INTRODUCTION: MISSING WORDS

When Ronald Dworkin was to deliver his 1988 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Stanford University, he was introduced by the university's president, Donald Kennedy. Kennedy offered an appreciative account of Dworkin's background and achievements, noted the title of the upcoming talk, then gathered up his notes and turned the podium over to the speaker. Dworkin proceeded to give a two-hour oration on the foundations of liberal equality, breathtaking in its detail and logical rigor and flowing eloquently without a hitch or hesitation. Just as he was concluding, Kennedy rushed up to the dais and exclaimed to the audience: “Please forgive me, I just realized that when I picked up my notes, I also inadvertently picked up Professor Dworkin's manuscript.” Without missing a beat, Dworkin had delivered his entire lecture from memory.Footnote ²

Dworkin's performance that day was one of the most impressive tour de forces I have ever witnessed, both intellectually and morally: intellectually, for the stunning capacity to recall and rehearse so much complex argumentation; morally, for wanting so gracefully not to embarrass Kennedy, his host, for his faux pas. To be sure, there may have been some element of plain showing off, but that was not my impression. Had Kennedy not spoken up at the end, nobody else in the hall would have known the truth.

I am reminded of these events, some twenty-six years later, by the reading of Ronald Dworkin's last book, Religion without God.Footnote ³ This posthumous volume displays the sort of astonishing and heroic insouciance that its author embodied that day at Stanford. At the risk of seeming to trivialize his point, even as Dworkin could give a coherent lecture without relying on his text, so he tells us that we can live a coherent life without relying on God. What we may normally imagine we require for inspiration or guidance, words or the Word, we are actually able to forego. The Logos is a dead letter.

Less metaphorically, Dworkin argues that, for most purposes, it does not matter whether God is alive or dead. We can go on treating human life as meaningful and the universe as suffused with “objective” (even “supernatural”) value (Religion without God [RwG], 6, 155), regardless of whether there is a personal Deity. Dworkin clearly finds theism implausible, but he is not out to disprove God's existence. His main aim in Religion without God is to point out, in key respects, the irrelevance of God. Pace Friedrich Nietzsche, who thought that the death of God had profound implications for the whole of life and culture—requiring a “transvaluation/revaluation of all values”Footnote ⁴—Dworkin thinks that, axiologically, things can go on pretty much as before, even in a godless world. Aesthetics, ethics, and even religion can continue unabated for atheists and theists alike, so long as they affirm substantive and intrinsic worth in the world. Such an affirmation is what makes a nonbeliever in God nevertheless “religious.”

Dworkin's idiosyncratic diction requires a bit of unpacking. He wishes to carve out a middle way between what he calls “irreligious atheism” and “religious theism.” “Irreligious atheism” denies objective values and thus sees aesthetics, ethics, and religion as matters of, at best, contingent human preference, or, at worst, mere illusion. “Religious theism,” on the other hand, endorses objective values but ties them to a Creator God. Dworkin's name for his tertium quid—belief in real values without a personal Deity—is “religious atheism,” and it is his alternative to both reductive materialism and traditional biblical faith.Footnote ⁵

Here, in his own words, is the heart of Dworkin's argument:

For my part, I am far less confident that non-subjectivist aesthetics, ethics, and religion can survive without God. Where Dworkin perceives a third alternative, I suspect an either/or: I see no credible via media between irreligious atheism and religious theism. Biblical faith may be false, but, if so, we are left with some form of emotivism, existentialism, or pragmatism. We are consigned, that is, to constructing or inventing or just asserting our own values. Merely willed or fabricated ideals take us far from most Western normative disciplines, as Nietzsche realized. The notion that the beautiful, the good, and the true are objective was, for him, the last implausible vestige of Jewish and Christian theism. (Sometimes Nietzsche indicted Socratic and Platonic philosophy as well.) If the biblical God is dead, or missing, better to be frankly irreligious and to talk in terms of “power” and “fitness.”Footnote ⁶ On this one point, it is hard to argue with the Antichrist.

