Not a “Swerve,” but a “Slouch” - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR

According to The Swerve, the award-winning book of intellectual history by Stephen Greenblatt, the event that jolted the western world from its religious somnolence was the discovery, by the book-finder Poggio Bracciolini, of an old manuscript in the monastery of Fulda. That manuscript was of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, a poetic presentation of atomism and the Epicurean way of life. The “swerve” of Greenblatt’s title refers to Epicurus’ notorious jitter in the otherwise straight travel of the atoms, so as to allow for free will. Greenblatt, however, uses the word to refer to the West’s liberation from religion, to pave the way for scientific dominion over nature, releasing the erotic impulse in us all. 

It’s complete historical nonsense, as a few reviewers have noted. Scientific investigation was well underway in the Middle Ages. Aristotle, whom the schoolmen came to call The Philosopher, was the amateur biologist, not Epicurus, as Plato was the amateur mathematician. Epicurus himself was uninterested in the natural sciences, except insofar as he could use a scientific dictum as a weapon against the belief that the gods had anything to do with human affairs. Lucretius was a keen observer of the natural world, and his conjectures regarding the behavior of atoms are quite appealing. But he was not moved to study the world for its own sake. Hence his sometimes embarrassing shrugs: 

The wheel of the sun can’t be much bigger than
It seems to our senses, or its light much dimmer.  (5.564-65) 

Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Eratosthenes could have told him otherwise.  

The great revolution in human thought about the universe that occurred in the 16th century had nothing to do with Lucretius, who was no astronomer. Nicholas of Cusa, a neoplatonist Christian and a cardinal of the Church, had no access to Lucretius, and did not need any to posit that perhaps the earth moved about the sun. Nicole Oresme, who died in 1382, well over a century before Copernicus’ famous treatise, had already maintained that the apparent motion of the stars, the planets, and the sun could be attributed to the earth’s diurnal rotation on a tilted axis and its revolution about the sun. Oresme was an accomplished physicist, astronomer, and mathematician. He was also bishop of Lisieux. Father Copernicus himself refers to ancient heliocentrists such as Aristarchus; not to Lucretius. Johannes Kepler was a neoplatonist in inspiration, a devout Christian by profession, and a regular correspondent with Jesuit and Lutheran mathematicians and astronomers. He had no particular use for Lucretius. Galileo does not refer to Lucretius at all in his Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems. In short, though Lucretius did restore respectability to the word “atom,” there is no evidence to suggest that the history of science would have been much different without his poem. 

That isn’t to say that people didn’t read Lucretius. Thomas Aquinas, long before the printing press, read everything he could lay his hands on, and hired a personal translator, Thomas of Moerbeke, to provide for him an accurate rendering of the works of Aristotle. Chaucer and Dante were omnivorous readers, and Petrarch, a teenager when Dante died in 1321, was himself a digger-up of old manuscripts, and hired his own tutor in Greek. So we should certainly expect that Lucretius would find readers, especially among the poets. 

What’s most interesting, though, is their reaction to him. It doesn’t at all fit the Greenblatt narrative template. Demonstrably religious poets, like Du Bartas in France, Tasso in Italy, and Spenser in England, read Lucretius, admired the poetry a good deal (as well they should have), did not take the materialism seriously (they didn’t need Lucretius to introduce them to that), and then, in the cases of Tasso and Spenser, leveled a deeply searching critique at the whole Epicurean ethos. They did for Lucretius what Thomas did for his opponents, and what Greenblatt never attempts to do for the Middle Ages or for religious belief. They gave the man his best shot, and then showed where he was wanting. To be specific, they criticized Epicureanism not for being too erotic, but for not being erotic enough.

 

We see this criticism in Tasso’s handling of one of his heroines, the partly comical down-on-her-luck Erminia, in Jerusalem Delivered. This poor young lady, a Muslim princess by birth, has fallen in love with Tancred, the leader of the Christian army that has seized her kingdom. Now in refuge in Jerusalem, she sees Tancred in the company of the crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon. She stands on the ramparts with the Muslim king of the city, picking out the Christians she can recognize, until she comes to the man she loves—and then she speaks with double meaning: 

He is Prince Tancred.  Oh, that I might have
that man my captive, and alive, not dead —
alive I want him for a sweet revenge,
so my desires may yet be comforted! (3.20.1-4) 

Erminia is but one of the many passionate souls in Jerusalem Delivered; we are meant to draw comparisons between her love for Tancred and, for example, Godfrey’s love: 

[God] viewed all creatures, and in Syria
upon the Christian princes fixed his eye,
and with his sight which spies into the heart
of human loves in deepest secrecy,
saw Godfrey ardent for one aim, to rout
the heathen from the land of the Most High. (1.8.1-6) 

Everyone in this poem is moved by love; whether the love is disordered, or has something evil as its object, is another matter. 

Tasso introduces Lucretius into the work, though, not when love is allowed to grow heated and physical, but rather when it is allowed to grow cool. He was but taking Lucretius at his word. For the Epicurean, erotic love—what we would consider an all-encompassing passion, a desire for irrevocable union with the beloved—is to be avoided. It’s like political activity, or warfare—a hassle. Better remain cool and detached: 

The man who shuns love can enjoy sex still —
More, for the goods come with no penalty.  (4.1064-65) 

It’s that detachment that Erminia is tempted by, when after a few misadventures she finds herself in a pastoral hideaway, populated by a family that has nothing to do with the Saracens and nothing to do with the Christians, because they have nothing to do with anything at all beyond themselves. The old shepherd father says that he too was once a desiring soul, and tried to fulfill his ambitions in the court at Memphis, but after many disappointments retreated to this sweet and quiet place. Tasso allows him to describe it with delicacy and simple beauty: 

Low and worthless to others, dear to me.
No treasure do I crave, no kingly rod.
And never in my heart’s tranquility
does care for power or money make abode.
I fear no poison squeezed into the cup;
for thirst, my stream is always clear and good.
My little garden and my flocks are able
to give enough food, free, for my poor table.

For our desires are small and our needs few,
enough to preserve life, and keep us well. (7.10-11.2) 

Tasso here is reworking the well-known passage in Lucretius that describes the simple life of ataraxia, freedom from the coils of trouble: 

Our nature yelps after this alone: that the body
Be free of pain, the mind enjoy the sense
Of pleasure, far removed from care or fear!
And so we see what little our bodies need,
Only such things as soothe the pain away. (2.17-21) 

And what would one do, with that little? Enjoy a philosophical picnic with your comrades, 

In the shade of a tall tree by the riverside,
[Your] bodies refreshed and gladdened, at no great cost,
Most pleasantly when the weather smiles and the season
Sprinkles the grassy meadow with new flowers. (2.30-34) 

Lovely, isn’t it? And Tasso’s adaptation is meant to be lovely too—lovely, and unsatisfying. Erminia agrees to remain in this pastoral idyll, hoping that time will allay her passion. It doesn’t work. It isn’t meant to work. For Tasso loves his heroine too much to allow her to love too little. She writes love poems, and hangs them on the trees. She weeps, and imagines that someday, if she should die with her love unfulfilled, Tancred will happen upon her grave, and grant her sufferings “the late prize / of a few little tears and a few sighs” (7.21.7-8), so that her sorrow in life might be compensated by the shadow of love after death. 

Now here is Tasso’s point. This Epicurean spa is not what the heart of man seeks. There is a gray acedia to the place. Erminia does not remain there. In fact, her love for Tancred is going to be fulfilled. Near the end of the poem, she will save his life, using her very hair to bind his freely bleeding wounds, and when he hardly returns to consciousness, asking who she is, she reassures him with these, her final words in the poem: 

“As your physician I’m prescribing rest,
so you be still. You’ll know, when the time’s due.
You will be cured—get ready for the fee.”
And she held his head to her bosom tenderly. (19.114.5-8) 

That devotion is far from anything that the Epicurean, ancient or modern, can know. Were I to put a scientific gloss on it, I might write “light years away.” Amateur theologian as I am, I’ll say it is a universe away: a universe of love.

The road from atheism - by Edward Feser

In Edward Feser

As most of my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the 1990s, give or take.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism.  I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition.  A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14.  Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good.  Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.  Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that.  Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends. 

