Thinking Christian

Book Review

When I picked up Cornelius Hunter’s Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism, I expected the “unseen religion” of the title to refer in some way to atheistic naturalism itself. Whether naturalism is a form of religion depends on definitions. If religion is defined as a system of beliefs involving the supernatural, then naturalism certainly doesn’t fit the description. Some, however, define it as any system of belief regarding where we came from, what is ultimately real, and what is finally important  or (per Paul Tillich) of ultimate concern. That definition’s wide scope could certainly include naturalism.

I was expecting Hunter to argue that naturalism was religious by the latter, looser definition. I was wrong. His claim was bolder than that, more potentially controversial—yet at the same time more founded in fact, and less in loosely controllable preferences regarding meanings of words. Scientific naturalism, says Hunter, was explicitly born from within the family of Christian theology, and dwells even now in buildings erected on the same ancestral property. We think of naturalism as rejecting religion, but it was actually historically rooted in it, and it seems to have difficulty running away from it.

Hunter traces two streams in intellectual history, rationalist and empiricist. Aristotle was the rationalist above all other philosophers. In early modern philosophy, Descartes supremely represents that stream. Francis Bacon, considered by many to be the founder of scientific methodology, represents empiricism—not that anyone is a pure example of either rationalism or empiricism, for no person has ever occupied the extreme endpoints of the continuum between the two.

How are the two distinguished from each other? I’ll come back to rationalism in a moment. Empiricism (in this context) is an approach which lets empirical evidences rule over scientific conclusions, with as little regard for metaphysical preconceptions as possible. Hunter’s attitude toward empiricism is perhaps best explained through his depiction near the end of the book (p. 137), in a section titled “An Alternative to Rationalism:”

The empirical approach is much less certain about the form of the result. And at the end of the investigation, it is less certain about the truthfulness of the result. Problems are complicated, and humanity is not always up to solving them completely. The empirical approach is not as tidy as the rational approach. But it also does not constrain itself to predetermined notions. It is more amenable to new and unexpected results.

All of this sounds like standard scientific reasoning. It echoes Intelligent Design opponents’ voices calling us all not to rush to conclusions, not to be in a great rush to fill in the gaps with God. Intelligent Design, they say, is built around a predetermined belief in God, and marshals all its evidence only toward that end.

But just as the empirical approach is not as tidy as the rational approach, so the history of ideas is not as tidy as many mistakenly think it is. Hunter introduces rationalism with this (pp. 11-12):

The assumption of naturalism in science is … a consequence of metaphysical reasoning, and the implications for science are profound…. naturalism provides science with well-defined universal criteria to which it conforms. Instead of merely following the data wherever it may lead, science already has a framework in place. The answer, to a certain extent, is already in place. This is a move toward rationalism and away from empiricism. The result is that science has a powerful philosophy of science, but as we shall see… it does not come without cost…. naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

The rest of the book is about what I left out in the ellipses in that quote. Bear with me a moment before I fill in the blanks. I want us to think about the part of this that I have already quoted. Is it true that science is guided, even controlled, by an assumption of naturalism? Let’s acknowledge that there is no such thing as “science” to be monolithically governed by one stream of thought. Nevertheless it is still true that many of the most prominent spokespersons insist that science treat the natural world as if it is all that exists. God and the supernatural, they insist, either do not exist, or if they do, they are useless or irrelevant as far as science is concerned.

If this is the case, as Hunter says and I think we all must agree, is it a “move … away from empiricism”? Of course it is. God’s non-existence has not been and cannot be proven in the lab or the field. Or is naturalism a necessary assumption for science—that the scientist must at least be a practical atheist? Some would say so, but this is just not at all the case. It’s based on completely mistaken or ad hoc assumptions about God. Any person who says that all knowledge should come by way of science, and that he or she is quite sure there is no God at work in the world, speaks a contradiction.

This is all fairly familiar. What Hunter surprisingly adds to it is the historical roots for the naturalism that is common within science. Let me fill in some of those ellipses now, with emphasis added:

The assumption of naturalism in science is neither a result of atheistic influence nor an empirically based scientific finding.

Theological naturalism provides science with well-defined universal criteria to which it conforms.

