Fisking Novak

Heather Mac Donald is offended by Novak equating religion and morality:

I’m puzzled as to why Mr. Novak and other Catholic thinkers believe that reason can discover something as abstruse and remote as God but not a workable set of ethical principles, but I will leave that quibble aside for now. His predictions of secular moral paralysis strike me as rather overblown. Does any parent ask himself whether he must allow his nine-year-old son to run over his four-year-old sister with his bike because “God is really dead” or because philosophers disagree on whether morality is consequentialist or deontological? He does not, because the value of his children is self-evident, as is the necessity of inculcating in them common decency, if only for the sake of a sane household. And his children will learn that common decency through repetition and by gradually understanding that others have the same capacity for pain and sorrow that they do. To be sure, some households remain dysfunctional, but their problems almost invariably stem from the parents’ incapacity, not from the failure to invoke God as a reason to not kick your mother when she asks you to pick up your clothes.