I couldn't have said it better myself

Heather MacDonald has been making a splash of late in conservative circles for her promulgation of a secular strain of conservatism. It started with this article on conservatism & religious belief in the August edition of the American Conservative. That prompted this reply from Michael Novak in National Review and FirstThings. Heather followed up with this reply to Novak today in National Review:

I have no doubt that a believer’s experience of God is powerful and transformative — indeed, that it is the most important reality in his life, as Novak so eloquently describes. I also know that no set of arguments can counter the force of that experience. But with all due respect, subjective experience is not always a guarantor of objective reality. It well may be that a Christian’s ecstatic awareness of God’s love is in fact caused by that love, but an outside observer needs something more to reach that conclusion.

He will likely evaluate the claims for God’s existence based on objective evidence. And here I have to revert to the question of why very bad things happen to good people, a topic which must be infinitely tedious to believers, because I find Novak’s arguments for God’s love more conclusory than evidentiary.

The most important characteristics of the Christian God, as I understand them, are his love of man and his justice. If one were to posit a god who is capricious, ironic, absent-minded, depraved, or completely unknowable, I’d be on board. Any one of those characteristics would comport with a deity superintending the world as I see it. But not the idea, as a Bush administration publicist put it to me, that every one of us is “precious in God’s eyes.”

Let me take a banal example. As I write this, the Los Angeles Times has a small item on a thoroughly unremarkable traffic accident. A 27-year-old man in Los Angeles misread a traffic signal, and drove his car into an oncoming Blue Line Metro Train. He and his sister were killed; his 7-year-old son and his grandmother were seriously injured.

Now imagine that a human father had behaved towards the occupants of the car as our Divine Father did. That is: a) He knew that his children would be mowed down by a train; b) he had the capacity to avert the disaster through any number of, for him, quite simple means; and c) he chose to do nothing. No one would call this father’s deliberate and possibly criminal passivity “love.” Instead, we would deem such a father a monster and banish him from our midst. Yet when God behaves in just this way, we remain firm in our conviction that he loved the occupants of that car, and that each was “precious” in his eyes.

How do I know that God could have averted the accident? Because believers tell me so. At the encouragement of their Church, Catholics regularly pray to saints to intercede with God on their behalf for the cure of sickness or protection from accidents. Such prayers would be nonsensical if God did not have the capacity to answer them. When a believer recovers from cancer, he thanks God for saving him. Ditto when an air passenger misses a flight which subsequently crashes — if he is a believer, he will likely thank God for keeping him off board (without wondering why he deserved a reprieve from death and the other passengers did not). If a hurricane misses a town, believers express gratitude to God for redirecting its course. As I mentioned in my American Conservative article, John Ashcroft credits God for keeping America safe since 9/11 (while holding him blameless from allowing the attack to go forward in the first place).

The traffic accident reported in the Los Angeles Times was quite trivial; such events happen on a daily basis in every town around the world. It is perhaps unfair to question God’s love for every “precious” last one of us on the basis of one measly car accident (which nevertheless was not insignificant for the car’s occupants). But it seems that there is simply nothing that will shake a believer from his conviction in God’s solicitude for man. This belief precedes worldly evidence; it does not grow out of it. Last year, National Review approvingly quoted Pope John Paul’s observation that God allowed “Nazism [only] twelve years of existence,” a statement intended to reassure us of God’s continuing love for individual human beings. A host of questions present themselves, including: Would 15 years have triggered a spasm of doubt? And if it’s acceptable for God to allow Nazism for 12 years, what about the Nazis themselves?

Perhaps when believers speak of God’s “love,” they use the term in a way that has nothing to do with ordinary usage. Novak maybe implies as much when he states: “What is difficult to believe is that any one of us . . . knows more than God does about His love for every individual.” God’s “love” is different from human love; it includes the capacity to foresee and watch the destruction of one’s children and not intervene. But then why not use a different word entirely — “callousness,” say. At the very least, if we are going to continue to use ordinary words in counterintuitive ways to refer to God, we should give them some sort of diacritical marker to let listeners know that the words they are hearing don’t mean what they ordinarily mean. One could speak of “G-love,” for instance, to distinguish it from ordinary human love.

This last paragraph from MacDonald eloquently makes the point that I have also made in past discussions on the Daily Duck saying that God has to either be judged by human standards of good and evil, in which he would be judged evil, or must be considered to be an alien, non-personal being following a different standard of good and evil that has no meaning or bearing for humans. He can't be personal and good, because as a person he is at best a cruel tyrant, at worst an unpredictable psychopath.

And MacDonald is dead on with these observations, which mirror the arguments that Harry, Skipper and I have been making in Pastor Kennedy's Deadly Hair:

Novak’s characterization of the Catholic Church strikes me as debatable. Perhaps today’s Catholic Church stands for “liberty,” but that phrase may be anachronistic applied to most of the Church’s glory years, even without reference to its reaction to the Reformation or the establishment of the Universal Inquisition. Even during the great explosion of Renaissance art under the patronage of Popes Julius II and Leo X, I don’t think that “liberty” was what the Church was about. Order, authority, grandeur, hierarchy — yes, and these are all extremely valuable traits. The uniting of temporal and spiritual power—that, as well, to magnificent result in Rome and elsewhere.

I also disagree slightly with Novak’s claim that Christianity conquered the world only “by argument and by personal example.” This may be true in the main, but early Christian emperors stamped out classical religion by destroying temples and outlawing pagan rituals. Pagans, Jews, and heretics were pariahs under the law. Justinian the Great shut down the Academy in Athens. These may have been necessary measures, but they go beyond argument.

You go, girl! MacDonald's summary is a perfectly reasoned response to the argument that conceptions of morality and justice are exclusively religious in nature and not derivable through secular principles:

Religious institutions and beliefs are, however, human creations. They grow out of man’s instinct for system and order, as well as out of the desire for life beyond death and a divine intervener in human affairs. Our striving for justice is one of the great human attributes. Far from imitating a divine model, man’s every effort to dispense justice is a battle against the randomness that rules the natural world.

It is probably not possible to determine whether the aspects of modern life that we most value today — including the rule of law, scientific exploration, or the free market — trace their origins ultimately to Christianity or to concurrent developments in the Western world. But America’s governing institutions stand on strong secular grounds, as well as whatever religious origins we may want to give them. And the arguments for conservative values can proceed on reason alone.

Make room, religious conservatives. The secular Cons are here! Deal with it.

Update: Razib Khan provides an excellent blow by blow commentary of the Heather MacDonald/National Review debates.