I suspect that Nietzsche is correct: Christ—religious theism—and the Antichrist—irreligious atheism—exhaust our options. To side with the former as the truth of our condition is not to say that all artistic, virtuous, or faithful people must be self-conscious Christians or even professing theists. That is manifestly false. But it is to contend that atheism, whether it calls itself “religious” or “irreligious,” is mistaken because “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). We may fail to recognize the “Father of lights” and thus may not give Him credit, but without that Father, there would be no lamp even to hide under a bushel. God is omni-relevant, axiologically, even if He is obscure, epistemically.

THE BASIC PROBLEM

In a crucial passage, Dworkin avers that “[T]he existence of a personal god—a supernatural, all-powerful, omniscient, and loving being—is a very exotic kind of scientific fact. But it is still a scientific fact, and it still requires a pertinent background moral principle to have any impact on value judgments” (RwG, 27–28). A sophisticated philosopher is aware that God is not like the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot or an alien bringing civilization from another planet, yet the basic problem remains that Dworkin treats God as one more object—or perhaps subject—in the universe. Even if God exists, he reasons, this has no bearing on art or morality, since facts cannot determine values. The is/ought gap cannot be spanned even by divinity. This HumeanFootnote ⁷ line is familiar, but it fails to comprehend that God is not a fact but the ground of all facts and values. Even as light is both a particle and a wave, so “the Father of lights” is the foundation of both science and morality.

The idea that there could be aesthetics, ethics, religion, and/or science without God is absurd to a believer, since there would be nothing at all without God. God is the First Mover Unmoved but also the Holy of Holies—that is, God is being and goodness itself. In God's necessary existence, beauty, goodness, and truth are all one; even contingent things are good insofar as they exist (that is, participate in being), since they are made by an all-good and all-powerful God. As Saint Augustine says in “Concerning the Nature of Good,”

Dworkin is well aware of this sort of Augustinian objection, but he dismisses it:

Dworkin had one of the most supple and subtle minds of his generation, but he had a tin ear for theological concepts, especially God as an “uncaused cause.” He rejects such an idea as the failed effort of “the science of godly religion” to “shield itself” from an “infinite regress” of questions about what produced or preceded God (RwG, 87–89). Hume raised the same objection in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, but neither Hume nor Dworkin explains how any theory of reality properly avoids skeptical iterations of the “Und dann?” question.

Classical Big Bang theory refers to a “singularity” in which everything—time, space, matter, energy, causality, etc.—sprang from nothing. String theory postulates eleven “dimensions,” seven of which are unobservable and several of which may be infinite. “Multiverse” cosmologies presume that anything that can happen does happen, somewhere and sometime, in an indeterminate number of discontinuous worlds. These visions arguably make a mockery of scientific explanation based on empirical evidence and possible falsification, yet Dworkin does not fault them. He grants that physics is not yet “fully integrated” (RwG, 97; see also RwG, 92), but he declares that “inevitability in science . . . means shielded strong integrity” (RwG, 87), and he anticipates this integrity for physics someday. Such integrity comes from within a discipline and so differs from a deus ex machina imposed on a theory from without or pasted on after the fact, we are told (RwG, 94–97). But what makes Dworkin so confident that the mutable, material universe is subject to such inevitable explanation? Is that an a priori assumption or an a posteriori observation? Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem demonstrates that even mathematics is not a closed system the axioms of which are fully provable from within. It may be that every science, natural or divine, must eventually turn its spade at non-demonstrable principles. Many of us crave inevitability in our astronomy and art, but some of us do not mind contingency all the way up and down.Footnote ⁹ Dworkin himself raises the spectral possibility of there being no “final” theory in physics and no “final” explanation of the world's beauty, but he pronounces it “unsatisfactory” (RwG, 81–82). So why pick on theology for demanding faith in a transcendent God?

Who is to say, moreover, and on what basis, which is the more foundational principle: Hume's fact/value distinction or Augustine's fact/value conflation? Dworkin takes Hume's distinction to be a matter of “logic” and to have a presumptive status that must be overridden by argument. Augustinian Christians take the opposite tack. Indeed, partly to avoid the very problems that Dworkin runs into in explaining how a purely accidental and inexplicable world can have beauty, goodness, and meaning, Augustinians posit a Creator. Dworkin is unsatisfied with a “crumbled cookie universe” (RwG, 80), in which things are simply as they are for no overarching reason, but I am not sure one can avoid such a cosmology once God is out of the picture.

