Most Mondays feature letters from students, but this one is from a student’s parents.

Question:

Our son, who tests at genius level, has just completed his first year of college.  Recently he nervously approached my wife and me to tell us that he no longer thinks Christianity is true.  He doesn't believe in God, says that we can know nothing except through science, and claims that each person has to define the meaning and significance of life for himself.  Religion, he thinks, is a crutch. 

He says he has come to these views on his own, through reading and chat room discussions.  Although he tells us he is open to further discussion, his attitude communicates that he isn't really open.  He refuses to believe that we could know God exists beyond a reasonable doubt, concluding that we may as well believe there is no God.  We have responded by reaffirming our love for him, reviewing the evidence for the truth of the Christian faith and trying to unravel some errors in his logical reasoning.  So far, though, it appears that we are making no progress whatsoever.  He is well-read in Christian apologetics and tells us that he has "heard it all.” 

Please, if there is anything you can do or recommend to help us in this difficult time, we would very deeply appreciate it.  We're encouraging him to talk with smart Christians.  I've read about you and I know you once traveled a path somewhat similar to my son's. 

Reply :

I was grieved to hear of your son's fall from faith.  As you guessed, this is a common story.  Yes, I do have a few suggestions. 

I've shortened your letter quite a bit for publication.  What the long, original version tells me is that during your talks with your son, you are pouring almost all of your energy into discussing his intellectual objections to Christianity.  It's important to realize that these intellectual objections are not necessarily the reason why he so abruptly lost his faith.  It almost never happens that a bright young person who understands apologetics runs into an argument he can't answer, then -- wham! -- stops believing.  What more often happens is that he develops a motive to lose his faith, then starts looking for arguments he can't answer. 

The question, then, is what that motive may have been.  Often, a young person has more than one such motive.  One common motive is personal sin.  If you are doing what God calls wrong, it's uncomfortable to believe in God.  Another motive is intellectual pride and vanity.  Smart people like to be recognized as smart by other smart people, but the intellectual culture of our day holds Christianity in contempt. 

I don't suggest that you and your wife should interrogate your son about his motives.  There are two good reasons not to.  The first is that although young people think they understand their motives well, in fact they usually don't.  The second reason is that even if you could prove that your son had a bad motive for losing his faith, that wouldn't prove that his present views are false.  So it isn't important to convince him that he must have had some motive for abandoning faith.  The important thing is to understand this fact about him yourselves.  Intelligent though he may be, his problem is less cognitive (being unable to understand) than volitional (being unwilling to understand). 

What else can I suggest? Pull back from lengthy discussions with him about the rational grounds for faith.  As you point out, you can't argue a person into belief.  Excessive indulgence in such discussions may even do more harm than good, by feeding your son's conviction that his motives are purely intellectual.  Of course I don't mean that you shouldn't discuss the intellectual dimension of faith -- you certainly should.  But let him bring it up. 

You must also distinguish between objections to faith that represent real intellectual problems for him, and objections to faith that he is using merely as smokescreens.  When you meet a real intellectual problem, offer a real intellectual solution.  A smokescreen, however, requires an entirely different response: What you have to do is blow it away and uncover the real issue hidden behind it.  There is an art to this, and you must depend on the assistance of the Holy Spirit. 

It won't work to say, "That's just a smokescreen.”  What you have to do is talk in such a way that your son recognizes for himself that he's only blowing smoke.  Sometimes a simple question is enough -- something like "Suppose I gave you a completely convincing intellectual response to every one of your objections.  Would you change your mind?" You'd be surprised how often people say "No."

Yes, it's important for your son to get to know smart Christians, but not for the reason you think.  Whether he talks with them about the faith isn't very important.  What's important is making it impossible for him to tell himself that smart Christians don't exist.  Nonbelievers with a lot of intellectual pride reassure themselves with the idea that faith is a defect of the intellect.  They find smart Christians unsettling.  As philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.” 

In the meantime, pray for your son without ceasing.  Pray for him whenever you think of him, morning, noon or night.  This is the most important thing of all.  Never despair.  Prayer may feel like not doing anything, but it is doing the greatest thing.  Implore God to do what is needed to bring your son to himself, like the prodigal son in the parable.  An ancient Christian woman named Monica prayed daily for her pagan son.  Our title for the man her son became is St. Augustine.

