God and Man at Yale Law - The Wall Street Journal

Was it divinely ordained that a boy raised by aggressively atheist parents would one day, in his eighth decade, make a passionate public case for God? This mischievous thought crosses my mind as I speak to Anthony Kronman, whose book “After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity and Joy,” forthcoming in March, aims to persuade America’s “relentlessly rational” elites to acknowledge the existence of “divinity.”

Those elites include his colleagues at Yale Law School, where Mr. Kronman, 76, is a professor and former dean. “In the academic circles in which I live and work,” Mr. Kronman writes, “the only respectable view of God is that he doesn’t exist.” He elaborates in an interview, saying that they regard his public professions of spirituality with “skeptical bemusement.” To the extent religion figures in their conversations at all, “it often does so as a synonym for prejudice and superstition—the attitude [Barack] Obama expressed, in an unguarded moment, when he made his regrettable comments about ‘guns and religion’ ” while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Mr. Kronman’s ambition is to repair “the schism between those for whom religion continues to matter and those who view it with amusement or contempt.” The political implications of this split are especially profound in America, which Mr. Kronman says is unlike any other country in both its “commitment to secular values” and the “seriousness with which it takes religious beliefs.” The combination of the two has frequently been a source of national strength, but in recent decades it has given rise to hostility and bitterness.

“After Disbelief” approaches the problem by giving each side its philosophical due. Mr. Kronman argues that the scientific conviction that everything in the world is “knowable and explicable” collides with the practical reality that we can never know everything—that the questions are “inexhaustible” because new ones arise from every answer.

“We’ll always be in the foothills of exploration, beyond which there are mountains upon mountains, all beyond our range,” he says by Zoom from his house in Block Island, R.I. That’s where God comes in—in Mr. Kronman’s conception—as a divine force working to ensure that all knowledge is provisional, and eternally so.

He acknowledges that’s different from the idea you might have absorbed in church or synagogue. Most people “think of God in the way Jews, Christians and Muslims do, as a Creator who exists apart from the world and brings it into being from nothing,” he says. On this view, “the most important fact about the world is that its existence is conditional”—it depends on God, whose own existence precedes it. God’s existence is “unconditional”; it depends on “nothing other than God himself.”

To put it another way, while the world’s existence is “contingent,” God’s is “necessary.” The Abrahamic religions “promise that we shall finally know God in the life to come,” but some devout believers hold that God’s will is off-limits to scientific inquiry.

Mr. Kronman, by contrast, comes to God by pondering science and its limits. Science explains the world in terms of cause and effect: “The idea of a cause is that of a necessary connection. To be sure, we can never empirically demonstrate that such a connection exists. All we are ever able to show is that two things are correlated.” To be meaningful, a hypothesis must be falsifiable, so that every hypothesis remains subject to refinement or disproof. Scientists may be highly confident in some conclusions, but they can never be absolutely certain they’ve proved anything.

“This is the scientific method,” Mr. Kronman says. “It is how science progresses.” Yet science is pursuing an unreachable goal: “It strives to show why things do not merely happen in an observable sequence but could not have happened in any other way.” That makes science “the experience of perpetual progress coupled with inevitable defeat.”

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Hence the leap of faith: “The order that science seeks to comprehend,” Mr. Kronman believes, is “unconditional and therefore eternal”—in other words, divine. God’s will is infinite, but contrary to Christian theology, it isn’t off-limits to scientific inquiry. In this light, science is a sort of holy pursuit: Understanding God and understanding the world are one and the same quest.

Mr. Kronman, who says his ideas draw on those of Aristotle and Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), describes himself as a “born-again pagan.” That may sound irreverent, but he clearly feels more spiritual kinship with traditional believers than with his secular colleagues. His fishing partner on Block Island is a devout Catholic. “When we’re fishing, we argue fiercely about religion. We disagree but take the subject seriously. That’s something I miss in the faculty lounge.”

What’s missing in American politics, meanwhile, is a party that takes account of interests and values on both sides of the spiritual divide. “I enthusiastically support gay marriage,” Mr. Kronman says, “but believe the baker who refuses to make a bespoke wedding cake for a same-sex couple should be allowed to decline.” On abortion, he thinks every woman “has the right to decide,” but that it “must be exercised in a reasonable period of time,” as defined, “among other ways, by the religious views of the citizens of the states who have the authority to define it.” He opposes organized prayer in public schools but faults high-school curriculums for giving short shrift to the history of religion.

