Out of darkness.(books, arts & manners)(No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers)

No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers, by Michael Novak (Doubleday, 336 pp., $23.95)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

WHAT hasn't Michael Novak written about in the course of his long career? Whether the subject is sports in American life or the meaning of ethnicity, The Experience of Nothingness or The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Novak is illuminating and unfailingly large-spirited. Indeed, so generous is the tone of his new book that criticism seems positively ungrateful. But perhaps Novak will be as indulgent toward carping reviewers as he has been toward Christopher Hitchens and his antics.

No One Sees God is rather like that fabled four-cornered pie in Gogol's Dead Souls: "In one corner put the cheeks and dried spine of a sturgeon, in another, some buckwheat, and some mushrooms and onions and soft roe, and, yes, some brains, and something else as well." Novak's book is in part a response to the so-called New Atheists. He gives Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett short shrift, but he finds Hitchens a more worthy antagonist, devoting an entire lengthy chapter to the arguments and obiter dicta laid down in Hitchens's bestseller, God Is Not Great. Two more chapters are given over to arguments about the existence of God with Novak's unbelieving friend and colleague Heather Mac Donald, who is based at the Manhattan Institute.

In the second half of the book, Novak steps back and offers his own ruminative reflections on these matters, which have long preoccupied him, most notably in Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge, first published in 1965 and issued in a third edition in 1994. He concludes with a chapter proclaiming "the end of the secularist age," heralding not a return to Christendom but rather "a prolonged, intelligent, and respectful conversation" that will reject "outmoded ways of drawing lines" pitting faith and reason against each other. In the same vein, Novak's epilogue asks atheists and believers to treat one another with the respect he has modeled throughout the book: "Neither the atheist nor the believer sees God. Both must live in darkness. Both must try to figure out from many clues, gleaned from here and there, who they really are in this vast cosmos, in this tiny arc of the universe, on this spinning blue-green ball, possibly insignificant among the galaxies, asteroids, cold dead planets, and even deader moons."

Hmm. We will come back to those even deader moons. By now you'll have a sense of the book. Readers will be inclined to take a taste from this corner of the pie, a taste from that corner, and this one kitty-corner, "and something else as well." They will find many excellent bits, such as this one:

 
   It is also significant that no one can come 
   to this God [that is, the God of Judaism 
   and Christianity] except by personal freedom. 
   Many of His first believers at times 
   turned against Him. A few were faithful to 
   Him freely, often at great personal cost. 
   Every story in the Bible has as its dramatic 
   axis an act of liberty. At one time the same 
   human being is unfaithful to God, and at 
   another faithful, and the suspense in the 
   next chapter is, What will he or she choose 
   next?