By Jon Meacham
Newsweek
April 9, 2007 issue - All men need the gods.
—Homer, ca. 800 B.C.
A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods.
—Plato, ca. 400 B.C
Later, when Blaise Pascal tried to get it all down on paper, he wrote in bursts, capturing flashes of what he thought he had seen in the vision—a vision that, by empirical standards, could only be called fantastical. There was no doubt in Pascal's mind, though, that it had happened, and happened in time and space, in a way his mathematically trained brain conceived of things as happening. Pascal remembered the exact time—between the hours of half past 10 and half past midnight on Monday, Nov. 23, 1654, the feast day, in the Christian calendar, of Saint Clement, pope and martyr. Jesus appeared to him; God was real; the Christian story true: "Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. God of Jesus Christ. My God and your God." In a collection of writings found after his death, published as "Pensées," Pascal blended his two passions, mathematics and faith, to lay out what has come to be known as Pascal's Wager. It is rather simple: it is smarter to bet that God exists, and to believe in him, because if it turns out that he is real, you win everything; if he is not, you lose nothing. So why not take the leap of faith?
Because, atheists say, religious belief of any kind is irrational, and the faithful are living in a fairy-tale world. As Jews and Christians commemorate Passover and Holy Week in the coming days, the ancient debate over whether God exists goes on. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 91 percent report they believe in God, with 82 percent identifying themselves as Christians. Yet half those surveyed say they "personally know" an atheist, and 47 percent believe the country is more accepting of atheism than it has been in the past—which suggests there may be closet atheists who do not believe but do not wish to say so to a pollster. Other cultural indicators are unmistakable: books making the case against religious belief are selling briskly, evidence that many Americans are entertaining arguments against God and what these authors see as the destructive effects of faith.
That such questions—they date back to at least Homer and Plato—are gaining fresh force suggests there is growing worry that religion has too much influence on the world around us, from inspiring terrorists to shaping federal policy on embryonic-stem-cell research. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, more than a third of Americans (36 percent) think the power of organized religion has increased in recent years, and a plurality (32 percent) say religion has too much influence.
There is, as the Book of Ecclesiastes says, nothing new under the sun. The term atheos (a- means without; theos means god or gods) can be found in antiquity. As the modern era took shape in the 16th century, Copernicus' revelation that Earth was not the center of the universe inaugurated a new age of rising skepticism. By the 18th, Enlightenment thinkers celebrated (prematurely) the defeat of what Thomas Jefferson called "monkish superstition." In the 19th, Charles Darwin published "Origin of Species," and doubt was so pervasive that Matthew Arnold believed the "Sea of Faith" was in retreat. The tide was barely out before Nietzsche declared God was dead.
While debate over religion in America is not new, it is fierce. Broadly put, the left is prone to caricature the faithful as superstitious and power-mad, while the right can sometimes attack atheists and secularists with anything but Christian charity. Whether we believe or disbelieve, then, many of us would like to see a more measured conversation about faith, reason, and the role of religion in American life. In that spirit, NEWSWEEK invited Sam Harris, the author of two best-selling books advocating atheism, "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation," and Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and the author of the worldwide best-seller "The Purpose-Driven Life," to discuss the ultimate question: is God real?
If you know anything about the two men, you will not find their answers surprising. The details of their arguments and the play of their minds, however, shed light on the nature of the clash about religion at this moment in America. Warren believes in the God of Abraham as revealed by Scripture, tradition and reason; Jesus is Warren's personal savior and was, Warren argues, who he said he was: the Son of God. Harris, naturally, takes a different view. "I no more believe in the Biblical God than I believe in Zeus, Isis, Thor and the thousands of other dead gods that lie buried in the mass grave we call 'mythology'," Harris says. "I doubt them all equally and for the same reason: lack of evidence."
There are many levels of argument between believers and atheists; Warren and Harris touch on many of them. Here are just a few. There has to be a God, the religious say, for the Bible (or the Qur'an) says so; this is the assertion of the literalist, and depends on an uncritical reading of Scriptures that some believers say were written (or dictated) by God. There is the moral-sense argument—there must be a God, the religious say, because human beings have an innate understanding of right and wrong, an understanding that God planted in every heart. There is the design argument—that the world is so complex and makes so much sense that there had to be a guiding intelligence at the center of it all.
