PJ RC?

I've been a fan of PJ O'Rourke for many years, going back to his National Lampoon days, of course, and especially, his tenure at Car & Driver Magazine, where he crafted astonishingly rude but funny pieces and caused his editors to refer to him nervously as "PJ (we're gonna get letters) O'Rourke." One of O'Rourke's great charms is his willingness to take on any issue, no matter how complex, and with rapier wit and gimlet eye, break it down into tiny, delectable pieces; his explanation of the S & L crisis of 'eighties in Rolling Stone is a modern classic.

One subject, however, that O'Rourke has eschewed (to the best of my knowledge) is God. O'Rourke's political and economic outlook is generally libertarian and I have always assumed he was an atheist or, at best, a deist. Not the case: in Search Magazine, O'Rourke takes on the deity and I am please to learn he does believes in Him, revealing it in a piece called, simply enough, On God that is (thank God!) rich in "O'Rourkeness."

“But science can be proved,” a scientist would say. “The whole point of science is experimental proof.” Yet we non-scientists have to take that experimental proof on faith because we don’t know what the scientists are talking about. This makes science a matter of faith in men while religion, of course, is a matter of faith in God, and if you’ve got to choose …

Personally, I don’t think you do. Science and religion both assert the same thing: that the universe operates according to rules and that those rules can be discerned. Albeit this does make it easier to believe in God than, for instance, organic chemistry. Just the fact of rules implies a rule maker while just the fact of mixing nitro with glycerin and causing an explosion does not imply a Ph.D.

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In one way, however, faith in science does come easier than faith in God—if fear is any gauge of how real we believe a thing is. To judge by human behavior, people are not trembling before the Almighty much. But many of those same people are scared silly by science. They are frightened by a climate stuck in the microwave of technological advances, frightened by genetic modifications that may—who knows?—cross cabbages with kings and produce a Prince Charles, and naturally they are frightened by the clouds of mushrooms being grown in the science cellars of Iran and North Korea.

Read it all. With a name like O'Rourke is it possible PJ is a lapsed Catholic? We can always hope, and if so, also hope he will come back into the fold: the world will be a better place when O'Rourke tackles liturgical dancing and contemporary Catholic service music.

(Thanks to Banished Child of Eve.)