No One Sees God - The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers

 General Description:

Surveying the contemporary religious landscape, the division between atheist and believer seems stark. However, having long struggled to understand the purpose of life and the meaning of suffering, Michael Novak finds the reality of spiritual life far different from the rhetorical war presented by bestselling atheists and the defenders of the faith who oppose them.

In No One Sees God, Novak brilliantly recasts the tired debate pitting faith against reason. Both the atheist and the believer experience the same “dark night” in which God’s presence seems absent, he argues, and the conflict between faith and doubt stems not from objective differences, but from divergent attitudes toward the unknown. Drawing from his lifelong passion for philosophy and his personal struggles with belief, he shows that, far from being irrational, the spiritual perspective actually provides the most satisfying answers to the eternal questions of meaning. Faith is a challenge at times, but it nonetheless offers the only fully coherent response to the human experience.

Ultimately, No One Sees God offers believers and unbelievers the opportunity to find common ground by acknowledging the complicated reality of the human struggle with doubt. Novak provides a stirring defense of the Christian worldview, while sidestepping the shrill tone that so often characterizes the discussion of faith, and given the challenges faced in the present age, all who value liberty will find hope in his new way of conversing.

MICHAEL NOVAK received the 1994 Templeton Prize, an award that has also gone to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, and Charles Taylor. He has taught at Harvard and Stanford and has held academic chairs at Syracuse University and Notre Dame, and now holds the Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

 

A kinder and gentler approach to debates between atheists and believers.

Michael Novak’s No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheist sand Believers brings a kinder and gentler approach to the often acrimonious and polemical debates between atheists and believers.

Novak reflects on God from the perspective of both faith and reason. He generously shares the faith while charitably responding to the objections of nonbelievers. In stark contrast to diatribes such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Novak appears to presume both good will and intellectual seriousness on the part of his opponents.

One important point Novak raises has to do with what he refers to as one’s "blick." A blick is the part of one’s intellectual habit that shapes one’s pattern of judgment concerning what is real or not real, true or false, credible or lacking in credibility. Atheists and theists, Novak points out, process information about themselves and the world around them in radically different ways. All parties Full Review...

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