Theological naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

Do you see now why I chose to introduce the topic at a gradual pace? Things could get confusing here. What on earth is “theological naturalism”? Isn’t that a self-contradictory concept?

No, it’s not, for though the naturalism that reigns in science today may be atheistic, it is unabashedly theological in nature. And in its historical beginnings its theology was even Christian, in a way. It wasn’t good Christian theology, but it was certainly theology in a Christian tradition.

In 1671 the Anglican chaplain Thomas Burnet wrote that the world was filled with majesty and grandeur yet also with “incredible confusion” and (as Hunter adds in his words, page 52) “lack of symmetry and proportion:”

From a distance the mountains were awe inspiring, but up close there were irregular rocks, moraines, and valleys. Maps and atlases portrayed well-ordered and symmetrical mountains, but Burnet found them to be “shapeless and ill-figured.”

To Burnet this did not seem like the kind of thing God would design. In fact, in 1681 he wrote (Hunter, p. 20),

We think him a better Artist… that makes a Clock that strikes regularly at every hour from the Springs and Wheels which he puts in the work, than he that hath so made his Clock that he must put his finger to it every hour to make it strike.

Hunter goes on to explain,

In other words, special divine action should be minimized. It is better for God to make a self-sufficient machine than to make one needing divine intervention.

This Anglican writing more than 300 years ago sounds astonishingly similar to Francisco Ayala today, who insists that God must be absent from nature, or else evil has no explanation. Or to Ken Miller, who cannot believe God would want to take credit for the mosquito. Or to Ian Barbour, who said (p. 120),

There seem to be too many blind alleys and extinct species and too much suffering and waste to attribute every event to God’s specific actions.

Or even to Darwin, who could not understand why (p. 121),

the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? … Facts, such as these … admit of no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation.

It sounds like Douglas Futuyma today, who (in Hunter’s paraphrase, p. 135) cannot believe God would have created nature so “full of useless features, inadequate design, shoddy workmanship, and harshness or cruelty”? Or evolutionary biologist George C. Williams who thinks a real God would have made better use of the sun (p. 133):

Why, then, would it be so far away, and why would it be enormously larger than the earth? This makes for a wasteful design…. Williams suggests a precisely shaped and brightly polished reflector mounted behind the sun to reflect wasted light upon the earth. As it is, the real earth-sun system “shows no such evidence of purposive engineering.”

One could easily ridicule a sentiment like that, but it would be grossly unfair to do so without having the context in which WIlliams said it. Instead we need to focus on this: Are these not theological arguments? Do they not presuppose a certain view of God? From whence within science does such a view of God come? The answer, of course, is nowhere; it does not come from within science. Historically it came from theologians in the Christian tradition: Thomas Burnet along with Ralph Cudworth, John Ray, Thomas Wolleston, Peter Annet, Charles Kingsley, and others, all of whom taught a view of God that they thought was Christian, and which required God to keep his hands off of his creation. This was not a Biblical view, but it was a view about God, propounded by men who actually believed in such a God. Naturalism was born in theology. Its parentage remains evident.

The “blind spot” spoken of in the title is scientific naturalism’s unawareness of its theological heritage. And it is also its diseased inability to see the possibility—not the certainty or proof, which Hunter does not consider to be in the purview of science, but the possibility—of a designer involved in nature. His arguments for design are well stated, yet they are also familiar, so I will not spend time on them here. More important is the gentle way he opens the philosophical door to the possibility of thinking of design. The alternative to rationalism Hunter espouses is aptly named moderate empiricism. We have met it already, in the first quote I provided near the beginning of this review. It’s a humble approach to knowledge. Unlike naturalism, it does not assume it sees all there is to see. It does not blind its eyes to the possibility of unexpected ultimate explanations.

There are flaws in this book. Several sentences and paragraphs in the early chapters could have used a copy editor’s review (which is surely often the case with my blogging, too, but a blog post just can’t go through as many cycles of review and revision as should be done with a book). Somehow that all seemed to diminish in the middle and end of the book, and I found myself less often needing to re-read, or wishing I could re-write something Hunter had said. The overall structure and flow could be more logical. There is a reason I started this review by quoting from near the end of the book.