As noted, Dworkin wishes to defend “religious atheism” against or alongside of both “religious theism” and “irreligious atheism.” The irreligious atheists include a host of philosophers and scientists who are increasingly content with or at least resigned to a “that's the way the cookie crumbles” account of reality. The fact that this reality is “absurd”—dead and deterministic, precluding intrinsic value and loveliness—is utterly unacceptable to Dworkin. But, again, what is the alternative, and how does one argue for it—“scientifically,” or otherwise?

One rub with Hume's dualism is that once one buys in to it, the Euthyphro dilemma becomes insoluble. It becomes impossible to say whether God commands something because it is good or something is good because God commands it. The point, however, is that for the Augustinian the dilemma is malformed. God is Goodness and, as such, the source and destiny of all that is. God does not discover goodness outside Himself and belatedly enjoin it; nor does He artificially order that evil be good. Goodness and God are the same, so there is no need and no way to prioritize them relative to each other. Asking about facts or values without God is like asking about space or time without the Big Bang that brought them simultaneously into being. Dworkin discusses the classical Big Bang, including the thesis that nothing preceded it, and he allows that this story is “now perhaps passé” (RwG, 94).Footnote ¹⁰ But even as pre-Einsteinian physicists treated space and time as distinct dimensions and inquired about when the physical world began in time, so post-Humean philosophers often treat “is” and “ought” as distinct dimensions and ask why any objective state of affairs should be realized or avoided. Once we see that space and time are a single continuum, we realize that the universe appeared with time, rather than in time. Similarly, once we see that, in God's necessary existence, scientific fact and moral value are one, we realize that the ancient Euthyphro dilemma is a nonstarter (cf. RwG, 154–56).

An even more troubling aspect of Hume's position is his notorious conclusion that “Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”Footnote ¹¹ For Hume, it is not irrational (that is, not objectively wrong) to prefer any factual situation over another for the simple reason that what makes a situation right or wrong is my emotional attitude toward it, not something inherent in the situation itself. Such moral subjectivism implies, for example, that, so long as I have no sympathy for slaves, their bondage is not unjust. Dworkin emphatically rejects this view in favor of moral realism, but it is unclear how this is feasible, once a stark is/ought dichotomy is affirmed. Dworkin's thesis is that, pace Hume, both aesthetic and moral judgments refer to real features of the world, not just to my state of mind or body, but these features remain rather mysterious. The objective reality of values must be taken on “faith,” according to Dworkin, but this faith seems not just unscientific but anti-scientific to many. It certainly did to Hume.

Again, Dworkin claims that “logic” requires a stark separation of fact and value, but Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz would disagree. Were they poor logicians? Most modern versions of deontic logic entail a direct correlation between a description of behavior—“Helen sincerely promised to help Jane with her homework”—and an ethical obligation—“Helen has a duty to help Jane.” To think that justifying the obligation requires an additional moral premise (such as “Promises are to be kept”) is to betray a lack of understanding of the meaning of the word “promise.” Or, at least, it betokens a Humean understanding of the term and thus the sort of moral subjectivism that makes deontic logic impossible. To repeat, Dworkin would resist this sort of emotivism, but how?

Can one have Hume's dichotomy without its entailing Hume's irreligiosity, particularly his rejection of real values? To invoke a probate metaphor, can one divide what were once thought to be God's personal effects—beauty, goodness, and truth—among his alienated children? I do not think so. The biblical God, especially as revealed in Jesus Christ, is without dispersible real property: the transcendent Father has nothing to bequeath but Himself. If He is absent, the children get no inheritance. Simone Weil contends that there are three sites “here below” where the love of God is implicitly present: the beauty of the world, religious ceremonies, and the neighbor. These are “presages of eternity” that can allay doubt, she maintains, but they are fleeting and do not make for worldly happiness.Footnote ¹² One might try to live off the temporal echoes of the divine Name, so to speak, but this a simulacrum of faith, hope, and love. Religion without God is not so much “Hamlet” without the Prince of Denmark as oration without words: futile. “The rest is silence.”

