A day or so after I’d written a piece about the implication of atheism for society in Dostoevsky’s work, Charles C. W. Cooke wrote a piece at National Review Online titled,” Yes, Atheism and Conservatism Are Compatible,” with the subtitle, “You needn’t believe in God to believe in the American constitutional order.” It only has over 2500 comments as of this writing, so this is a topic of some interest to conservatives, and libertarians as well.
It’s a fascinating piece written with a lot of verve by a man who doesn’t like the accusation that his atheistic faith commitments are incompatible to his native conservative temperament and philosophy of government. (Some atheists might object to my using the phrase “faith commitments” when speaking of atheism, but since we can’t know everything faith is required of everyone.)
As you can see Cooke was responding to an over the top statement from Brent Bozell about an atheist group being invited to have a booth at CPAC. In fact he calls it an atrocity. Regardless, the question stands: is atheism incompatible with conservatism and constitutional government? Since, as Cooke points out, that a lot of atheists and agnostics are prominent conservatives then plainly it is not. And if atheists want to be on the side of limited government and religious freedom and free markets, should we shoo them away because we don’t approve of their worldview? As a friend of mine said, why should we seek to shrink the tent?
Clearly, not all atheists are created equal. Some atheists hate religion and see it as an inherently pernicious force in the world (and as we are speaking of America and Western culture let us take religion to mean Christianity. When the “new atheists” speak they often conflate Christianity and Islam, but since the latter has nothing to do with the rise of Western culture and America the conflation is not helpful.) Other atheists like Cook see in religion a positive force, and where it has not been in the history of the West they bring a helpful nuance to the discussion.
Cooke makes an excellent point that the issues isn’t belief in God or not, but religious liberty:
In my experience at least, it is Progressivism and not conservatism that is eternally hostile to variation and to individual belief, and, while we are constantly told that the opposite is the case, it is those who pride themselves on being secular who seem more likely and more keen to abridge my liberties than those who pride themselves on being religious. That I do not share the convictions of the religious by no means implies that I wish for the state to reach into their lives.
Thus people like Bozell are completely missing the point in the context of 21st Century America. Cooke points out that we are not one nation under God, but one nation under a constitution. The precarious fault line we face in the age of Obama isn’t between those who embrace religion, as Obama claims to, and those who do not, but between those who believe in liberty as a positive, indeed foundational virtue of the Republic, and those who believe state coercion defines liberty; this is known as “positive liberty” and a complete bastardization of the very concept of liberty.
So all you atheists who love real liberty, who believe in personal responsibility and that capitalism is a force for good in the world, this Jesus loving sinner saved by grace welcomes you to the team!
Having stated this unequivocally, there are a few things I think Mr. Cooke gets absolutely wrong, and I can’t let these pass without comment. If you don’t want to get all religious you can stop reading now.
He states:
Occasionally, I’m asked why I “believe there is no God,” which is a reasonable question in a vacuum but which nonetheless rather seems to invert the traditional order of things. After all, that’s not typically how we make our inquiries on the right, is it? Instead, we ask what evidence there is that something is true.
Unfortunately this is a typical statement for a modern atheist, that Christians don’t rely on evidence for the veracity of their claims. And I have absolutely no idea what a vacuum has to do with anything in this context. Regardless of how you assess the evidence, Christianity is not simply a “revealed” religion, as Cooke claims in the context of his explanation of Jefferson’s rejection of Christianity. “Revealed” as he, and obviously Jefferson, use it assumes a lie as true.
Christianity is grounded in evidence, its claims completely beholden to historical verification. There is nothing more frustrating than arrogant internet atheists claiming that Christians believe what they do in spite of there being no evidence. It seems Mr. Cooke believes such a distortion of the actual Christian witness. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I will quote the first few verses of Luke’s Gospel, a doctor who traveled with the Apostle Paul on his missionary journeys:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
The Apostle Peter says, “For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2 Peter 1:16) The Apostle Paul speaks of Jesus appearing to 500 witnesses after his resurrection, and says, “[I]f Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” (1 Cor. 15:14). He says in the same chapter:
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
Doubting Thomas, you remember him? Said he wouldn’t believe unless he put his hands in Jesus’ wounds; he did, and he worshiped him. You can call all these people liars, you can say that the documentary evidence is insufficient, but there are very well grounded reasons why we believe what we believe.
