Light On Dark Water

…Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts…

So Jesus addressed his people on the subject of divorce. But reading some of our prominent critics of religion makes me think it’s their heads that are the problem; no matter how intelligent and reasonable they may be on some subjects, their minds seem to be impermeable to very straightforward ideas where religion is concerned.

For instance, there’s John Derbyshire’s bizarre complaint on National Review Online a couple of days ago that Benedict XVI is somehow hypocritical or fraudulent when he speaks against moral relativism.

Derb (as they call him) is frustrating. On certain subjects he’s an interesting and sometimes delightful writer. His National Review column, “The Straggler,” is almost always a fine, graceful, wry commentary on the small things of life; one of the better things in the magazine, in fact. But on religion, and especially on Catholicism, toward which he clearly has a residual Anglo-Protestant hostility even though he is no longer even a Christian, he is often strikingly dense. In this case he is unable to grasp that the pope is discussing the question of whether there are absolute moral principles, and the implications of believing that there are none. Derbyshire not only fails to understand this, which should be clear to any person of reasonable intelligence and reading skill, but attacks it with startling irrelevancies that indicate an inability to grasp the difference between physical science and philosophy. The exchange starts here, and then he digs the hole deeper here. (There is some attempt at rebuttal by a couple of other NR writers, but it doesn't get anywhere; see the archives for April 21 and after if you want to try to follow the argument.)

This is a man who has written well-regarded books on mathematics. Yet here he seems to believe that difficulty in knowing and agreeing upon universal moral principles somehow makes assertion of their existence meaningless and hypocritical. The fallacy in this should be obvious to anyone who can think logically. Derbyshire is certainly capable of thinking logically. Therefore something else is at work in preventing him from doing so in this case.

And then there’s Christopher Hitchens. I’ve enjoyed his literary criticism in The Atlantic for some time, but he says such ignorant things about Christianity with such apparent confidence that I can no longer assume that he is speaking in good faith about anything, and will probably not bother reading him in the future: if he tells me Evelyn Waugh said this, or George Orwell believed that, what grounds do I have for supposing that he isn’t just ranting ignorantly, just as he does about religion? Why should I assume that he has intellectual integrity on one subject and not another?

Of course, in spite of the title of this post, I think it does begin in the heart. And it’s an amusing irony, if you care to be amused, that two men who pride themselves on the purity of their reason seem to be so driven by something else where religion is concerned.

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