I am oversimplifying (some), but none of these is a particularly strong proof of a deity. Scriptures are the product of human hands and hearts, and have been translated and copied for generations upon generations; scholarship clearly shows us that the texts present historical and literary problems that would seem to rule out the possibility that they are perfect books. (And in the case of the Gospels, to take just one instance, the author of John explicitly says he is not writing history or biography in the sense the modern world thinks of such genres, but that he is offering his story "so that ye may believe." At least he was not hiding the ball.) When it comes to morality, it is possible that empathy is a trait that developed in evolution as a desirable feature in forming communities that stood a better chance of thriving in the process of natural selection. On the question of design, there is no evidence, outside the Bible, to support the proposition that a Creator has been in the picture, though Darwin acknowledged that no one knows how things got started in the very first instance.
There are, of course, religious counter-counter-arguments to these counter-arguments; the debate goes on world without end. With the exception of explaining the origin of the physical law that brought the universe into being 14 billion years ago, atheists can easily mock the religious for believing in fantastical stories of ascending saviors, parting seas and burning bushes. With little trouble the atheists can pose devastating questions; if God is great, then why do babies get cancer? Why do the innocent suffer? Why do the religious kill in the name of their God, when their God is supposed to be love incarnate? Why did God stop performing miracles on a large scale a couple of months after the first Pentecost?
Excellent questions all. Believers reply that God made us with free will, for love coerced is no love at all, only tyranny, and God wanted us to choose whether to love him or not, to obey him or not. Evil of human devising exists because we make horrible choices and have, as Saint Paul said, fallen short of the glory of God. Evil from nature or disease is a mystery; God has not told us everything, and has his own purposes beyond our understanding. What happens happens for a reason, even if we have no comprehension what that reason might be. If we knew everything, we would be God, not men.
To believe in any form of God requires, it is true, what Henry James called a "willing suspension of disbelief"; it is not especially rational to think, as so many Christians do, that a crucified Nazarene did what no other man had done before or since: rise from the dead and say that believing he had done so would wash you in the atoning blood of the lamb. As Harris likes to point out, people who demand evidence for everything else in their lives are somehow all too happy to accept the word of long-dead Biblical authors in a corner of a long-dead empire.
Yet it is not only Christians who know they are engaging in a leap from fact to faith. God, the great Rabbi Abraham Jacob Heschel said in 1967, "did not make it easy for us to have faith in him, to remain faithful to him. This is our tragedy: the insecurity of faith, the unbearable burden of our commitment. The facts that deny the divine are mighty, indeed; the arguments of agnosticism are eloquent, the events that defy him are spectacular ... Our faith is fragile, never immune to error, distortion or deception. There are no final proofs for the existence of God, Father and Creator of all. There are only witnesses. Supreme among them are the prophets of Israel." No final proofs—there it is, the ultimate caveat. Doubt and faith are not at war; they are parts of the same whole.
History teaches that religion, too, is part of the whole story of humanity. The religious impulse, whether born of fear, or hope, or both, appears intrinsic. It is the atheist who is exceptional, not the believer, though believers are hardly unified in what they believe in except this: that there is an ordering reality beyond time and space, a reality that can include the possibility of salvation in the form of a blissful life after death. Some believers would say only the virtuous will enjoy such a reward, and others say that only those with certain religious beliefs will make it, and still others that we do not know enough to say who will be rescued from the darkness of death and perhaps eternal punishment and who will not. Even Billy Graham, who, with the possible exception of John Paul II, has preached the Gospel to more people than any other man in human history, acknowledges that God's will is unfathomable. In the summer of 2006, sitting in his mountaintop house in North Carolina, I asked Graham whether a moral secularist or a good Muslim or good Jew would go to heaven. His reply: those decisions are for God to make, not men.
So is God real? It seems safe to say at least this much: he is real insofar as he is a force who influences human beings who believe in his existence. In his landmark Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901, the American philosopher William James quoted a Bryn Mawr colleague on the matter: "The truth of the matter can be put in this way: God is not known, he is not understood; he is used—sometimes as a meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion."
But which God is it—God the Father of Christianity, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob of Judaism, or the God who spoke to the Prophet in the cave in the founding moments of Islam, or some other God, known only to a few, or even just to you? The pragmatic believer of any tradition, it seems, is on safe ground by saying that though we may hope to know, and though we may think we know, we cannot know who God is—or if he is—until what William Faulkner called "the last red and dying evening."