Still I’m glad I pushed on through the awkward constructions and the somewhat strange sequence of topics. By the end of the book, Hunter had made his argument superbly clear, and along the way he provided persuasive evidence. If he is right, then naturalism is not just a blind spot: it is an inescapably theological blind spot.

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Book Review

I should have anticipated it from the title, but N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is presented me with an unexpected personal challenge. Wright is an historian of the New Testament era, and in this book heset out to accomplish two historical purposes. The first was what one might call an attempt at time travel: to help us understand the way first century Israelites would have experienced Jesus among them, and how they would have understood his message. The second purpose was to establish reasons to believe the New Testament accounts—especially of the Resurrection—can be trusted historically.

His apologetic for the Resurrection was a new one to me, creative and (I think) compelling, and I would recommend the book on that basis alone. The first part of the book had a deeper, not entirely comfortable impact on me, though. That is where I will dwell for this review.

Even Christ followers can go off track, Wright says, by misunderstanding the context of Jesus’ times:

We have to make a journey as difficult for us in the in the contemporary Western world as that taken by the Wise Men as they went to Bethlehem. We have to think our way back into someone else’s world, specifically the world of the Old Testament as it was perceived and lived by first-century Jews. That is the world Jesus addressed, the world whose concerns he made his own. Until we know how Jesus’ contemporaries were thinking, it will not just be difficult to understand what he meant by the “Kingdom of God”; it will be totally impossible.

Is he saying Christianity has Jesus all mixed up? No and yes. Wright takes Scripture to be historical; he regards it as trustworthy. The message of Christ in it is true. But most of us probably do not understand quite what he meant by his central message: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Like the tables in the Temple, he turned upside-down Jewish expectations regarding the Kingdom. In fact, “repent” in this context (which in the Greek is metanoia, change of mind) did not mean, “stop sinning,” though that would certainly be one effect of what it meant. At a deeper level it meant to change one’s entire way of thinking about the Kingdom of God in the world.

Much of Jesus’ ministry was to overturn the Temple system itself, preparing to establish a new way of relating with God. This was more radical than most of us realize. The Temple was the heart of Israel’s national life, not just its religion. It was the center of power for some Jewish leaders—the ones who would ultimately have him killed.

This is what Wright wants us to see, and to see it through the eyes of a first-century Jew. For me, his time-travel purpose succeeded. He enabled me for a while, to a deeper extent than ever before, to see Jesus as many of his contemporaries must have seen him: the son of a carpenter, youngish, probably not at all outstanding in his physical appearance, walking the countryside with a small group of followers, teaching wisdom, demonstrating truth and love—and leading a revolution that would change not just one nation at its heart, but the whole future history of the world.

But wait. They wouldn’t have seen him as leading a revolution that would change the nation and the world. Not clearly, and certainly not until much later. He would have appeared to them as what I’ve already described: a youngish carpenter’s son, who had taken up the role of a wandering rabbi. We know of him as the leader of an historic revolution. To them, how likely would that have seemed? I’ll come back to that question in a moment.

To be sure, Jesus stood out among rabbis. He performed miracles, including healings, exorcisms, feeding large crowds with little food to start with, and raising the dead. He taught unique wisdom of a life of truth and love, and he taught it from his own authority (Matthew 7:28-29). More remarkably yet, he lived by his own teaching, consistently setting the highest example of how to live a life.

Still, how likely would it seem, to someone watching him teach in the synagogue or debating in the marketplace, that this one youngish (apparent) carpenter’s son, without benefit of microphone, megaphone, or public relations officer, with no head-start by way of family money or reputation, lacking the right degrees from the right schools, and gathering such a strange assortment of followers, would be the one to overturn the whole way God interacted with humans and humans with God?

Wright actually had me thinking for a while, “you know, this is just so implausible.” It wasn’t because he said anything to indicate it might not be true (quite the contrary). It was because I was seeing Jesus, I think, the way many people would have seen him at the time: the youngish carpenter’s son turned into a wandering rabbi with a strange set of followers. He was in those ways a very ordinary man. Israelites at the time thought that when God sent someone to change the world, it would be someone a lot less ordinary-looking, doing something a lot more spectacular. I caught myself thinking, “Yes, that’s how God would have/should have done it. Not this way.”