Christians have a branch of theology that goes back to the Apostles called apologetics; we contend for the truth of the gospel. Evidence is critical, proof impossible. The website Apologetics 315 is a great resource that shows our faith is built on evidence we find compelling, rational and reasonable. Mr. Cooke may want to avail himself of some of those resources so he can see that we are right in the middle of “the traditional order of things.”
Another quote from Mr. Cooke:
God or no God, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence are all built upon centuries of English law, human experience, and British and European philosophy, and the natural-law case for them stands nicely on its own.
Actually, no it doesn’t. Here the vacuum reference would be apropos. None of these things would have existed without the Christian religion, and thus the personal deity that stands behind it. Atheism, which is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, didn’t even exist prior to the so called Enlightenment. Nothing stands “nicely on its own,” least of all “the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.” To say that English law “stands nicely on its own” is, well, absurd. Has Cooke ever read Blackstone?
Maybe he means today the natural-law case could do without all that God stuff, and I guess Burke might even agree with that. But without a Christianity infused Western culture none of these things would have ever existed, which Cooke would likely acknowledge. To say that now such an integral part of the puzzle is no longer necessary is a faith I could just not embrace. (You may want to listen to an interview with David Bentley Hart, author of “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies,” especially his argument that Christianity was a radically transformational force, i.e. revolution, in the history of the world.)
And one last if you’ll indulge me:
And yet one can reasonably easily take Jefferson’s example and, without having to have an answer as to what created the world, merely rely upon the same sources as he did — upon Locke and Newton and Cicero and Bacon and, ultimately, upon one’s own human reason. From this, one can argue that the properties of the universe suggest self-ownership, that this self-ownership yields certain rights that should be held to be unalienable, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. After all, that’s what we’re all fighting for. Right?
Yikes! One knows hardly where to start. Locke? Christian. Newton? Way Christian. I can’t speak in depth to Cicero and Bacon, but they lived well before atheism as we know it was an option philosophically. And Cooke has far more faith than I could muster in “one’s own human reason.” “From this,” he says. From what? Our unaided human reason? From this we get “self-ownership”? Really? The naiveté is breathtaking, and tomes of been written that prove just that. But this is no reason to kick Mr. Cooke off the team. He comes to the right conclusions even if gets there in a way that is ultimately philosophically dissatisfying, and I would argue self-defeating.
I respect you, Mr. D’Virgilio, but I think you are incorrect on at least two points.
1) Christianity is not simply a congeries of supposedly historical facts. The doctrine of the trinity is a metaphysical, not an historical, assertion.
2) “We wouldn’t even know there was Greek thought without the Church keeping it alive…” In fact, Greek philosophy was preserved amongst Muslims and Jews as well as by Christians.
Thanks for the comments, Shmeul.
1) I would agree that the doctrine of the Trinity is a metaphysical assertion, but it did not arise in an historical vacuum. In fact, it is only from the testimony of historical persons in ancient texts that have very solid historical attestation that the possibility of such a counter intuitive doctrine as the Trinity ever came to exist.
2) I am probably be guilty of hyperbole here. I don’t know enough about these things (note to self: study this more) to speak with much confidence, but while what you say is no doubt true, without the Catholic Church my guess is a whole lot more of the knowledge of antiquity would have been lost.
Richard, Thank you for your comment.
1. Unfortunately you completely missed my point, or probably more likely I didn’t state it well. I didn’t say the Bible has evidence because people who wrote it believed it. They claimed to be EYEWITNESSES of the resurrection. If you studied your textual criticism you’d know that these claims based on historical analysis go back to less than a decade after the crucifixion. The creed that speaks of this if you study the Greek carefully likely goes back to James and Peter in Jerusalem in the earliest days of the new Church. Your comparison to the Koran is kind of silly. Nobody was raised from the dead to validate the Islamic message. In fact, the Koran claims Jesus didn’t even die on the cross! Christianity is completely different than other religions because Christianity isn’t a set of beliefs we must believe in, it is a set of historical facts that have been verified by a substantial enough amount of evidence that people have put their faith in Jesus for 2000 years.
