“Please, I don’t want to listen to any arguments.” Heard it before? I have. But maybe it’s high time to “listen up” and hear some arguments. Especially sound arguments, that is, the ones that are valid in form and have only true premises. After all, the glory of such arguments is that their conclusions are true. So, here’s a modest proposal: Let’s argue in the right way, about the right thing, at the right time. Better, as well, to add only with the right people. It’s easier said than done. But Chesterton would welcome this proposal. Indeed, he pointed out that “people generally quarrel because they cannot argue.”

There’s one plain-spoken contemporary pundit who would also sign on. Bret Stephens, writing in the New York Times, though relegated to the bottom of the Opinion pages (Sept. 17), asks the question “What is the soul of the Western Tradition?” His immediate answer: “Argument.” He laments that we have abandoned a culture of argument. Doing so has left a void which invites the worst sort of identity politics. But Stephens does not, thereby, lament the loss of the truths to which sound arguments give birth. Rather, he insists that the “true Western tradition lies more in its skepticism than in its certitude.” Proud alumnus that he is of the University of Chicago, it seems that his required reading list did not include Wittgenstein. For if there is one lesson that Wittgenstein teaches, it is that doubt presupposes belief. Doubt must always have grounds.

To be sure, there’s a critical difference between being presented with a truth, even by way of argument, and accepting that truth. Consider Scripture. It does not consist in a long chain of sound arguments. Indeed, St. John Henry Newman prefaced his A Grammar of Assent with an observation, itself a truth, from St. Ambrose: “Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum,” that is, “It is not by logic that God has decided to save his people.” But neither does God save us by a concatenation of contradictions. Enlightenment critics of the Church falsely attributed to Tertullian the assertion “Credo quia absurdum,” that is, “I believe because it is absurd.” Well, maybe somewhere someone does. But Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that the “Catholic Tradition, from the outset, rejected the so-called ‘fideism’, which is the desire to believe against reason. Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd) is not a formula that interprets the Catholic faith.”

Of late I’ve been re-reading the letters of Flannery O’Connor in The Habit of Being. It’s a splendid collection edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald. Though O’Connor was a daughter, even an enfant terrible, of the Deep South, her teachers and literary acquaintances included a great many atheists. For her part, she made no bones about her Catholic orthodoxy. Still, she counselled one of her favorite correspondents, a recent convert, about the limits of argument in opening the way to faith. “This is not to say that faith isn’t subject to reason or that you shouldn’t inform yourself of ways to defend it; but such would be for your own sake; it would never much help you to win arguments.”

Surely the most frequent charge against the faith is that, given the scope and severity of evil, the following statements:

(1) God is omnibenevolent,
(2) God is omniscient, and
(3) God is omnipotent

cannot be simultaneously true. You are not alone, gentle reader, if you have wrestled with the problem of evil! Perhaps the finest analytic philosopher of the day, Alvin Plantinga, points out that we need not, in the face of this problem, demonstrate the truth of any of these three statements. What is required, rather, is that we show that they are not incompatible with the existence of evil. For my part, I like to challenge the atheist with the Problem of the Good. How is it, in the materialist’s universe, shorn of value, that we so often encounter good people doing great deeds?

As the conversation between believers and our cultured despisers continues, as it surely will, how are we to conduct ourselves? No less an authority than St. Peter tells us, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that is within you. But do so with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). Just maybe, somewhere, there is a gloss that adds “or, if need be, with a feisty resolve.” It’s worth noting, as well, that reasons are unlike apples. If one has apples, they are easy enough to give. It’s not always so with reasons, especially with reasons of the heart.