But I was still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad years.  Kierkegaard was my first real philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly appealed to me.  But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close second.  (I still confess an affection for Kaufmann.  Nietzsche, not so much.)  Analytic philosophy would, before long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth.  For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand, civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a grand individual like himself.  For the skeptical analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments, something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before getting on to the really interesting stuff.  And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school.  Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth -- something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

But it takes some reading and thinking to get to that point.  Kaufmann’s books were among my favorites, serious as they were on the “existential” side of disbelief without the ultimately impractical pomposity of Nietzsche.  Naturally I took it for granted that Hume, Kant, et al. had identified the main problems with the traditional proofs of God’s existence long ago.  On issues of concern to a contemporary analytic philosopher, J. L. Mackie was the man, and I regarded his book The Miracle of Theism as a solid piece of philosophical work.  I still do.  I later came to realize that he doesn’t get Aquinas or some other things right.  (I discuss what he says about Aquinas in Aquinas.)  But the book is intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for anything written by a “New Atheist.”  Antony Flew’s challenge to the intelligibility of various religious assertions may have seemed like dated “ordinary language” philosophy to some, but I was convinced there was something to it.  Kai Nielsen was the “go to” guy on issues of morality and religion.  Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification was a doorstop of a book, and a useful compendium of arguments.  I used to wonder with a little embarrassment whether my landlord, who was religious but a nice guy, could see that big word “ATHEISM” on its spine -- sitting there sort of like a middle finger on the bookshelf behind me -- when he’d come to collect the rent.  But if so he never raised an eyebrow or said a word about it.

The argument from evil was never the main rationale for my atheism; indeed, the problem of suffering has only gotten really interesting to me since I returned to the Catholic Church.  (Not because the existence of suffering poses a challenge to the truth of classical theism -- for reasons I’ve given elsewhere, I think it poses no such challenge at all -- but because the role various specific instances of suffering actually play in divine providence is often really quite mysterious.)  To be sure, like any other atheist I might have cited the problem of suffering when rattling off the reasons why theism couldn’t be true, but it wasn’t what primarily impressed me philosophically.  What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief.  If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed.  Indeed, that there were no such arguments seemed to me something which would itself be an instance of evil if God existed, and this was an aspect of the problem of evil that seemed really novel and interesting.  

I see from a look at my old school papers that I was expressing this idea in a couple of essays written for different courses in 1992.  (I think that when J. L. Schellenberg’s book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason appeared in 1993 I was both gratified that someone was saying something to that effect in print, and annoyed that it wasn’t me.)  Attempts to sidestep the evidentialist challenge, like Alvin Plantinga’s, did not convince me, and still don’t.  My Master’s thesis was a defense of “evidentialism” against critics like Plantinga.  I haven’t read it in years, but I imagine that, apart from its atheism and a detail here or there, I’d still agree with it.  

I was also greatly impressed by the sheer implausibility of attributing humanlike characteristics to something as rarefied as the cause of the world.  J. C. A. Gaskin’s The Quest for Eternity had a fascinating section on the question of whether a centre of consciousness could coherently be attributed to God, a problem I found compelling.  Moreover, the very idea of attributing moral virtues (or for that matter moral vices) to God seemed to make no sense, given that the conditions that made talk of kindness, courage, etc. intelligible in human life could not apply to Him.  Even if something otherwise like God did exist, I thought, He would be “beyond good and evil” -- He would not be the sort of thing one could attribute moral characteristics to, and thus wouldn’t be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  (Richard Swinburne’s attempt to show otherwise did not work, as I argued in another school paper.)  The Euthyphro problem, which also had a big impact on me, only reinforced the conclusion that you couldn’t tie morality to God in the way that (as I then assumed) the monotheistic religions required.

Those were, I think, the main components of my mature atheism: the conviction that theists could neither meet nor evade the evidentialist challenge; and the view that there could be, in any event, no coherent notion of a cause of the world with the relevant humanlike attributes.  What is remarkable is how much of the basis I then had for these judgments I still find compelling.  As I would come to realize only years later, the conception of God I then found so implausible was essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception, and not the classical theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been committed.  And as my longtime readers know, I still find theistic personalism objectionable.  The fideism that I found (and still find) so appalling was, as I would also come to see only later, no part of the mainstream classical theist tradition either.  And while the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion.  But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition.

It is this classical tradition -- the tradition of Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics -- that I had little knowledge of then.  To be sure, I had read the usual selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Anselm that pretty much every philosophy student reads -- several of Plato’s dialogues, the Five Ways, chapter 2 of the Proslogium, and so forth.  Indeed, I read a lot more than that.  I’d read the entire Proslogium of Anselm, as well as the Monologium, the Cur Deus Homo, and the exchange with Gaunilo, early in my undergraduate years.  I’d read Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia and De Principiis Naturae, big chunks of Plotinus’s Enneads, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher, and Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Road to God.  I’d read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy -- hardly an unbiased source, to be sure -- but also a bit of Gilson.  All while becoming an atheist during my undergrad years.  And I still didn’t understand the classical tradition.

Why not?  Because to read something is not necessarily to understand it.  Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do.  But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks.  You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth.  And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen -- especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because it’s not what you grew up believing.  Zeal of the deconverted, and all that.

You’re pretty much just going through the motions at that point.  And if, while in that mindset, what you’re reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate.  You’ll take whatever happens to strike you as the main themes, read into them what you’re familiar with from modern writers, and ignore the unfamiliar bits as irrelevant.  “This part sounds like what Leibniz or Plantinga says, but Hume and Mackie already showed what’s wrong with that; I don’t even know what the hell this other part means, but no one today seems to be saying that sort of thing anyway, so who cares…”  Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on.  How far can you go wrong?

Very, very far.   It took me the better part of a decade to see that, and what prepared the way were some developments in my philosophical thinking that seemingly had nothing to do with religion.  The first of them had to do instead with the philosophy of language and logic.  Late in my undergrad years at Cal State Fullerton I took a seminar in logic and language in which the theme was the relationship between sentences and what they express.  (Propositions?  Meanings?  Thoughts?  That’s the question.)  Similar themes would be treated in courses I took in grad school, at first at Claremont and later at UC Santa Barbara.  Certain arguments stood out.  There was Alonzo Church’s translation argument, and, above all, Frege’s wonderful essay “The Thought.”  Outside of class I discovered Karl Popper’s World 3 concept, and the work of Jerrold Katz.  The upshot of these arguments was that the propositional content of sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds, or anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance.  As the arguments sank in over the course of months and years, I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good.  

Not that that led me to give up naturalism, at least not initially.  A more nuanced, skeptical naturalism was my preferred approach -- what else was there, right?  My studies in the philosophy of mind reinforced this tendency.  At first, and like so many undergraduate philosophy majors, I took the materialist line for granted.  Mental activity was just brain activity.  What could be more obvious?  But reading John Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind destroyed this illusion, and convinced me that the standard materialist theories were all hopeless.  That Searle was himself a naturalist no doubt made this easier to accept.  Indeed, Searle became another hero of mine.  He was smart, funny, gave perfectly organized public lectures on complex topics without notes, and said whatever he thought whether or not it was fashionable.  And he wrote so beautifully, eschewing the needless formalisms that give a veneer of pseudo-rigor and “professionalism” to the writings of too many analytic philosophers.  “That is how I want to write!” I decided.  

Brilliant as he was as a critic, though, Searle’s own approach to the mind-body problem -- “biological naturalism” -- never convinced me.  It struck me (and seemingly everyone else but Searle himself) as a riff on property dualism.  But there was another major influence on my thinking in the philosophy of mind in those days, Michael Lockwood’s fascinating book Mind, Brain and the Quantum.  Lockwood was also a naturalist of sorts, and yet he too was critical of some of the standard materialist moves.  Most importantly, though, Lockwood’s book introduced me to Bertrand Russell’s later views on these issues, which would have a major influence on my thinking ever afterward.  Russell emphasized that physics really gives us very little knowledge of the material world.  In particular, it gives us knowledge of its abstract structure, of what can be captured in equations and the like.  But it gives us no knowledge of the intrinsic nature of matter, of the concrete reality that fleshes out the abstract structure.  Introspection, by contrast, gives us direct knowledge of our thoughts and experiences.  The upshot is that it is matter, and not mind, that is the really problematic side of the mind-body problem.  

This was truly revolutionary, and it reinforced the conclusion that contemporary materialism was shallow and dogmatic.  And that Lockwood and Russell were themselves naturalists made it once again easy to accept the message.  I got hold of whatever I could find on these neglected views of Russell’s -- Russell’s The Analysis of Matter and various essays and book chapters, Lockwood’s other writings on the topic, some terrific neglected essays by Grover Maxwell, some related arguments from John Foster and Howard Robinson.  David Chalmers and Galen Strawson were also starting to take an interest in Russell around that time.  But once again I found myself agreeing more with the criticisms than with the positive proposals.  Russell took the view that what fleshes out the structure described by physics were sense data (more or less what contemporary writers call qualia).  This might seem to entail a kind of panpsychism, the view that mental properties are everywhere in nature.  Russell avoided this bizarre result by arguing that sense data could exist apart from a conscious subject which was aware of them, and Lockwood took the same line.  I wasn’t convinced, and one of my earliest published articles was a criticism of Lockwood’s arguments on this subject (an article to which Lockwood very graciously replied).  Chalmers and Strawson, meanwhile, were flirting with the idea of just accepting the panpsychist tendency of Russell’s positive views, but that seemed crazy to me.

