Dear TAS editor,
Arthur Krystal (Why Smart People Believe in God, Autumn 2001) says he wants to believe, but just can't seem to get beyond his long list of doubts. He makes it very clear that his unbelief is not based on intellectual reasons, but on personal ones. He has simply resolved to reject the God of the Bible, finding Him distasteful to his delicate sensibilities.
I wonder if Mr. Krystal is aware that every good thing (including refined sensibilities) comes from the God he doubts, even mocks. In our personal lives, God is the author of love, joy, peace, hope, forgiveness, talent, intellect and virtue of all types. In our corporate life, God is the author of such things as liberty (cf. The Theme is Freedom, M. Stanton Evans), individual dignity, the rule of law, true tolerance (vs. wishy washy moral equivalence), science, reason, ethical judgment and on and on. The cultural results of the corrosion of faith in the West are visible daily in the news, the personal results in Mr. Krystal's life are known only to him and those close to him (and to God). The only proper attitude toward all these gifts is thankfulness to God for His bounty and deep regret for the innate human tendency toward error and evil.
The history of secular humanism has been to appropriate the many fruits of the western Judeo-Christian tradition, distort them, obscure and dismiss their true roots, then impugn their true source as being inimical to secular humanism. Incredible brazenness! As he partakes of these tactics, Mr. Krystal wonders why God would want to confound these (self-proclaimed) "wise" men!
Anxious to demonstrate his commitment to reason, Mr. Krystal seems unaware that modern humanism is based on contradictions such as "there are no absolutes" (except this statement), "there can be no certainty" (except this statement), "truth is relative" (except this statement), "only empirically verifiable or falsifiable statements have any meaning" (except this statement). These humanist irrationalities demonstrate only that they'd prefer these things to be true so they can do as they please without guilt. They have a need to feel rational and tolerant precisely because they lack these qualities.
Mr. Krystal's claim that only atheists have the intellectual high ground would be laughable if it weren't so sad. Only a willful rebel skilled at rationalizing could survey the incredible wonder of the universe and surmise that it came from nothing through random chance. In his book, Time For Truth, Os Guinness observes that there is an embarrassingly long list of western thinkers whose intelligence outdistanced their morals. He concludes "the choice is ours, so also will be the consequences."
Steven P. Sawyer
Mr. Krystal demonstrates his left-liberal humanist bias in many ways; his incredible snobbery in writing off the opinions of a vast majority of people who offend him in various ways, his belief in the basic goodness of man, his rejection of original sin and his doubt of the existence of an enduring moral order.
G. K. Chesterton (written off as an antisemite) talked of the "thin thread of thankfulness" that ultimately kept him from atheism, the idea that one really can't honestly observe all we have to be thankful for (beauty in nature, justice...) and then assume God doesn't exist and all is meaningless.
I want to thank the Amazon reviewer archimedes tritium for his many insights, two of which I've adopted in this letter, including: the many contradictory statements of modernism/humanism and the historical method of secular humanism/modernism to "rip off" the fruits of Judeo-Christian heritage, then obscure their source.
Darwinist science, OK, but philosophy/metaphysics, no thanks!