Believe:
Why Everyone Should Be Religious
by ross douthat
zondervan, 240 pages, $29.99
I grew up in a religiously sympathetic, if not always actively practicing, household. During my toddler years, my family attended an Orthodox church on the other side of town, where I would sit at the back, playing with a box of crayons. I remember liking what I thought of as “the bread.” I don’t recall much else. We stopped going sometime before I started school, and I haven’t been back to church regularly since.
Though I was a philosophically curious child, I didn’t think seriously about religion until many years later, when New Atheism burst onto the scene. It struck me as embarrassingly simplistic. For centuries, its hackneyed story went, scientific men had been erecting a network of lamps across reality, so that no corner might remain unlit. Some pioneers—Copernicus, Newton, Darwin—had illuminated whole expanses in one go. Others did their duty with a single light. But collectively, enlightened society was nobly beating back darkness. Gods, souls, and spirits, trapped in that last superstitious strip on the horizon, were now finally awaiting their inevitable extinction.
It seemed to me, however, that there were still huge gaps far from the edges—strange patches, right at the heart of reality, that remained dark no matter how close you held the torch: consciousness, reason, morality, the very fact of existence itself. These mysteries seemed mysterious for a reason. They were black holes that sucked in and destroyed any rational argument that strayed too close. I liked that. I liked that atheism seemed incapable of forming a closed system, that there were little fissures where its confident claims would always leak out. At the same time, I found it hard to take solace in religion, which seemed to me to want to patch things up too hastily. Agnosticism, I concluded, got the balance just right.
Ross Douthat would disagree. In his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat insists that earnest seekers like me should, if we follow things through rationally, end up with not high-minded ambivalence but active faith. The gap between nonbelief and belief, he wants to show us, appears vast only from the ground, where the trunks of the two trees stand far apart. But climb up into the branches, and you find the two arching toward each other: Indeed, it is really only a short hop from the farthest outstretched branch of agnosticism to the nearest dangling limb of faith. Like a squirrel to its young, Douthat shows how it’s done.
His route involves three moves. First, Douthat builds a cumulative case against atheism, focusing on three mysterious phenomena that seem to frustrate naturalism: the finely tuned laws of the universe, the remarkable powers of the human mind, and the continued prevalence of mystical and miraculous experiences. Next comes the hinge chapter, “The Case For Commitment,” in which Douthat tries to convince those of us now intellectually persuaded of the limits of naturalism to upgrade our agnosticism to full-fat faith. And finally, in the remaining four chapters, Douthat explores religion in its many different forms, with a touching coda on his own Christian faith at the end. These later sections include rich passages on the problem of evil, sexual ethics, and the accuracy of the gospels. But, as Douthat would acknowledge, first he has to get us there.
Things get off to a good start. Douthat makes light work of naturalism, even if many of his arguments will be familiar to those who have already read, say, Stephen M. Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith or Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. First, Douthat tackles the childish notion that Copernicus and Darwin somehow did away with religious mystery. When Copernicus switched the Sun and Earth around, he observes, it did no more to undermine our sense of some unexplained underlying order than a magician swapping upturned tumblers on a table does away with the table. Similarly, Darwin revolutionized biology, but he made no dent at all in “what ancient Hinduism called rta, the fundamental ordering principle of the world”—the “law-bound material substructure required for evolution” to occur in the first place.
Indeed, recent scientific discoveries, Douthat argues, appear to make it more, not less, likely that the universe was in some sense designed for us. Take the nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together inside atoms. If it were off by the tiniest fraction—“a ‘fraction’ that can be represented by the equivalent of moving less than one inch on a ruler the size of the universe”—hydrogen, and thus water and human life itself, would never have formed. The most common naturalistic solution to this problem is to posit the existence of a near-infinite number of parallel universes, with ours being one of the very few that is suited to life. But as Douthat writes, this solution utterly compromises the scientific ideals of theoretical simplicity and empirical verifiability. We “solve” the mystery of our world only by postulating a trillion other worlds, all presumably linked by some further universe-generating entity—none of which we could ever reasonably prove.
