FAITH/ Great God, It’s the Great God Debate

On April 7, a sold-out audience in Notre Dame’s Leighton Concert Hall watched this year’s edition of “The God Debate.” Before a packed house, “New Atheist” Sam Harris and philosopher of religion William Lane Craig argued whether God is the source of morality.

Oddly, whenever I think of Harris in this debate, I think of St. Augustine’s Confessions. Specifically this passage comes to mind: "I was glad, if also ashamed, to discover that I had been barking for years not against the Catholic faith but against mental figments of physical images. My rashness and impiety lay in the fact that what I ought to have verified by investigation I had simply asserted as an accusation.”

St. Augustine wrote those words in midlife, reflecting on that time in his youth just before he entered fully into the Catholic faith of his mother, St. Monica. I won’t suggest that Harris is at a similar point in his life. But someone so obsessed with religion, even if negatively, is surely wrestling with the angel of God.

Still, my first and less-than-charitable thought involving Harris is ad hominem abusive. He is so uncomprehending of Catholicism that for a Christian to debate him at Notre Dame is like a physicist debating a Flat Earth theorist at Cal Tech. Yes there are such theorists, although perhaps not as many as those who “bark against mental figments . . . asserting as an accusation” their own ignorance of Christian belief. And while I am convinced that even Sam Harris has a mother, and for that reason ought to receive a kind thought here and there, I have no illusion that he is on the verge of an Augustine-style conversion.

Yet, earlier in the Confessions, Augustine tells us that his mother pleaded with a bishop that he intervene with her son to lead him away from his Manichean errors. The bishop basically told her: “Augustine is a smart boy; let him keep reading and he’ll make his way out of the nonsense; I did.”

So there’s hope for the likes of Sam Harris, struggling so hard like Augustine to find an explanation. But here is where the terms of the debate, “Is Good from God?” come in to play, and one has to wonder just what is at issue. I am writing this piece just hours before the big event. And I wonder what this great debate is about. It’s sold out, and the advertising says that it is back “by popular demand,” a reference to last year’s great God debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. But what is it that the people demand, and why?