Admiring once again the clarity of mind and persistent attention to evidence that characterize your writing, Heather, I note that you put three different sorts of questions to me. One set asks me about the reasonableness of the Christian faith, and its ability to persuade others of its claims.

George Frederick Jewett Scholar Michael Novak

Another set insists upon respect for the autonomy of reason, moved by its own "innate" (as you put it) search for truth, justice, and solid empirical evidence.

The third set challenges me with open hints about the differences in philosophical outlook ("metaphysics") that divide us. It is these last that most divide us, at least as I assess where we have so far arrived. By "metaphysics" here, I mean considerations of reason, without faith. I mean the "background assumptions" about nature and history that are implicit in all that we think and write. Such differences in metaphysics among the chief participants in Plato's dialogues are starkly drawn. If the participants are to make progress in their more immediate arguments, it is necessary to bring these underlying differences to light. (Bringing these to light, by the way, is a work of reason, even if it is not exactly empirical reason.)

But first let me make clear why I would prefer at this juncture not to argue in terms of Christian faith, either for it or against it. To employ Christian faith in setting forth the fullness of the way I think would be a great pleasure. But in the world in which I work, I have for years found it better to keep such matters out of sight, tacit perhaps, unnecessary for the arguments I am called upon to make. (The Chair I occupy at the American Enterprise Institute is designated the Jewett Chair "in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy." "Religion" is intended here in the broadest descriptive sense, so that it might cover the religious views of Socrates, Cicero, Mohammed, etc.) I agree with Heather that one can and probably should argue about the costs and benefits of the minimum wage, childbearing outside of marriage, personalized Social Security accounts, mandatory national health insurance, why capitalism is superior to socialism as an economic system, and the like, within the confines of reason alone. The world of reason has its own relative autonomy, which must be respected.

Experience shows, of course, that substantial numbers of the public have learned to think in religious categories, in the categories of "faith." Such persons are not to be despised, yet one does note that they are suspicious of "merely" rational empirical thinking, which they find cold, bloodless, and mostly a way of rationalizing what one really wants to do, but dare not quite express. For instance, in arguing in Latin America about capitalism, I have found Hayek's splendid arguments not convincing to many, because while they "sound nice," they are too secular. Some people want to weigh the religious bearing of Hayek's arguments, too. How do they fit in the larger scheme of things? For some audiences, an ability to explain things in religious terms (due account being made for audiences of different religions) is indispensable for getting one's points a fair hearing.

In this respect, Heather seems to be making matters a little too comfortable for herself, and easier, when she insists that everyone should learn to speak her language of reason and empiricism. Hers is a very sound option. Yet experience teaches me that her way is not sufficient for large numbers of people, in this country and abroad. And on this earth, there are a lot more religious than secular people.

For myself, however, I am happy to play by her rules, and stick to the ways of reason, evidence, and (as much as possible) the empirical. It would be wrong to use my Catholic faith where the proper autonomy of reason suffices. (This is a quite traditional way for Catholics to proceed, beautifully laid out by Thomas Aquinas, for one.) Still, I should point out the intellectual advantages of using Jewish or Christian faith along with reason. Using reason alone is a little like using the naked eye, whereas "putting on faith" is a little like putting on perfectly calibrated glasses, and using telescopes or microscopes, when needed, to capture otherwise invisible dimensions of reality. Faith does not take away reason, but assists it and enables it to see more and better and more steadily. Faith enhances reason, and takes it where it could not go alone.

Some scholars even argue--Alfred North Whitehead, for one--that for 5,300 years before the scientific era biblical faith taught entire cultures to trust reason and to pursue it, habits without which the scientific enterprise would have no mooring in human habits and expectations. This is because Jewish and Christian faith bear witness to the vision that the one Creator is Logos, that humans are made in the image of Logos, and thus have a vocation to follow reason, and that hidden in all things, even the most contingent and puzzling, are reasons why things are as they are. These reasons, although some remain ever beyond our ken, await patient discovery by legions of highly disciplined, dedicated, scientific, and wise inquirers.

Therefore, even from motives that in my case spring partly from faith, Heather's first two challenges seem to me quite reasonable, and not merely acceptable to me, but already a matter of daily practice. I freely recognize the proper autonomy of reason alone in settling disputes of public policy. Secondly, it is simply obvious that many people do not think that the claims of the Catholic faith--or of any religious faith--are reasonable, given their own standards for what is reasonable. It is simply a matter of respect for such persons to do one's best to keep the argument going in their own terms, without insisting upon one's own.

But the third set of questions that Heather puts before me is not amenable to so direct and uncomplicated an argument. Many background assumptions, a lot of metaphysical disagreements, divide us.

Heather manifests a deep respect for human conscience, for the human quest for truth and justice, and for the "innate" drives for goodness and care for others that she finds in human life. Where did these come from? What sort of reality is it, in which such rays of light sometimes appear? I suspect that Heather, as I do, frequently finds the world of human experience absurd and meaningless. The law of the jungle does not seem as benign, or as promising for progress in truth and justice, as do certain specifically human energies, drives, and aspirations. The problem with animal rights, someone once quipped, is getting the animals to respect them. All the more reason to wonder, then, about Heather's quest for the good and the true.

