Mike and Petrit,

Your comments are thoughtful and deserve an equally thoughtful response. I’ve been flat-out barely-hanging-in busy for the last few months, and I didn’t want to toss a shallow response at you, so I haven’t said anything.

Unfortunately, time is still a far scarcer commodity than I’d like. So I’ll offer a brief sketch of a response here, and try to find time for a more careful one later.

Mike: Rather than make a weak and amateur attempt at apologetics, let me direct you to the many writers who have made a career of bringing rationality to Christianity and Catholicism. C.S. Lewis was one of the best, and was seminal to my own change of mind and ultimate conversion. God in the Dock is a good place to start.

In a nutshell, my argument for Catholicism over other forms of Christianity is simple: primacy. Once I grant the historical evidence for Jesus as the Deity incarnate (cf. Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ), I have to take pretty darn seriously the church he established, with Peter as its head. That church has survived some two thousand years (AFAIK, the only formal human institution to do so), Avignon Captivity and the like notwithstanding. So, as I see it, I need a pretty darn strong argument against the Catholic church before I can view other Christian denominations as more than well-meaning but astray splinter groups. (Exception: Catholics acknowledge the Orthodox, Eastern-rite churches as equally valid sister churches, differing in superficials but not core theology.)

(I also think that no other church has as much richness and depth of theology and apologetics as the Catholic Church. This isn’t a proof of correctness, but a pointer.)

Petrit: Let me assure you that I am familiar with Dawkins’ ideas from prior writings, not just from a “third-party report of a speech at Pop!Tech.” I’ve always thought he was a little overly inclined to foam at the mouth, and to give people of faith less credit than they deserve. But the details of Dawkins’ arguments are actually not so central to my post, or at least to its intention: my primary aim was to plant a flag in the sand and say “Hey, I’m intelligent, well-educated, and thoughtful, and I’m also Catholic. I may not be right, but don’t write me off as an ignorant wacko.” I don’t mind that Dawkins disagrees with my world-view. I mind that he’s insulting.

And sure, much of the world may be relatively unthinking in its beliefs (religious, ethical, political, racial, or otherwise), but I may not be as idiosyncratic as you think. Many people would be surprised by how many sincere theists can be found in a univeristy Physics department, even in a highly secular university in a highly secular region of a highly secular state. (I certainly was.) Who do you think I did my arguing and debating with when I was still a rabid atheist?

Finally, regarding the “lack of strong empirical evidence for supernatural intervention by a loving god”, I’d argue that there is evidence, but one must go looking for it in good faith to see it. As to why there isn’t more in-your-face can’t-be-missed can’t-be-misinterpreted evidence, well, the short answer is that there can’t be without wrecking The Divine Plan. You’re touching on what’s known as “the problem of evil”, and tomes have been written on that by people much smarter and better informed (and probably less busy) than I… Including by the aforementioned C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain) and Lee Strobel (The Case for Faith).

The answers aren’t simple, because the reality isn’t simple. To my mind, that’s one of the many small, supporting bits of evidence that this whole Christianity thing is true, and not just the product of human imagination. It’s not simple, but it’s not arbitrary or self-contradictory, either… Though it may appear so, especally after being filtered through myriad finite, fallible, idiosyncratic human minds.

(Go on, it’s not that long.)

For the record, I’m Catholic and very serious about it. I’m also a trained and practicing scientist with a Ph.D. in Physics. I was raised atheist, and converted while in graduate school because Catholicism made too damn much sense not to agree with. This was no sudden Road to Damascus conversion, but a long, careful, suspicious, examined, intellectual decision. (To mimic the star of one of Dawkins’ anecdotes, “I was wrong for 26 years.”) And I find no irreconcilable disagreements between modern science and Catholic theology; they talk about different things. Apparent incompatibilities usually arise from a flawed understanding of one or both.

I apply the same rigorous standards to knowledge of both the material and spiritual worlds, because they’re two sides of the same coin, and they’re both just dimensions of “what is”. The primary difference is that one can build a decent model of the material world by looking only outwards, but must look into the human psyche (one’s own and others’) for evidence about the spiritual.

Science is just “best practice” thinking. It should be applied to everything that’s worth knowing, because thinking is the only way anything is ever known. You get the evidence, the clues, wherever you can find them.

That means I subject beliefs — my own and other people’s — to challenge and scrutiny. It also means I have the humility to admit that finite minds will never completely understand the natural or supernatural worlds. All understanding is just a “working model”.

Contrary to Dawkins’ characterization, “faith” does not mean closing one’s ears to evidence or argument. That’s “denial”. Faith is having the guts to bet something you care about on the partial understanding you’ve got, even though you don’t have all the answers. And faith means accepting challenges to your beliefs with confidence that those beliefs will either be strengthened or corrected.

It is regrettably true that a great many religious believers refuse to examine their beliefs analytically and impartially. It is also regrettably true that a great many unbelievers make the same mistake.

(David Weinberger pretty much pegs Dawkins.)