My preferred solution was to take the negative, critical side of the Russellian position -- the view that physics gives us knowledge only of the abstract structure of matter -- and push a similar line toward the mind itself.  All our knowledge, both of the external world described by physics and of the internal world of conscious experience and thought, was knowledge only of structure, of the relations between elements but not of their intrinsic nature.  I would discover that Rudolf Carnap had taken something in the ballpark of this position, but the main influence on my thinking here was, of all people, the economist and political philosopher F. A. Hayek.  The libertarianism I was then attracted to had already led me to take an interest in Hayek.  When I found out that he had written a book on the mind-body problem, and that it took a position like Russell’s only more radical, it seemed like kismet.  Hayek’s The Sensory Order and some of his related essays would come to be the major influences on my positive views.  

But they were inchoate, since Hayek was not a philosopher by profession.  That gave me something to do.  Working out Hayek’s position in a more systematic way than he had done would be the project of my doctoral dissertation, “Russell, Hayek, and the Mind-Body Problem.”  (Both here and in the earlier Master’s thesis link, by the way, Google books overstates the page count.  I wasn’t that long-winded!)  This was, to be sure, a very eccentric topic for a dissertation.  Russell’s views were marginal at the time, and are still not widely accepted.  Probably very few philosophers of mind even know who Hayek is, and fewer still care.  But I thought their views were both true and interesting, and that was that.  (If you want advice on how to climb the career ladder in academic philosophy, I’m not the guy to ask.  But you knew that already.)  

Spelling out the Hayekian position in a satisfactory way was very difficult.  Lockwood had presented Russell’s position as a kind of mind-brain identity theory in reverse: It’s not that the mind turns out to be the brain, but that the brain turns out to be the mind.  More precisely, visual and tactile perceptions of the brain of the sort a neurosurgeon might have do not tell us what the brain is really like, but present us only with a representation of the brain.  It is actually introspection of our own mental states that tells us the inner nature of the matter that makes up the brain.  It seemed to me that Hayek’s position amounted to something like functionalism in reverse:  It’s not that the mind turns out to be a kind of causal network of the sort that might be instantiated in the brain, or a computer, or some other material system -- understood naively, i.e. taking our perceptual experience of these physical systems as accurate representations of their intrinsic nature.  Rather, introspection of our mental states and their relations is actually a kind of direct awareness of the inner nature of causation itself.  We shouldn’t reduce mind to causal relations; rather we should inflate our notion of causation and see in it the mental properties we know from introspection.

So I then argued, and wrote up the results both in the dissertation and in another article.  But the views were weird, required a great deal of abstractive effort even to understand, and one had to care about Hayek even to try, which almost no philosophers of mind do.  To be sure, Searle was interested in Hayek in a general way -- when Steven Postrel and I interviewed him for Reason, and when I talked to him about Hayek on other occasions, he even expressed interest in The Sensory Order in particular -- but this interest never manifested itself in his published work.  Chalmers very kindly gave me lots of feedback on the Hayekian spin on Russell that I was trying to develop, and pushed me to clarify the underlying metaphysics.  But his own tendency was, as I have said, to explore (at least tentatively) the panpsychist reading of Russell.

And yet my own development of Hayek might itself seem ultimately to have flirted with panpsychism.  For if introspection of our mental states gives us awareness of the inner nature of causation, doesn’t that imply that causation itself -- including causation in the world outside the brain -- is in some sense mental?  This certainly went beyond anything Hayek himself had said.  In my later thinking about Hayek’s position (of which I would give a more adequate exposition in my Cambridge Companion to Hayek article on Hayek’s philosophy of mind), I would retreat from this reading and emphasize instead the idea that introspection and perception give us only representations of the inner and outer worlds, and not their intrinsic nature.

This, for reasons I spell out in the article just referred to, offers a possible solution to the problem that qualia pose for naturalism.  But because the view presupposes the notion of representation, it does not account for intentionality.  Here my inclinations went in more of a “mysterian” direction.  I had long been fascinated by Colin McGinn’s arguments to the effect that there was a perfectly naturalistic explanation of consciousness, but one we may be incapable in principle of understanding given the limitations on our cognitive faculties.  I thought we could say more about consciousness than McGinn thought we probably could, but I also came to think that his mysterian approach was correct vis-à-vis the intentional content of our mental states.  Lockwood and Hayek said things that lent plausibility to this.  

I would later largely abandon the Hayekian position altogether, because it presupposes an indirect realist account of perception that I would eventually reject.  (That took some time.  The influence of indirect realism is clearly evident in my book Philosophy of Mind.)  But I had come to some conclusions in the philosophy of mind that would persist.  First, as Russell had argued, physics, which materialists take to be the gold standard of our knowledge of the material world, in fact doesn’t give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of matter in the first place.  The usual materialist theories were not even clearly thought out, much less correct.  Second, a complete naturalistic explanation of intentionality is impossible.  

But I was still a naturalist.  It was also while still a naturalist that I first started to take a serious interest in Aristotelianism, though at the time that interest had to do with ethics rather than metaphysics.   Even before I became an atheist I had been introduced to the Aristotelian idea that what is good for us is determined by our nature, and that our nature is what it is whether or not we think of it as having come from God.  After becoming an atheist, then, I became drawn to ethicists like Philippa Foot, who defended a broadly Aristotelian approach to the subject from a secular point of view.  Her book Virtues and Vices and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue were the big influences on my thinking about ethical theory during my atheist years.  

One consequence of this was that I always took teleology seriously, because it was so clearly evident a feature of ordinary practical reasoning.  (How did I reconcile this with naturalism?  I’m not sure I then saw the conflict all that clearly.  But in any event I thought that teleological notions could be fitted into a naturalistic framework in the standard, broadly Darwinian way -- the function of a thing is to be cashed out in terms of the reason why it was selected, etc.  I only later came to see that teleology ultimately had to be a bottom level feature of the world rather than a derivative one.)

After Virtue also taught me another important lesson -- that a set of concepts could become hopelessly confused and lead to paradox when yanked from the original context which gave them their intelligibility.  MacIntyre argued that this is what had happened to the key concepts of modern moral theory, removed as they had been from the pre-modern framework that was their original home.  I would later come to see that the same thing is true in metaphysics -- that the metaphysical categories contemporary philosophers make casual use of (causation, substance, essence, mind, matter, and so forth) have been grotesquely distorted in modern philosophy, pulled as they have been from the classical (and especially Aristotelian-Scholastic) framework in which they had been so carefully refined.  As I argue in The Last Superstition, many of the so-called “traditional” problems of philosophy are really just artifacts of the anti-Scholastic revolution of the moderns.  They flow from highly contentious and historically contingent metaphysical assumptions, and do not reflect anything about the nature of philosophical reflection per se.  And the standard moves of modern atheist argumentation typically presuppose these same assumptions.  But I wouldn’t see that for years.

I was on my way to seeing it, however.  Several crucial background elements were in place by the late 90s.  Fregean and related arguments had gotten me to take very seriously the idea that something like Platonic realism might be true.  (I would later see that Aristotelian realism was in fact the right way to go, but the basic anti-naturalistic move had been made.)  The arguments of Searle and others had shown that existing versions of materialism were no good.  Russellian arguments had shown that modern science and philosophy had no clear idea of what matter was in the first place.  Whatever it was supposed to be, though, it seemed it was not something to which one could assimilate mind, at least not if one wanted to avoid panpsychism.  Naturalism came to seem mysterious at best.  Meanwhile, Aristotelian ideas had a certain plausibility.  All that was needed was some systematic alternative to naturalism.

Then, in the late 90s, while still a grad student, I was given an opportunity to teach a philosophy of religion course, followed by several opportunities to teach “intro to philosophy” courses.  In the latter, I wanted to focus on topics that would be of interest to undergrads who might have no general interest in philosophy.  Since everyone had some interest in religion (even if only, in some cases, a hostile interest), arguments for God’s existence seemed a good topic for at least part of the course.  Naturally, that was a topic for the philosophy of religion course too.  So, I had a reason to revisit the subject after having given it relatively little thought for many years.

