened to Giordano Bruno, to Galileo and to many others, and from many other testimonies. I actually don’t think St. Peter’s in Rome is that wonderful a building. But if you think it is, and if you want to take credit for it, then you have to accept also the responsibility for the fact that it was built on the revenues of the special sale of indulgences.

 

DAW: Chalk and cheese. Let me just clarify one thing. If you’re speaking about the artists, I think it’s true; it’s very difficult to get at the core of an artist’s intentions. The question of them living in fear I don’t know about, and then the examples you give are two scientists. That to my mind is very much a separate issue. I would say this - it seems to me very difficult to come up with what I think we might agree on, as masterpieces of music, literature, painting, sculpture, if there isn’t some higher vision, if there isn’t something motivating it. I don’t know of many great artists who have created great art solely out of fear.
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HH: … Christopher Hitchens, the question on the table is - without a higher vision, can there ever be great art?

 

CH: No, I would say there could not. I mean, I think that there’s a big confusion, though, in many people’s minds between the transcendent and the supernatural. I have a special passage in my book trying to speak about this. I think is one wants to consider the awe inspiring and the infinite and the majestic, that actually, there’s more to be found if you study the photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, or examine the extraordinary beauty and implications of the double helix, or read a page of Stephen Hawking on the event horizon than there is in, say, the contemplation, I’m very sorry to say, of St. Dominic, and that the natural world is wonderful enough, and as Einstein says, the miraculous thing about it is they aren’t in miracle, that it works with an impressive, extraordinary underlying regularity. Now Dr. White can’t follow me in this by, it seems to me, by definition, because he’s obliged to believe that the Church has recorded and established Divine interventions that are responsive to prayerful intercessions that changed the natural order in favor of those praying, for example, a belief that I’m sorry to say, I must get out of the way, I think is utterly nonsensical, and actually sinister.

 

HH: David Allen White?

 

DAW: A number of things to comment on there. Let me start with a word of praise for the book. I find in it one of the more interesting passages. I wish I could quote it at length, but in the book, Mr. Hitchens talks about indeed those staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, talks about the glorious mystery and the symmetry of the double helix. I wouldn’t disagree that those are remarkable things, and that science at its greatest has allowed us view that. Now obviously, our response to that will be different. But I do have a question, and I would like to get to the other issue about prayer in a moment, but let me put it this way. One of the great events in modern human history was that man stepped off the planet. It was an extraordinary scientific event - it was an extraordinary human event, an engineering feat that in its way was incomparable. I know of only two works inspired from that event. One, Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On The Moon, which I’m very fond of, even though Mr. Mailer drives me crazy much of the time with things he says, but I think he is a fine writer and an interesting writer.

 

CH: Well, we agree about that.

 

HH: Christopher Hitchens, … are you destroying civilization by attacking God?

 

CH: Well, right…Well, Oscar Wilde, who we’d both have to agree was a rather heterodox Catholic, did, I remember once say, that there were religions that invented green chartreuse can never truly die. And like you, I’m a great fan of Evelyn Waugh, but I’m sorry to say that the will to power, which Nietzsche said would be all that was left of that religion, is expressed through religion as well. You don’t get away from the will to power by invoking faith. It’s part of the will to power, and it’s always been used for it. And if you want instances of power without grace, there are many theocracies to which I can point you, sir, as you must know.

 

DAW: Oh, of course I know, but again, it doesn’t invalidate the notion that grace exists, and power is more dangerous without grace.

…

CH: It would if it were true, but I mean, but what Professor White has to do before he goes any further is to say that he repudiates the decades, generations in which children were told in blood-curdling tones by elderly virgins, that they would go to hell if they played with themselves, even though they were Catholic, and those who weren’t Catholic would go to hell no matter what, if they had turned away from the Church, if they were the wrong kind of Christian, or if they were Jewish, or Muslims. And the whole argument of invincible ignorance is invented to deal with an insuperable problem, which is this. Why did the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth only begin and occur in a small, remote, inaccessible, illiterate part of Palestine? Why are the millions and millions of people who’ve been born and died never hearing of it, why there are still millions and millions of people who never had the chance to be redeemed in the only available way? The Church says extra-ecclesia nulla salus. Am I not correct?