RELIGIOUS VS. ANTI-RELIGIOUS ATHEISM

All that said, I understand and appreciate Dworkin's heartfelt attempt at a kind of rapprochement between theists and some atheists. He highlights the fact that many earnest and compassionate secularists share a range of sensibilities and commitments—including moral realism—with many tolerant and pluralistic believers. In this regard, his work is reminiscent of recent books by Roger Penrose, Stuart Kauffman, and Thomas Nagel.Footnote ¹³ All four authors are atheists, but they nevertheless want to defend human freedom and responsibility, as well as (some) “religious” values, against the onslaughts of their more materialist colleagues. Indeed, the four constitute a novel backlash against the metaphysical reductivism and ethical nihilism of anti-religious atheists—a.k.a., evolutionary psychologists and philosophers—like E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Michael Ruse, and Richard Joyce.Footnote ¹⁴ Whereas Dawkins takes persons to be epiphenomenal to “selfish genes,” and Ruse and Joyce consider morality to be an “illusion” or an “error,” Penrose and Nagel insist on the immaterial reality of conscious agency, even as Dworkin and Kauffman do not flinch from talking about the “objective” importance of a well-lived life and the inherent inviolability of “the sacred.”

Dworkin was certainly a friend, in both theory and practice, to several of the ethical causes that many Jews and Christians wish to advance. He was manifestly a thoughtful and charitable man. Yet I am reminded of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous remark that it was actually the white moderates, the sincere exponents of “law and order,” who often represented more of a threat to the civil rights movement than the overtly bigoted racists. The latter cast the question of civil rights in high relief, pricking the conscience of the nation on the need for a decisive choice between love and justice or hatred and injustice. The moderates, on the other hand, counseled gradualism and compromise. Their intentions were good, and a number of notable Christian clergy were among them; nevertheless, King felt compelled to address his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to precisely this group. After a hundred years of Jim Crow laws following the tepid Emancipation Proclamation, King explained, the time for patience and accommodation was over. Nonviolent direct action was called for.

Analogously, I fear that Dworkin soft-pedals the either/or before us. As noted, he objects to the reductivism and nihilism of several contemporary atheists, but the older arguments of Galileo, Newton, and Darwin, as commonly interpreted, actually do lead to a deterministic and purposeless cosmos. Ruse and Joyce are not alone in thinking that taking modern science seriously means accepting that ethics is, in J. L. Mackie's phrase, an “error theory”?Footnote ¹⁵ Under these circumstances, Dworkin's irenic attempt to segregate “science” and “religion” clouds the issue. Dworkin briefly discusses the inability of string theorists and others to reconcile Einstein's general relativity with quantum indeterminacy. He understandably calls quantum theory “fantastical” (RwG, 151). But his hard fact/value distinction makes it appear that empirical science and normative faith constitute two “Non-Oerlapping Magisteria,” to use Stephen Jay Gould's expression.Footnote ¹⁶ For Dworkin, God is as irrelevant to science as She is to aesthetics, ethics, and religion. This fails, however, to recognize the ways in which physics and theology may straightforwardly conflict.

If biblical theism teaches that homo sapiens were intentionally created by a divine intelligence and neo-Darwinian biology insists that human life is an accidental upshot of random physical forces, they cannot both be right. A version of evolution may be true and compatible with religious faith; God may have used evolution as part of the teleological process whereby conscious life emerged over time, as Asa Gray maintained.Footnote ¹⁷ But the truth of a blind and arbitrary natural history would mean the basic falsity of Judaism and Christianity. Once we admit this, the challenge to Dworkin's “fully integrated” physics is threefold: (1) to show how reductivist science and even the so-called Standard Model of particle physics are problematic on their own terms, (2) to propose a scientific revolution that reconciles relativity and indeterminacy, and (3) to explain how the relevant revolution is one that both atheists and theists can accept. This is a tall order that no one can even begin to fill at this juncture.Footnote ¹⁸

