“If I recall correctly, Bertrand Russell was once asked if there were any conceivable evidence which could lead him to a belief in God. He offered something similar to Cleanthes’s suggestion. He was then asked what he would say if, after dying, he were transported to the presence of God; how would he justify his failure on earth to be a believer? ‘I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!'” (source here)
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All of a sudden Ross Douthat is everywhere, touting his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Believe in God. He wants to make it a best seller, and I’m sure it will be given the number of people still yearning for religion despite its delusional nature. And, in fact, in his new Free Press article on the book, it’s clear that Douthat wants people to be deluded—or at least wants them to swallow the unevidenced tenets of religion—tenets like a god, Jesus as god’s Alter Ego/son, the Resurrection, and even Heaven and Hell.
The point of this piece is to criticize those people who don’t really accept the full-on Catholicism apparently embraced by Douthat, but rather have embraced what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief”: the notion that while one may not accept religion or its claims oneself, you can still think that religion is good for society as a whole. We’ve called that the “Little People’s Argument” on this site, because it’s explicitly condescending. And it’s widespread. I can think right off the bat of several people who appear to embrace belief in belief, including Jordan Peterson and the late Michael Ruse.
Here is the target of Douthat’s lucubrations: those who “convert for some of the wrong reasons” (i.e., who convert, or profess religion, simply because doing so is seen as good for society):
As the author of a new book urging religious belief on, well, everybody, some of these critiques get my hackles up. In writingBelieve: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which came out this past week, one of my assumptions was that there are a great many people in our culture who hover on the threshold of religion, and they need both reassurance that faith can be reasonable and a friendly but sharp-elbowed shove. But the idea that there exists some kind of ideal version of this process, some perfectly high-minded religious conversion unmediated by secondary influences, political inclinations, tribal loyalties—well, maybe among the greatest saints, but ordinary mortals are always likely to convert for some of the wrong reasons as well as some of the ideal ones.
And what are the wrong reasons? Douthat explains below, getting in a hamhanded swipe at Dawkins, who of course neither believes in the tenets of religion nor thinks religion is a net good, though he is glad he lives in a society that evolved from an earlier Christian one rather than from a Muslim one:
There is, however, a different kind of relationship to religion that does deserve critique. This is the category of person who likes religious ideas when other people believe in them, who wants religion to exist for its civilization-shaping qualities without personally accepting any of its impositions, who draws pleasure from what the late Richard John Neuhaus called “regretful unbelief,” who only really believes in belief.
This is a special temptation for the intellectual. Think of the sociologist who has a thousand data points proving the advantages of joining and belonging and practicing a faith tradition, and an indifferent attitude to the tradition’s truth. The psychologist who stands ready with a thousand fascinating mythic readings of the Old or New Testament but dances away whenever he’s challenged about whether the events in question actually took place. The self-proclaimed “cultural Christian,” whether of the Elon Musk or the Richard Dawkins school, who loves some aspect of the Western inheritance and fears some dark post-Western future—but not enough to actually embrace the West’s metaphysical foundations. The political philosopher with many religious friends and allies in front of whom he would never explicitly use the term “noble lie,” even though you know he’s thinking it.
This tendency is especially suited to eras like our own, when the pendulum has swung away from militant atheism and toward some recognition that religion might be useful for society after all, though it takes somewhat different forms on the right and on the left.
Such people are, says Douthat, “mediocre converts” because they won’t nom the whole hog along with its belief in demons, Gods with supernatural powers, messiahs, and an afterlife either floating on a cloud or burning in eternal flames. And yes, it’s clear that Douthat swallows this stuff:
But I come not just to criticize this tendency, to poke gently at any figure you might recognize in the sketches just above. Some of the critique has to be aimed at the religious as well, for not pushing hard enough against this spirit, not arguing more directly with friends and allies who occupy this space.
We (the religious) like being liked, we appreciate being appreciated, and belief-in-belief provides a useful language to translate between the strangeness of some of our convictions and the world of secular priorities and routines. To talk about faith’s benefits rather than its truth claims. To promise therapeutic advantages when talk of heaven seems embarrassing. To remain in the natural and material and psychological because that way you don’t lose anyone by mentioning the Devil.
