Recent writings by the “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—present an ideal occasion for Michael Novak to return to his deepest philosophical passion: exploring a reasoned approach to questions about the nature and destiny of human beings.
Novak begins No One Sees God with experiences of suffering and meaninglessness. (His brother was murdered in Bangladesh in 1964.) He then takes up direct conversations with the new atheists, one by one, not to refute them but to show how all of us share a common darkness. Beginning in nihilism and relativism, he finds a step-by-step way to think about suffering and evil, prayer, and trust in the God of the Absurd.
The present age is too serious for the literature of contempt that atheists since the Enlightenment have directed at believers–and which believers have reciprocated. The “end of the secularist age”— the collapse of the illusion that the whole world was supposed to be turning secular—may have arrived. Novak proposes a new “age of reasoned conversation,” in which believers and unbelievers recognize each other’s dignity in the common darkness that is their lot.
Following Novak’s presentation, Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution and AEI resident scholar Christina Hoff Sommers will discuss the possibility of a new and fruitful conversation between atheists and believers. AEI president Christopher DeMuth will moderate.
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