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So there was no real rational explanation for what happened. It was more of a mystical thing.

Well, I don't know if mystical is the right word for it or not, but I certainly couldn't explain it.

But it was so overpowering I had to accept that this was just Truth. This was not a feeling. This was not a preference. It certainly wasn't what I wanted to believe, but I had to believe. I had to conclude that this was Truth.

Now, if there's such a thing as evil, then there has to be such a thing as good, because the only way to get an evil thing is to take a good thing and ruin it. So that meant that there was both good and evil, and that meant that I'd been so wrong that almost anything could be true, including the faith that I'd given up.

So how did you revisit your faith? You probably identified some misconceptions of the faith as it had been delivered to you as a kid.

I can't claim the excuse that misconceptions of the faith were delivered to me. I abandoned it. I did the wrong thing with my eyes open.

But when I came back, I came back with my eyes open, too. I think I pretty well damaged my mind by that time.

You know, you can't tell yourself that obvious things—like the difference between right and wrong—are really not true without really playing some tricks on your mind. So when I came back, it took a couple of years for God to put me back together. And one of the preoccupations of my research ever since then has been How is it possible for people to tell themselves that they don't know what they really do know?

Clearly, you're not the only one who has turned his eyes away from natural law and moral consequences. One wonders whether such people can be reasoned back into it when they have done this damage to their mind by bending it into unnatural ways.

I was surprised to find that a lot more people were in conditions something like mine. There's a difference between an honest mistake, or an honest ignorance, and a smokescreen. There's a difference between not knowing something and telling yourself that you don't know it even though you do.

Most of our moral confusion, I think, is that second kind. It isn't that we don't really know what's right and wrong. We like to tell ourselves that. We say, we're stumbling around in the dark and that everything is shades of gray, when in fact, the sun is shining and things are pretty clear.

That's denial.

Still, you have to find a way of talking to someone in denial that causes him to recognize it for himself. You have to be able to burst his bubble so that his own evasion is exposed to him.

So tell us what you mean by "the lost world of common truths."

Well, the lost world is simply all of those things that we all really know about right and wrong and that we used to all admit that we really knew. People the world over still by and large will recognize that it's wrong to deliberately take innocent human life, it's wrong to steal for yourself what belongs to your neighbor, it's wrong to sleep with your neighbor's wife or husband. These are not just mysterious secrets of only our own moral tradition. Yet we insist in the United States, in our time, in saying that all these things are very difficult, that we all really disagree, and that there is no common ground that we can stand on.

In fact, as you point out, people get angry when we assert that there is moral law.

In most areas of life, if you tell somebody, "You're really ignorant. You don't know anything," he's going to be insulted. But when it comes to the moral law, people want to tell you they don't really know anything. Nobody knows anything. This is all so difficult. We're all groping in the fog. And if you tell them that's not true, they'll become offended with you and say, "What are you? Judgmental? Intolerant?"

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47