2. Actually I didn’t say Christianity was the ONLY antecedent Why would you assume I meant that? Cheap. But here is what I will say. We wouldn’t even know there was Greek thought without the Church keeping it alive in the so called “dark ages.” And if you think, as you seem to say, that Greek thought is exclusively the antecedent to Western Democracy and our Constitution, I will say with all due respect, that your ignorance is revealed by such a claim. A simple Hillsdale College course on Western Heritage will tell you what an absurd claim that is.
3. Your third point is barely worth responding to because you are informed, apparently, by a deeply anti-religious, and anti-Christian bias. And I don’t chortle. Why would you say I chortle? What does that actually mean? That I think I’m superior to whoever disagrees with me? I will not step back from my claim that thinking “self-ownership” is somehow available in an historical vacuum, that human reason somehow exists on a plane unto itself apart from philosophical causes that allowed it to develop is naive. In the extreme. Is that chortling?
And science progressed only because scientists and philosophers made MAJOR breaks with orthodoxy. That’s your argument? Seriously? It’s Christian doctrine not the Christian worldview that advanced the preconditions of scientific advance? Talk about clumsy.
You are obviously the kind of atheist that Charles Cooke is not because he can be honest about what the historical record shows us, that the West and America in particular have a profound debt to the Christian religion. And he appreciates it. And snark isn’t a great tool for promoting reasoned debate.
Well, D’Virgilio should be commended for trying to expand the conservative tent and welcome in nonbelievers…
But he can’t refrain from using increasingly bad arguments to criticize those nonbelievers’ lack of faith. In the second half of his article, D’Virgilio makes three points, each of which are easily debunked.
1. “The Bible has evidence because the people who wrote it believed it.” By this estimation, ANY religious book is evidence for the veracity of its own belief system. Why believe in the Bible, and not the Koran? “Check out this apologetics website, Doubting Thomas,” is about as useful a follow-up argument as “there’s a Wikipedia page I have to introduce you to.”
2. “Christianity was the foundation for all Constitutional antecedents, because atheism didn’t exist before the Enlightenment.” Actually, Greek thought was the foundation for all Constitutional antecedents. There are some atheists named ‘Epicurus’ and ‘Seneca’–among many others–that D’Virgilio has neglected.
3. “Philosophers and scientists were Christians back in the day, and human reason is more magical than an omnipotent extraterrestrial entity who knows all, sees all, and does all.” This is just a clumsy counter-argument to a clumsy argument. All the philosophers listed may be nominally Christian, but each made MAJOR breaks with orthodoxy: even Isaac Newton compared Christ-worship to idolatry, and espoused the proto-Unitarian ideas of Fausto Sozzini. Cooke states (clumsily, but correctly) that the humanist, rationalist studies of Jefferson led to his belief in self-ownership; D’Virgilio simply calls this argument naive (i.e. stupid) and chortles that human reason is more unbelievable than a God who births himself to kill himself to save humans because of some rule he made for himself.
So, it’s a fifty-fifty article. D’Virgilio comes to the right conclusions even if gets there in a way that is ultimately philosophically dissatisfying, and I would argue self-defeating.
Richard Maloney, you are mistaken; the Bible has evidence because it has evidence. For instance, the city of Nineveh was believed to be a fable until it was discovered. I would call that evidence for Biblical accuracy. You also have the Big Bang theory, which sounds suspiciously like Genesis.
There are a host of others; the Book of John speaks of ocean bottom vents, for instance, The Book of Genesis speaks of both the First Law of Thermodynamics and of entropic decay (second law). These were concepts unknown to the world at that time. The Book of Isaiah points out that the Earth is a sphere, and that it hangs in space. The Book of Job speaks of dividing a beam of light. The Book of Genesis suggests that one super continent first appeared on Earth before breaking up.
I could go on but I suspect everyone gets the point. There is considerable evidence that the Bible foreknew certain things. As the Reverend Isaac Newton said;
“No sciences are better attested than the religion of the Bible.”