 

DAW: That’s absolutely correct, yes.

….

HH: Professor White?

 

DAW: Well, I’m not sure it would be fair to say that the Church claims to know the mind of God. What the Church claims is that revelations came from God, telling us the things we needed to know to eventually attain salvation. In the simplest terms of the Catechism, the first question of the old Baltimore Catechism, why are we here? To know, love and serve God in this world, and be with Him in the next. There’s no claim that we have the entire picture. We can never as humans fully grasp the mind of God. It’s a great blessing that we’ve been given a glimpse of it as we have, and that He’s spoken to us, and told us what we need to know. But it’s very interesting, you know, in a sense that the debate will rage on. I think eventually, a revelation will come even to those who don’t believe. But a little line from William Blake. He who doubts from what he sees will never believe. Do what you please. There is a kind of entrenchment in positions, I think more now than ever before, because science offers an alternative. And it may be more difficult to believe now than it’s ever been in the past, and I think that may be a sign we’re in, as the Chinese say, interesting times.

 

 

HH: Christopher Hitchens, in our first conversation in this series, and I hope there will be more, I had you opposite theologian Mark Roberts, and I quoted to you from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Einstein, in which Einstein said, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that behind all the discernible laws and connection, there remains something subtle and tangible and inexplicable, a veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend, and that is my religion. To that extent, in fact, I am religious.” Now David Allen White says science destroys religion. It seems to me that Einstein is saying it builds upon it.

 

CH: Well, I’m saying that if you take religion as being the pantheism of Spinoza, who was in fact Einstein’s favorite philosopher, a man not just excommunicated by his own synagogue, but that excommunication enthusiastically seconded by the Catholic and Protestant authorities of the day. It was a very highly dangerous heresy. Then it amounts to then what I was saying earlier about the Hubble telescope or the double helix. Of course there are things that are awe inspiring that make us feel small, that inspire in us the transcendent. But these have nothing to do with the supernatural. The insistence of Einstein is that there are no miracles, there are no changes in the natural order, God does not intervene in our affairs, there is no such person, in fact, to do so. And his statements about organized religion throughout his life were uniformly contemptuous for that reason.

 

HH: David Allen White?

 

DAW: Let me ask a question. I want to clarify one thing. I am not in any way against science. It seems to me fairly obvious that there have been scientific discoveries of the last few centuries that have been absolutely remarkable. I’m in total agreement with that. And everything from the exploration out there, which is fascinating…I mean, the pictures from the Hubble telescope are indeed awe inspiring, as well as going deep inside, the miracles of biology and what we’ve learned about the human body. This is remarkable. There is a role for science, it has to do with nature, it has to do with our understanding of the way things are created, and how they operate. My concern is that there is a corresponding diminution of the inner life. Let me put it this way. I ask my students this often. I ask them to name their five senses, and they can all do it, of course, instantaneously. And those five senses are the means by which we know nature and the outside world. Back in the Middle Ages, there was the notion of the five wits: common sense, fancy imagination, estimation, sometimes call judgment or memory. They have not idea of these. And the fact of the matter is there is an inner life, there are things going on inside us. Now I understand, given the book, that religion is rejected by Christopher Hitchens, but is there not an inner life that is worthy of exploring that can take us to places that the discoveries of science and nature cannot? Let me ask you a specific question. In the book, you refer more than once to the conscience. Would you agree that the conscience is part of what I’m calling the inner life?

 

CH: Absolutely I would. I believe that’s why I spent a little time discussing Socrates and what he called his daemon, his inner prompting that warned him when he was being dishonest or in an argument, for example, that made him break off from doing so.

