No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Novak
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 12280
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0385526105
Dewey Decimal Number: 261.21
EAN: 9780385526104
ASIN: 0385526105
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
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Product 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.
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 Fascinating, thought-provoking, and inspiring September 7, 2008
A fascinating book; a remarkable meditation on the "dark night" of those who would believe in God, and those who do not. It's main theme is of finding common ground and rejecting the attitude of the "new atheists" who seem to see their own views as beyond reproach.
I am still digesting a lot of the philosophy presented in the book, and its many discussions of authors, both atheist and believer, have lengthened my "to read" list.
I do not pretend to have many astonishing insights to share in my review, I just wish to encourage others who read this book description and are intrigued by its subject matter to go ahead and purchase this book. It is profound, a meditation on belief unlike anything I've read.
Thank you, Mr. Novak. I only wish I were more articulate so I could leave a worthier review.
 Very Insightful September 6, 2008
I found the book very insightful, but at this point I don't think it does any good to regurgitate what Dawkins and Hitchens write even if it is to counter their views. The reason is, Dawkins and Hitchens are intellectual light weights and psuedo-scientists so responding to them brings you down to their level. Novak should simply proceed with the valid insights he has and ignore those individuals all together. One of the points Novak makes that is true, however, is that athiests are always saying believers ignore scientific evidense. But at a very fundamental level, athiests and believers believe the same thing. That is - something has always been here. Athiests will tell you the Universe - all matter and energy - has always been here (steady state, expanding-collapsing etc) while believers would say that God (an entity outside the universe) has always been here and the universe (energy, matter, time) began. At least to date, guess which view the scientific evidense supports? It is the latter. So really its the athiests that are ignoring the available evidense. Anyway, I found it a good read with plenty of food for thought.
Novak wins the battlefield while observing the rules of rational engagement September 4, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Michael Novak's entry into the ongoing intellectual debate between Christians and the "New Athiests" is notable both for its content and approach. If Novak had merely brought his impressive intellectual acumen to the debate, that alone would have been a wonderful contribution. Happily he does the debate a second service by remaining civil while pursuing it, and in doing so, he kills his opponents with kindness.
The New Athiests, it should be remembered, rely on outrageous and outlandish language (as well as downright insulting discourse) to get their message out. Novak responds to their vitriol but refuses stooping to their level. By doing so, he comes across not only confident in his position, but also reveals the New Athiests to be the very cultural barbarians they accuse Christians of resembling.
Novak's victory over the New Athiests even on their own terms is evidenced in the very title of his book: while the New Athiests claim that someone is crazy or foolhardy for claiming to see God, Novak responds that in actuality "No One Sees God" (at least not in the anthropomorphic or cheesy way imagined by the New Athiests).
Furthermore, Novak displays a basic rhetorical trait seemingly lacking in his interlocutors, namely, he understands their positions from the inside, while they apparently only possess a caricature of Christian belief. This is an embarrassing situation for the New Athiests to find themselves in because their dismissal of religion is premised upon the claim that they have understood it.
I have only so far spoken about Novak's approach. His CONTENT is detailed, philosophically-rigorous and, most notably, intensely personal. It poses a formidable challenge to the New Athiests on each of these different levels. After all, they claim that atheism is not only a better way to think, but also a better way to live privately and civically. Therefore if atheism is actually any of these things, its proponents must engage Novak's points, and they must simultaneously show to the rest of us watching the debate that they can do so humanely and rationally.
After all, isn't a more humane and rational society their purported goal?
An interesting addition September 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Novak's latest work is divided into four parts. In part one, Novak gives a close reading to the works of the most prominent new atheists: Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.
Part two engages nonbelievers in a Socratic dialogue. Interestingly, Novak spends much of this time addressing an actual Alcibiades in the person of Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald. Their exchange sheds light on the problem of evil and the causes of human suffering. Its format as an actual conversation between believer and non-believer makes for a particularly fruitful exchange, usually lacking in hypothetical dialogue or the usual faceless polemic that has marked this genre.
Novak goes on to describe the phenomenology of human life in general--for believers and non-believers. It is an interesting attempt to find common ground between the two camps based on mutual experience.
He concludes by pointing out the flaws in secularism and foretelling the fall of the current Secularist Age.
All in all it's a fascinating addition to the interminable back-and-forth between believers and non-believers. Its even-handedness and charity are to be commended (especially in the face of bile artists like Dawkins and Hitchens). It's well written, if at times tending toward the baroque. Certainly a worthwhile read.
The Author puts in two cents September 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It does need to be noted that I was NOT in this book presenting the whole of the Christian gospel or making a case for Christianity and Judaism. My aim was much more modest. I was trying to re-create what used to be called "natural theology," the study of all those things we can learn about God based solely on reason alone and our experience of ourselves and the world around us. This is not the kind of knowledge that brings salvation, or opens the way to eternal life. But it is a form of knowing shared by huge numbers of people around the world, in the ancient and medieval worlds, at the time of the American founding, and today. Belief in God as the abiding presence of light (intelligence, even mathematics) in all things, and as the source of the (to us) inscrutable order, power, and majesty of nature has been the default postion of the human race. Almost all human beings in history have shared in it. In America today, the Pew poll found fewer than ten percent of all Americans identifying themselves as atheists or agnostics. About half of all agnostics and one-fifth of atheists confessed to believing in God as just described -- but not in the Jewish/Christian God. Our country desperately needs a respectful dialogue between believers and unbelievers. I have tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to mark out one way by which that dialogue might get underway, for the sake of brotherly comity, civility and increasing respect for one another.
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