I don’t know if it’s considered ethical to use one’s newspaper column to reproduce excerpts of a book that you’ve written—at least if you get paid for both the book and the column, which would be double-dipping. But let’s leave that aside to consider Ross Douthat’s new book, which he’s excerpted twice in The New York Times. In the latest article, below, Douthat gives several arguments for the existence of God, including his favorite one, which turns out to be humans’ ability to comprehend the truths of the universe. That comprehension is supposedly evidence for a divinity, for Douthat doesn’t see how natural selection could give us abilities beyond those that evolved during most of the six million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps. Click below to see his arguments, which are also archived here. And of course I try to refute his arguments.
First, here Douthat’s book, apparently part of an intellectual/journalist push to argue that religion (despite its disappearance) is really, really, supported by evidence. Click below to go to the Amazon site. The book came out yesterday.
I’ll also leave aside my problem that it’s hard to believe in God if you’ve already rejected that form of supernaturalism. However, Douthat is trying to pull an anti-Hitchens and convince us that, yes, there are very good arguments for believing in God, In other words, he’s trying to reconvert us nonbelievers. The problem is that he recycles the same old tired arguments that have failed to convince most nonbelievers, and so offers at best a lame argument. It sure doesn’t convince me, though, as I said in Faith Versus Fact, I don’t think it’s a 100% absolute certainty that no God exists. That would be an unscientific point of view. But I’m pretty damn sure that we live in a godless universe.
Here are Douthat’s arguments, most of which should be familiar to you (his quotes are indented):
1.) The three big ones. He considers the best evidence for God to be the “convergence of multipole different lines of arguments”, though the convergence of weak arguments do not, to me, lead to a very convincing argument:
Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.
Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.
The cosmic design argument rests on the so-called “fine tuning” of the universe, which of course has alternative explanations, including the fact that we do not know how fine-tuned the universe is since we don’t know what other combinations of constants would permit life; the anthropic principle that since we’re here to observe life, the constants must have permitted life; the view that the constants may be connected in a way that we don’t understand; the idea that there are multiple universes, only some of which permit life, and we happily happen to be in one that allows it (Douthat, not a scientist, rejects the multiverse explanation); that the universe would look very different from how it does now if it really was fine-tuned, and so on. For a good summary of these arguments, see Sean Carroll’s video and my post here, as well as Carroll’s summary at The Preposterous Universe. Douthat apparently has not considered these rebuttals seriously.
As far as human consciousness is concerned, Douthat doesn’t see how it could have evolved, and therefore sees it as a product of God. But we are beginning to understand the naturalistic underpinnings of consciousness, which means that evolution—either directly for consciousness or indirectly via evolution that’s produced consciousness as a byproduct—is a plausible alternative. For some reason Douthat ignores the evidence that other species of animals are conscious (some appear to have a “theory of mind,” which implies consciousness, as well as the ability to pass the mirror test for self recognition; see also here). Since Douthat sees human exceptionalism for this trait as evidence for God, what about the consciousness of animals. Why did God make them conscious. Douthat:
[God’s] infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”
Are squirrels and ravens also made in the image of God?
Finally, there Douthat’s argument based on “the plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions”. I guess you’d have to read the book to see what “disenchanted conditions” means (presumably not when you’re in church or taking LSD), but I’m always dubious that one having an experience of God (and I have had “spiritual” experience, which I don’t consider evidence for God) proves the existence of God. After all, people have illusions and delusions and experiences all the time that do not compoart with reality. People with anorexia look in the mirror and think they are too fat even though they are skeletal. But they are not fat. I could go on, but you can think of similar delusions.
But wait! There’s more!
2.) The universe is intelligible and we can use reason to understand it. To Douthat, this is the most convincing argument of all.
Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.
This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. (There is an even more intense argument that even having our thoughts align as they do with physical reality is extremely unlikely and miraculous, but I’ll just direct you down that rabbit hole rather than explore it.)
But the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness and assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning — that the response to stimuli that enabled early Homo sapiens to recognize the patterns, say, of a predator’s behavior ended up having adaptive use beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding.
As we’ll see in #3 below, Douthat doubts the evolutionary hypothesis for other reasons, but in fact I cannot see our powers of understanding the universe as something that defies naturalistic evolution. We have evolved through natural selection to understand what we could over the first six million years of our lineage. Individuals that had correct understandings (snakes might kill you, thunder means that there may be water, cat tracks are a cause of concern) are those who survived, while those who didn’t understand such stuff would not survive. This is of course not unique to humans, for many animals show what seems to be an understanding of their world, and what various signs and signals mean. Some birds know that if another bird seems them cache an acorn, they have to go rehide the acorn. The sure looks like reasoning, but it may be the product of natural selection—or even learning. And, of course, the ability to learn evolved by natural selection as well.
