The New York Daily News published today an abridged version of the article posted below.

(Warning: Non-Yankees fans may not like the final line.  Read at your own risk.)

The Coalition of Reason vs. The Coalition of Common Sense
Rev. Gabriel Gillen, O.P.
October 30, 2009

The thing I love about New Yorkers is their common sense. They can smell a rat a mile away. That's why I couldn't wait to hear their reactions when the Coalition of Reason announced their new ad campaign 'Good without God' in NYC subways. After Googling for the poster I printed it out and started to show the ad around. It reads: "A Million New Yorkers Are Good Without God. Are You?" One guy quipped, in Brooklynese, "Father, I'm not good with God!"

It reminded me of something a wise old priest by the name of Benedict Groeschel once told me years ago, when we happened to meet on the subway: "Sinners think they're saints; saints know they're sinners!" He didn't learn that at Columbia University where he obtained a doctorate in psychology. He knew that was true from living with and among New Yorkers.

The wording of this new ad goes back to the age of the Enlightenment, when the attempt was made to define essential moral norms by saying that they would be valid, even if God did not exist or at least that His existence could in no way be verified by human beings. Kant had denied that it was possible to know God in the domain of pure reason, but at the same time had represented God, freedom, and immortality as postulates of practical reason, without which, for him, moral action did not make sense.

Take for example, the courage of our own subway superman, Wesley Autrey, the construction worker with two small children who risked his life to save a stranger who had fallen onto the tracks. According to Kant and Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, this type of heroic action cannot simply be explained by a Darwinian model. As Collins puts it, "Many would argue that altruism has been supported by evolution because it helps the group survive. But some people sacrificially give of themselves to those who are outside their group and with whom they have absolutely nothing in common."

Autrey's action was not logical-in the sense of serving his own interests or those of his family-but moral. Such an action ultimately presupposes a dimension that transcends strictly earthly or natural parameters, the only ones acknowledged by the atheist vision.

If the claim is made-as the new campaign does-that an atheist is capable of this same type of heroism, I would not only agree with this assertion but point to a concrete example from the well-known atheist Peter Singer. When his own mother lay helpless with Alzheimer's disease, he broke all of his own rules, thus throwing away his credibility as a utilitarian philosopher onto the tracks: He came to her rescue.

Let me explain: he went against his own moral code, which in this case would have required him not to help his mother because it is more logical to help others with a better probability of surviving. There is logic to Singer's reasoning, but it just seems too...heartless. Thankfully, Peter Singer's heroic actions speak louder than his radically rationalistic vision. In other words...Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot practiced what they preached, Singer did not.

History has shown that a radically rationalist culture becomes radically irrational if it is detached from God. The atheistic ideologies of Nazism and Communism did not produce earthly paradises but only tragic regimes of terror that trampled human dignity and freedom.

This is why Benedict XVI reverses the axiom of the subway ad and says: "Even those who are unable to accept God should in any case seek to live and direct their lives as if God exists. This is the same advice that Renée Pascal had given to his non-believing friends; it is the advice that we would like to give today as well to our friends who do not believe."

OK, so one million New Yorkers are practical atheists, living their lives in a way as if God does not exist. But in the final analysis, they are all still wired to do the right thing when it counts and live their lives as though God does exist. In his book Practical Ethics, Singer asserts,"...ethics is not an ideal system that is noble in theory but no good in practice. The reverse is closer to the truth: an ethical judgment that is no good in practice must suffer from a theoretical defect."

The Ad from the Coalition of Reason contains a theoretical defect and is going up against the Coalition of Common Sense. It's like the Phillies going up against the Yankees.

Who's gonna win? Fugettaboutit!

Post Scriptum  

Peter Singer did the right thing when his mother was sick, and I am sure he has done many other good things in his life.  But he advances many bad philosophical ideas.  He takes rationalism to the extreme, and even many atheists disagree with him.  A friend of mine Dr. Peter Colosi has some excellent articles on the problems with Peter Singer's writings. 

A fundamentalist, on the other hand, takes faith to the extreme.

They both led us increasingly to the edge of the abyss.

Ask Singer or a terrorist the great Socratic question: "Is it ever right to do wrong?"  Singer ends up defining "wrong" subjectively. he has an inalienable right to do whatever he wills.  The terrorist says that God is not bound by reason and can do whatever he wills.  Both Singer (with a philosophic idea) and the terrorist (with a theological idea) say that the will is superior to the intellect and is not subject to reason.  Both systems have to resort to a voluntaristic theory of state and being to explain why they are not immoral for using violence against those who are innocent.

One might say our modern culture needs to become more pagan.  I would agree, in the sense that the ancient pagan Greeks knew hundreds of years before Christ that it was never right to do wrong.