Many theists contend that a purely materialistic worldview must be augmented with reference to immaterial mind, including the divine mind (see the following section), but this is a move that atheists, by definition, cannot make. Hence Dworkin severely overstates the case when he writes,

Atheists and theists have “the same grounds” for their normative beliefs, and the existence or nonexistence of God has “no moral or political implications”? Are faith in God and God Herself really so irrelevant? Both divine command theorists and natural law exponents would disagree, as Dworkin well knows, but is it plausible to think that they so grossly misunderstand their own faith? A Christian's basing her universal love of neighbors (agape) on their all bearing the image of God and all being dear to their Creator must be folly, according to Dworkin. For Ivan Karamazov, “without God . . . everything is permitted”Footnote ¹⁹; for Dworkin, God makes no difference whatsoever to what is permitted or forbidden. One might hold that believers and nonbelievers can find points of overlap and possibilities for compromise in their evaluative judgments. One might even hope for a measure of pragmatic convergence. But neither of these scenarios is equivalent to theists and atheists having exactly the same grounds for their convictions. Like John Rawls, Dworkin seems to think that civility requires uniformity and/or unanimity of opinion and/or principle. This is not the case.Footnote ²⁰

The proposition that God matters to the content and justification of normative beliefs is not an argument for theism. It may well be that God does not exist and thus theism is false. But the truth of the proposition entails that atheists and theists genuinely disagree over the character of the well-lived life. Dworkin himself is renowned for propounding an account of law that is a third alternative to legal positivism and natural law theory. His “interpretivist” approach aims to relate law and morality without assuming that the former is already “out there” ontologically. In Law's Empire, jurisprudence is not a static matter of discovery but rather a dynamic process of consistently applying communal norms to historic cases. In Religion without God, however, Dworkin is talking about morality and politics directly, not about their relation to law. Even if law does not primarily apprehend real values, morality and politics do, at least ideally. So disputes over the source and nature of value must, inevitably, have moral and political implications.Footnote ²¹

CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND THE “REINVENTION” OF THE SACRED

Let me return briefly to the matter of contemporary science and value judgments. One common reading of quantum mechanics is that it is impossible to give an adequate account of reality without reference to consciousness.Footnote ²² The famous double-slit interference experiment demonstrates that the collapse of the wave function that determines the nature of light (and everything else) depends upon an observing mind. Many physicists accept this principle without feeling compelled to become theists, but the obvious question is: What mind was observing the universe before the evolution of human beings? Unless one holds that there was no physical reality until intelligent creatures appeared, one would seem to have to postulate a supernatural mind to make sense of the natural order. Indeed, I am drawn to the thesis that aesthetic, ethical, religious, and scientific realisms—the views, respectively, that beauty, goodness, piety, and empirical truth are objective values—depend ultimately on a commitment to theism.Footnote ²³ If nothing would be real without God's active awareness, a fortiori any realistic discipline presupposes the Deity. That is a big “if,” of course, and I have no knock-down argument in favor of it. But it makes the most sense of the observable order in the universe, in my estimation.Footnote ²⁴ Who knows: perhaps dark energy is the way in which the divine mind affects visible matter?

One might deny God's existence, of course—again, this would not be illogical, not be a mere contradiction in terms—but this evidently implies the unreality of the world, including one's own mind. Hard-core reductivists accept this self-deconstruction, but it is a high price to pay. Ironically, Dworkin's irreligious atheists may have more in common with his religious theists than do his religious atheists. This is because the former two groups affirm that without God, value objectivity is implausible, if not impossible. According to religious theists, God can get along without traditional religion and ethics; but, according to both religious theists and irreligious atheists, traditional religion and ethics cannot get along without God. To the extent that religious atheists defend the autonomy of classical value from God, they are further from Her than many of the bluntly irreligious. As Søren Kierkegaard observed, those self-consciously in despair are actually closer to heaven than those who are content with a God-less life.Footnote ²⁵

