Those who pile remorseless fact on remorseless fact in the name of rational science usually wind up constructing another idol, only one that is lifeless; that is their right and choice, but why should it surprise them that the rest of us refuse to bow down and worship with them?

What is one to make of the onslaught of atheist tracts over the past year or two – Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, all raking the countryside with their discontent with religion?
 
Did all those Silent Nights and Merry Christmases and Happy Hanukkahs finally get to them? Has peace on earth good will toward men driven them to madness? Does the Nativity cut to the heart of their pain?
 
They are an interesting lot, these men, who find faith an absurd – even abominable — idea and will not rest until they make cry uncle all of us who insist on believing. And convert us to what? One might lament the evangelical who is so persistent that he alienates people and threatens them with visions of fire, but at least such a person is trying to save a soul. What are the evangelical atheists trying to save? What are they trying to sell – other than a rationalism taken to such extremes that is ceases to be rational?

Let us concede that faith is a mystery beyond reason. Like love, hope, and charity, it has reasons that reason does not know. It can no more be understood by reason than Mozart or Shakespeare. Yet here is the irony. Though western religious tolerance, rooted in enlightenment, is upon us, the apostles of atheism are not content.
  
People, in this nation at least, are free to worship the sun, Satan or nothing at all. Atheists espouse their views routinely on national television, make money pedaling their books, and are, for the most part, greeted by indifference. Not good enough for people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. They want us to submit to their demand that the public square be stripped of every vestige of faith. This is not only unacceptable, it betrays the tradition of American history and a spiritual instinct as old as humanity itself.
 
Neverthless, evidence of this crusade can be seen across this land. In our courts, our malls and in the halls of government, the atheists (or their surrogates) aggressively seek to impose their objections to faith on the vast majority of faithful Americans. It is not enough that they are not forced to pray, they now find offensive any public display of prayer. Having been given the tolerance they claimed as their right, they are intolerant of any public affection for faith. They will not rest, so it seems, until every religious symbol is removed from any spot on which they might tread.
 
Hitchens is the most determined advocate of this position, his occasional blandishments about tolerance aside.  Not with a scalpel but a Gatling gun does he seek to sweep away the crimes cloaked by the mask of religion. Whether it is the abuse of women, children or medical science, he is quite right to be outraged by pain inflicted on the world by moral bullies and extremists who have concluded that their dogmas justify acting as God’s judges and executioners on earth. One only has to consider the daily toll of killings each day in the name of religious faith to appreciate Hitchens’ point.
 
But Hitchens misfires, not because he is wrong but because he is right. Dogmatic believers – atheist or otherwise – often assume a knowledge that invites abuse. He calls his book, god is not great. It could just as easily have been named man is not great. Or nationalism is not great. Or extremism is not great.
 
The inquisition was insane. So was the Holocaust. Flying planes into buildings in the name of faith is every bit as pernicious and murderous as crucifying Christians in the name of Caesar. Drinking Kool Aid laced with poison makes about as much sense as dispatching millions of people to the Gulag. G. K. Chesterton observed that human beings are not rational and Hitchens acknowledges this but then fails to digest the relevant lessons.
 
For every case of religious-inspired violence there is an equally horrific example of violence rooted in atheistic or pagan political culture. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are relevant not because they deal with rare abnormalities in human behavior, but because they speak to failings that afflict the vast majority of flawed human beings.
 
Early on Hitchens writes:  “The true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows the knee.” Yet, Hitchens knows that the true believer is as likely to be a Marxist as a Muslim, a Nazi as a Catholic, a nationalist as a Morman, a secular humanist as a Buddhist.  And so Hitchens tries a bit of polemical gymnastics, and seeks to lump every sort of dogma, from materialism to paganism, under the heading of "religion." In doing so, he has rendered his book meaningless. If he cannot distinguish between the worship of God and the worship of man, how does one take him seriously as a critic? If the impulse to believe in dogmas is at issue, isn’t Hitchens’ belief in unbelief just another dogma?
 