 

DAW: Exactly, so…

 

CH: We know that there are some people who are born without this. We call them sociopathic, or we know that some people are born positively like flouting such admonition, and we call them psychopaths. C.S. Lewis said that of course, the conscience was in a way the proof, the demonstration of the existence of God, which I don’t think you can claim that it is. But that’s why I began by saying that religion has to be understood as our first and, alas, worst, because first attempt at philosophy, at understanding who we are, why we’re here, what we’re for, and what ultimately our duties are to one another. As all these matters can be just as profoundly addressed in the absence of any belief in the supernatural, or any hope, and this is important, I think, of a Divine reward or a Divine punishment.

 

DAW: Well, if I may say so, Socrates also believed in that. As you know in the Fido Dialogue, he posits not just an afterlife, he’s talking about the immortality of the soul, but curiously posits a place of judgment. Those who have committed terrible wrongs are thrown into the lake of Tarterus, and never emerge again. And then he talks about those who have done things wrong, but basically curable, who after they spend their time are released, and then those who go immediately to a very pleasant place. I mean, he, through reason, he comes to Dante as well. But let me ask one…

 

…

 

HH: Professor White… Mr. Hitchens said that his confidence in the explanation for unknown mysteries about the person and science is “the exponential projection of accumulated experience with fact.” If you take that standard and apply it to the exponential projection of accumulated experience with the unknown, beginning with Socrates and extending through Walker Percy, doesn’t that point us overwhelmingly to a belief in God, contrary to Mr. Hitchens’ most recent book?

 

DAW: Well you see, that is precisely what brought me back to questions of faith, and eventually brought me into the Church. To quote my…well, if I may, one of our favorite writers, Evelyn Waugh, the Church is there, and it is a coherent philosophical system that Waugh says make intransigent historical claims. It’s difficult to ignore. Let me just put it that way. But in any case, I do see at the center of things a mystery. But that mystery and the acknowledgement of that mystery allows us to go exploring. My worry is that science is turning into scientism as such, and too many people are taking it exclusively, and as they do so, the mystery of man himself is disappearing. You quote this line in the book, and it’s appropriate, Hamlet saying to Horatio there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. By the end of the play, there’s the astonishing moment at the death of Hamlet when Horatio, the skeptic and the agnostic, in his farewell, says goodnight sweet prince and flights of angels, sing thee to they rest. I find it overwhelmingly beautiful, and a great mystery that Horatio has learned there is more than he believed of in that universe. I find the mystery, the emotion, the beauty of it overwhelming, and I don’t think it was based on something false or phony. I believe it has a very real base that is different from science, because we are half dust, and we explore the dust through nature, and we’re have divinity, and the language the mystery of the internal life, and our spiritual yearning, which I think you now put into the world of science, draw us in that direction.

 

HH: Christopher Hitchens?

 

CH: Yeah, well I don’t think Hamlet saw the ghost, either, though it’s very…you can’t have the play without it. But you see, you’re trying to force me to sound like an absolutely dry and arid materialist.

 

DAW: No, you’re not, and… …no, no, let me be fair…

 

CH: The fact that Democritus and Epicurus and Lucretius worked out - I have no idea how they managed to do this - that all matter was made of atoms. I daresay you don’t contest that?
…

 

It was interesting that Mr. Hitchens seemed almost ready to accept, at least provisionally, the Einstein-Spinoza view of an intelligently organized universe.  This would go a long way to explain his acknowledged sense of awe.

Humanists have been struggling with the “death of god” of at least of what Einstein called a “personal god” for the last 200 years or so.  I find two figures very interesting and instructive: Spinoza and his latter day followers – favorably referred to by Mr. Hitchens, and the legendary Dr. Albert Schweitzer, whose life affirming humanism is almost universally venerated. 

Each life story is somewhat emblematic of the two enduring threads in the non-religious humanist tradition.