He’s generally wary of “the reconstruction of our educational practices along politically progressive lines” and cites the New York Times “1619 Project” as a prime example. He describes himself as “very uneasy” with the “campaign to demonumentalize America, to take many of our heroes off their pedestals,” which he calls a “program of erasure” in the name of a “radical reconstruction of traditional values.”

All of this, he says, puts him on the “red-state side of the divide.” Yet he remains a Democrat. “I was raised in a household of Democrats,” he says. His parents were passionate about civil rights and “sympathetic to working-class interests and the urgent needs of the poor.” In college in the 1960s, he joined the radical Students for a Democratic Society. While he’s moved well to the right since then, he says he has “no interest in the Republican Party, which has abandoned its commitment to traditional conservative values and prostituted itself to the worst demagogic powers in American life.”

“What I do not like about the Democratic Party today,” he says, “is its growing distraction by the deformities of identity politics and the intellectual perversities of the woke left.” He sees this ideology as a product of “the process of secularization,” which “has enfeebled many of the larger structures of meaning that once gave the lives of those living within them purpose and direction. Among these were the ties of ethnic and cultural solidarity that defined the identities of individual human beings and provided ready-made answers to the deepest questions of life.”

Those ties gave way to “an ideal of human freedom that celebrates our power as individuals to decide which identities to embrace and which to discard. . . . For those who long to be rooted again, identity politics offers an ersatz security. But it cannot succeed. The experience of fate, once it is gone, cannot be reproduced or recovered by choice.“

His book, he says, addresses two sets of readers. The first is those who believe that secularism and science are “incompatible” with religion; the second, those who have left the churches in search of some other form of spirituality, “one that is more consistent with modern beliefs.”

His message for the former cohort: “Your commitment to reason is founded upon a belief in the infinite divinity of the world. You are already religious, despite your protestations.” To the latter he says, perhaps a little too conveniently, that his formulation of divinity “is the religion you need.” His objective is to preserve “the fusion of secularism and religion that has been a defining trait of American civilization since John Winthrop’s ‘city on a hill’ became Thomas Jefferson’s ‘great republic.’ ”

The book is also deeply personal. Mr. Kronman was reared by resolutely atheist parents “in a family that was haunted by the absence of God.” His father, Harry Kronman, was a rabbi who became a Hollywood screenwriter. His mother, Rosella Towne, was a film actress for five years—she appeared in several Ronald Reagan movies—until she married Harry and quit showbiz in 1942. She was a rebel against her own evangelical mother, who had “dragged her to countless revivals” in churches and open-air tents. “The fire and brimstone of the meetings she was dragged to as a child seared her with a wound that never healed,” Mr. Kronman says.

Harry Kronman, for his part, “fled the closed world of his Orthodox youth. His determined rejection of Judaism reinforced my mother’s message.” The regular presence of Towne’s father, who listened to the Rosary Hour on the radio each night, “was further confirmation” in Mr. Kronman’s parents’ eyes “of what superstition can do to a healthy mind.”

His mother was “the great influence” in Mr. Kronman’s life. “She was fiercely anticlerical but had a natural passion for philosophy.” Mother and son would sit for hours on the front steps of their house in Santa Monica, Calif., “talking about the stars, and what was beyond the ones we could see, and beyond the ones we couldn’t.” His mother “always had a martini in her hand, and the air was heavy with gardenias.” Even before he was old enough to drink, he found this atmosphere “intoxicating.”

Mr. Kronman remembers asking her “who studied such things.” She said, “metaphysicians.” He had “never heard the word before and thought maybe you had to go to medical school to become one.”

He decided that was what he wanted to be. He majored in philosophy as an undergraduate at Williams, where he was captivated by the French atheist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80). Yet he discovered that all the great metaphysicians were—“surprise of surprises”—concerned above all with the existence of God. “And so I backed into my religious views, which my mother strongly discouraged, through philosophy, which she just as strongly recommended.”

His mother, who died in 2014, had “some sense of this in her later years,” Mr. Kronman says. “She was, I think, more amused than surprised.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

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