As a faithful person, I am prepared to defend my faith, but I am not prepared to let Hitchens define what that faith is. I will defend a belief in God, but not a belief in Hitchens as the arbiter of what God is. I am prepared to defend the notion that Jesus stood in unique relationship to creation, but I am not prepared to let Hitchens equate Roman paganism with the Beatitudes. We need not submit to their circular logic, which goes something like this: religion is bad, bad things happen, thus religion is the mother of all bad things.
 
Hitchens’ history is sorely lacking. There is no compelling proof that Jesus existed, he claims at one point. I doubt Mr. Hitchens would deny the existence of Shakespeare, and we certainly have as much evidence to support that Jesus lived as we do that Shakespeare did. He claims that the moral instruction of the Bible and the New Testament are nothing new, but clearly he has chosen to ignore the brutalities of the pagan world.
 
Mr. Hitchens is not content to argue that religion, taken to radical extremes, does much harm. No, he argues that religion “poisons everything” and he does not exempt Judaism or Christianity or any other of the great world religions. Such a comprehensive claim discredits itself at the outset, for religion no more poisoned the world than the world poisoned the world.
 
Life is a vale of tears, an imperfect journey, however lifted it might be by the tender mercies or moments of beauty we experience. Yet religion has enriched that experience and offered glimpes of the eternal by inspiring art, literature, music, architecture, and philosophy. It has compelled men to look beyond themselves, just as it has commanded them to bend their knees. It has comforted millions in time of need, and led to shattering moral insights.
 
We also know, as Mr. Hitchens dutifully reminds us, that religion has been used to break men’s minds and spirits, to force men to deny their own sacred beliefs, to rip them apart from the very creation for which we give thanks to God. Yet, I am amazed at how unpersuasive the religious critics are.
 
Dawkins relates a claim made by some that the universe could no more come into existence by chance than a Boeing 747 could be assembled by a windstorm blowing through a salvage lot. What about the obvious question: is the universe anything like a Boeing 747? Is the universe a machine, or a mysterious blend of poetry, drama and science? We can only assume a creator, an intelligent design, if what we are today is what the creator intended us to be, right? If the wind shapes a cloud in the image of an elephant, do we assume that the wind consciously created the shape? Our existence could be an accident of moving parts, not always effectively assembled to judge by all the discarded pieces of creation.
 
But then maybe God isn't an engineer or an architect, but a dramatist or a comedian. Nature is sublime and brutal, efficient and wasteful, miraculous and horrifying, comical and tragic. Those who claim to have faith must concede that if God exists, all of this is part of the creation God made possible, and that we have a limited capacity to make sense of it – the child with cancer or a fissionable atom that unleashes hell. As C.S. Lewis reminded us, waste, inefficiency, loss, suffering are all part of God’s plan. It would be hard to argue otherwise.
 
The unbeliever likewise must answer difficult questions. Believing in a God that unleashed creation may be farfetched, but is it more farfetched than believing that our universe came from nothing? And if the object lesson of evolution is that the best is what emerges from the primordial morass of human existence, are we not forced to concede, at this juncture at least, that religious belief is the superior idea, given its dominance of virtually every culture and society known to man?
 
It is my own view that the journey to understanding will not be marked by arrogant preaching, but by tentative steps in the direction of self-discovery. It will not be found by a thousand theologians debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but by a childlike wonder that finds all things possible –- snowflakes that dance in the air like fairies, a sun that melts away each evening, stars that twinkle like icicles on a winter’s day. Small mysteries that add up to universal wonder are the stuff of faith.
 
No, it is not the humble Christian who poses the problem, but the arrogant atheist. It is not the uncertain agnostic who threatens God’s children, but the religious who mistakes himself for God. I, for one, share Hitchens’ concerns about true believers if he means those who are incapable of entertaining doubt. I would go further. I would argue that doubt is essential to a healthy faith. And I would go even further by arguing that God would consider doubt essential to true faith.
 
