I like the publication First Things. I respect the life's work of the theologian and philosopher Michael Novak. But, damn, and yawn, if I don't see simplistic, dismissive, curriculum vitae-padding arguments against unbelievers, like Novak's latest, too often in First Things and elsewhere on the Christian Right.
In a
drive-by article, majestically titled "Atheism and Evil," Novak engages a friendly audience of First Things readers to quickly dismiss atheists and agnostics for their struggles with belief.
A good percentage of these unbelievers, according to a recent poll, have allowed the problem of evil to drive them away from the notion of a personal God. But, surprisingly, many of them cling to some notion of an ultimate force.
In the most insulting statement of the entire piece, Novak accuses all of them of possessing a "morose delectation" for the reality of evil. In other words, they should just get over their perverse hang-up with suffering. (Now break out the brandy.)
Novak reminds us, yawn, that Thomas Aquinas posited that evil was not a co-equal reality with good. Evil tends toward non-being rather than being. (Ah, how did millions of human beings miss that? It's all explained now!)
And, without the possibility of moral evil, the world could never reach its current heights of goodness.
Excuse me if I yawn, again. These arguments are repeated endlessly against modern unbelief like a Thomistic spell. And yet, unbelief doesn't seem to go away. Curious.
Of course, the reality of physical evil (hurricanes, cancers, etc.) is not addressed here. That would have required at least another page of strenuous quoting of the Church Fathers.
Or perhaps it is, encrusted within Novak's brief, metaphorical reference to the world as a "tapestry of human experience." Or in his sweeping notion that "[a]ll the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and 'blooming, buzzing profusion.'”
There you have it. The whole thing, from Krakatoa to Katrina, is just another "good story," and "blooming, buzzing profusion." What?
I know that Michael Novak means better. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens' delectations have gotten too much under his skin.
But I think that if one were actually concerned with these issues, in a spirit of genuine solidarity with non-First Things subscribers, it might help to acknowledge the serious concerns of "unbelievers" -- and perhaps more "believers" than one might care to acknowledge -- with moral evil, physical evil, and even metaphysical evil -- where one grinds daily against the limits of one's own being.
In a media-mad world in which human beings are buffeted daily by images of untold suffering and cruelty, and even levels of human success and honor that they will never achieve, it will require more than a series of dusty syllogisms to ease the suffering and dissension caused by the "immense crisscrossing" within the human spirit of the problems of moral, natural and metaphysical evil.