All while telling ourselves, of course, that belief-in-belief is one of the paths to real conversion. As, indeed, it quite often is—but only if you don’t make the position feel too comfortable, too much like a well-appointed destination, rather than a station on the way.
Note the reference to the Devil and heaven, which Douthat clearly embrace. What are the evidence for these? Nothing but what’s in the Bible, which of course brings us to the quote that opens this post. Douthat is willing to bet his whole existence in the claims of a book that’s clearly fictional. The only reason he’s a Catholic is because a.) he sees no way that human reason alone could comprehend the universe without the help of a god and b.) Jesus appeals to him more than does Mohammad or Krishna. (See my posts here, here and here.). That’s pretty much it.
We all know that much of the Bible is fiction (there was no census that got Jesus from Bethlehem to Nazareth, there was no Exodus nor a pack of Jews wandering in the desert for decades, no record of the dead rising from the grave after the crucifixion and Resurrection, nor even any non-Biblical evidence for a Resurrection. So what makes Douthat so sure that the miracles of Jesus really happened, or that there really is a heaven or hell? Why are miracles so thin on the ground these days when they were ubiquitous when Jesus lived? Why doesn’t God simply show Himself to us if he wants us to believe in Him.
It’s all pure wish-thinking. What he really has is indeed belief in belief, but a form that applies to himself rather than society. That’s the only way I can explain why he buys this pabulum and, in this new piece, tries to force it down our throats. Bolding below is mine:
Having spent 15 years as a religious columnist for an audience that includes a great many nonbelievers, I am as guilty of this kind of incomplete evangelization as any other writer. But my new book is a deliberate attempt to leave this kind of halfway argument behind, and to persuade readers to accept religious ideas on their own terms—to transcend the merely sociological and talk directly about why there’s probably a real God with actual demands and expectations, a real supernatural realm that plays some role in human life and history, and yes, a real heaven and a risk of hell.
One of the liberating things about the stranger world we find ourselves in today, the weirder timeline of plagues and populism, psychedelic encounters and AI voices in the air, is that it feels more reasonable to be straightforward in religious argument—to say that of course belief is good for all manner of secondary reasons, but the primary reason is that the core claims of religion are not a fiction, noble or otherwise, but quite probably just the truth. And in that spirit to bless—with whatever warnings and admonitions—the unruly neophyte, the sinful half-believer, and the slightly embarrassing convert.
“Quite probably the truth”! What are his priors? But which religion has the truest core claims? Catholicism, of course, but Douthat doesn’t given us a reason why. Indeed, he seems to disdain reason in favor of emotion and revelation, the last refuges of the intellectual scoundrel. I needn’t go further: just read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
Finally, for people like me who need evidence to embrace a new proposition, what can Douthat say to make me believe things for which there is no evidence—indeed, things like Hell that I find inherently repulsive? And the biggest question is why the NYT and the Free Press let a man proselytize in its pages about beliefs that lack evidence. Why don’t they also add ringing defenses of Scientology with its tenets about Xenu:
Xenu (/ˈziːnuː/ ZEE-noo), also called Xemu, is a figure in the Church of Scientology‘s secret “Advanced Technology”, a sacred and esoteric teaching. According to the “Technology”, Xenu was the extraterrestrial ruler of a “Galactic Confederacy” who brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as “Teegeeack”) in DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.
Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But it is no more believable than the Bible. The only reason we mock Scientology is that we were alive when it was made up.
OMG. His brain seems to have developed in a way that forces him to believe and to criticize those who do not. He can’t help himself; his brain will engage entire synaptic networks of rationalizations to protect and reinforce his original belief.
About as close as I can get to a belief in a Supreme Being(s) is this: nature, the universe, and perhaps other things are the creator(s), but these are a far stretch from Wotan, Yahweh, or Zeus.
I can see his point. He’s a Catholic…he believes certain assertions about reality. Such as…one man on Earth has a unique access to knowledge that no one else has. That person is the Pope, who can receive divine revelation, a form of knowledge that is by definition inscrutable to science, and therefore promulgate moral truths and settle theological disputes. For instance, abortion is murder because the immortal soul enters the body at conception is a form of divine revelation.
Catholics aren’t offering any soul data to support this…you just have to take their word for it.