Spinoza’s vision of reality was of a well ordered materialism in which all was part of the God whose essential nature was order; this was hardly the deity of Abraham, Sarah and Jacob, and it seemed to allow no room for good and evil because, all was God. 

Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow 17^th century Jews. Spinoza was later reclaimed by his modern Reform Jewish coreligionists.  His 20^th century almost-but-not-quite secular camp follower was Albert Einstein, another ethically enlightened humanist, one who – truth be told – was not a full-on atheist, but certainly one who had rejected a “personal god” in favor of an impersonal Source-of-all-order.

Schweitzer’s ethical model, reverence for life, was colored by a tragic vision in which he saw a universal will-to-live torn by the Darwinian struggle. We can trace his sense of revulsion to the deeper normative unity implied by the use of the term “universal”.  I located Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s compelling aphorism (“The world presents the ghastly spectacle of a universal will-to-live divided against itself”) in his book, “Philosophy of Civilization”, long out of print.  Put so elegantly, his inadequately differentiated life affirmation seemed to blur the distinction between intelligent, morally conscious human life and animal life.

Both thinkers experienced reverence for the universal.  But I detect a similar confusion in both Spinoza’s arid pantheism* (ref. my extended footnote discussion about “the god models” below), and Albert Schweitzer’s richer, but tragic Reverence of Life.

It seems to me that both models missed or disregarded the moral distinctions based on the local presence of absence of living, volitional, moral conscious beings (Spinoza’s rocks, trees, and stars, may be “God” - the non-local whole - but they are not living sentient, thinking moral agents, and Schweitzer’s animals, though alive, are not as morally valuable, say, as a small child). To be fair, Schweitzer was a physician, and his actual practice was more reasonable than his aphorism implies; he saved people in preference to animals.  An aphorism, however penetrating, is not an axiom.

Both models, it also seems to me, seem to blur the nature and significance of intelligent morally aware consciousness vs. proto intelligent non consciousness objects or living things. Not everything in the “world” is equally alive, or equally awake.  Spinoza and Schweitzer’s visions (however compelling in part) seem less morally persuasive to me than classic historically-founded humanism, the kind abstracted in the aphorism “man is the measure of all things” attributed to Protagoras, and given flesh during Renaissance Italy. 

I note for later discussion that - like some of the biblical models – Spinoza and Schweitzer’s humanism share a common a view of the world as – for better or worse – essentially a finished project of the Creator (for Spinoza, perfect in its cosmic order or for Schweitzer, eternally broken by endless cannibalism).

Christopher Hitchens is an engaging, thoughtful essayist with a conscience. Phillip Pullman is a wonderful writer, living in Oxford, England, who has thoughtfully explored cosmic questions about the purpose of human life and the nature of the universe in his brilliant fantasy, the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Pullman, grandson of an Anglican priest, has been named by “The New Yorker” as “one of England’s most outspoken atheists”. In spite of that disclaimer, I find a strong spiritual thread operating in his work. 

From each writer we get a sort of Eric Hoffer-esque* contempt for all forms of ecclesiastic authority.

*

Hoffer’s best work, “The True Believer”, exposed Nazism and communism as secular religions the organizational morphology of which mirrored the authoritarian religions that both Hitchens and Pullman deplore. I had the privilege if seeing this passionate, coherent, trenchant self educated longshoreman twice in the sixties, a man who maintained from life experience that the common people were “lumpy with talent” and that the idle intellectuals were a dangerous combination of skill and lack of judgment.

Among the species of morally outraged atheists, the contempt of the abuses of ecclesial authority is a bias-engendering attitude that is allowed to reflect back against divine authority itself. For these intellectuals, the abuse of earthly authority by church is presumed to reflect that of the divine. It is as if some of the institutional proponents of religion are actually mirroring an unjust deity.  The resulting atheism is morally inspired, and entails the rejection of a deity that is seen as too external, too hierarchical, too controlling and too unjust.  I also get the strong impression that these, and other humanist atheists, are reacting to a specific theological construct as if it were the only one – while possibly knowing that it is not – in order to make a more effective moral critique.  In this they might resemble the early first century Christians who, from the point of view of the Roman polytheistic pagans, were the world’s “first atheists”.

