In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.

“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.

Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.

These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.

Much of Brooks’ thinking appears predicated on his belief that people are hardwired “for fairness, empathy and attachment”—a belief, he suggests, that flies in the face of the theory that genes are wholly “selfish.” But few researchers subscribe to a genes-aren’t-selfish belief. Most of them, explains National Review’s John Derbyshire, a Hitchens-caliber antitheist, believe “deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment” are simply “‘cold’ survival strategies” passed directly from those selfish genes.

Derbyshire agrees with Brooks for different reasons. “We are more and more accustomed to high evidentiary standards in our work and leisure—if only from watching courtroom dramas on TV or doing quality control and evaluative work,” he writes. “It’s hard to believe the average hasn’t been creeping up, and will continue to do so. This saps away at faith in the magical and miraculous . . . Reflective people will indeed turn to a sort of ‘neural Buddhism,’ some kind of organized system of spirituality that doesn’t require us to believe in incredible occurrences in the remote past, or in the individual personality surviving death.”

Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”

Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”

As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.

“Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed” (John 20:6-9).

If you skimmed that verse quickly you missed the great philosophical debate of the next two thousand years of Western civilization: what constitutes “evidence”?

Let’s have an instant replay of the scene: It’s dawn and two men are racing. John outruns Peter (perhaps he is younger) and reaches the crypt first; he does not enter. Peter arrives second and, being Peter, barges in. He takes in the following brute data at a glance: linen cloths lying; Jesus’ head-covering apart from the linens, folded up. No body. (A reporter would have scribbled notes, perhaps looked for signs of struggle, foul play, forced entry.)

John crossed the threshold second. We are told he “also went in, and saw and believed.”

You might think, “Wait! Wait! John is skipping too many steps! What about this possibility, and that possibility?” And you proffer a dozen theories to explain the missing corpse, and each generation after you generates a dozen more.

When I was on the threshold of becoming a Christian, in the early 70s, pestering Christians with objection after objection, a patient man named John finally said calmly: “You know, Andrée, there comes a point where you have to stop accumulating evidence and decide.”

Of making many books there is no end. In the final analysis, there is this: the linen cloth neatly folded, the empty tomb, and your choice.

I had a rendezvous with a college friend I haven’t seen in 35 years. I picked him out in a crowd on a city common; the eyes don’t change.

After a shaky personal start in college, he went on to work his way through law school, became a captain in the army, went into private practice, then worked as a trial attorney in both the criminal justice division and the public defender’s office, then as an enforcer of his state’s environmental protection laws, moving on to be the state’s first Prosecutor of insurance fraud, then Inspector General, then First Assistant Attorney General. Now he’s a judge, and well respected for his integrity and courage.

All this I learned snooping on the internet; he is much too modest in person. And anyway, you don’t put on airs with someone you knew when you were 19.

He has no interest in God but is a good listener. Toward the end of the meal I hazarded a change of subject: “You’re all about evidence,” I said. I was leading the witness to a consideration of the elephant-in-the-room evidence that persuaded me, soon after our college parting, about the existence of God — the Romans 7 conundrum that we don’t do what we want to do. He disclosed the same personal dilemma but still wasn’t biting.

It was finally time to say goodbye, and on the way home I thought about what I had gleaned about his courtroom: compassion for the underdog and intolerance for fat-cat exploiters, his love of the law and hatred of lawbreaking. I had given him a Bible over dinner, and who knows, maybe he’ll open it — maybe see in his own internal wiring another evidence of God that demands a verdict.

Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has a book coming out this week called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.  He admits that many of these kinds of books have been written and that the best is probably still Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, but Keller probably knows the sophisticated, urban, and urbane audience better than most others, and so his book may be worth reading.  And, Lewis’s audience was a little different:

The questions are now not just philosophical (e.g. Is there evidence for God’s existence?) They are also now cultural (Doesn’t strong faith make a multicultural society impossible?), political (Doesn’t orthodox religion undermine freedom?) and personal. Also fifty years ago, when C.S. Lewis was writing, there was general agreement that rational argument and empirical method were the best ways to discover truth. That consensus has vanished. Today there are deep disagreements over how we know things and how certain we can be about anything. Most of the older books presenting Christianity now are only persuasive and even comprehensible to a very narrow range of people.

These books seem only to persuade those who are on the fence and looking for reasons to believe, as opposed to those looking for reasons not to.  As the Devil says to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov: “Proof is the last thing you need.”  But I’m sure this new book will be great for those who can be persuaded by it.

I don’t mean to beat the dying horse called The Golden Compass - for example, I’m pretty sure you won’t be possessed by Legion if you actually see it - but the movie does seem to provide a nice window onto the new explicity of religion and theology in the American consciousness. 

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Oh, what a brilliant short essay.  Mark Galli at Christianity Today writes about how this year, 2007, was about looking for God and not finding him.  Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens, you name it: Everybody’s wondering where God is.  Not that Hitchens wants to find him, but that does seem to be his purpose: Proving he’s not there to be found.  Galli’s essay turns all this on its head by suggesting that we’re not looking for God at all, and that we really do wish, deep down, that Hitchens is right.