At first I taught the material the way so many professors do: Here are the arguments; here are the obvious fallacies they commit; let’s move on.  I never came across like Richard Dawkins, but I no doubt did come across like Nigel Warburton (say): politely dismissive.  And, as I gradually came to see, totally ill-informed.  The “line ‘em up, then shoot ‘em down” approach was boring, and the arguments seemed obviously stupid.  Yet the people who had presented them historically were obviously not stupid.  So, it seemed to me that it would be interesting to try to give the arguments a run for their money, and to try to make it understandable to the students why anyone would ever have accepted them.

So I started to read and think more about them.  I came to find William Rowe’s approach to the Leibnizian sort of cosmological argument interesting and pedagogically useful.  He didn’t seem to accept the argument, but he made it clear that asking “What caused God?”, “How do we know the universe had a beginning?”, etc. weren’t really serious objections.  He also made it clear that the thrust of the argument had to do with what was a straightforward and undeniably serious philosophical question:  Should we regard the world as ultimately explicable or not?  If not, then the argument fails.  But if so, then it does seem to make it plausible that something like God, or at least the God of the philosophers, must exist.  And it didn’t seem silly to wonder whether there might be such an explanation.  Richard Taylor’s clear, punchy chapter on natural theology in his little book Metaphysics made the same point, and made for a useful selection for the students to read.  

Naturally, I had already long been aware of this sort of argument.  The difference was that when I had first thought about it years before I was approaching it as someone who had had a religious background and wanted to see whether there was any argument for God’s existence that was really persuasive.  Russell’s retort to Copleston, to the effect that we can always insist that the universe is just there and that’s that, had then seemed to me sufficient to show that the argument was simply not compelling.  We’re just not rationally forced to accept it.  I had, as it were, put the argument on trial and it had been unable to establish its innocence to my satisfaction.  But now I was approaching it as a naturalist who was trying to give my students a reason to see the argument as something at least worth thinking about for a class period or two.  I was playing defense attorney rather than prosecution, but a defense attorney with the confidence of someone who didn’t have a stake in his client’s acquittal.  Already being a confirmed naturalist, I could be dispassionate rather than argumentative, and could treat the whole thing as a philosophical exercise.  

And from that point of view it started to seem that Russell’s reply, while it had rhetorical power, was perhaps not quite airtight philosophically.  Sure, you could always say that there’s no ultimate explanation.  And maybe there’s no way to prove otherwise.  But is it really true?  Is it really even more plausible to think that than to think that there is an explanation?  Guys like Rowe and Taylor, by no means religious fanatics or apologists but just philosophers entertaining a deep question, seemed to take the question pretty seriously.  Interesting, I thought.  Though for the time being, “interesting” -- rather than correct or persuasive -- was all I found it.  

Then there was Aquinas.  At the high tide of my undergrad Brash Young Atheist stage, I had taken a class on medieval philosophy with the late John Cronquist, an atheist professor at Cal State Fullerton who was absolutely contemptuous of Christianity.  Campus apologists of the Protestant stripe were a frequent target of his ire, though he had a choice quip or two about Catholicism as well.  He was one of the smartest and most well-read people I have ever known -- the kind of guy you find intellectually intimidating and hope not to get in an argument with -- and I liked him very much.  One of the odd and interesting things about that course, though, was how respectfully Cronquist treated some of the medievals, especially Aquinas.  He said that compared to them, contemporary pop apologists were “like a pimple on the ass of an athlete.”  (I remember him dramatically pointing to his own posterior as he said this, for emphasis.)  He obviously didn’t buy the Scholastic system for a moment, but he treated the material as worth taking a semester to try to understand.  And he said a couple of things that stood out.  First, for reasons I don’t recall him elaborating on much, he seemed to think that the Third Way in particular might have something to be said for it.  Second, he said that the mind-body problem, which he seemed to think was terribly vexing, really boiled down to the problem of universals.  For years I would wonder what he meant by that.  (I now think it must have had to do with the way our grasp of abstract concepts features in Aristotelian arguments for the immateriality of the intellect.) 

At the time I filed these remarks away as curiosities (just as I had then regarded the material we covered in the class as mere curiosities).  But I think his example made it easier for me, years later, to take a second look at Aquinas as I prepared course material.  I look back at my first lectures on the Five Ways with extreme embarrassment.  If you’d heard them, you’d have thought I was cribbing from an advance copy of The God Delusion, if not in tone then at least in the substance of my criticisms.  But that started slowly to change as I read more about the arguments and began to work the material into my lectures.  A good friend of mine, who had also gone from Catholicism to atheism and was a fellow grad student, was familiar with William Lane Craig’s book The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, and seemed to find it useful in preparing his own lectures on the subject.  Our discussions of the arguments were very helpful.  Furthermore, Atheism and Theism by J. J. C. Smart and John Haldane had recently appeared, with Haldane defending, and Smart treating respectfully, some old-fashioned Thomistic arguments for the existence of God.  Such materials opened up a new world.  The way I and so many other philosophers tended to read the Five Ways was, as I gradually came to realize, laughably off base.  

The immediate effect was that I found a way to teach the Five Ways without seeming like I was putting fish in a barrel for the students to shoot at.  I still didn’t agree with the arguments, but at least teaching them was getting interesting.  I recall one class period when, having done my best to try to defend some argument (the First Way, I think) against various objections, I finally stated whatever it was I thought at the time was a difficulty that hadn’t been satisfactorily answered.  One of my smartest students expressed relief: She had been worried for a moment that there might be a good argument for God’s existence after all!  (Anyone who thinks wishful thinking is all on the side of religious people is fooling himself.)  

None of this undermined my commitment to naturalism for some time.  I published my first several journal articles while still in grad school, and two of them were criticisms of the doctrine of the Trinity.  (I’m now a staunch Trinitarian, of course.  But once again, it turns out that I still more or less agree with the arguments I then presented.  The versions of Trinitarianism I then attacked are, I continue to think, wrong.  But Trinitarianism itself is true.)  

But the language of act and potency, per se and per accidens causal series and the like started to enter my lectures on Aquinas, and before long, my thinking.  It was all very strange.  Aquinas’s arguments had a certain power when all of this metaphysical background was taken account of.  And there was a certain plausibility to the metaphysics.  There were reasons for distinguishing between actuality and potentiality, the different kinds of causal series, and so forth.   Yet no one seemed to talk that way anymore -- or, again, at least no one “mainstream.”  Could there really be anything to it all if contemporary philosophers weren’t saying anything about it?  And yet, precisely because they weren’t talking about it, they weren’t refuting it either.  Indeed, when they did say anything about Aquinas’s arguments at all, most of them showed only that they couldn’t even be bothered to get him right, much less show why he was mistaken.  Arguments from current philosophical fashion are bad enough.  But when most philosophers not only do not accept a certain view, but demonstrate that they don’t even understand what it is, things can start to smell very fishy indeed.

And so they did.  I already knew from the lay of the land in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that the standard naturalist approaches had no solid intellectual foundation, and themselves rested as much on fashion as on anything else.  Even writers like Searle, who I admired greatly and whose naturalism I shared, had no plausible positive alternative.  McGinn-style mysterianism started to seem like a dodge, especially given that certain arguments (like the Platonic realist ones) seemed to show that matter simply is not in fact all that there is, not merely that we can’t know how it can be all that there is.  Some secular writers were even toying with Aristotelian ideas anyway.  The only reason for not taking Aquinas and similar thinkers seriously seemed to be that most other academic philosophers weren’t taking them seriously.  And yet as I had come to learn, many of them didn’t even understand Aquinas and Co. in the first place, and their own naturalism was riddled with problems.  Against Aquinas, for naturalism -- the case increasingly seemed to come down to the consensus of the profession.  And what exactly was that worth?  

It isn’t worth a damn thing, of course.  Careerists might not see that, nor might a young man more excited by the “question what your parents taught you” side of philosophy than all that “objective pursuit of truth” stuff.  But a grownup will see it, and a philosopher had sure as hell better see it.  

I don’t know exactly when everything clicked.  There was no single event, but a gradual transformation.  As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.”  Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!”  By the summer of 2001 I would find myself trying to argue my wife’s skeptical physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism on the train the four of us were taking through eastern Europe.

There’s more to the story than that, of course.  In particular, it would take an essay of its own to explain why I returned to the Catholic Church, specifically, as I would by the end of 2001.  But I can already hear some readers protesting at what I have said.  I don’t mean the New Atheist types, always on the hunt for some ad hominem nugget that will excuse them from having to take the actual arguments of the other side seriously.  (God Himself could come down from on high and put before such people an airtight ontological proof of His existence while parting the Red Sea, and they’d still insist that what really motivated these arguments was a desire to rationalize His moral prejudices.  And that their own continued disbelief was just a matter of, you know, following the evidence where it leads.)  