And then it hit me: it had to be this way.

It had to be this way because of what Jesus came to do, especially in his earthly ministry before the cross. Jesus’ purpose was not to make a spectacle of himself. He even asked people to keep some rather spectacular things quiet for the time being (Mark 8:27-30; Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 3:7-12; Mark 5:21-43). His purpose was to show how to live a life God’s way. More specifically he came to show you and me, and ordinary people everywhere, how we can live life God’s way. As much as possible, he had to do it as an ordinary person, so that we ordinary people could see his example and follow, in our ordinary lives.

Of course he had other purposes besides this: to display the Kingdom of God through his miracles, and ultimately to make it possible through his death and resurrection for us to be reconciled to God and enter the Kingdom with him. His life in those ways was not at all ordinary, and not what we are called to do.

Much of his ministry, though, was about praying and teaching, loving others, affirming the outcast, comforting the hurting, and confronting purveyors of falsehood and hypocrisy. These are things we can do as he did. These are ordinary kinds of things, for ordinary people in God’s Kingdom to do.

To do them as lovingly and consistently as he did—now, that’s far from ordinary. If you haven’t ever done it read the book of Mark or Luke (start at Mark 1 or Luke 1 online if you don’t have a printed version handy). See how extraordinarily he lived out the ordinary things of life.

Pick up a copy of Wright’s book as a companion to your reading, too. Perhaps you’ll see as I did that when God sent someone to change the world, it had to be this way.

The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is by N.T. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1999. 204 pages including endnotes and index. Amazon price US$12.24.

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Book Review

“One of the most haunting things about living in Rwanda after the genocide is that killers still walk among the survivors.” (From page 249.)

I have just experienced one of the most remarkable books of my life: As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation From Rwanda, by Prison Fellowship senior writer and editor Catherine Claire Larson.

Next Thursday evening at 9:00 pm EDT, here on this blog, you will have the opportunity to meet Catherine and interact with her in an online chat. I urge you to mark it on your calendar. If you can get your hands on the book before then, I urge you to do that too.

This posting will not be a complete book review. I intend to extend that out over several posts between now and Thursday. What I have to offer right now is an initial reaction.

In about 100 days in 1994, between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their neighbors, the Hutus. Murder on this scale is beyond imagining. Larson tells seven very personal stories of victims’ and survivors’ experiences—stories not for those with weak stomachs. Her reporting succeeds in walking the fine line between expressing the heart of the pain, and sensationalizing it. I’ll come back to some of that later.

The real core of her book is not about the massacre, but about what has come since. Rwandan prisons could never hold all the murderers. Large numbers of them were released. Killers walk among the survivors. And in the stories she brings us in this book, reconciliation has been possible.

Personal Reflections
I come from a very small town, from very middle-class roots. My mother’s parents were both immigrants from Norway, homesteaders in North Dakota, hard-working, God-fearing people. They moved their large family to Michigan late in the 1920s, to a small town south of Flint, which at the time was very much a thriving community. All of their children—my mother and aunts and uncles—lived out their values of hard work, love, and respect. You wouldn’t think that two of their grandchildren would meet their ends through murder.

My cousin Jeanette was jogging in a park in Lansing. It took fifteen years to identify her murderer, which finally happened through some outstanding detective work aided by a virtual miracle of evidence found after all those years. Her case was featured on the A&E channel’s Cold Case Files show. I didn’t see it when it first aired. I happened on it while alone in a hotel room on a business trip, surfing through channels with the remote control. Let me give you this advice I hope you never need: if you are ever going to see the story of a relative’s murder on TV, don’t do it while alone far from home. I could hardly bear to watch it. It wasn’t that the story was new to me; I had been keeping up with it all along through the family. But it was brutal to see it played out before me on the television screen. I could hardly stand watching it, but there was no way I could turn it off, either. This was family. At the end they interviewed my Aunt Muriel and my cousin Joe, Jeannette’s brother. I sat there watching, crying, alone.