If you are not religious, or indeed religious but not Catholic, then all of this is pure bunkum, if not insane.
But if you are Catholic, but think that abortion is ok, then what is your basis for disagreeing with divine revelation (with the Pope as the conduit)? Or rejecting other doctrines, such as those about invisible realms like heaven and purgatory? Or eternal punishment in Hell? This “buffet style” Catholicism is indeed a mushheaded approach to religion.
But unlike Douthat, I wish that everyone who is religious would be a mushhead, barely aware of the tenets of their faith. Those people are much less likely to be fundamentalists and zealots.
I think it fair to say most Catholics approve of abortion, most Christians don’t believe in hell, and the clergy are often afraid of telling their flock the extent of church doctrine because the flock would be horrified.
While it is true that such people are less likely to be fundamentalists and zealots, they nevertheless support the maintenance of church power. Religion is about political power. Churches are in effect political parties.
By the way, you overestimate the importance of the Pope. Any catholic can provide a revelation, and the Pope is said to be infallible only when speaking “Ex cathedra,” which is rarely done.
I thought I was careful to indicate that the Pope was only infallible on narrow theological matters. While any Catholic can in principal have a revelation, it would still have to be filtered through the apparatus of the Church before becoming doctrine. The point is that the Pope is believed to have special epistemological powers that the rest of us don’t possess. There is no justification for this silly belief.
Agreed that Churches have political influence. The most salient aspect of this is their avoidance of taxes.
One objection to religion that I have long had is the idea of revelation. An all-powerful God reveals his wishes to a single person (whether Moses, Jesus, the Pope, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, or whomever) and tells that person to spread The Word. An all-powerful God could just as easily tell everyone without the use of a middleman. Why use such an inefficient system?
When Lincoln was president, he received a letter from a farmer in Iowa who said that God had sent him a message to pass on to the president. Lincoln tossed the letter into the trash unread, saying “God knows where I live. If He has a message for me, He will tell me, not some farmer in Iowa.”
Excellent. That is the heart of it. Douthat asserts that we must believe because he asserts it is true, which he obtains by belief and no evidence. But why is his belief more valuable than a Scientologist, Mormon, Muslim or Hindu? It is all just assertion.
I hope the Lincoln story is really true and not apocryphal. Only adds to the luster of Honest Abe.
Which is why we’ve seen lots of debates between atheists and some religious person, but very rarely will you see a Catholic vs. a Muslim, or a Mormon vs. an Evangelical Christian. If they start poking holes in each other’s assertions, it becomes obvious that they are engaging in special pleading.
Atheists should always emphasize that there is often as much difference in assertions about reality between the various world religions as there is between the non-religious and the religious.
John Loftus’s “The Outsider Test for Faith” is a good source here. He challenges believers to examine their own faith with all of the rigour and scepticism that they direct towards other faiths. See eg https://www.debunking-christianity.com/search?q=Outsider+test+for+faith
Where and when has Douthat debated religiosos of differing faiths and denominations? He says he’s irked by his critics’ responses. He should save some sharp elbows for his religious competitors. For starters, I’d like to see Douthat debate a Southern Baptist fundamentalist on the latter’s assertion of “the priesthood of believers.” IIRC, these Baptists hold that THEY are the true original New Testament church. They no less presume to stand their ground on the rectitude and righteousness of their claims and beliefs. (Though the two no doubt would agree on keeping wimmin’ out of the pulpit, and that wives should be subservient and subordinate to their always pure-as-the-driven snow husbands.)
I died. I was in an ambulance at the time on the way to hospital. My wife saw me die and my head fall to one side and shouted at the medic who was doing his paperwork. He shouted his mate who was driving down this narrow country lane until he pulled over into a muddy lay bye. They kicked my wife out and took her to the medics car that was leading the ambulance. I was fortunate that they restarted my heart and took me to hospital. When I finally came round I had this lump in my chest which I found out was a pacemaker. Now, during all this time I was dead, at least two or three minutes, there were no bright lights no angelic choir singing, nothing at all. I am really sorry to puncture anyone’s hopes of a life in some eternal holiday park but it just does not exist.