No, I’m talking about a certain kind of religious believer, the type who’s always going on about how faith is really a matter of the heart rather than the head, that no one’s ever been argued into religion, etc.  It will be said by such a believer that my change of view was too rationalistic, too cerebral, too bloodless, too focused on a theoretical knowledge of the God of the philosophers rather than a personal response to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But the dichotomy is a false one, and the implied conception of the relationship between faith and reason not only foolish but heterodox.  As to the heterodoxy and foolishness of fideism, and the correct understanding of the relationship of faith and reason, I have addressed that set of issues in a previous post.  As to the “heart versus head” stuff, it seems to me to rest on an erroneous bifurcation of human nature.  Man is a unity, his rationality and animality, intellect and passions, theoretical and moral lives all ultimately oriented toward the same end.  That is why even a pagan like Aristotle knew that our happiness lay in “the contemplation and service of God,” whose existence he knew of via philosophical argumentation.  That is why Plotinus could know that we “forget the father, God” because of “self-will.”  While the pagan may have no access to the supernatural end that only grace makes possible, he is still capable of a natural knowledge of God, and will naturally tend to love what he knows.  

As Plotinus’s remark indicates, that does not mean that the will does not have a role to play.  But that is true wherever reason leads us to a conclusion we might not like, not merely in matters of religion.  And once you have allowed yourself to see the truth that reason leads you to, what reason apprehends is (given the convertibility of the transcendentals) as good and beautiful as it is real.  If you find yourself intellectually convinced that there is a divine Uncaused Cause who sustains the world and you in being at every instant, and don’t find this conclusion extremely strange and moving, something that leads you to a kind of reverence, then I daresay you haven’t understood it.  Of course, there are those whose heads and hearts are so out of sync that they cannot follow both at the same time.  But we shouldn’t mistake this pathology for an insight into human nature.

Speaking for myself, anyway, I can say this much.  When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back.  As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed.  But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true.

The Church and Secularism - part 1 - by Peter Kreeft

In CERC

I'd like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription.

Sometimes, when people hear me addressed as "Dr. Kreeft," they think I'm the other kind of doctor — a medical doctor — and then, when I tell them that, no, I'm a philosophy professor, they usually say, "Oh, well, I guess we need that kind of doctor too." But today I want to act like a medical doctor, but for the soul rather than the body. 

 

I'm told that in medical school they tell you that there are four indispensable steps to any medical analysis of a patient's condition. And these four steps are the basic logic of all practical problem-solving in every field — medicine, business, detectives, whatever — because, there are two variables: there's something good or desirable and something bad or undesirable. And then there's the cause and the effect. So you can have the bad effect, the bad cause, the good effect, or the good cause. So the four steps of a medical analysis are first, an observation of the symptoms, which are the bad effects; then a diagnosis of the disease that is causing the symptoms — that's the bad cause; then a prognosis of the hope for a healing, which is the good effect; and then a prescription for the treatment, which is the good cause. 

All of Buddhism is based on those four points, which Buddha calls the Four Noble Truths. And when one of his disciples once asked him to speculate about other philosophical questions, he refused, saying, "This is all I teach you. I teach you simply that life is suffering, and that the cause of suffering is selfish desire, and that there is hope for ending all suffering by ending its cause, and my Noble Eightfold Path is the way to end the cause." That's a doctor's analysis but applied to the soul rather than the body. 

So I'd like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription.

Symptoms

 

Start with the symptoms. If you went to a country and you found that fifty percent of the citizens of that country committed suicide, you would say that that is a very sick country and does not have a very good hope for survival. That is Western Civilization, because the fundamental building block of all societies is families. Families are the fundamental citizens of every society. And divorce is the suicide of a family. When the body and the soul separate, the body dies. When the mother and the father separate, the family dies. So a fifty percent divorce rate, which is what we have in North America, means a fifty percent suicide rate. That's a very, very serious symptom. 

If you think that's a stretch, let's take suicide literally. What is our suicide rate? I think it's the fourth highest in the world, directly proportionate to wealth, by the way; the richer you are, the more likely it is you'll think your life is so wonderful that you put a bullet through your head. And William Bennett's index of social indicators tells us that in just fifty years, in the last half of the twentieth century, the suicide rate among teenagers has increased five thousand percent. That's a rather spectacular statistic. 

An even more spectacular statistic is our willingness to murder our own unborn children. As Mother Teresa says, "If abortion isn't wrong, nothing's wrong." Our ancestors would literally not be able to believe that. 

I have a little story that shows that. I know a doctor who told me that his friend, a dietician, agreed to work in — I think it was Zaire — some African country — for a couple of years for the United Nations because they discovered this tribe that was so isolated that they were still very innocent, and they distrusted outsiders, and it was one of the most primitive tribes left on earth, and the anthropologists wanted to study them before they died out. And they were dying out because their diet was so bad they were killing themselves but they didn't know it. They were very primitive. For instance, their favourite spice was dried flies. Dead flies dried by the sun. And they didn't trust outsiders, black or white. 

So this doctor, who I think was from Canada, volunteered to spend, if necessary, two years of his life trying to win his way into this tribe to convince them to change their diet to survive, so that the rest of the world could study them for scientific interests. And he succeeded, and it took a long time, and he persuaded them to change their diet, and their health improved dramatically and very quickly, so everybody in the tribe knew that he spoke the truth and he was trustable and he was the first outsider they loved and trusted, and they were fascinated with him. 

So they kept asking him questions about the outside world. And he said that they were like children: they were very innocent and peaceful, but ignorant. He had to explain to them what planes were, and he explained that we could fly to the moon, and they believed that, and that we had weapons that were so great that we could destroy the whole world with them, if some one madman just pressed a button, and they believed that. They believed everything he said. He was like God to them, almost. 

But he said there were two things that it was almost impossible for them to believe. They just had no holding places in their mind. One was, that when they asked him, "Do you have wise men in the outside world too?" — sages, shamans — he said, "Yes, they're called philosophers." Well, philosophy means a love of wisdom. So they asked him "What gods do they believe in?" They were aware that other tribes believed in other gods. And he said, well, seventy-five percent of philosophers outside of Catholic universities are atheists. (Four percent of sane people are atheists, but seventy-five percent of philosophers are atheists.) They had no word in their language for atheists, so he had to explain to them that an atheist believes in no god at all. They at first thought that was a joke. They couldn't believe that. Not the good gods? Not the bad gods? Not the male gods? Not the female gods? Not the gods of the earth? Not the gods of the sky? Not the gods of our tribe? Not the gods of the other tribe? No gods at all? There are people in the world who believe in no gods at all? That blew their mind. But he said they were like very precocious children; they were very energetic and they didn't give up easily, so they said, "We must solve this puzzle." 

Whenever they had a puzzle, he said, the oldest members of the tribe would get in a circle and they'd all talk together, like bees buzzing together. They had this ability to hear many voices at once. And after a few minutes or a few hours they finally solved the puzzle, and the head tribesman would announce the solution. So that's what they did with the problem of atheists. It took them all day. This was the biggest problem they ever had in their tribe. But at the end of the day, they finally emerged, smiling, and the head tribesman said, "We have solved the riddle of your atheists. We know that you people have these great big concrete buildings that you like for some strange reason, and that you live in these cities. Well, these atheists, as you call them, must have been born in the cellars of these buildings, and never emerged outside of these buildings. They have never seen a bird, they have never seen a waterfall, they have never seen the stars! That is why they are atheists!" 

But there was another thing that he told them that they could not believe at all, ever. Literally, psychologically, impossible to believe. And that was that one third of all the children that were conceived in North America were murdered by people called "physicians" or "healers," who were paid by the parents. Their reaction to that was a polite giggle, because they knew it must be a joke and they didn't understand the joke, so they pretended to laugh. They giggled. And he tried to persuade them that it wasn't a joke. And they literally could not believe that it wasn't a joke. So they thought it was a riddle. 

So he stayed there for a few months after he told them this, and every day they'd come to him and say, "Can you explain the riddle today?" And he kept saying, "It's not a riddle. It's true." And they literally could not believe that. He said the last sight I had of them was when the plane came in the little dirt landing strip to take me away, the head tribesman came to me and said, "We will never see you again in this world. You must tell us the solution to your riddle today, because we will never discover it ourselves." And he said, "It's not a riddle. It's true." And he said the last sight I had of him is walking from my side by the door of the plane back to his tribesmen who were eagerly awaiting the solution to this hilariously funny riddle, and they were looking with eyes wide open with expectation to hear the funniest joke they'd ever heard in life, and the head tribesman was looking down and hanging his head, and still not believing. One wonders who the primitives are.

