Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions about God

National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by John J. DiIulio, Jr.

IMAGINE, fathers. Imagine an extremely bright, articulate, independent daughter in her mid twenties who still thinks enough of her old man to come to him with her most heartfelt questions about life, death, good, evil-and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Imagine that she patiently listens, learns, and looks to her dad even as she remains frankly and smartly skeptical about his best answers.

Michael Novak does not have to imagine. He is blessed with his own daughter Jana. Together they have produced a most intimate, intellectually challenging, and artfully organized transcript of their father-daughter dialogue on matters of religious faith. It is a book that I will surely one day ask my own daughter, now a pre-teen, to read when she wonders out loud about my commitment as a Roman Catholic.

Novak the elder is a world-renowned Catholic theologian and a public intellectual. His daughter peppers her prize-winning papa with a dozen sets of questions, from "Why Does Religion, Any Religion, Matter?" and "What Is God Like?" to "Why Is Our Family Catholic?," "What Is Christian Sexual Love?," and "What about Abortion?"

The book opens with Jana asking why she should bother with religion in the first place. After all, she avers, many religions are "so contrived-and so controlling," so "patriarchal, distant, and unsatisfying." Besides, she probes, "if one can believe in God without truly needing to believe in religion, then why bother believing in religion unless it offers you something?"

Her father's bedrock reply for all seasons reads in part:

My simple answer is: Because it is true. . . . You wouldn't want to turn to religion for comfort, security, or peace of mind (although that's what atheists say religion is for). Because if religion isn't true, you wouldn't find peace of mind or comfort or security anyway. . . . There is no other purpose in joining a religious communion except that it is a communion bearing the truth about God, human destiny, and yourself. . . . Do not make a religious choice for lighter reasons. . . . What does religion offer? . . . Most of all: it communicates to us the presence of God. And God's best name, from this point of view, is Truth: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6).

That is the ultimate answer to every human why, the foundation of all true religions, and the sole and sufficient reason to enter into any religious body, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other. It is also a profoundly conservative answer in a profoundly unconservative epoch in which religious people are either patronized or demonized by the dominant culture's secular elites.

Profoundly conservative, that is, in the sense delineated by Russell Kirk when he wrote of "the reality of Providential purpose and intelligent direction of the cosmos" as the central and abiding canon of the conservative mind. God as Truth has been in liberal modernity's cross hairs for centuries. It has been hacked at mercilessly (else what was all that noise about Darwin?) with the rise of modern science. It has been aggressively diagnosed as superstition, neurosis, or worse by generations of influential atheists from Rousseau to Bertrand Russell. And it has been buried without ceremony by libertarians, Straussians, and otherwise conservative souls who embrace religion because they believe that it facilitates social order, checks statism, and furnishes convenient myths that restrain popular appetites.

Michael Novak reminds Jana that most of the world's people profess some religious faith. He is also surely aware of the recent spate of books and articles proclaiming that cutting-edge advances in a wide variety of theoretical and natural sciences have resurrected the view that science and religion are on much the same page of Truth's hymnal. According to these accounts, what we already know or are rapidly discovering about everything from the "big bang" to human evolution makes a belief in God or "intelligent design" hardly synonymous with scientific illiteracy.

Wisely, however, Jana's father does not rest his fundamental answer to her questions about God on either popular assent or the testimony of scientific experts. Rather, when Jana asks why she or her friends, some of whom "do believe in God, at least vaguely," should care, since just "because God exists does not mean we have to believe in him or do anything about it," her father stays faithful to his message about His truth. He observes that "you want to know the truth about yourself." So then: "Believe that all the signs of intelligence so manifest in yourself are in vain, and that all is from chance, impersonal and mad, and in the end meaningless, a tale told by an idiot! Believe that if you can. That is an act of faith to which your father, who tried-really tried-could not leap."

JANA counters her father's understanding that "religion matters" by stressing that even the great religions offer different answers to the God question, which "may only show that the question is not legitimate."