I would say that your extraordinary experience has hardly any relevance to the factual question of an afterlife. If you had seen a bright light, or the face of God or Buddha or whatever, as countless people have, I would dismiss it as endogenous DMT or psilocin giving a mystical flavor to whatever you thought you were perceiving as your consciousness slipped away.
On the other hand, suppose you had stayed dead. Who is to say that you wouldn’t have regained consciousness sometime later in a heavenly paradise of gardens and wine and seventy two virgins and what have you?
Perceiving nothing for two or three minutes tells you absolutely nothing.
Is no data better than abridged data in your view?
You only offer speculation without any support and even if though I fully realize the sparseness of data provided by John, it is more than no data. I find it a strange position, to dismiss all data as flawed and then go on baseless speculation.
Douthat sounds not only like a proselytizer but someone flirting with authoritarianism. He seems so convinced that he’s right that he’s willing to throw a “sharp-elbowed shove” at non-believers. That might be metaphorical now, but we all know what theists have done when they have secular power.
If you’re reading this, Ross, keep your elbows to yourself and instead provide evidence for your beliefs. I suspect there is none in your entire book.
Maybe Rev. Spooner was right, and the Lord really is a shoving leopard?
His is a call to extremism. Like Muslim extremists, he finds support for this in his preferred holy scriptures. God, as Sam Harris has pointed out, is not a moderate. Douthat’s book isn’t just dumb. It’s dangerous.
I completely agree, and with Patrick at #6. It is only a short step from “Everybody should believe in God” to “Everybody must believe in God”. There are plenty of people in the US – and even some in the UK – who would be delighted to take advantage of that assertion. And there are one or two leaders I can think of who would be only too happy to use it for their own purposes.
And a further step to “Everybody must believe in my God”
All claimants for supernaturals or anything not physical or dependent upon it (energy-matter-information) should be first informed about the Negative Fallacy so they don’t request that skeptics prove non-existence in likely infinite reality (an open system until a spatio-temporal boundary is evidenced.) Second, they should be invited to present their evidence for existence to The Nobel Committee and expect to win a Prize along with ~ a million bucks! They can also be reminded that there are no known calorie free thoughts, feelings, memories, hallucinations, etc.
Thx JC. I use the Lord Xenu and thetan story whenever I’m talking to someone about gender ideology. I ask if we can agree to use plain language without ambiguous or euphemistic lingo and tell them whenever they use a cult term like “trans” or “cis”, I will interject by mentioning “Lord Xenu” or “thetan”. It’s remarkably effective at highlighting how much they rely on gender Newspeak and avoiding talking clearly about the subject.
The mediocre semi-believers keep the whole thing going. The spouse who goes along to keep the other spouse happy, the parents who bring their children to keep the grandparents happy. People who go to church for the music or the community. I am as disdainful of belief-in-belief as anyone, but that sustains the institution more than the minority of actual believers.
Mea culpa. I once was one of those pragmatic spouses. It didn’t end well. On the plus side I now know (or at least knew) the bible and church history pretty well, which has sometimes been useful, e.g. when reading or seeing a Shakespeare play.
Art and community are actually benefits of religious belief. Of course they are not exclusive to religious belief, but a sub-set of people prefer to be inspired by the supernatural, the clear morality of story in a messy word of facts and the relief of abdicating responsibility.
Sometimes I envy people with the capability of just believing in stuff, facts and evidence be damned. It surely makes for a more carefree life in certain regards.
Jihad, anyone? Deus Vult?
https://youtu.be/fINh4SsOyBw?si=M1aZ9g7kX3f1JJvV
Kudos to Douthat for at least having some metaphysical commitments, unlike other believers in things numinous.
Unfortunately, his god is a horrible three-headed vampire, unworthy of admiration, let alone worship. But Ross loves the order of hierarchy, and weakly sacrifices his mind on the altar of god’s Plan and Expectations and Demands.
The only god worth having is one who fully shares knowledge and power, flattening the political landscape into a democracy. No Kings. No Mysteries. That would be true omnibenevolence.
Slightly O/T: for some reason I am reminded of the winning entry in a limerick competition in the New Statesman many years ago:
There was an Old Man with a Beard,
Who said “I demand to be feared!
So call Me your God,
And love Me, you sod!”