We're not having children. For strictly biological reasons, a society cannot survive without having children. Europe is almost lost. In another generation, Europe will be a Muslim continent, because Muslims are the only ones having children. And we're not. They deserve it. It used to be that seventy-five percent of the people in England were in church on a Sunday morning. Now it's four percent. It used to be that five percent of Frenchmen identified themselves as atheists. Now it's forty percent. You can find statistics of our culture's decline and crisis everywhere. Some of them are very clear; some of them are more subtle. One of the subtle but deep symptoms is moral scepticism. No society in history has ever existed without believing in some version of the natural moral law. Ours is the first that officially does not believe in this. It's illegal to appeal to natural law to justify positive law. The United States Supreme Court said so. I think Canada is even farther advanced, like tooth decay can be farther advanced. 

Imagine — I don't have a blackboard here — imagine a square on a blackboard, perched on one of its four points. And at the top there is Community and at the bottom there is Chaos. And at the two corners there are two other Cs which are the only arms, the only means that a community has to ward off chaos. They're called Cops and Conscience. The law of the four Cs. Any community, whether it's a human body, or a community of people, or a tribe of animals, survives only if it wards off chaos. Chaos is like death. It destroys, it separates. And for a human community, the only two ways to preserve that community against chaos are the inner cop or the outer cop. And the inner cop is conscience. And cops are the outer conscience. So conscience depends upon a natural law. If there is no natural moral law, if morality is simply positive law, law posited by man, manmade, the rules of the game, then it's not morality. It's just a contract. There's no binding absolute obligation to it. And that's the prevailing theory of morality among intellectuals and among media personalities in our civilization. 

C. S. Lewis wrote, in an article entitled "The Poison of Subjectivism," that "this moral relativism will certainly damn our souls and end our species." C. S. Lewis was a British Oxford don. They are not prone to exaggeration. Why "damn our souls"? Well, according to Jesus, you have to repent and believe in order to be saved. How can you repent if there's no such thing as sin? And how can there be such a thing as sin unless there's an absolute moral law against which you sin? Why "end our species?" Because even though this may not biologically end our species, it will spiritually end our species by producing a new kind of creature, a creature without a conscience, Nietzsche's superman. Nietzsche was, alas, a prophet. A conscience-ectomy would be a very serious operation, to put it mildly. C. S. Lewis calls such a person "a man without a chest." He's got a head, he's got guts, but he's got no chest. He's got no conscience, no moral will.

He were raised as a Protestant, grew into an atheist, you married a Christian Scientist and then became a Catholic - Interview with John C. Wright

In John C. Wright's Journal 

Q: You were raised as a Protestant, you grew into an atheist, you married a Christian Scientist and then you went and became a Catholic. It’s hard not to think of a miracle. How were you led into the fold?

A: Odd as this will sound to Christian readers, my reason for being an atheist was because of a deeply rooted love of truth.

Since a young age, I believed that human reason, and only human reason, was man’s path to discover the nature of reality and virtue, to discover what one is and what one ought to be, provided one was sufficiently fearless and objective and dispassionate in the investigation. All belief in anything supernatural I rejected as insufficiently supported the evidence; even the concept of a natural above nature I rejected as paradox. But for all my skepticism I never lost my love of truth.

Three things happened which eroded my faith in atheism.

First, when I became a husband, I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of unborn children. The atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended and acted as if my son were not alive, not human, not important; when, of course, any man who loves the truth cannot help but see that he has a duty to love and protect his beloved children. The secular not only lied, they tempted young mothers to commit the most atrocious crime imaginable, for surely to kill one’s own little helpless baby is worse than to kill a stranger, because when a mother who should love her helpless child kills a relative, there is treason involved, a betrayal of her highest duty and her deepest instincts. The baby has no one else to protect him.

My son was wrongly diagnosed with having a disease, and the doctor gently suggested killing him. My wife was a Christian, and would not even hear of the issue. To my infinite shame and regret, for a moment, just for a moment, overcome with the fear of the burdens raising a crippled child would lay on me, I was tempted by the offer, and contemplated killing my own son. You see, I did not have the staff of the Church on which to lean. I was trying with my own unaided human reason to find my way through the thicket of vice and virtue, right and wrong, and so for a moment my foot touched the pathway to hell.

For that moment, in my heart, I thought as a murderer thinks, and not just a healthy, normal murderer, no, a kin-slayer; an infanticide.

What was wrong with the atheist world, if we atheists were so right on so many things, that we could be so grossly wrong about this?

Second, when I became a father, I realized that my duty as a father was to raise my sons to be men, real men, and not to be weak and foolish creatures enslaved to degrading vices. This was not a matter of opinion or preference: it was a matter of iron duty, which I could not evade any more than I could evade the fact that twice two equals four.  The atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended and acted as if all moral choices are equal and all equally meaningless: that no matter what you choose, your choice is sacred and praiseworthy, because there is no wrong choice. This doctrine is not only a lie, it is illogical, on the grounds that a father cannot instruct his children to make choices without standards, and a standard by definition is something one does not choose. It is a given.

So, once again, I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of human vice and human sexuality. I had been told by the secular culture and by my fellow atheists that sex was a recreation, a source of meaningless pleasure, and I had been told that fornication was better than monogamy, and sexual perversion was better than chastity. Upon becoming a father, logic told me that no matter what my preferences or opinions in the matter, I would be failing in my duty to my sons if I taught them to be unchaste or to be perverts. But everyone around me, the entire world, the media, the press, the culture, the academia, the laws, all were unified against that single, simple idea that truth is better than falsehood and purity better than vice. I realized with a sensation of seasickness that I was surrounded by an empire of lies.

So for the second time I asked myself, what was wrong with the atheist world, if we atheists were so right on so many things, that we could be so grossly wrong about this?

On September 11^th, the anniversary of the defeat of the Paynims of the Battle of Vienna, America, and all the Western world, was viciously and cravenly attacked by Mohammedans, and the long war between Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, suspended since Lepanto, was renewed.  As an atheist, I saw this as an example of the extravagant evils of religion in action, and was certain that my fellow atheists would be as outraged as was I with the attack on our most beloved institutions of the West, the liberty – particular intellectual and academic liberty – which we enjoyed.

Instead, the atheists, particularly those of the American Left, vocally and wholeheartedly supported and applauded every effort to stop any retaliation for the unprovoked attack, and sided, wherever possible, with our enemies. While not coming out and saying they wished for enemy victory, they rushed to aid and comfort them, put legal and social barriers in place against our forces to protect the foe, and played the grossly dishonest word-games of moral equivalence and blaming the victim.

I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of secularism. It was not, as it so often claimed to be, a merely rational and human concern for human life on Earth. To judge from the public reaction of the majority of atheists after the Twin Towers fell, the atheists did not side with civilization against the dark and barbaric terrorists. No, they sided with the terrorists against the Christians.

I stared in all directions in astonishment, with wide eyes and mouth hanging open. What had driven the world I served insane? They were suicidal. The atheists were aiding and abetting the Jihad, offering apologetics and support for it.

The thing I had thought my whole life was atheism was not atheism, it was merely antichristianity.

I was ashamed to the core of my being to see my fellow atheists behaving in such a fashion. In three areas of paramount importance, the nature of life and death, the nature of sex and romance, and the nature of war and peace, my fellow atheists were not only wrong, they were extraordinarily and absurdly and profoundly wrong, wrong to the point of insanity.

At about this same time, atheism started becoming popular, and many books and articles were published that were openly atheistic: authors such as Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris. One would think I would rejoice to see the ideas I supported at long last receiving public attention. But the books and articles were lies. My fellow atheists were not attacking the things about religion I thought mistaken and evil, they were attacking the good things which made religion tolerable, those same three issues of life versus death, chastity versus perversion, self-defense versus self-destruction. They were attacking reason.

I was an atheist because I loved truth and I thought that the truth, the unpleasant truth, was that no gods were or could be real. Because I loved truth, I loved virtue, life, reason, and goodness. And I found myself alone. All my fellow atheists, to one degree or another, were on the side of falsehood, death, nonsense and madness and evil.

I have three times mentioned how shocked I was, but I did not say what shocked me so. I was shocked by the sheer frivolity, the lightheartedness, the silliness of my fellow atheists and the whole secular world in their approach to these deep matters of life and death, purity and perversity, peace and war. They treated all issues of philosophy like questions of fashion.