The debate over God is necessarily abstract, but religion, obviously, has profound real-world implications. To base one's behavior on a blind acceptance of words put down long ago, however revered those words are, is an abdication of reason and responsibility—and reason and responsibility are, for many believers, gifts from God. Does a Christian in our time really think that, as Saint Paul argued, slavery is divinely ordained? Do the vast majority of Muslims actually believe their duty is to kill the infidel? In both cases, the answer is no. But the holy books can be read to say these things, which is why reason and interpretation have led many believers of great faithfulness to see such passages metaphorically, or to consider them to have been superseded by historical and cultural changes. "If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning," said Saint Augustine, "this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly. It is not the meaning of Scripture which is opposed to the truth but the meaning which he has wanted to give to it." Augustine's point allows Christians to take advantage of scientific and social advances without surrendering the ultimate authority of revelation. The Christian intellectual tradition, in other words, enables believers to negotiate just about anything short of the critical contention of the faith, that Jesus is Lord and salvation is on offer through belief in him. Still, there are many Christians who hew to a literal interpretation of Scripture, and say with sincerity and conviction that any one who does not accept Jesus as his personal savior will be cast into the fires of hell.
Ah, say the atheists, see, we told you exclusivist faiths like Christianity are forces for evil. So let's get rid of faith, replace it with rationality and science, and all shall be well, or at least vastly better. But the atheist solution has its own problems. In "Letter to a Christian Nation," Harris likens himself to an abolitionist and religion to slavery, but who is to say that a wholly scientific world would not itself soon produce dogma and strife over the findings, interpretations and applications of experiments and research? It is possible, even probable, that science would become a kind of religion, with creeds and convictions and arguments over the nature of reality. Labs would replace cathedrals, brain scans holy books. It would be different, but would it necessarily be better?
I doubt it, and the question is largely rhetorical, for humankind is not on the verge of replacing a religious world view with a scientific one. In its most practical form, the argument between atheists and the faithful is about public life and private belief. When you press many atheists, you find they are at their most ferocious and passionate when they think religion is playing too large a role—or any role—in politics or the classrooms or the labs or the courts.
They have a point. Theocracies—that is, governments organized around religious dogma—are not conducive to the cultivation of the kinds of societies many Americans value. But history teaches us that religion need not be entirely barred (as if it could) from public life in order to build a culture of liberty and freedom of inquiry and conscience. The key is how a culture manages the different factions contending for influence in a given time and place. The brilliance of the American experiment lies in its creation of a republican arena in which all manner of forces—religious, economic, geographic, what have you—can take their stand within the confines of a system in which checks and balances limit the possibilities of radicalism of any kind. Our government is slow, cumbersome and resistant to reform—by design.
Liberty and republican values are the guardrails against extremism, either religious or secular. Religion should not dictate education or science policy, for example, but there is nothing wrong—and there is much right—with its being one voice among many in the shaping of our public lives. One cannot be for one group's right to speak out and exert influence and be against another group's right to do so. The battles must be fought on the merits, and religion should be one force on the field, not the only one.
This moderate solution pleases neither the atheists nor the fervent believers, which may recommend it even more. The more conservative faithful think centrists are squishy, and some atheists argue, as Harris puts it, that "religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others ... all we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of Scripture imposes on us."
Experience suggests, however, that the centrist approach tends to be the most pragmatic and is, to paraphrase Churchill on democracy, the worst possible answer, except for all the others. Atheists would expel God from the debate, but what of the rights of the religious to execute the duties of citizenship? And the most fervid believers would drive atheists from the arena in a fit of fear masquerading as scorn, but what of the rights of the atheists to play a full and unimpeded part in the story of the nation? Neither side should be frightened of debate; both have every reason, if they are as confident as they say they are, to be intellectually open to the other.
Which brings us to the exchange in the following pages. To say the least, Rick Warren did not lose his faith in the middle of the debate; nor did Sam Harris fall to his knees in a moment of sudden conversion. But they talked—civilly, coolly, even with a laugh here and there. The fact that such a conversation can take place between two men who would—and probably will—spend a lifetime opposing what the other stands for is a small ray of light in the gloom of the culture wars. In the end, Warren says that he has "thrown the dice," gambling that Jesus was not a liar, that he was what he said he was in the Gospel accounts. Harris is betting otherwise: "In the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose." And so four centuries on, a world away from Pascal's France, two men are undertaking his old wager. Who will win? No one can say. At least not yet.