And Man did just that, which is weird.
It was early on that I understood that Douthout possessed a marked deficiency — a “dent” of sorts — in his thinking apparatus. He and Trish Harrison make a wonderful couple of jerks.
If there was a real God or supernatural realm the lucky chosen few could be expected to have an overwhelming advantage over the rest of us mere mortals but simple observation is that all the groups in the world are fairly level pegging. The communists and Islamists have a big percentage of the remaining reserves of fossil oil /gas and minerals / rare earth elements so looks like the God of western democracy didn’t plan too well. However there is still time for Zeus to reveal a winning design for nuclear fusion and thus lead western Europe to world domination. Wouldn’t a real devil carry the secrets of Nato over to Putin to give the powers of darkness a crushing advantage ? Did the devil save Trump from death so that Trump could throw the EU under a Russian tank ? If there really were ghosts wouldn’t the victims of murder go straight to the police and lead them to where the body lay and also to where the culprit was hiding and further more haunt the culprit into suicidal insanity ? etc How come magicians only do useless party tricks ? Plus not forgetting that Jesus gave the false impression that all anybody could do was pray and hope for the best where as we see there have been many medical procedures to improve quality of health / lifespan. On the other hand maybe Jesus foresaw that such improvements would lead to overpopulation and degradation of world ecosystems and habitats etc. But why don’t Christians give us the answer to antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria ? Why didn’t Yahweh just switch off all the Egyptians rather than a few first born? Why only give the chosen ones a tiny slither of land instead of the whole Arabian peninsula? But where did the ideas about angels, demons and gods come from ? Just ways the parasitic priesthood could scare people into handing over their cash ?
Interesting that Douthat believes in the Devil yet also presumably regards himself as a monotheist. Belief in a “good god” (God) responsible for all the good stuff and a “bad god” (Devil) responsible for all the bad is a rather convenient solution to the “problem of evil” but requires belief in two gods rather than one. I suspect it reflects an ancient Zoroastrian influence.
Douthat says the core claims of religion are quite probably just the truth. But the core claims of religion are people are no good, we are lost without help from the invisible, and nature is unable to provide answers to the questions that vex us.
“why there’s probably a real God”
“Probably”? Sorry but I’m going to need a stronger argument than that. My Catholic family members who are actual believers wouldn’t add a hedge like that.
Ohh, would Mr. Hitchens have a field day with this delusional and self righteous mediocrity! Belief in belief is still a convenient compromise with hypocritical motives. Dennett did not condone this rationalizing but saw it used as an excuse to accommodate cultural pressures and conformity.Ross Douthat will probably benefit handsomely from this drivel as he knows his audience.
Also sounds to me like that god he thinks everyone should believe in is specifically Christian. Eh?
Kids play make believe. Why not adults? Don’t we? Behavior is a product of genetics and environment. Any individual is not responsible for either one. Yet society holds him to account for mis-behavior. As if he has free will. Isn’t free will make believe? Yess, but we need to have free will in order to hold Mr X to account; we need to believe he could have done right, not wrong. Or, at least, we need to pretend to believe the better to justify punishment imposed. Suppose religion happy-fies. And perhaps improves behavior. Why not make believe, as we do with Santa?
A book, you say? On that?
For those with a passing knowledge of the British comedy character Alan Partridge, this reminds me of the episode where Alan gets increasingly agitated by people discussing one of his favourite subjects, James Bond, and finally can stand it no longer, shouting:
“Stop getting Bond wrong!!”
If you’ve built an important part of your existence on a narrative which fails to connect with reality, time after weary time, it’s a bit rich to complain when others decide to do it in a different way.
It seems that the Free Press has bought into the whole “the world would be a better place if everyone had a religion” idea that has recently been expressed as an antidote to all our ills. The fact they are so ecumenical about which religion that should be, though, gives me pause. They may end up encouraging a world of religious belief that is even more anti-Jewish than we currently have.
I find it telling that an omniscient and omnipotent being would need humans to proclaim its existence.
There is no magic sky daddy.
Anyone who does believe has been brainwashed. Of course, you could prove me wrong. Just pray to the deity for some simple words to convince the sane people and then relay them to us. We will wait. LOL