In Reinventing the Sacred, Stuart Kauffman courageously defends conscious agency and real values against scientific determinism and materialism, but his title is self-defeating, since “the sacred” is precisely not something we invent, but something we discover. Or, better still, the sacred is what invents us gratuitously and unpredictably. Only such a reality can re-enchant us and “break the Galilean spell,” thus taking us “beyond reductionism,” in Kauffman's words.Footnote ²⁶ Unlike Dworkin, who affirms the “supernatural” but confesses his “godlessness,” Kauffman avidly employs the word “God” but eschews the “supernatural.” For Kauffman, God is “fully natural,” not the biblical Creator, but “the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.”Footnote ²⁷ “[I]t is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol,” writes Kauffman.Footnote ²⁸ For theists, conversely, the sacred is not exclusively an emergent property of nature, but also something supernatural. I know of no strictly “scientific” way to settle this dispute, however.Footnote ²⁹

According to Kauffman, there is genuine contingency and purposeful development in the world, such that “[s]cience cannot foretell the evolution of the biosphere, of human technologies, or of human culture or history.”Footnote ³⁰ We are not fully determined by our genes, and, further, there is no purely naturalistic way to explain where nature and her laws came from. Similarly, trying to explain the origin of life in terms of descent with modification is like trying to explain the origin of the universe in terms of particles and forces that did not exist until after the Big Bang. As a reasonably informed theist, I affirm the basic fact of evolution, but random mutation and natural selection are not enough to account for it.Footnote ³¹ Natural selection did not cause DNA, for instance; it presupposes DNA. The $64,000 question is whether appeals to natural creativity are sufficient to explain the plenitude of the world. Faith and science meld, I hold, when we discover that a loving God invented us via a causally open, but nonetheless convergent, biological process.

ETHICS, RELIGION, AND RELIGIOUS ETHICS

Dworkin frequently runs together two distinct questions: “Can there be ethics without God?” and “Can there be religion without God?” Many philosophers have said “yes” to the former question, but many have said “no” to the latter. In his God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens conflates God and religion, indicting the Deity for crimes committed in His name by churches, sects, and individual human beings.Footnote ³² Dworkin would go to the other extreme and separate God and religion entirely, praising the latter for being realist about values independently of whether there is a Creator. Hitchens's focus on the vices of “religious” creatures tells us little or nothing about the greatness of the Creator, any more than a parent is responsible for the behavior of his or her adult child. Unless one presumes a hard predestinarian line in which God directly causes—in fact, necessitates—everything to happen in history, one must allow for human freedom and fallibility over against the Godhead. Dworkin's focus on the virtues of “religious” creatures, in turn, tells us little or nothing about the littleness/dispensability of the Creator. Even if one presumes a Deistic line in which God directly causes nothing to happen in history, one must allow for divine creativity and power to bring the world and humans into being in the first place. To both Hitchens and Dworkin, then, a traditional theist reiterates that God can get along without religion, but religion cannot get along without God.Footnote ³³

Let me back up and ask the real question on Dworkin's mind: Can there be religious ethics without God? Can we answer the question, “How then shall we live?” with reference to sacredness, holiness, grace, supernatural value, and the like, without assuming a personal Deity in or behind these notions? In short, can we have the theological virtues without theos? The Dalai Lama eloquently extols “altruism based on compassion and love,” on a seemingly non-theistic basis.Footnote ³⁴ Richard Rorty recommends that we transfer willingness to suffer “from one's hopes for paradise to one's hopes for one's grandchildren.”Footnote ³⁵ Jeffrey Stout has even defended a secular version of piety, which he equates with appreciation and awe before the grandeur of nature, rather than before the perfection of God.Footnote ³⁶ Yet I wonder if one can have piety towards inanimate objects or impersonal powers, however majestic and beautiful. My own sense of the virtue is that it is a grateful response to a Person, a humble acknowledgement of Another's intentional benevolence or sacrifice. Nature may be awesome, but it is not literally benevolent. And I do not have to tell the Dalai Lama, Rorty, or Stout that nature (including human nature) is often mercilessly destructive.