Newsweek
April 9, 2007 issue - All men need the gods.
—Homer, ca. 800 B.C.
A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods.
—Plato, ca. 400 B.C
Later, when Blaise Pascal tried to get it all down on paper, he wrote in bursts, capturing flashes of what he thought he had seen in the vision—a vision that, by empirical standards, could only be called fantastical. There was no doubt in Pascal's mind, though, that it had happened, and happened in time and space, in a way his mathematically trained brain conceived of things as happening. Pascal remembered the exact time—between the hours of half past 10 and half past midnight on Monday, Nov. 23, 1654, the feast day, in the Christian calendar, of Saint Clement, pope and martyr. Jesus appeared to him; God was real; the Christian story true: "Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. God of Jesus Christ. My God and your God." In a collection of writings found after his death, published as "Pensées," Pascal blended his two passions, mathematics and faith, to lay out what has come to be known as Pascal's Wager. It is rather simple: it is smarter to bet that God exists, and to believe in him, because if it turns out that he is real, you win everything; if he is not, you lose nothing. So why not take the leap of faith?
Because, atheists say, religious belief of any kind is irrational, and the faithful are living in a fairy-tale world. As Jews and Christians commemorate Passover and Holy Week in the coming days, the ancient debate over whether God exists goes on. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 91 percent report they believe in God, with 82 percent identifying themselves as Christians. Yet half those surveyed say they "personally know" an atheist, and 47 percent believe the country is more accepting of atheism than it has been in the past—which suggests there may be closet atheists who do not believe but do not wish to say so to a pollster. Other cultural indicators are unmistakable: books making the case against religious belief are selling briskly, evidence that many Americans are entertaining arguments against God and what these authors see as the destructive effects of faith.
That such questions—they date back to at least Homer and Plato—are gaining fresh force suggests there is growing worry that religion has too much influence on the world around us, from inspiring terrorists to shaping federal policy on embryonic-stem-cell research. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, more than a third of Americans (36 percent) think the power of organized religion has increased in recent years, and a plurality (32 percent) say religion has too much influence.
There is, as the Book of Ecclesiastes says, nothing new under the sun. The term atheos (a- means without; theos means god or gods) can be found in antiquity. As the modern era took shape in the 16th century, Copernicus' revelation that Earth was not the center of the universe inaugurated a new age of rising skepticism. By the 18th, Enlightenment thinkers celebrated (prematurely) the defeat of what Thomas Jefferson called "monkish superstition." In the 19th, Charles Darwin published "Origin of Species," and doubt was so pervasive that Matthew Arnold believed the "Sea of Faith" was in retreat. The tide was barely out before Nietzsche declared God was dead.
While debate over religion in America is not new, it is fierce. Broadly put, the left is prone to caricature the faithful as superstitious and power-mad, while the right can sometimes attack atheists and secularists with anything but Christian charity. Whether we believe or disbelieve, then, many of us would like to see a more measured conversation about faith, reason, and the role of religion in American life. In that spirit, NEWSWEEK invited Sam Harris, the author of two best-selling books advocating atheism, "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation," and Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and the author of the worldwide best-seller "The Purpose-Driven Life," to discuss the ultimate question: is God real?
If you know anything about the two men, you will not find their answers surprising. The details of their arguments and the play of their minds, however, shed light on the nature of the clash about religion at this moment in America. Warren believes in the God of Abraham as revealed by Scripture, tradition and reason; Jesus is Warren's personal savior and was, Warren argues, who he said he was: the Son of God. Harris, naturally, takes a different view. "I no more believe in the Biblical God than I believe in Zeus, Isis, Thor and the thousands of other dead gods that lie buried in the mass grave we call 'mythology'," Harris says. "I doubt them all equally and for the same reason: lack of evidence."
There are many levels of argument between believers and atheists; Warren and Harris touch on many of them. Here are just a few. There has to be a God, the religious say, for the Bible (or the Qur'an) says so; this is the assertion of the literalist, and depends on an uncritical reading of Scriptures that some believers say were written (or dictated) by God. There is the moral-sense argument—there must be a God, the religious say, because human beings have an innate understanding of right and wrong, an understanding that God planted in every heart. There is the design argument—that the world is so complex and makes so much sense that there had to be a guiding intelligence at the center of it all.