My cousin Brian was walking his dog in an upscale gated community just west of Orlando. A car drove by, going too fast, and he called out to them to slow down. Somebody got out of the car with a gun and shot him for it. I saw him in the hospital a few weeks later, again while traveling alone on a business trip. The first time I saw him—well, to describe his condition would be to go beyond the bounds of what I ought to write. He hardly looked human. The second time I saw him, a few months later, there appeared to be hope. He was able to sit up in bed, and was in good spirits. But he succumbed to a final infection. His killer was never identified.

Massively Multiplied Pain
Experiences like these carry a pain that will never go away. They can also carry an anger that lasts. Compared to Rwanda, though, they are as nothing. Neighbors killed neighbors by the scores. Survivors lost mother, father, siblings, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends. I do not know the multiplier that would take my experiences and feelings, and match them to those of the survivors in Rwanda.

Reconciliation
But these are stories of reconciliation and forgiveness, of anger that ends even though the pain lasts—even of friendship being restored. They are stories of the work of Jesus Christ in the most battered hearts imaginable. There are even stories of the work of Christ in repentant killers’ hearts.

It took me a long time to read this book. (I hope that you will be able to read it more quickly than I did.) On virtually every page–especially in the first several chapters—I had to stop and think and pray, to recover: to recover from facing the reality of how brutal we can be to each other. Even more than that I had to pause often to recover (in a way) from the astonishing wonder of how God could work to bring forgiveness and reconciliation nevertheless.

I can forgive my cousins’ killers as far as it is my place to do so (for the loss or pain I have experienced through what they did), but to do so is to pass a far lesser test than Rwandans have faced. One of the killers is in jail for life, and since I wasn’t at trial I’ve never seen or met him. The other is unknown, and will probably never be identified. Forgiveness is no mere academic point in that case, but it is nothing like forgiving a genocidaire who targeted most of one’s own family—and then living as neighbors with him in the same village.

Could the Gospel really be that good, that really powerful, to effect such deep change in the most difficult of real situations? Then it is even better than I had realized. Not any easier, but better.

There will be more to come. Please be ready to join us for our chat on Thursday night.

As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation From Rwanda, by Catherine Claire Larson. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009. Paperback, 284 pages. Amazon Price US$12.47.

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Book Review

Bayard Taylor has a knack for explaining issues for teens and college students, and doing it clearly, with a refreshing sense of humor. He did it previously with Blah, Blah, Blah, an excellent guide to worldviews (and yes, that’s its title, or at least part of it). He has done it again with The Late Great Ape Debate, a tour of five prominent views of origins. What he does with these five views may be regarded as heretical by some—especially by mainstream evolution proponents. He lets the readers decide for themselves.

Actually that may be a bit overstated. The book is an introduction to these five views, not an exhaustive description. It’s an orientation, providing readers a way for to find their way around in the debate, to recognize the various views for what they are when they see them or hear them. There is not enough information in the book for the reader to come away with an educated, strong opinion on which view they ascribe to themselves, but there’s plenty for them to get started with.

Taylor does not tell us where he himself stands until very late in the book, except that as a Christian he quickly rejects naturalistic evolution, the view that natural processes with no guidance or intervention from God produced life, the universe, and everything (to borrow a phrase from elsewhere). The other four views (theistic evolution, young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and intelligent design) he maps on to a taxonomy showing how they each treat scientific evidences and Biblical interpretation. Briefly he sets forth pros and cons for each. Near the end, as I said, he lets us know what he himself thinks, but he also lets us know his own wife doesn’t necessarily agree with him. That, as much as anything else, underscores his approach: we can disagree on these things and remain friends—but we ought to at least know what we’re talking about!

That’s one of the three main features I found most valuable about this book. It gets the reader started, prepared to evaluate some of the debate, wise to what’s going on under the surface in various approaches, without hammering on one interpretation in particular. Like Taylor, I’m convinced that naturalistic evolution is completely wrong, for we have multiple independent reasons to be confident that God has directed natural history. Also like Taylor, I have a definite position of my own in the controversy; but also like him, I know the whole story has not been told yet, and new information might lead to new interpretations. No matter what, it behooves us all to be aware of the various positions and their implications.

It’s particularly important in a contentious atmosphere to understand others’ positions accurately. Taylor does us all a terrific service by straightening out one of the most significant distortions of the all: the astonishingly tendentious version of the Scopes trial presented in the play and movie, Inherit the Wind. Scene by scene, character by character he compares the fiction with the reality. The book is worth reading for that alone.