It also raises a burning question: How should our mildly overdeveloped ape brains, brains selected by nature for their ability to hunt and cooperate, be capable of reasoning about such a thing? So we come to the second chapter, on the unaccountable power of human reason and, relatedly, the irreducibility of first-person consciousness. Here, Douthat’s case against naturalism is, I think, unanswerable. It is a “just-so story” of the laziest kind to propose that our rational faculties—faculties many orders of magnitude more sophisticated and abstract than was ever necessary for our survival in the African savannah—can be accounted for by natural selection alone. The gap between, for example, making primitive tools and grasping quantum mechanics—between, that is, pragmatically modifying one’s environment and penetrating to the very heart of reality—is arguably even more remarkable than the leap from unthinking bacterium to maker of primitive tools. Indeed, it is questionable whether this advance really represents “more of the same thing,” some happy byproduct of pushing the intelligence slider a little further along the scale, at all. Rather, it seems to result in a completely different kind of rationality. And all of this for what seems to confer, proportionally, vanishingly little extra survival benefit.
Meanwhile, the notion that something as demonstrably immaterial as qualitative, subjective consciousness should be reducible to physical processes is plain wishful thinking. Today we are not an inch closer to understanding how to get from matter to mind than Descartes was four hundred years ago, when he opted to ignore the problem. Douthat quotes Steven Pinker, who, in his book How the Mind Works, gives an admirably honest list of all the problems that remain unexplained by neuroscience: “consciousness . . . the self . . . the unified center of sentience . . . free will . . . knowledge . . . meaning . . . morality.” Oh.
Douthat’s last case against naturalism concerns the continued prevalence of mystical experiences—and miracles—in our supposedly secularized age. Here, I confess, I struggled somewhat. Though I remain open to the idea that some of these phenomena do reflect something transcendental, I find it hard to treat them as rational arguments for belief. This might be a failing on my part. But, like Douthat himself, I suspect, I am temperamentally drawn to arguments that leave me no room for doubt, arguments that reveal some obvious but overlooked magic animating the rules, rather than to exceptions. Still, Douthat’s account of the intellectual pretzels some naturalists twist themselves into in order to deny their own mystical experiences is delightful. The arch-skeptic Michael Shermer’s explanation for why his wife’s grandfather’s broken radio began mysteriously playing music on their wedding day is—brace yourself—that his wife’s grandfather inhabits “a multidimensional tesseract in which he can see her at all times of her life simultaneously.” Of course! Naturally, the grandfather then does what any romantic chap inhabiting a multidimensional tesseract would do—he uses “gravitational waves near a black hole or a wormhole to turn on his old radio for his granddaughter.” Hmm.
Despite Douthat’s admirably jargon-free prose, the first section does get a bit baggy at times. He often uses three—or five—concrete examples where one would do just fine. In one especially laborious passage in the second chapter, he agonizes over the philosopher David Chalmers’s “now-famous”—which you would think also means “doesn’t need too much explaining”—“hard problem” of consciousness. Douthat spends seven pages discussing the issue, as if anxious that we won’t grasp it until we’ve heard it twelve or thirteen times.
This gripe aside, the first three chapters form an entertaining overview—and, in sum, convincing defense—of anti-naturalism. The real problem comes with the next chapter, “The Case for Commitment.” Here, things get weird. Ostensibly, Douthat wants to show us, rationally, how to convert our doubts about scientism into actual religious belief. At first glance, though, his arguments are desperately underpowered. He provides three main reasons why someone like me ought to give a mainstream faith a go. First, I am unlikely to be a religious genius, capable of figuring out the deepest truths of reality by myself. Second, being a part of an existing community will help me to cement my religious practice. Third, established religions offer me safeguards against darker, more dangerous forms of spiritual exploration.
Hold on, you might be thinking. Don’t all of these reasons presuppose the conclusion Douthat is trying to argue for—that finding a specific faith is always rationally better than sticking with agnosticism? Because he hasn’t made that case yet! None of his three proposals would be relevant to a person who has concluded that we will probably never reach the final truths of reality, and that that’s okay—that a modest “It’s-all-too-complex-and-mysterious-for-our-limited-minds” awe is the most reasonable response to the evidence in front of us. Douthat seems to be rushing ahead, as though it were self-evident that religious exploration is preferable to unassuming wonder—as though the reader had obviously already decided to upgrade his anti-naturalism to something stronger. I don’t think that step has been made yet.
Then you start to notice, dotted throughout the chapter—but never properly explained—vaguely apocalyptic allusions: passing mentions of “eternal stakes,” of “supernatural destiny,” of “preparation for whatever might be waiting on the other side.” Suddenly, Douthat, a little desperately, seems to be exhorting us just to get over the line, to sign up to something. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism—it doesn’t really matter what. You’ll be “allowed to change your mind and leave,” he assures us—no one is “asking you to join a cult.” It is surely better, he argues, “to face the consequences of even a mistaken commitment or decision than to hear, at the last, the fateful judgment, ‘because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.’”