I am oversimplifying (some), but none of these is a particularly strong proof of a deity. Scriptures are the product of human hands and hearts, and have been translated and copied for generations upon generations; scholarship clearly shows us that the texts present historical and literary problems that would seem to rule out the possibility that they are perfect books. (And in the case of the Gospels, to take just one instance, the author of John explicitly says he is not writing history or biography in the sense the modern world thinks of such genres, but that he is offering his story "so that ye may believe." At least he was not hiding the ball.) When it comes to morality, it is possible that empathy is a trait that developed in evolution as a desirable feature in forming communities that stood a better chance of thriving in the process of natural selection. On the question of design, there is no evidence, outside the Bible, to support the proposition that a Creator has been in the picture, though Darwin acknowledged that no one knows how things got started in the very first instance.
There are, of course, religious counter-counter-arguments to these counter-arguments; the debate goes on world without end. With the exception of explaining the origin of the physical law that brought the universe into being 14 billion years ago, atheists can easily mock the religious for believing in fantastical stories of ascending saviors, parting seas and burning bushes. With little trouble the atheists can pose devastating questions; if God is great, then why do babies get cancer? Why do the innocent suffer? Why do the religious kill in the name of their God, when their God is supposed to be love incarnate? Why did God stop performing miracles on a large scale a couple of months after the first Pentecost?
Excellent questions all. Believers reply that God made us with free will, for love coerced is no love at all, only tyranny, and God wanted us to choose whether to love him or not, to obey him or not. Evil of human devising exists because we make horrible choices and have, as Saint Paul said, fallen short of the glory of God. Evil from nature or disease is a mystery; God has not told us everything, and has his own purposes beyond our understanding. What happens happens for a reason, even if we have no comprehension what that reason might be. If we knew everything, we would be God, not men.
To believe in any form of God requires, it is true, what Henry James called a "willing suspension of disbelief"; it is not especially rational to think, as so many Christians do, that a crucified Nazarene did what no other man had done before or since: rise from the dead and say that believing he had done so would wash you in the atoning blood of the lamb. As Harris likes to point out, people who demand evidence for everything else in their lives are somehow all too happy to accept the word of long-dead Biblical authors in a corner of a long-dead empire.
Yet it is not only Christians who know they are engaging in a leap from fact to faith. God, the great Rabbi Abraham Jacob Heschel said in 1967, "did not make it easy for us to have faith in him, to remain faithful to him. This is our tragedy: the insecurity of faith, the unbearable burden of our commitment. The facts that deny the divine are mighty, indeed; the arguments of agnosticism are eloquent, the events that defy him are spectacular ... Our faith is fragile, never immune to error, distortion or deception. There are no final proofs for the existence of God, Father and Creator of all. There are only witnesses. Supreme among them are the prophets of Israel." No final proofs—there it is, the ultimate caveat. Doubt and faith are not at war; they are parts of the same whole.
History teaches that religion, too, is part of the whole story of humanity. The religious impulse, whether born of fear, or hope, or both, appears intrinsic. It is the atheist who is exceptional, not the believer, though believers are hardly unified in what they believe in except this: that there is an ordering reality beyond time and space, a reality that can include the possibility of salvation in the form of a blissful life after death. Some believers would say only the virtuous will enjoy such a reward, and others say that only those with certain religious beliefs will make it, and still others that we do not know enough to say who will be rescued from the darkness of death and perhaps eternal punishment and who will not. Even Billy Graham, who, with the possible exception of John Paul II, has preached the Gospel to more people than any other man in human history, acknowledges that God's will is unfathomable. In the summer of 2006, sitting in his mountaintop house in North Carolina, I asked Graham whether a moral secularist or a good Muslim or good Jew would go to heaven. His reply: those decisions are for God to make, not men.
So is God real? It seems safe to say at least this much: he is real insofar as he is a force who influences human beings who believe in his existence. In his landmark Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901, the American philosopher William James quoted a Bryn Mawr colleague on the matter: "The truth of the matter can be put in this way: God is not known, he is not understood; he is used—sometimes as a meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion."
But which God is it—God the Father of Christianity, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob of Judaism, or the God who spoke to the Prophet in the cave in the founding moments of Islam, or some other God, known only to a few, or even just to you? The pragmatic believer of any tradition, it seems, is on safe ground by saying that though we may hope to know, and though we may think we know, we cannot know who God is—or if he is—until what William Faulkner called "the last red and dying evening."