In any event, we must distinguish between the epistemic significance of theism and the causal significance of theos. Again, I have no doubt that human beings can practice forms of faith, hope, and love without self-conscious belief in God, but such practice still depends, ontologically, on the reality of God's grace. Other things being equal, true convictions about God help one to be good, but atheists' virtues are not mere “glittering vices.” Much beautiful art and many kind deeds are produced by individuals oblivious to or actively resentful of the very idea of a Deity. Nevertheless, it remains the case that they are not giving credit where it is due. Jesus himself takes this piety to the extreme in Mark 10:18: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”

And what of immortality? Do religious ethics require that we trust in our postmortem perdurability in order to make faith, hope, and love practically possible? Does God's goodness mandate His granting some or all people an afterlife, lest human existence be absurd or unfair? Dworkin dedicates comparatively little space to the topic of death and the possible survival of it, but he concludes that a well-lived life, though it ends, is “an achievement complete in itself” and “a kind of immortality,” “the only kind we have any business wanting” (RwG, 158–59). I admire such an attitude, however disconsoling, especially in light of Nietzsche's telling critique of Matthew 5:46–47: “The principle of ‘Christian love’: in the end it wants to be paid well.”Footnote ³⁷ If, as I believe, virtue is its own reward, a participation in God's own holiness, then we must avoid tainting our moral motives with insistence on extraneous benefits. I do not deny the possibility or desirability of resurrection, but I try not to think about it, lest it be a sop rather than a mystery.Footnote ³⁸

CONCLUSION: LOGIC AND THE LOGOS

Religion without God is a striking legal brief against desolation in a secular age. Atheists are not as dispossessed as they might think. Religious atheists, at any rate, can still inherit real property from the Western tradition. To stretch the metaphor, reading Dworkin's book is like listening to a probate hearing in which the court must decide what to do with a disappeared robber baron's estate. “The missing person may be deceased, in hiding, or living openly among us,” the judge declares, “but his putative assets were stolen and thus limiting their distribution to his heirs would be unjust enrichment. The party in question never legally possessed these goods, so his status and whereabouts do not matter. The court must return the wealth to its rightful owners: Helen, you get beauty; Immanuel, to you goes goodness; you, Cosmo, acquire purpose; and so on.”

Dworkin makes a compelling case for the futility—what he calls the “unsatisfactoriness” (RwG, 80–81)—of values such as beauty and goodness not being objective. In that case, the human heart, will, and mind would be “useless passions” (Sartre) to the extent that they pine for deep meaning in the world. Not only would the aesthetic quest for the sublime and the moral desire for the just be a delusion, so also would the scientific pursuit of truth. An absurd and/or deterministic universe, without sufficient reason, would imply that the mind's apprehension of empirical fact is either purely by chance or utterly inconceivable. The mind itself would be but an epiphenomenon dependent upon and reducible to blind, buffeted matter. This dour conclusion is embraced by irreligious atheists like Richard Dawkins and Michael Ruse, but Dworkin highlights its destructiveness: no normative discipline can remain standing if values are mere projections.

I am persuaded by Dworkin's critique of irreligious atheism, but I find his own religious atheism equally unstable. The idea that the material world just happens to be objectively lovely, worthwhile, and intelligible is incomprehensible to me. In the end, I read Religion without God as a reductio of its own title. I have no irresistible argument in favor of theism. I embrace it for a host of intersecting personal, moral, and metaphysical reasons. (If God speaks, one cannot very well consider Him unreal or impersonal.Footnote ³⁹) But I am quite certain that neither religious theism nor religious atheism is forced on us by “logic” alone. That is a too-easy answer to a highly complex question. If Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God is unsuccessful—an attempt to pull a palpable rabbit out of a verbal hat—then so is Dworkin's appeal to the meaning of words insufficient to prove God's aesthetic and ethical irrelevance. The atheistic thesis that finite beauty, goodness, and truth are self-sufficient or self-explanatory is as controversial as the theistic contention that explaining temporal and spatial creatures requires reference to a transcendent and eternal Creator. Neither position is simply illogical.

Is the divine Logos a dead letter? Only if we decline to claim it and live by it.