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In a culture proud of its tolerance, it’s old news to say we are afraid of meaningful words like good and evil.  Daphne Merkin asks in the Times:

What does evil - a term that came into general use only in the 15th century, originally referring to the overstepping of proper limits - look like these days, when so many of us are wary of reductive terms, unsure of our own convictions and easily persuaded of the moral relativism of our values? (The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word is “little used in modern colloquial English.”) Does it have a particular smell, like teen spirit? Does it come wearing a hood, as in the movies? Or, again, does it look like you and me, sitting over dinner and enjoying a glass of vintage Bordeaux?

This is a sad question.  She asks it like a little girl asking her agnostic daddy where grandma’s going after she’s buried.  It’s a question that looks visionary to many, but comes off like some courtier asking Queen Isabella, upon Columbus’s return, “What if the world is round?”

For those who believe secular higher education is as Godless as we make it out to be at WMB, you might enjoy reading Finding God at Harvard, a series of essays from “contributors all have, of course, some connection to Harvard: students, alumni, professors, and guest speakers.”  The title is utterly pedestrian: anything with a gerund, these days, sounds like a book that was an editor’s idea, rather than a writer’s - and that’s never a good sign.  But get past the title and you might enjoy it.  All writers included in the book “view their callings - from student to astrophysicist to senator - as channels for praise and service.”

WORLD on the Web interviews Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Great About Christianity.

WORLD on the Web: You call your new book the first comprehensive answer to people such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Did you draw from many Christian apologists, past and present, when researching, and if so, which ones?

D’Souza: Not particularly. There are some good apologists out there, but they tend to inhabit the church subculture. What I mean is that you’ve got guys like Lee Strobel and Ravi Zacharias. But have you seen Ravi Zacharias on Larry King? Have you seen them debate the leading atheists? I want to emulate C.S. Lewis: someone who has good academic credentials but writes for a mainstream audience.

WoW: Do you think What’s So Great About Christianity will have the effect of Lewis’ Mere Christianity for the 21st century?

It’s certainly written with that intention. I’m trying not only to inspire Christians but to engage the seeker. I love the idea of raising the difficult questions; not just refuting someone by saying, “you’re wrong because …” but also saying, “is it true that you believe…” Let’s be skeptical together … the Socratic approach.

WoW: You devote a lot of your time in the book to Darwinism and its effect on society. What is your opinion of forms of theistic evolution?

My main thought is that whatever you think about the subject, Christians should not feel that their faith is at stake. Christians are very defensive when it comes to the universe. We live in a designed universe, and it doesn’t really matter whether the dog and the wolf share a common ancestor.

WoW: You say that Christianity is growing and flourishing in the rural areas of America and in second- and third-world countries. What do you think is the future of cities like New York and Los Angeles?

I think that urban life is built on distraction. It tends to be a little bit hostile to traditional religious morality. However, as people enjoy the benefits of modernity, education, the cities, the thought that pops into the mind is, “is this all there is?” The feeling itself is a product of modernity. A lot of academics have thought that as a society becomes more modern, religion will wane. Just the opposite; (seeking) starts out with a real interest and a desire to know more. The real enemy of religion is not the atheist, but the one who is indifferent.

WoW: If there’s one aspect of the culture that you could see transformed or revived, what would you want that to be and why?

If I could transform one institution, I would probably start with education and schools.

WoW: What are some specific ways that you feel Christians have become apathetic or fallen short of their callings in recent times?

The Bible calls on all of us to be missionaries, contenders for the faith. Many Christians don’t have the right secular language to do that. If you’re talking to an atheist, he’s going to say, “I don’t care what the Bible says.” The point of reason is to remove the obstacles to faith. For many people, reason is a block. I’m not advocating reason as a substitute for faith, but as a prelude or preamble to faith.

WoW: What can the church be doing to transform the culture?

I would like to see the church be more explicit in providing debate and apologetics training. This wuld prepare people to not only be better Christians in the church, but also better Christians in the world. The church should train Christians to present their views in a secular culture.

While we’re on the subject of debates (ala Hitchens and D’Souza, see below), here’s one between a “Christian” and A.J. Jacobs, the self-described agnostic, unpracticing Jew who wrote The Year of Living Biblically, where Jacobs attempts to follow every rule in the Bible.  Despite the ignorance and know-nothing attitude of the book’s central premise (a premise shared by so many ignorant and know-nothing Christians, I might add), the debate starts with a few nice thoughts.  The “Christian,” Matt Labash, writes to Jacobs:

At first glance, I thought yours was going to be nothing but a jokey book-a one-note immersion-journalism stunt in which you pin the tail on the fundies and Orthodox Jews, showing the absurdity of the Bible by acting out its strangest parts […] But you get well past the weirdness, too. At heart, this is a seeker’s book, a doubter’s odyssey. Like most of the best books of the Bible, such as Job and my absolute favorite (and yours), Ecclesiastes, it’s a book about an athletic contest: trying to wrestle God to the ground. Agnostics and atheists tend to think that believers never doubt, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Even Jesus doubted God at Gethsemane, and, according to Christian theology, He is God. If Jesus can doubt Himself, I’m not going to beat myself up for doing the same on occasion.

That’s a nice, fresh way to begin a debate with an agnostic.  Think of it like the Hitchens-Wilson debate with a greater dose of satire.