I learned from Albert Camus that an unavoidable duality in our actual experience gives rise to what he calls the Absurd. On the one hand, there is the undeniable longing for truth, beauty, goodness, justice, unity, wholeness, love, that we powerfully experience within us, even under the most unpromising conditions (as in the Gulag, under torture). On the other hand, these aspirations cannot avoid crashing face to face on the cruel randomness, isolation, desolation, and emptiness that we are often forced to confront. We can evade the latter for a long time by distracting ourselves with pulsating music, card playing, restless movement, ceaseless activity.

Yet, sooner or later, we are driven to ask: Why are we here? Why so many abandoned children crying in the night? Why the everlasting boredom, and the incessant rain of nothingness upon the windowpanes of our consciousness? Why so many pointless routines, such petty strife, such kitchen dishonesties, such office pretenses?

Without both these sides of our consciousness, Camus taught us, we would not come to rest on the razor's edge of the Absurd--keeping the two sides in contact is crucial to our truthfulness: our longing for meaning and beauty, in contact with the jarring and jading of our lives.

Heather would like to shift onto my shoulders the burden of explaining the evil and absurdity in the world, which our reason discerns steadily enough. Yet even when she has eliminated God from the scheme of life as she sees it, she has not diminished by one iota the same evils, sufferings, and injustices we both see around us. She does not explain how they fit into her fairly rosy view of progress, reason, and the secular. A faith she dares not express seems to tell her that this progress is indefinitely upwards, ennobling, worth contributing to. Yet, irony of ironies, meaninglessness squared, what if our visible "progress" is hurtling us toward the most awful end of history any apocalyptic writer has ever imagined? What if progress is not progress at all, but madness on the loose? (Heather may well hold this darker assumption, not the rosy one.) I am not trying to diminish the glory of modern progress. On the contrary, I am trying to make myself conscious of the underlying metaphysics on which it depends--its vision of the direction in which history tends, its underlying dynamism, and its ultimate kindliness and benevolence toward humankind.

Heather herself suggests that the true problem before us is not the problem of evil, but the problem of good. In my experience, the problem of evil really does bother the Christian believer, because it goes contrary to what faith teaches about the goodness of God. By comparison, this is not a problem for my atheist friends. For them, the evil of the world is just there. Insofar as it matters metaphysically, it torches arguments for the existence of God. To their mind, absurdity forms the backdrop for their heroic human Sisyphus who, against all odds, keeps rolling progress up the hill.

For them, it seems (but maybe I misunderstand), what comes from reality is meaninglessness. What comes from humans is the ennobling effort to make progress, despite the absurdity at the heart of things.

But this is not the way Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Seneca--none of them Christians--saw the fundamental reality of things. They, particularly Plato, were stunned by the beauty in things, the forms visible everywhere to the inner eye, the perfections toward which things of every kind tend. Indeed, so splendid to him did this beauty seem that it felt to him as if life on this earth, lived by empirical reason alone (which he never disdained, but only honored), was like life in a cave, shaded from the brilliance outside its door.

Something like this vision is, I think, buried in Heather's own metaphysics. She really does see humans as aspiring to "forms" such as truth, justice, fairness, judiciousness, amity, the concern of one human for another. She measures progress by approximation to these forms. Out in the future, furthermore, these forms beckon us onward.

In her writings, Heather seems a lightsome being, impassioned by conscience, justice, and the careful use of reason, pleased most by progress in reducing the suffering of her fellow human beings. She seems to agree that these inner strivings are "innate," not really earned, but given. She writes as though these qualities are, more than their opposites, truly in touch with reality. This fierce belief of hers does not blind her to the ways in which, in fact, this day's reality is obscured by backwardness, recalcitrance, and resistance to the light of reason. But this noble belief sustains her even then.

In my view, Heather's own conscience and noble longings for the good--which seem foreign to most other things in the universe--are signals of the divine. Put another way, such signals led Plato and many another non-Christian philosophers to conclude that, in the end, the fundamental force at the heart of things cannot be considered purely evil. On the contrary, that force is the attraction that slowly pulls the human race onwards and upwards.

To conclude. It is good to nourish that force in many human breasts, in a Republic that would be worthy of the noble side of our nature.

As both Heather and I see it, this task can be accomplished by reason and lofty human sentiments, apart from Christian (or any other) faith.

Except. I hesitate, and perhaps Heather does too, because of such things as Moral Inertia. Like the cooling of a cup of tea, the erosion of mountains, and the dying of distant stars, human character also declines across generations. For a purely secular morality, weak before the ravages of relativism, moral decadence is an almost irresistible downward drive.

I do not wish to end on a note suggesting that religion is an indispensable means to the survival of the Republic. I don't mean, either, to argue for religion on account of its social utility. My aim is solely to linger awhile on the source of Heather's own goodness of spirit, along with the fidelity of such moral heroes as Sharansky under torture in the Gulag. To what, exactly, was Anatole Sharansky exercising fidelity, under pain in every part of his body and soul?

Sharansky came up with his own answer.

As must we all.

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.