Douthat, though, says that we understand far more than we could have evolved to understand: our powers or reasoning far exceed what was “needed” by natural selection. Ergo Jesus and the last point:
3.) We understand far more about the universes than would be expected if our powers of reasoning evolved by natural selection. We can play chess, we can make music, we can send people to the Moon. How on earth did we evolve the capabilities to do those things? Douthat:
Even then, it seems likely that in many, many potential universes those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, that there would have been either inherent limits on our ape-minds or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration, as the practical gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any obvious evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap.
“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?
This to me seems a really misguided argument, for it neglects two things that have developed through culture, which, of course, though not unique in humans, are most highly developed in our species (advanced reasoning and complex culture). I could add writing, which allows us to pass on knowledge to a distant futurity. Once we have a big brain and an ability to reason, and on top of that culture and communication through writing or syntactical language, the sky is the limit. Playing chess or going to the moon is not a result of evolution, but a byproduct of an evolutionary process that eventually led to the development of culture and communication (both of which, by the way, would also be favored by natural selection, since we are social animals). Further, it’s not just us who have abilities that could not have evolved. Lyrebirds can imitate car doors closing or chainsaws; parrots can imitate human speech and song. While some imitation may have been favored by natural selection, surely the imitation of human speech has piggybacked on other abilities. Dogs and horses can be trained to do things that are completely unnatural to them, and would never have appeared in nature, but they get a reward for successful training. It’s not hard to see that these abilities are simply byproducts of these animals’ evolution. Now horses and parrots have neither the culture, language, or manual abilities to build spaceships, and so they haven’t done so, but one can see in many species potential abilities that could not have been the direct product of evolution.
And if we can see in other species these “piggyback” abilities, then it’s not so hard to see them in our own species. That, after all, is the line of argument that Darwin made in his books, showing that humans could have evolved because there’s a continuum between the features and behavior of other species and of our own species.
And with that I will conclude my argument on this Darwin Day. Douthat, I fear, is simply appropriating old arguments and cobbling them together to argue for God. But of course the best argument for God, which can’t be made because it hasn’t worked, is direct signs of God’s existence, like him spelling out “I am that I am” in the stars (that one is due to Carl Sagan). In Faith Versus Fact I list other arguments that would tentatively convince me, an atheist, of the existence of not just God, but of a Christian God. But no such evidence has appeared, so Douthat relies on The Argument from Lived Spiritual and Religious Experience. The words of the late Victor Stenger come to mind: he said something like, “The absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence—if that evidence should be there.” It isn’t.
Finally, there are arguments against God, especially Douthat’s Christian variety. One was made by Stephen Fry: Why does God let innocent children die of cancer, or kill millions through earthquakes and tsunamis? Presumably an omnipotent and loving God would have the ability to prevent needless suffering. I’m sure Douthat deals with that in his book, but I’ve heard all the justifications for that (“God gave us free will,” “God gave us a planet with tectonic plates,” “We don’t understand God’s ways,” and so on), and find none convincing.
Douthat is merely buttressing a faith that he probably learned as a child (he’s not a Hindu or Muslim, after all), and I’m betting that his book will be an extended exercise in confirmation bias. We shall see.
****************
Douthat has also touted his book on a podcast with Catholic believer Andrew Sullivan. I’ve listened to about half of their 1½-hour conversation (link below), but you can listen to it by clicking on the screenshot below, and you can see Sullivan’s notes here. An excerpt:
Ross is a writer and a dear old colleague, back when we were both bloggers at The Atlantic. Since then he’s been a columnist at the New York Times — and, in my mind, he’s the best columnist in the country. The author of many books, including Grand New Party and The Decadent Society, his new one is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (which you can pre-order now). So in this podcast, I play — literally — Devil’s advocate. Forgive me for getting stuck on the meaning of the universe in the first 20 minutes or so. It picks up after that.
For two clips of our convo — on the difference between proselytizing and evangelizing, and the “hallucinations of the sane” — see our YouTube page.
Other topics: Creation; the improbable parameters of the Big Bang; the “fine-tuning” argument I cannot understand; extraterrestrial life; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Hitch; the atheist/materialist view; the multiverse; quantum physics; consciousness; John von Neumann; Isaac Newton; human evolution; tribal survival; the exponential unity of global knowledge; Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; the substack Bentham’s Bulldog; why humans wonder; miracles; Sebastian Junger and near-death experiences; the scientific method; William James; religious individualists; cults; Vatican II; Pope Francis; the sex-abuse crisis in the Church; suffering and theodicy; Lyme Disease; the AIDS crisis; Jesus and the Resurrection; Peter J Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels?; and the natural selection of religions.