That’s the second of the three features of this book I appreciated the most. The third is its enjoyable readability, especially for high school and college students. Taylor has a flair for a phrase. The chapter on Inherit the Wind he titles “Inherit the Spin.”. Section headings like “To Go Ape or Not To Go Ape—That Is The Question” spice up the reading throughout. Sure, it’s not on the order of a professional journal presentation, but that’s not what it’s for.

It’s almost graduation time. This would be a great summer reading gift for a recently graduated senior heading off to the worldview bazaar known as college. (Coupling it with Blah, Blah, Blah would make it even better.) But it doesn’t have to be a graduating senior: anyone could profit from the excellent overview this provides for a difficult debate.

The Late Great Ape Debate by Bayard Taylor, 2008. Cincinnati, OH: Standard Publishing. 196 pages plus endnotes. Amazon Price US$11.04.

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Book Review

Michael Novak is convinced that

Atheists and believers in God can and should open civil, reasoned conversations about questions important to each. Who really are we? What may we hope? How ought we to live?

In the face of such questions, both the atheist and the theist stand in similar darkness. The atheist does not see God–but neither does the believer….

The world of human experience is not all that different for the believer in God versus the atheist….

Why not, then, set aside our cultures of mutual distrust and begin to converse like serious human beings?

Out of that conviction, he has written No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers. It is a book for turning down the heat of debate, recognizing our shared humanness, opening our ears to hear the other side of the story. As such it is more than timely.

Novak, according to the flyleaf, has taught at Harvard and Stanford, and held academic chairs at Syracuse University and Notre Dame. He now holds the Jewett Chair in Religions, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He was granted the Templeton Prize for progress in religion in 1994. A Roman Catholic, he presents views in this book with which Protestant believers may be almost entirely in agreement. One hopes that his call for more irenic religious debate might also be amenable to many atheists.

Peaceable discussion does not mean, however, simply nodding or shaking our heads blandly when we agree or disagree. Novak disagrees deeply and pointedly with the four famous “New Atheists,” Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens. Above all, he takes exception to their dismissing religion offhand with an air of knowledge that in many cases is quite unsupported in fact or argument. Theirs is not the calm approach to reasoned debate that Novak desires; or, as he put it in his title to Chapter One, it is “Not the Way to Invite a Conversation.” All of them, he says, “think religion is so great a menace that they do not show much disposition for dialogue.” In their books,

there is not a shred of evidence that their authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism. Self-questioning about their own scholarly indifference to their subject; about the horrific brutalities committed in the name of “scientific atheism” during the twentieth century; about the restless and mercurial dissatisfactions in atheist and secular movements during the past hundred years…. all such questions are notable by their absence.

Of Dawkins he writes,

Had Professor Dawkins made even a semiserious pretense of fairness, I would have thought much more carefully about his criticisms of Christian peoples…. The letter that Harris claims is intended for a Christian nation is, in fact, totally uninterested in Christianity on any level…. Dennett’s concept of reason and science is so narrow that he seems trapped in something like early-period A.J. Ayer.

It is serious dialogue he desires, not that of the sort set forth by these New Atheists. By way of demonstration and contrast, he devotes 54 pages respectfully responding to his colleague (his description) Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, who had written a short article espousing atheism in the American Conservative in August 2006. It is a back-and-forth exchange, actually, marked throughout by the sense of common humanness Novak calls us to recognize. He allows her in his book to present her case, and in a tone of genuine friendship he answers with his own. Here you get a sense of his approach:

It is rare in American life today to conduct public argument at the depth Heather chooses. Her arguments are crucial to our national life.

A famous Jesuit once said that to achieve real disagreement, two disputants must drink a case of brandy together. Most of what seem to be “disagreements” are a case of mutual misunderstanding. These are not so much real disagreements as false leads. What is needed, then, is a patient willingness to circle round and round together, during many long evenings, narrowing the issues….

One of the best things about friendship is lifelong disagreement on important points, cherished in affectionate argument.

He goes on to list four topics on which believer and unbeliever are likely to be in agreement; and then moves on to state his own case.