None of my fellow atheists, not one, was an inspiration for me as a husband, or as a father, or as a patriot of the civilization of the West. Even men whom I admired for other reasons, or were dear friends, treated selfishness as if it were the norm, treated love of life as if it were an oddity, or treated history as if it had never happened.

The idea haunted me that the atheists could not be wrong about all the important issues in life, but right about the one paramount issue of whether God existed.

Once my faith in atheism was lost, my deep-seated hatred of Christianity eroded. I began reading Christian authors, particularly C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. In them, I found the sanity and sobriety that was missing in my atheist allies. Lewis and Chesterton were not merely right, but deeply and soundly and soberly right, right in the way a healthy man is right: their hearts were in the right place.

The idea haunted me that the Christians could be right about all the important issues in life, but wrong about the one paramount issue of whether God existed.

So I sat down to read the Summa Theologica. Remember that it was my firm belief that unaided human reason was the only tool men had to discover the nature of reality and morality. I reasoned that this work, written by the most reasonable writer of all time, could settle the matter. If he could not reason me into belief in God, no one could.

Well, the thickness and the dryness, the sheer hard work of the intellectual effort defeated my attempt. I gazed with weary eyes at the endless pages of tightly-reasoned proofs, each as difficult as a math problem, and decided that God Almighty would not, if He were real, expect every illiterate farmer in every village too small to have a paved road run to it to go through this careful and painstaking means of reasoning to discover Him. If He were Almighty, as well as being the creator of the laws of nature of the universe, He would have some means by which the people whom He wished to save from death could be saved.

Armed with this simple reasoning, I decided to put all my lifetime of philosophy to an empirical test! I knelt and prayed perhaps the most arrogant prayer of all time (albeit, at the time, being an atheist, I had no idea how arrogant it was).

“Dear God,” I prayed, “I know you do not exist. I can prove it with the accuracy and elegance of a proof from Euclid. But, as a philosopher, I am honor bound to entertain seriously even ideas I know to be absurd. So, just on the off chance that the absurd idea that You exist is true, sir, I demand that You show Yourself to me and prove that You exist. If You hear this prayer, and do not answer, then You either do not care if I know You, or You cannot. If the first case, You are not all-loving, and in the second, not all-knowing or not all-powerful , so if You do not answer this prayer, You lack one of the defining attributes of God. And if You do not exist at all, I have wasted no more than a lungful of air and a moment, of time, but I have done all my duty as a philosopher requires, and put the matter to the test. I dare You to show Yourself to me.”

Well, God answers prayers, even blasphemous ones, sometimes with a dreadful sense of humor. Three days later, I was stricken out of the clear blue with a heart attack. As I lay on the floor writhing and dying, my wife, a good Christian woman, called her Church, and a man who makes his living praying for the sick and healing them offered to heal me , which he did on the spot and in that same moment. The pain went from being all-consuming to nothing in the time it would take you to snap your fingers.

Astonished and clutching my chest at the sudden and complete surcease of pain, and curious as to what had afflicted me, I went to the hospital emergency room. I was not worried, but I wanted an examination to tell me what had happened.   The doctors ordered major heart surgery, for it seemed that I had five blocked arteries in my heart. So I was in one hospital and then another for several days.

On the first day, before any surgery, while I was waiting in the emergency room, I suddenly grew aware of my own soul, a part of myself which, up until that moment, I would have said was mythical, make-believe. I felt the Holy Spirit enter my body. It was like a physical sensation. I was not drugged nor in pain nor frightened nor influenced by anything that would deceive my senses and memory: nor can I describe it to anyone who had not suffered a similar sensation.

As you can imagine, this gave me much to ponder. After the surgery, to the surprise of the nurses, I did not need any pain killers, because an act of prayer merely made the pain go away.

Then the Virgin Mary came to visit me. She has told me not to speak of what we spoke of, but I will say that there was no secret to it, nothing you could not learn merely by reading your Bible.

That was astonishing enough, but then I saw God. He was like a light, and like perfect love, and I was filled with ecstasy and bliss.

Later, I saw Jesus Christ.  Unlike my other visitors, He terrified me, telling me that He would be my judge on the last day, but that God the Father judged no man. At this point, I suspect that my visions might be hallucinations, because no Christian I had ever met, and no book by any Christian I had ever read, had ever put across this odd and zany doctrine that God does not judge men, but that Christ does.

After I was released from the Hospital, I spend many a day at home recovering. Again, I was not on  any drugs nor pain killers, nothing that would influence my thinking or my perceptions. And I had a religious experience. This was different in nature than the visions, which were experiences much like speaking to  a person, or communing with a loved one. This was more like being a mind taken up into a larger mind, a small soul being embraced in a larger one, a soul larger than the universe. I saw that all thoughts ultimately issue from God, who is the prime mover of thought as He is of action, and I saw the relation of time to free will, and the paradox of God’s foreknowledge and the freedom of men to disobey was explained to me. It was as if I stood outside of time, and could turn and look at it, and see its structure, its symphony.

If this were not enough, two or three weeks later, I decided to read the Bible for the first time since in my adult life. I came across a passage which was word for word the same as the vision of Christ said to me. The passage is from the John, which I had never read before, not even in school.

So, I had asked, nay, demanded proof from God that He show Himself to me, and I was answered as entirely as any man could ask. I experienced a miracle healing, was saved from death, then felt the Holy Spirit, spoke to the Virgin and saw the Father, and later had a religious experience. As a philosopher, I note with wry amusement that the attempts of my atheist friends to explain away my experiences as coincidence or delusion or self-delusion are contemptibly weak, a mere tissue of ad hoc explanations. I note as well, that they cannot explain why virtue is better than vice, logic better than nonsense, life better than death, or why there is a universe instead of a void.

To be sure, there are mysteries and paradoxes in Christianity, questions of incarnation and foreknowledge at which the human reason quails, and yet from these paradoxes come conclusions so sound and clear and wholesome that a man can know how best to live. I have tried my whole life to live up to the strict and stern standards of the noble Roman Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Seneca, and to live with as little fear of death as Socrates displayed, even with a cup of poison in his hand.

The only time I was utterly unafraid was when (according to the world’s standards) I should have been most afraid, when I was under the knife for major surgery. Instead, filled with the love of God and a peace that cannot be described, I was buoyant, fearless, and cheerful. I was as unafraid as Saint John when he held a cup of poison in his hand.

In other words, as a Stoic, I could never live as a Stoic, and adhere to the pagan standards of a good and noble life. But as a Christian, I could.

My  atheist friends, when they pontificate on their doctrines of life, utter paradoxes even more paradoxical than any Christian theology, and from their paradoxes come only darkness and hell, conclusions so confused and petty that a man who actually believed them would either throw himself into a whorehouse and live his life in an endless and endlessly vain pursuit of false pleasures,  or throw himself in to the sea and drown his meaningless life in the uncaring salt wave.

I hope that answers the question.

Q: The Great Books program of St. John’s College had a significant influence on the way you understand the world and, indirectly, on your becoming a Catholic. Could you tell us something about it? 

A: Ah, I see you have resolved only to ask me questions which require page after page to answer!  Saint John’s College in Annapolis is a school of a type that might be more familiar to Europeans than to Americans. There are no tests and no grades, and every student follows the same course of study, which consists of the classical Trivium and Quadrivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy). We read the Great Books of Western literature in roughly chronological order, starting with the ancient Greeks, the Latins, the Medieval and Renaissance writers, the Reformation and Enlightenment, and finally, and disappointingly, the Moderns.

We read literature starting with Homer, philosophy starting with Plato, studies music and languages, science from Ptolemy to Einstein, mathematics from Euclid to Goedel politics from Aristotle to the Federalist Papers, and economics, the youngest of the disciplines, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx.

Such an education is like being a man with a memory in a world of amnesiacs. All the clever ideas which you will hear from all the clever people, repeated as if no one could question them, all come from somewhere and for some reason, usually in answer to a specific problem in philosophy or politics, ethics or mathematics – and the clever people are not clever enough to tell you where their ideas come from. Nor, not knowing their origins, can the clever people defend such ideas.

A little knowledge of the great conversation which has been going on between the generations and which forms the basis of our civilization (for the basis of civilization is in the habits of virtue formed by the habits of mind, which in turn are formed by philosophy) would be of inestimable value. Consider that Aristotle, in analyzing the  Utopian Republic of Plato, adroitly identified the problem with all schemes to own property in common, or raise children communally. Imagine the bloodshed that would have been averted, the millions and tens of millions of lives saved in the Twentieth Century, had this adroit criticism of communism been remembered and taken to heart by the intellectuals of those years.