There are also shorter YouTube clips of the discussion here and here. The longer discussion is pretty much a precis of the article above, at least the bit I listened to. Sullivan says he pushes back just to be the devil’s advocate, but I haven’t yet gotten to that part.
h/t: Paulo
Always good to review.
Yes there are mysterious experiences. They can be simple – the simpler the better. I hope everyone notices these things, I think they are good, they make life interesting.
Isn’t that enough? Apparently not for some.
I think one thing to come out of some religions that is valuable, is some sort of idea that nobody is perfect. We are born imperfect, into an imperfect world, and neither are perfect-able. It is settling ..
until…
… aren’t we all “created equal”? Isn’t it called “A more Perfect Union”? Hoo boy, there’s some stuff to discuss (some other time).
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”
-John Adams
To the Massachusetts Militia
11 October 1798
“I think one thing to come out of some religions that is valuable, is some sort of idea that nobody is perfect.”
I don’t need religion to point this out for me. I understand you wanting to be charitable, but this is yet another case of religion taking credit for stuff that they shouldn’t be.
This is a bit like pointing out that “life is hard”. Duh.
Agreed
Maybe religion has ways of putting it that mass-market better – that get uptake.
They fold it into a storybook world, or something. They were the original forms of social clubs or entertainment, perhaps.
The town of Vidalia, GA, is dedicated to the preamble goal “to farm a more perfect onion.”
Several of these arguments look to me as if they rest on a decided lack of imagination, starting out as they do with the end we already know.
For example, consider the Fine Tuning Argument, which only gets off the ground by assuming upfront that the universe has to fit oxygen-breathing carbon-forms of human life such as ourselves. But God could presumably have made beings -to -worship-Him in any way He could conceive of — a ground of beings surely near infinite in scope.
If we were gasses who could only live in a universe dense as a black hole, we would be astonished to find ourselves in just such a black hole as we could live in. So what? The system would always look like it was rigged.
Same for claiming that the universe being intelligible to us when we struggle hard to understand it, is a proof of God. Wouldn’t it have been a better proof of God if the universe were intelligible to us immediately, and throughout all our history, with no struggle at all? Why isn’t that the expected default, with the nonexistence of God the best explanation for our surprising ignorance and incompetence?
Not enough imagination.
Basically: “I cannot imagine, therefore God”.
Re “capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics” — no, Ross, we understand what we understand, and it is indeed a much deeper understanding than we had as bronze-age goat herders (“a god did it”), but it’s hardly the deepest; there are still opaque issues at the foundations, e.g. the QM “measurement problem”. Maybe your god(s) determine what counts as a measurement on a case-by-case basis; that’s about the level of understanding we currently have. (If you somehow decide to use this fact as a rah-rah-god argument in your writings, please do cite me so I can then rhetorically tear you a new god-shaped hole.)
For me, the best understanding of how evolution results in capabilities that aren’t directly survival related is informational.
Organism’s chemical reactions respond to environmental pressures for survival. That simple activity requires sensors that take in information and genetic systems that initiate action.
As that system evolves to more complexity, it takes in more information than it actually needs to survive and this “excess” information can initiate behavior that is responsive to the environment but not specifically survival related.
With more evolved organisms, this can result in activity like “play” and curiosity. Living things need to know what’s going on around them.
Douthat asserts that “our powers of reasoning far exceed what was ‘needed’ by natural selection”. This looks rather like the assertion of the Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga that natural selection could not have made our faculties reliable enough to know things like that evolution is true. Richard Carrier took Plantinga apart in a number of blog posts several years ago; this is one of them: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13180
(NB: it is rather long, and quite rude).
I seem to remember Carrier as being known for his unwelcome ejaculations.
A question:
When AI is developed to a level where humans are no longer needed,
will AI engines start worshiping deities and develop sects, thereby
leading to schisms and religious wars ?
Over half a century ago Asimov addressed this issue in some of his robot stories. His answer is pretty much “yes”.
+2. And eventually the robots reasoned that humans were too dumb to have created robots.
None of those arguments are convincing. Note that I’ve only read the excerpts here, so I may not be giving Douthat a fair shot.
Pascal’s wager doesn’t necessarily lead you to Christianity as Christian apologists like to think. At best, it leads you to bet on the existence of God. But why the Christian God? Why not Allah? Or any of the Hindu gods? And on and on…
Furthermore, you can’t make yourself believe something just because the result of not believing might be disastrous. If someone held a gun to your head and said that you had to believe the world is flat or you would be shot, you might certainly say it is, to hopefully save your life, but that in no way means you really believe it.