We can believe it because it has evidence. Granted, not everything is to be taken literally, or to be understood in the manner we understand them today. But we have a good deal of solid factual evidence to back up much of what is in there.
And we have witnesses even today. Google Zeitun or Medjugorje or Fatima.
The existence of the Hittites was another example of Biblical accuracy that was scoffed at. There are quite a few more examples.
Your claim that all Constitutional antecedents are Greek is not correct. The Greeks did not believe in the fundamental equality of all men, for instance, which comes rather from the Hebrews. And a good many of the ideas of the Founders came from Roman and not Greek thinking. And British law, which was influenced by Christian thought.
I would suggest you read Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order. He devotes a chapter each to both the Hebrew and Christian roots of the American system. Or read this http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2011/06/did-america-have-a-christian-founding
The Constitutiion may not have any specific Christian assertions in it, but it is clearly embedded in Christian thinking, particularly the thinking Of Thomas Aquinas and Natural Law. Here is a good discussion on the topic. http://catholiceducation.org/articles/politics/pg0001.html
Your claim that most scientist and philosophers were NOMINALLY Christian is quite convenient for your position and dubious at best. Many may have been at odds with the Church in some way or another (like Galileo who was tried not for his belief in Copernicanism but for his willful insistance on teaching it as approved science rather than theory – and as official Church doctrine.) I fear too many atheists take any example of disagreement or discord as proof of proto-atheism.
You say;
“D’Virgilio simply calls this argument naive (i.e. stupid) and chortles that human reason is more unbelievable than a God who births himself to kill himself to save humans because of some rule he made for himself.”
Smug self-satisfaction aside, why do you insist that you understand things beyond your knowledge base and intellectual capacity? That is the conceit of atheists, that they can understand what they do not grasp and dismiss what they do not understand. Using this logic many things never existed at all. There are no subatomic particles because science did not know of them. No black holes, because at one time they were unknown.
D’Virgilio never said reason was unbelievable, by the way. Those are YOUR words. He argued that claims a cold and impersonal universe could lead one to conclude that human beings are precious, have a right to self ownership, and thus have inalienable rights are a stretch and that believing this is tantamount to a bigger act of faith. You either did not understand this point or you are being purposely obtuse.
It IS a huge leap of faith. The universe seems to favor selfishness and aggression, and grants small favor to rights. Richard Dawkins would agree with that last statement, by the way – he wrote a book entitled “the selfish gene”.
Rights come from God. That is why, in the end, atheist conservatives either become libertarians or leave the camp entirely. It becomes impossible to square Natural Law with materialism in the end.
Timothy, thank you for taking the time for laying out such thoughtful comments, not only because you agree with me, but because you clearly treat your interlocutor with respect and your arguments are strong.
One of the most pathetic aspects of the “new atheism” is the claim that the Christian faith rests on a foundation devoid of evidence. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I just learned this morning that for a long time critical scholars (the ones that don’t believe the Bible is God’s Word or true) argued that Pontius Pilate was a fictitious actor on the biblical stage. Archaeology proved them wrong. Even non-believing textual critics believe that the historical evidence for the resurrection is compelling, but of course they have to figure out a way to explain it away. The amount of textual evidence for the Bible we have today being the same as it was when written is embarrassingly large, blowing away any other text of ancient history. Of course I could go on and on and on.
No, it’s the atheist who has no evidence for what they believe, the atheist who takes a leap of faith by ignoring or misrepresenting any arguments that contradict that faith. And it is an unfortunate truth that many atheists treat their intellectual opponents like dirt because, after all, that’s exactly what they think they are!
There is only one universally true religion. It is called freedom.
It is the most simple of all religions to understand, though the hardest to live.
It has a single creed: all humans have an inalienable right it life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of their own happiness.
It has only one commandment: thou shalt not use force or fraud in your dealings with your fellow man.
The Christian God is a founding member of the freedom religion, thus all true Christians join as well. However, you are not required to believe in Him in order to join. Adopting the creed and living the commandment are the only prerequisites. Race, sex, culture, sexual orientation, religion, attractiveness or wealth are great big don’t cares.