This common humanness is evident throughout the book. The common darkness (“No One Sees God”) is in the opening and in the epilogue, but most clearly explained in a chapter on Thinking About God, where he reminds us that even Moses at the Burning Bush did not see God; all he saw was a flame; and

as a drop is to the ocean, so compared to God is a dancing flame.

It is not all darkness: there is knowledge. Yet mystery remains.

Brave and persistent men may come to know God exists. (I repeat, know it. Not believe it.) They can know unmistakably that God exists…. They know it by the fruits of God’s presence in their own lives and in the lives of others…. However humans cannot know, cannot possibly know, what God is. Not with God’s own self-knowledge, and not even with their own.

Elsewhere he also draws at length upon the knowledge of God to be gained through natural theology, as well as through Scripture.

Nearing the close of the book Novak speaks of the via negativa, the negative way (literally), the way of not-knowing: for all our theology and Biblical studies, there is far more about God we cannot grasp than there is that we can understand and know. This approach is more common to Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions than to my own Protestant version of Christianity. It expresses a refreshing and helpful humility in one’s approach to God, and to one’s own knowledge and understanding. Yet for all that, Novak still emphasizes that we can know God’s existence, and some of what God is like, even in the midst of the mystery.

It was a difficult task he set for himself: to call for reasoned, even brotherly discourse at a time when four best-selling atheists have been spilling forth in a most unbrotherly tone. (He might also have pointed to the tone taken on many atheist Internet sites–Pharyngula, for example.) His exchange with Heather MacDonald showed that discourse of that sort is possible. I can only hope that this blog follows Novak’s example of spirited yet respectful debate; a strongly reasoned defense of Christian belief couple with an awareness that others may choose differently; and that though we may have different answers, we all share similar burdens, issues, and questions.

No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers by Michael Novak. New York: Doubleday, 2008. 336 Pages. Amazon Price (Hardcover) US$16.29.

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Many people have commented on Timothy Keller’s book The Reason for God. I thought I had done a review myself, but I can’t find it! That’s what happens when you blog for a while–it’s hard to keep track of what you’ve done.

Here’s the short, better-late-than-never version: it’s one of the best books written lately on how Christianity makes sense. Its chief virtue is in the way Keller takes contemporary objections very seriously, and in the clear, rational, Biblically and historically informed approach he takes to providing answers.

Yet when I read it I was somewhat disappointed, let down. Why? Because I had already listened to his talks on the same topics. He’s an excellent writer, but an even better speaker. If you have to choose one or the other, listen to the talks. (They have the further advantage of being free downloads.) If you’re going to do both, read first, listen later, and learn both ways.

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Book Review

Richard Abanes takes a thorough and critical look at Eckhart Tolle’s latest book, in his 2008 Bethany House book, A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller. It’s a study primarily aimed (through most of its length) toward Christian believers, drawing on Christians’ shared trust in the Bible as a trustworthy revelation from God. As such it could well be an invaluable resource for Christians who may find Tolle attractive, like Kelly at the 2:41 point in this YouTube video. Abanes draws 80 discrete statements out of Tolle’s A New Earth and painstakingly shows how they all fall short of truth.

The first chapter differs from the rest in comparing Tolle with Tolle, rather than Tolle with Scripture, providing a point of contact with those who do not adhere to biblical authority. For example, Tolle says, “every belief is an obstacle.” Abanes asks rather sensibly whether that itself is a belief. Later he quotes Tolle,

To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens. It means not to label it mentally as good or bad. . . . The Master responds to falsehood and truth, good news and bad news, in exactly the same way: [By merely saying,] “is that so?”

As spiritual as that may sound, Abanes shows that Tolle’s

[B]ooks and lectures are filled with judgments about what is good, bad, right, wrong, true, and false (for example, wars, exclusive religious claims, the witch hunts of Europe, materialism, sickness, addiction).

It is indeed an old deception, wrapped up in soothing spiritual language and propelled by Oprah’s powerful marketing. If you have questions about Tolle, or if you know of someone who thinks it may be a nice addition to Christianity, this short book may provide your best, most accessible set of trustworthy answers.

A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller by Richard Abanes. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2008. 173 pages plus endnotes. Amazon price US$9.59.

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