IMO the Pascal percentage play is to believe in the most vicious narcissistic god available, since then the differential payoff of belief over non-belief is greatest. Who knows, maybe this is similar to what actually got us the Abrahamic gods.
Pascal was a Christian. I doubt if he would agree that the Christian God is the most vicious available.
It’s up there, certainly in its OT guise. There are of course other bronze-age gods which we would consider to be more vicious, e.g. Moloch with its child sacrifices. But even in Pascal’s era’s more-modern guise, it bestows infinite punishment for finite transgression, that being a main point of P’s wager. “Crimes against humanity” doesn’t even begin to describe many of its activities.
And don’t forget the pathological narcissism.
I like to think that if God exists (I don’t think he does, but let’s roll) then there is a special place in hell for those who believe because of Pascal’s wager. That’s not sincere belief, that’s and attempt to cheat God, surely that’s not rewarded. I know that apologists say that one who starts believing because of PW will eventually develop a true belief, but what if not?
Great point!!
‘[God’s] infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start.’
I Dou[b]that
Yeah, he’s talking through his Douthat.
Ross Dotard has always been such a tiresome creature. I read him before I fired the NYTimes from my life. He’s not as aggressively stupid like, say, Gabor Mate, Linda Polgren, or as dishonest and dangerous as Mendi Hassan or RFK – he’s just slightly irritating and always wrong.
I note from the headlines Ms./Mr. Boylan is griping in the Times about trans. Again. Remember this is the person – the Time’s wery speshul twans representative who took the murderer’s side in the Charlie Hebdo murders because “we shouldn’t disrespect faaaaith.”
So glad I cancelled the NY Times.
D.A.
NYC
Ross Douthat farts “God” upon hearing “religion.” Why? Religion is a human activity. People, not gods, sit in church pews, rail against porn, and corrupt government. “God” is irrelevant.
Unless, of course, “God” is a code word for the political power of the churches. Then “God” makes sense. The word boils down to “We rule, obey us, submit, submit, submit!”
“God” is a red herring, a distraction, a way to shift the discussion off the misdeeds of churchgoers. “God exists!” is no excuse.
My best argument against religion is when people prey to be saved and die.
And sometimes they also pray. 🙂
That God smites those who oppress them!
Ok, I’d defend a person oppressed for their religion as much as I’d defend someone being abused by religion.
Try as hard as I might, I can’t convince myself to believe in fairies, especially all powerful invisible ones.
Anyone can come up with a new religion that includes afterlife explanations. One that I have thought of is that every subatomic string in every atom in our bodies is connected with its counterpart in another universe through Planck sized wormholes. When we die our consciousness is transferred, and we wake up as another version of ourselves in a parallel universe, with no memory of the original universe’s self. We exist through eternity with our consciousness bouncing from universe to universe. I could probably make a lot of money by developing this concept into a new religion, a la L. Ron Hubbard, but I’m too lazy and too honest to take the time.
One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh (Robert Heinlein)
Ross again confirming his middle name is “Don’t”.
Given that the reality of a claim of the existence of a God can be demonstrated so easily, as mentioned, by a truly Godly act or Godly presence, it is a God for God’s sake, these other spectacularly insufficient arguments are more proof of a lack of a God than for a God.
That they all seem to be based on personal incredulity or begging the question, there is nothing to see here.
Douthat has a point when he claims that there is some mystery behind the “fine tuning” of the universe, consciousness, and our ability to understand the structure of an atom. However, does he explain in his book (which I have not read) how this mystery leads to the beliefs in the resurrection of Jesus, assumption of the Virgin Mary, eternal life of humans (but not animals), and other dogmas of the Catholic Church?
Exactly. “The atom is hard to understand. Therefore, this cracker is actually the body of a man who died 2,000 years ago.”
That sounds like a non-sequitur to me, but perhaps I’m missing the sophistication.
For more than 10 years now, Douthat, a fanatic, has been gracelessly pushing right-wing propaganda in his New York Times pieces. He’s on the side of every right-wing belief, myth or talking point and he has an unparalleled talent for providing links to some obscure but mostly unhinged right-wing and far-right websites. As for his apologetics, he writes a blatant and usually moronic argument for defense of religion every few months. You can tell from the prose that those are the articles he’s always straining at the harness to write. His prose, he seems to believe, is clever, a clever attempt to disguise what he’s attempting to communicate so the NYT doesn’t fire him as it has most of its right-wing columnists, and it’s why he writes the most unreadable prose on the NYT and it’s clear that he wants to stay on the Times so that he can continue to propagandize to the evil liberals. His disdain for those liberals and for secularism is obvious, meanwhile.