Trust God.  Intellectual pride is like a tower of adamant, with the door locked from the inside.  Sometimes the only way available to the Divine Love to bring a soul back to Himself is to bring him low.  If He brings your own son low, you must be ready, because your faith may be tested too.

People on the left call conservatives liars.  People on the right call progressives liars.  Are these two claims equivalent?

Philosophically, no.  At least some kinds of conservatives still believe that truth is correspondence with reality, and that saying what you know to be false with the intention of deceiving is always wrong.  This doesn’t mean they will never lie.  What it means is that they think they shouldn’t.  Whenever they do lie, their own creed accuses them.

From the beginning, however, the progressive movement has embraced pragmatism, a philosophy which is notoriously committed to the view that truth is whatever works.  Certain kinds of conservatives, including the Law and Economics crowd, are strongly attracted to it too.

If truth is whatever works, then a lie is a lie only if it fails; if it succeeds, it isn’t a lie.  It follows that although a pragmatist may sincerely agree that lying is wrong, for him this means only that he has to get away with it.  If he does, then it worked, so he was telling the truth all along.

The drawback of this philosophy is that you won’t actually know whether or not you are lying until you either get caught or get away with it.  So the way to avoid lying isn’t to avoid saying things that don’t correspond with reality, but to never get caught.  Gather enough power to shut up your critics and make people believe what you say.

This also explains why certain political factions are so fond of the jeers “You’ve lost” and “You’re on the wrong side of history.”  If truth is what works, those losers are liars by definition.

Considering the prevalence of vice, any politician might say whatever is expedient for gaining power.  Viewing the matter objectively, though, which kinds of politician would you expect to do it more:  The ones that believe in doing it, or the ones that don’t?

Objections Concerning Psychopathy and Incoherency

Objection 3.  If it were really true that everyone knows the general precepts of the moral law, then everyone who violated them would feel the pangs of conscience.  But psychologists report that sociopaths and psychopaths have no conscience.  To much the same effect, anthropologists commonly distinguish between guilt cultures, shame cultures, and fear cultures.  Remorseful feelings are prominent only in guilt cultures.

Psychologists who say that sociopaths and psychopaths lack conscience are confusing the judgment of conscience, an intellectual event, with the feeling of remorse, an emotional event.  Again I would address the objector:  Have you never had the experience of doing something you knew to be wrong, but not feeling bad about it?  Sociopaths and psychopaths are not people who do not know their acts are wrong, but people who never feel bad about it.  Even without guilty feelings, by the way, they do show signs of guilty knowledge.  One young murderer who had been described by police as having no conscience confirmed to a reporter that he didn’t feel bad for what he had done.  But after a moment he added, “There must be something wrong with me, don’t you think?   Because I should.”

The same point applies to so-called shame and fear cultures.  There may be a great deal of cultural variation in the emotional reaction to guilty knowledge.  We are not discussing whether everyone feels the same when he violates a known moral law, but whether everyone knows the moral law.*

Objection 4.  If St. Thomas is right, then anyone who denies knowledge of the general principles of the natural law must be self-deceived.  But the notion of self-deception is incoherent, because it conceives of a single person as two persons, one of whom knows something, though the other is in the dark.  It is as though I were to say that I am thinking about something, and at the same time that I am not thinking about it.

Yes, the suggestion that one and the same mind can both know and not know something in the same sense at the same time is incoherent.  However, the hypothesis that the denier really does know what he claims not to know can be developed without this dubious notion.  St. Thomas would suggest, "Don't say that you are both thinking and yet not thinking about something, or thinking about it in what both is and yet is not your real mind.  Rather say that you have one mind, but its operations are subtle and complex.  Even when you are not actually thinking about something, you may be apt to think of it at any moment.  To put it differently, even when the knowledge is not actualized in present awareness, you may possess it habitually.  In the meantime, your mind may continue to be dispositionally influenced by it.”

If this analysis is correct, then the distinction between unconscious and conscious knowledge which is so common today is perhaps best viewed as an unsuccessful attempt to get at something that St. Thomas’s own distinction, between habitual and actualized knowledge, gets at more successfully.  Expressions like “self-deception” are best used in a figurative rather than in a literal sense.  To be self-deceived does not mean that there are two of me.  It means that although I have a dispositional tendency to be aware of something – a “natural habit,” as St. Thomas says -- I am resisting it; I am trying not to think about this something.