In his typically genial way, Douthat then admits, a little sheepishly, that jumping straight to Revelation 3:16 might seem rather intense. Well, yes, I’m afraid it does.
In the end, Douthat never properly spells out how we get logically from, say, humble wonder at the remarkable powers of human reason to an all-consuming fear of damnation. But as the book progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that his crucial move here is not so much rational as it is drawn from his own particular interpretation of Scripture. In the very last chapter, Douthat talks movingly about the tension he feels between his own personal inclinations—his hope that all souls will ultimately be saved—and the urgent message of the Gospels, which give us “warning after warning not to let this moment go to waste.” As he explains, he cannot quite bring himself to believe that God intends to punish all nonbelievers. But the Bible makes it clear that our creator expects some effort from us. Douthat therefore wants “to urge people toward religion generally, to suggest that it’s better to start somewhere even if it isn’t the place I would start, out of a trust that God’s providence will ultimately reward all sorts of efforts and enfold all manner of sincere beliefs.”
It’s unclear why this should mean that the cautious, Christian-leaning agnostic will be worse off on Judgment Day than the fervent polytheist. True, Douthat does claim at one point that, “just by choosing one faith and practicing it,” the seeker “will probably get closer to the truth than if they hover forever in agnosticism.” But I think that’s contentious. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, deep down, Douthat thinks so, too. I don’t begrudge him his desire to save my soul, and, sincerely, I sympathize with his predicament. But his “pick a faith, any faith” evangelical perennialism seems to me quite arbitrary. Speaking personally, I simply cannot believe that all of existence, the overwhelming, mysterious realness of reality, emanates from a source that would divide things up in such a—to me—trivial way.
So much the worse for me, perhaps. My amateur theology isn’t going to change religious minds. But if Douthat wanted an “impartial” argument that might—might—persuade nonbelievers, I think there was a better option on the table.
All of us, to pilfer an idea from the philosopher Charles Taylor, feel that our lives, our actions, our relationships are imbued with an ineliminable sense of moral meaning. I don’t just mean that we think things are good and bad. I mean, more generally, that we cannot help feeling that things profoundly matter. As Taylor once put it, we orient ourselves in normative space no less than in physical space—everything in our lives is charged with some kind of significance.
If I were Douthat, I might ask: What can we extrapolate, rationally, from this universal feature of human experience? Can it really be reduced to some evolutionarily advantageous mechanism for tribal cooperation? And if not, might it point beyond itself somehow, toward some greater source of meaning?
Later, in the sixth chapter, Douthat defends his decision not to make this kind of moral argument for God. He writes: “I have tried to present a case for religion that is more empirical than moral, stressing the good reasons to believe rather than suggesting that we need belief in order to be virtuous.” Citing Dostoyevsky’s famous line in The Brothers Karamazov—“If there is no God, all is permitted”—he continues: “while [this line] is true enough, [it] cannot by itself be the primary reason to believe in God.”
I think this gets things back to front. Morality is not just a bonus feature we gain if God happens to exist. Morality is a disconcerting, ever-demanding presence in our lives, intimately connected with—and therefore in just as much need of explanation as—reason. Its stubborn refusal to be explained away naturalistically makes it one of the most compelling bits of “empirical” evidence for belief.
Morality troubles me in a simpler way, too. It is obvious to me that my deeds matter. And yet, like many complacent agnostics, I realize, a little uncomfortably, that my beliefs ultimately rest on a residual Christian ethics. This is where I find it hardest to justify my remaining entirely aloof. The final truth about reality, I genuinely believe, can wait. How I live here and now can’t.
A few weeks ago, someone I know got himself into what was, I think, a terrible moral mess—the kind of thing that divides groups of friends into condemners and forgivers. Quite apart from everything else, it made me realize that as life wears on, things get more, not less, morally complex. I’m increasingly aware that, for me at least, secular ethics aren’t up to the job. I can’t say that means I’ll start believing. I’m not convinced I can, fully. But when I first heard about my friend, I happened to be walking through central London, wrestling with Douthat’s book in my mind. I’m not sure why, but I slipped into a church and quietly said a prayer.