The debate over God is necessarily abstract, but religion, obviously, has profound real-world implications. To base one's behavior on a blind acceptance of words put down long ago, however revered those words are, is an abdication of reason and responsibility—and reason and responsibility are, for many believers, gifts from God. Does a Christian in our time really think that, as Saint Paul argued, slavery is divinely ordained? Do the vast majority of Muslims actually believe their duty is to kill the infidel? In both cases, the answer is no. But the holy books can be read to say these things, which is why reason and interpretation have led many believers of great faithfulness to see such passages metaphorically, or to consider them to have been superseded by historical and cultural changes. "If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning," said Saint Augustine, "this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly. It is not the meaning of Scripture which is opposed to the truth but the meaning which he has wanted to give to it." Augustine's point allows Christians to take advantage of scientific and social advances without surrendering the ultimate authority of revelation. The Christian intellectual tradition, in other words, enables believers to negotiate just about anything short of the critical contention of the faith, that Jesus is Lord and salvation is on offer through belief in him. Still, there are many Christians who hew to a literal interpretation of Scripture, and say with sincerity and conviction that any one who does not accept Jesus as his personal savior will be cast into the fires of hell.
Ah, say the atheists, see, we told you exclusivist faiths like Christianity are forces for evil. So let's get rid of faith, replace it with rationality and science, and all shall be well, or at least vastly better. But the atheist solution has its own problems. In "Letter to a Christian Nation," Harris likens himself to an abolitionist and religion to slavery, but who is to say that a wholly scientific world would not itself soon produce dogma and strife over the findings, interpretations and applications of experiments and research? It is possible, even probable, that science would become a kind of religion, with creeds and convictions and arguments over the nature of reality. Labs would replace cathedrals, brain scans holy books. It would be different, but would it necessarily be better?
I doubt it, and the question is largely rhetorical, for humankind is not on the verge of replacing a religious world view with a scientific one. In its most practical form, the argument between atheists and the faithful is about public life and private belief. When you press many atheists, you find they are at their most ferocious and passionate when they think religion is playing too large a role—or any role—in politics or the classrooms or the labs or the courts.
They have a point. Theocracies—that is, governments organized around religious dogma—are not conducive to the cultivation of the kinds of societies many Americans value. But history teaches us that religion need not be entirely barred (as if it could) from public life in order to build a culture of liberty and freedom of inquiry and conscience. The key is how a culture manages the different factions contending for influence in a given time and place. The brilliance of the American experiment lies in its creation of a republican arena in which all manner of forces—religious, economic, geographic, what have you—can take their stand within the confines of a system in which checks and balances limit the possibilities of radicalism of any kind. Our government is slow, cumbersome and resistant to reform—by design.
Liberty and republican values are the guardrails against extremism, either religious or secular. Religion should not dictate education or science policy, for example, but there is nothing wrong—and there is much right—with its being one voice among many in the shaping of our public lives. One cannot be for one group's right to speak out and exert influence and be against another group's right to do so. The battles must be fought on the merits, and religion should be one force on the field, not the only one.
This moderate solution pleases neither the atheists nor the fervent believers, which may recommend it even more. The more conservative faithful think centrists are squishy, and some atheists argue, as Harris puts it, that "religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others ... all we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of Scripture imposes on us."
Experience suggests, however, that the centrist approach tends to be the most pragmatic and is, to paraphrase Churchill on democracy, the worst possible answer, except for all the others. Atheists would expel God from the debate, but what of the rights of the religious to execute the duties of citizenship? And the most fervid believers would drive atheists from the arena in a fit of fear masquerading as scorn, but what of the rights of the atheists to play a full and unimpeded part in the story of the nation? Neither side should be frightened of debate; both have every reason, if they are as confident as they say they are, to be intellectually open to the other.
Which brings us to the exchange in the following pages. To say the least, Rick Warren did not lose his faith in the middle of the debate; nor did Sam Harris fall to his knees in a moment of sudden conversion. But they talked—civilly, coolly, even with a laugh here and there. The fact that such a conversation can take place between two men who would—and probably will—spend a lifetime opposing what the other stands for is a small ray of light in the gloom of the culture wars. In the end, Warren says that he has "thrown the dice," gambling that Jesus was not a liar, that he was what he said he was in the Gospel accounts. Harris is betting otherwise: "In the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose." And so four centuries on, a world away from Pascal's France, two men are undertaking his old wager. Who will win? No one can say. At least not yet.