I believe that the deeper core of this thread of atheistic writing, imbued as it is with a civilized humanism, represents an overbroad rebellion against non-essential religious doctrines, like the vicarious denial of moral accountability based on one version of Christ’s atonement for the sins of the rest of us for all time. [I acknowledge that this statement of the atonement doctrine is something of a caricature.]

This may explain why the typical secular atheist’s (or agnostic’s) threshold of proof for acceptance of the divine’s existence is so often set much higher than for any other beliefs that aren’t empirically verifiable in the sense of a controlled physical experiment, because the outcome of such a belief system seems to validate one’s condemnation by “higher authority”, the loss of one’s creative autonomy and the diminution of individual moral accountability. 

After all, those of us who represent the neo-theists, if you will, are equally opposed by any loss of any human creative autonomy and vigorously opposed the cheapening of individual moral accountability whether via value-free multi-culturalism or a theology of fuzzy, pan-value “forgiveness”. 

Then there is the “this life is much more important to than any mythical life after death” point of view.  This formulation (true as it is - in part) avoids the questions: 

I should note that, among the most morally self conscious secular humanists, the notion of conscience is usually accepted as a given. But it is too often taken as a comfortable, unexamined given, without the necessary (and difficult) inquiry as to “How can this be?” [A brilliant attempt to answer this question has just been written by Jacob Needleman, a philosopher of the old school, one equally comfortable quoting Socrates, St. Paul and Hillel the elder. His book, “Why Can’t We Be Good?” (2007), is carefully (and beautifully) written in terms that bridge the secular humanist - theist gap.] 

It is assumed, I suspect, that as long as conscience is shared among one’s civilized colleagues, further inquiry is neither necessary nor fruitful. 

Again, the deeper question remains essentially unanswered (Why should we care about anything that happens after we die?) other than by saying, “because I want us to”.

Among the wisest and most sensitive secular humanists you tend to find a confession of longing for some of the comforts of the religious sensibility - “If only it were true”, they tend to concede, followed by – “but I care most about what actually is the case. 

As if the non-atheists did not also care about the truth. 

One senses that for an atheist of a certain stripe to weaken his or her hard stance, say, by believing in a universe imbued with meaning and purpose, is somehow psychologically threatening.  I sense that it threatens to set up the “believer” for profound disappointment.  You can almost see the still painful wounds revealed by this stance. PEAS again.

So we tend to hear the claim that one’s awe at the majesty and beauty of nature is the sufficient substitute for that which is dismissed as supernatural belief. [“See we have a sense of material transcendence, after all!”] But this, too, is done without a deeper inquiry as to why the human faculty for awe-filled apprehension should be even possible for us. 

Ultimately, what is really being rejected here? I suspect it is the model of an extrinsic deity, one that is all too easily appropriable by abusive human authority, a deity that – from the perspective of these critics – is (if real) unwilling to intervene against the counterfeit prophets. 

But missing from this worldview is a robust connection to hope, holiness and the divine intelligence; these are the gifts that only the confidence engendered by faith can provide us. In the last two examples I detect the atheism of the painful disappointment of the disillusioned.

To be fair, at the same time I have witnessed evidence of a robust sense of conscience and justice among many self professed “non-believers”. But this commitment, however passionate and brave, must be asserted by our atheist friends as an arbitrary stance, firmly held “in the air” as it were, but without the taint of a foundation in “faith”. 

This is sometimes called heroic atheism. I firmly believe that any dialogue abut the human condion will be enriched by their welcome inclusion.

Wherever we find ethical integrity and fierce moral allegiance we are detecting evidence of an explicit or implicit pan-generational source of ethical motivation. I propose there are “god implications” in such moral alignments towards the universe, whether acknowledged or not.