Michael Novak doesn't understand atheists

Michael Novak, longtime Catholic writer & commentator, tries to get inside the atheist mindset in this post from the FirstThings blog:

Writers who call themselves atheists have often surprised me by their reasons for not believing in God. In the long history of humanity, of course, their unbelief is an anomaly, a distinctly minority position. Even Clarence Darrow once said that he certainly did not believe in the Jewish or Christian God, but any damn fool knows there is a force and an intelligence that has shaped the universe we live in. But a few others, oddly, do not even believe that much.

I remember once reading a book about atheism by an atheist, who after considerable study of the situation in the United States wrote that (I forget the exact number) something like 70 percent of those who call themselves atheists do actually believe in a force or energy or ordering intelligence within the natural order. If that is what “God” is, they believe in God. They say “atheist,” it seems, to distinguish themselves from being Christians or Jews.

For a similar reason, some call themselves “naturalists,” as if Christianity and Judaism mean “supernaturalist.”

"A force or intelligence" does not equate to the word "God". That's equivalent to saying "I believe that there's something out there that does something which causes things to be as they are". A computer has intelligence. You could say that an ant colony is intelligent. The question which must be answered in the affirmative to equate that force or intelligence with God is "is it a personal, singular intelligence". That rules out collective or non-personal intelligence.

You can confuse the God question in any number of ways. You can define "God" so broadly as to make it impossible for anyone not to believe in it. By doing so you will have emptied the word of any meaningful content. To me the most salient dividing line between belief and nonbelief is to consider whether the acknowledgement of this entity makes any real difference in how the believer lives his or her life. Does his God demand any personal recognition, worship or due? Does his conception of God change the way he would live his life from the way he would without that conception of God. Does his God "matter"?

One reason I have often encountered for not believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus runs like this: As long as there is even one orphaned child, who uncomprehendingly sobs alone in the dark, I will not accept a God who permits such a world to exist. I refuse.

Another reason I have heard is this: Any God who would throw human beings into unmitigated torture in hell for all eternity, just because of a minor infraction of some silly taboo, is a being to despise, not to accept.

Doubtless there are other reasons besides these two. A full inventory would make a marvelous anthropological study. Yet, the tribe of atheists worldwide is, after all, a small one. Check out the estimates for the religious beliefs of humankind published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Despite the efforts of communist Russia and China to coerce people into atheism, the number and the proportion of atheists are still impressively small.

To return to the two reasons for unbelief given above: The first is a rather odd one. The inquirer assumes a position of moral superiority to God, as a person more intelligent, more pure, more noble, more compassionate. It suggests that the inquirer cares more about the child sobbing in the dark than that child’s Creator and Father does. That would certainly be odd.

It is not odd at all. It is just a recognition that the definition of what is good is separate from the definition of what God, or any other personal being, wills. This is where the religious, who pride themselves on the assertion of goodness and evil as objective, unchangeable truths, confuse their logic so thoroughly. If the good is whatever God wills, then either the good is subjective, or God is not a personal being. Conflating the two destroys the distinction between the two words. Either we focus on what God wants and ignore the question of whether He is good, since the word good has lost its meaning, or we focus on what is good, and not view God as a personal being, for He has become merely the manifestation of an objective truth, and thus has no "will", per se.

Caring about children sobbing in the dark, or more importantly about children dying senselessly, is either good or it is bad. Everyone with a conscience can agree on this, regardless of whether we are good enough to act upon it in the face of these realities. We recognize people who act in the face of the suffering of such children as good. If God is omnipotent we would expect him to act to prevent senseless suffering. If He does not He is either not good, or not in a position to act, therefore not omnipotent. Or doesn't exist. Logically you have to choose one of these three options.

The second objection, concerning hell, evinces a most primitive notion of hell, and also of what constitutes a sin. A sin, writes St. Thomas Aquinas, is an “aversio a Deo,” a turning away from God, a turning away from Light, a deliberate and fully considered turning away from the light, however dim, of one’s own conscience.

From this it follows that hell is the utter absence of God, made fully conscious to the unfortunate one who with full deliberation excluded God from his life. In his lifetime only dimly aware of the vastness of God’s love for and friendship toward humans, such a person recognizes too late that it is only by his own personal choice that he forever cut himself off from the presence of the Divine Lover. It was pride that led to his total isolation, cold and dark. Pride that led to a fully considered and deliberate choice to live as though there is no God.

No one can complain about being in hell. Hell cannot be entered inadvertently but must be deliberately chosen. The choice that constitutes it is to exclude deliberately the God of Love from one’s own heart. It is to push away the extended arms of the divine friendship.

Some choices, like diamonds, are forever.

This is nonsense on, as Skipper would say, stilts. This "primitive" notion of hell is the majority notion of Christians today. Novak is being obtuse in pretending that Christianity has risen beyond such primitive notions. As a writer on religious affairs he cannot be ignorant of the tremendous growth of evangelical Christianity both in the US and around the world in the last 30 years. Hell for disbelief is de-rigeur for the evangelical identity. Not just general disbelief, but disbelief in the very particular theological canon of the evangelical church. Novak himself is condemned to hell by this view.

But Novak's view is really just a way to have his sophistication and brimstone too. He makes it seem as if God's invitation to an embrace, or his mere existence, is a universally known reality, as obvious to every person as sunlight or air. I've not received any invitations whose source is obviously God. I've received many from mortal men with a notion that they speak for God. That doesn't cut it with me. How am I supposed to know which one really speaks for God, if any? I've not been presented with any choices to enter hell.

Novak, of course, is using the language of the heart. Since I don't feel the same in my heart as he does, then obviously I am deserving of hell. This is the real danger of religion - the reification of feelings. Not of feelings related to common experience, but spiritual feelings. I have plenty of room in my heart for my fellow human beings, none for imaginary beings. Religion places the love for imaginary beings above the love for real people. It is a brutal truth at the bottom of every religious impulse, which no amount of feigned sophistication can obscure.