Trying not to think about something is rather difficult.  If that my aim, then I must school myself in the arts of self-distraction.  In fact, in order to avoid thinking about one thing, I must regiment myself not to think of a large number of things which act as triggers for thinking about it.  And let us not forget that the ever-increasing effort required to resist my dispositional tendency has dispositional consequences of its own – a point to which we will return.

Link to Part 7 of 14

Note to puzzled readers:

On the Teaching page, the broken

link from here to here has been

discovered and fixed.

Question:

You answered the Lutheran minister’s question about how to explain to his flock what is going on, but you didn’t answer an important related question.  Some Christians propose that the Church “divorce” itself from civil marriage – that ministers stop signing civil marriage certificates – because marriage as the Church understands it and “marriage” as the state defines it no longer have anything to do with each other.  What do you think of this?

Reply:

As I explained in my previous post, civil marriage has traditionally meant recognition by the state that a natural marriage exists.  The advantage of such recognition is that the law can then enforce the duties of the spouses to their children and to each other.

This was a good thing.  Although it had nothing to do with religion per se – for the state was not interested in the sacrament – the state did accommodate the Church by allowing her ministers to file marriage certificates.  This too was a good thing.  Notice that it was a one-way relationship.  In effect, the state said “If the Church says there is a natural marriage, we believe it.”  But if the state said “There is no longer a marriage,” the Church was not required to believe it, and if the state said “The parties are qualified to marry,” the Church was not required to agree.

Logically, one might think that would not have to change.  In the past, the Church could say “Steve and Sally are not qualified to marry, so they may not participate in the marriage rites of the Church, and we will not certify to the state that a marriage exists.”  Now, the Church can say “Steve and Ernest are not qualified to marry, so they may not marry in the Church, and we will not certify to the state that a marriage exists.”

But I think it will change.  Just because the state has abandoned the natural law, civil “marriage” now means nothing more than that state declares a certain sexual arrangement deserving of “esteem.”  I think, therefore, that pressure will be applied the Church to either accept the state’s definition of the arrangements deserving of such "esteem" (which of course it cannot do), or lose its privilege of certifying to the state that a marriage exists.  So the “divorce” you ask about will be forced upon the Church.

At that point, the Church might or might not advise parties who become sacramentally married to have a civil marriage too.  I expect that this decision would turn upon whether by that time civil marriage has any remaining connection with the legal enforcement of parental duties to the children.  The way things are going, it probably won’t, since already the state’s definition of “marriage” has lost all connection with procreation.  But we will see.

Monday, as always, is a student letter day.

Comment:

I really appreciated the discussion of postmodernism in your fictional Office Hours dialogue “The Big Story.”  I am a second year graduate student in a liberal English department.  Postmodernism is my teachers' favorite intellectual child.  It has been a struggle to reconcile my academic work with my faith.  “Office Hours” has given me a heartfelt look at the role Christians ought to be playing in the intellectual and university community.

Reply:

You're doing much better than I did in graduate school; I had already abandoned my faith and didn't return to it until I was out and teaching.  So many things have changed since then; Christians are discovering each other in academia and reintegrating their faith with their scholarship.  An ancient Christian saying is Unus Christianus, nullus Christianus -- “a sole Christian is no Christian.”  That's no less true in academia than in any other walk of life.

A number of Catholic and Protestant scholars have told their own stories.  If it would give you a lift to read some of them, try Kelly Monroe Kullberg’s Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians.  You can read the account of my own conversion here.  Protestant, Catholic, and ecumenical scholarly associations also exist in many of the disciplines, and are easy to find online.  Christians have begun to promote renewal in several academic fields.  For example, two generations ago the philosophy of religion was dead and most philosophers took atheism for granted, but since then philosophy of religion has experienced a resurrection, most of its leading practitioners are theists, and most of the theists are persons of Christian faith.

Our literary culture used to be Christian.  Maybe you will be one of the pioneers in its rebirth!  May the Father of Lights illuminate your intellect and set lamps on the path of your studies.