Doubt is integral to faith precisely because faith is the triumph of hope over reason. Where there is no doubt, there can be no struggle, no search, no journey toward understanding, and no reconciliation between the material and the spiritual. Those who never question can be easily tempted to tyranny. When Jesus said that the heart of the law is mercy, when he forgave sinners as a matter of routine practice, he was speaking to the heart of the Christian mystery — those who condemn risk condemnation. The paradox is instructive. It is the possibility of error that binds our common humanity; it is the capacity to admit we might be wrong that leads us to truth. Thus are religious faith and science joined.
 
Where might faith be found? It can be found in countless places. In prayerful moments inside an empty church, in the joyous Masses at Christmas season, in the gestures of peace transmitted through an embrace or a handshake, in the traditions of charity and gift-giving, in the recognition of shared, irredeemable losses, in questioning moments of despair when all seems futile, in the little things that annoy us, in the still small voice that pierces the thundering winds. That these dramas are beyond the calculus of today’s zealots, faithful or not, is the root of much tragedy. It is those who demand merciless perfection who are most dangerous to imperfect humans.
 
No one will deny the intelligence of men such as Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens. They are provocative, but are they wise? Who sounds more dogmatic — the man who writes that “religion poisons everything,” or a believer like “silly” Malcolm Muggeridge who called his autobiography The Chronicles of Wasted Time.  For all their stated objections to the abuse of religion, these atheists seem more interested in destroying any faith that violates their own sacramental unbelief. They are quick to indict the religious for every heinous crime committed in the name of faith, but in doing so they embrace the same absolutism they condemn in the religious zealot. They ask the faithful to own every sin committed in the name of God, but they will not shoulder a solitary sin committed in the name of science or atheism.
 
They remind me of a journalist I knew years ago, while working at the Virginian Pilot & Ledger-Star. Alan was a provocative thinker and he found me a curious character. On several occasions over drinks or dinner he would inquire about my politics and my Catholic faith. At one point, he suggested that if I truly believed, I should exert every effort to convert him. After all, he winked, his very soul was in jeopardy. I would answer today the same way I answered him then. I don’t know with certainty God’s will or even if God exists, I can only suggest that my own life has been deeply enriched by the tradition of faith into which I was born; that Jesus, more than any other thinker, teacher or prophet, has brought me face to face with shattering glimpses of truth.
 
Of course, I am not alone. Reynolds Price, a Duke University novelist, poet and essayist, remarks that he is overwhelmed by “the always startling degree of tolerance and compassion shown and commended by Jesus. I say startling because I’m always caught off guard by that characteristic whenever I read about him.”
 
Phillip Simmons, in his beautiful book, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, explores the gospel story of Jesus entering Jerusalem. The Pharisees warned him to quiet the crowd, but Jesus answered that even if the crowd were silent, the stones would shout out. Simmons continued: “True religion is an activity of the imagination . . . and Jesus felt himself so aligned with the natural and cosmic order that the very stones would cry out his arrival. Jesus at this moment is in the state of true wildness, when we express our divine natures as naturally as animals do, when our every word and deed flows directly from our highest purposes.”
 
Chesterton observed: “If it were true that by leaving the temple we walked out into a world of truths, the question would be answered, but it is not true. By leaving the temple, we walk into a world of idols; and the idols of the marketplace are more perishable and passing than the gods of the temple we have left. If we wished to test rationally the case of rationalism, we should follow the career of the skeptic and ask how far he remained skeptical about the idols or the ideals of the world into which he went . . ..”
 
Those who pile remorseless fact on remorseless fact in the name of rational science usually wind up constructing another idol, only one that is lifeless; that is their right and choice, but why should it surprise them that the rest of us refuse to bow down and worship with them?