In my day, the school was blissfully free of Political Correctness – there simply are no African American ancient Greek philosophers or playwrights or historians or poets to put onto the list of Great Books, and a writer like Cervantes was present because he was great, not because he was “Hispanic”. I believe that purity has been sullied by the inclusion of at least one writer based on his skin color, not based on the merit of his contribution in the commonwealth of letters.

Q: Should Catholic colleges concentrate on providing that kind of education?

A: I don’t know anything about Catholic colleges to be able to answer the question. I will say that the swiftest and best cure for Protestantism and Modernism is to be familiar with the accomplishments of the past. Nothing shatters the yokel parochialism of the present day more swiftly than recognizing the immense stature of men of genius whose thought built our world.

Q: When you became a Catholic you took the name of a 1^st Century martyr, Saint Justin. Why did you choose that patron saint?

He is the patron saint of philosophy.  I think of myself first as a philosopher who writes novels, not as a novelist who writes philosophy.  I pray him to inspire and lead me to be as he was: one who cared more for truth than for life.

Q: You write for a living and, apparently, in your free time, after a long day writing… you keep on writing. You have a successful blog on which you talk about literature and sci-fi, but also about God, philosophy, politics and morals. Why did you start writing a blog?

A: Human weakness, vanity, madness. I was once a newspaperman, and my generous editor gave me leave to write on any of the topics of the day, or, for that many, any topic at all. As if bitten by a bug, I became so used to writing editorials that I find I cannot long do without it. It is sort of like St Vitus’s Dance, except with words rather than foot-twitching.

Q:  Some people think that science fiction and Catholicism are all but incompatible (due to the old Faith vs. Science canard). I guess you don’t agree…

A: I rather strongly do not agree. Catholicism invented Western Civilization which invented science. The scientific method rests on certain metaphysical and theological axioms without which it cannot exist. Because these axioms were not recognized in the ancient world or the Orient, there was no scientific progress properly so called in ancient Greece, or Rome, or before the coming of the White Man, in India, China, or the New World, accomplished though these civilizations in other ways certainly were.

The modern recrudescence of paganism, the bland heathen world view of the materialists, is undermining the ability of the West to continue to do science. The recent scandal and word-war over Global Warming and Global Cooling I suggest is a sign of the decay of modern science. Postmodern science is a dead limb severed from its life giving Catholic roots. Earlier examples of the abortive science of postchristian nations can be seen in Lysenko in Soviet Russia, and the make-believe race sciences and history of the Nazi Germans.

To a smaller degree, science and Protestantism are all but incompatible, since the essential point of Protestantism is the rejection of the unity and the Magisterium of the Church.  This necessitates whole dependence for all matters of faith and morals on a private interpretation of scripture. Such private interpretation is strongly inclined, since there is no certain authority on which to rely, to be literal. Protestantism, with its strong emphasis on private judgment and private reason, ironically is prone to enthusiasm, including outbreaks of mania and emotionalism and esoteric doctrine which an authoritarian Church naturally hinders or checks. Science is unemotional and public and authoritative, and the findings of geology, astronomy, and biology certainly seem to be incompatible with a literal reading of Genesis; and the enthusiastic nature of some Protestant groups urges them to hold science and literature and learning in low regard (the example of Deal Hudson as depicted in his autobiographical AN AMERICAN CONVERSION spring to mind).

That said, it must be emphasized that Protestantism does not contain the direct opposition to science and reason found in the esoteric religions of the East, Buddhism and Taoism, or the indirect opposition to reason and science prompted by paganism and polytheism in general.

Without a belief in a monotheistic creator, there is no assurance that reason is sufficient to discover the laws of nature, or even that there are laws. The materialism of Karl Marx, for example, proposes a universe where by definition the position of brain atoms are determined by mechanics, by the actions of selfish genes or mindless social and economic forces. In such a universe no scientific reasoning, nor reasoning on any topic, is possible or imaginable.

Likewise, without a belief in the independence of secondary causes from the whims of many gods there is no point to the study, since such laws are merely illusions of consistence in an arbitrary acts. For this reason, the classical world never reduced the speculations of its philosophers to an system of natural philosophy called science.

Likewise again, the belief in that all the material world is illusionary of necessity obliterates the motive for scientific research. There are no medical researchers who are practicing Christian Scientists.

And finally, the belief found in mainstream Mohammedanism that the one God participates directly in all acts of cause and effect in effect obliterates cause and effect, since the existence of regularity in nature becomes an illusion produced by the reliability of the inscrutable will of God.

Q:  You’ve recently published a novel called Count to a Trillion. Could a new reader guess that you’re a Catholic just by reading it? Are there Catholic elements in your books?

A: So far in my life, I have not used by books to proselytize or flatter or even to describe my own beliefs, neither my atheist beliefs when I was an atheist, nor theist now. I write enough editorials that I feel little need to editorialize while engaged in the serious business of storytelling. But any writer’s world view appears whether he will or no in the world he invents, so a new reader who was perspicacious might hazard such a guess.  But he would have to be extremely perspicacious.

What I do not do in COUNT TO A TRILLION is have the main characters avoid religion or condemn it. Both the heroine and the villain are Roman Catholics, because they are Spanish, and my conceit is that the Spain of the future will reflect the days of the Spanish Empire, achieving a glory from the discovery of news worlds in space which once she achieved in the discovery of the New World in the Americas.  My hero is something of a skeptic, albeit nominally a Christian.

Because the novel deals with immense spans of time, the Roman Catholic Church obtains an unusual prominence, merely because it is assumed in the novel that the Church will last as far into the future as she has into the past.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A: I am writing the opposite of a Dan Brown novel. My young hero realizes that he is unlike his brothers in looks and nature, and begins to wonder if he was adopted. Tillamook, Oregon, the cheese capital of America somehow does not seem like his home to himself. He father is a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps an assassin for the Opus Dei or, better yet, a Knight Templar whose grandmaster still controls the Ark of the Covenant.  When our hero goes to work for the Haunted Museum, whose curator is an insane scientists who collects animals that should not or could not still exist in our world, he discovers that there is more than one world. Our young hero falls in love with the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter, and is off to rescue her when the mad scientist warns him she is about to open a doorway into a parallel dimension using the Moebius Coil.

The idea behind the story is that the energy required to create a second and parallel universe is greater than the universe and comes from outside of it, so therefore only when miracles occur or fail to occur is the timeline split into two parallels. The main enemy of the youthful hero is the world that arose when the Tower of Babel, in that version of history, never was struck by the confusion of tongues and never fell. Unfortunately, the Babylonians were the first in all parallel history to discover the secret of how to travel sideways in time, and, being from a world where there are neither nations nor tribes nor divisions, the Babylonians can neither imagine nor tolerate living in peace with neighbors not in union and unity with them, and so they have conquered all the various versions of history, and soon will conquer ours.

There is more to it than that, of course. The story includes monkey-masked ninja-girls, levitating prophets, one eyed Arimaspians, living iron, no-headed Blemmye, blood-quaffers and cynocephalics,  one-legged Sciopods, not to mention the stolen Rhine-gold, the flail of a conquered Pharaoh, the tarncape,  the Cup of Jamshyd, and a prayer-powered “mecha” or walking tower shaped like a shining suit of armor forty stories tall, and a remarkably beautiful mermaid from a world where the fleets descended from the Ark of Noah have yet to find dry ground.

Q:  Finally, two obvious questions for all Catholic sci-fi writers: Has any Cardinal already contacted you to enlist you in the Arcane Conspiracy to replace all Heads of State with robots in order to enslave free countries and subject them to the Tyranny of the Church? Have you received the unbreakable medieval-latin cyphers for secret communications with the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith by the (Laser) Sword?

A: No, but I have been given my secret decoder rosary with built in strangle wire, my stealth jetpack, and I have been shown the secret confessional booth whose trapdoor leads into the secret lair where the crime-solving supercomputer of the Archbishop  hums with power. Adoring the lair walls, along with giant pennies and robots of dinosaurs, is the trophy room of relics and icons. From this cave, cadres of ninja-trained priests in black rush out to track down criminals and evildoers …. in order to hear their confessions and bring them forgiveness and tell them the secret of eternal life.

Compared to how wild and supernatural that is, any mere conspiracy of world conquest seems tame, does it not? The world is already subject to the tyranny of the head of our Church, for all authority in heaven and earth is His.

2. How would you instruct a soul that finds their being to be oddly, madly jealous of your certitude on questions of faith?