I swear, NYT columnist Ross Douthat must have a huge publicity machine, because his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is appearing everywhere, usually as excerpts. The point of the book is to assert that religion’s decline in America is slowing, and that readers having a “God-shaped hole,” denoting a lack of religious meaning in their lives, should not just become religious, but become Christian. (Douthat thinks that Catholicism is the “right” religion, and of course he happens to be Catholic).
And by “believe,” Douthat doesn’t just mean adhering to a watered-down form of Christianity that sees the New Testament as a series of metaphors. No, he really believes the tenets of his faith, including the miracles of Jesus, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the existence of Satan and the afterlife. (See my posts on this delusional book here.) It is a sign of the times that this book, which calls for people to embrace claims that are palpably ridiculous and totally unevidenced—unless you take the New Testament literally, which you can’t because it’s wrong and self-contradictory—is getting not only wide press, but approbation. Even the New Yorker summary and review of the book, which you can read by clicking below (the screenshot links to the archived version here) is pretty mild in its criticism. Author Rothman is a nonbeliever, and gives good responses to Douthat’s “evidence” for God, but at the end says the he “respects [Douthat’s effort to persuade.” What does that mean? He respects Douthat’s efforts to proselytize people with a divisive and harmful faith, and to believe stuff without evidence? Well, the New Yorker has always been a bit soft on faith (despite the fact that most of its writers are atheists), because some of their rich and educated readers have “belief in belief”.
Rothman’s summary of the book (his words are indented):
“Believe” is different: in it, Douthat proselytizes. His intended readers aren’t dyed-in-the-wool skeptics of the Richard Dawkins variety, who find religion intellectually absurd. His main goal is to reach people who are curious about faith, or who are “spiritual” but not religious. (According to some surveys, as many as a third of Americans see themselves this way.) If you’re in this camp, you might have a general sense of the mystical ineffability of existence, or believe that there’s more to it than science can describe. You might be agnostic, or even an atheist, while also feeling that religion’s rituals, rhythms, and attitudes can enrich life and connect you to others; that its practices draw our attention to what really matters. At the same time, you might not be able to accept the idea that Jesus actually rose again on the third day.
But Douthat needs to persuade the audience that yes, Jesus rose like a loaf of bread, and more:
Douthat argues that you should be religious because religion, as traditionally conceived, is true; in fact, it’s not just true but commonsensical, despite the rise of science. His most surprising, and perhaps reckless, assertion is that scientific progress has actually increased the chances that “religious perspectives are closer to the truth than purely secular worldviews.”
From what I’ve read here and elsewhere, Douthat has two main arguments for religion. The Argument from Increasing God of the Gaps, and the Argument from Personal Experience.
In “Believe,” Douthat rebels against these attempts to adjust the scale of God; he resists both the minimizing God-of-the-gaps approach and the maximizing abstraction proposed by thinkers like Armstrong and Tillich. First of all, he maintains that the gaps are actually widening: from a survey of speculative ideas in physics, neuroscience, and biology, he draws the conclusion that a “convergence of different forms of evidence” actively points toward the existence of a traditional God. Second, he argues that, even in our supposedly secular world, it’s still eminently reasonable to believe in a supernatural God who reaches down to Earth and affects our lives. David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher known for his pursuit of empiricism, predicted that, as the world grew more rational and scientific, people would stop having supernatural experiences, which he thought more common among “ignorant and barbarous nations.” Douthat points out that this hasn’t happened. [JAC: No data are given, however, about any decrease over time.] About a third of Americans “claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing,” he notes, and regular people continue to have mystical experiences of various kinds. (A 2023 survey conducted by Pew Research found that nearly four in ten respondents believed that the dead can communicate with the living.) Religious experience is a “brute fact,” Douthat writes, shared among billions of people, and its “mysteries constantly cry out for interpretation” just as they always have.
Miraculous healing? Talk to me when an amputee regrows a leg, or someone without eyes regains the ability to see. Why can’t God cure ailments that medicine is impotent to cure?
I’ve discussed some of the God of the Gaps arguments made by Douthat, the two most prominent being the “fine-tuning” argument (the physical parameters of the universe were cleverly adjusted to allow our existence) and the consciousness of humans, which Douthat says cannot be explained by science. Rothman is good at refuting both in brief responses, and I’ll let you read what he wrote. Plus remember that animals like dogs, cats, squirrels, and other primates also appear to be conscious (of course we can’t prove that), but are these other creatures made in God’s image, too? Rothman makes a good point here:
Throughout “Believe,” the implication is that work at the frontiers of science has increased the amount of mystery in the world by uncovering impenetrable unknowns. But this is misleading. Science has vastly expanded our understanding of how things work, reducing mystery; along the way, it has inevitably shifted the landscape of our ignorance, sometimes drastically. This new landscape can feel unfamiliar; strangeness comes with the territory. But just because we don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean that we face the ultimately mysterious; we’re probably still dealing with the ordinary, earthly unknown. And if science really does hit a hard limit in certain areas, or if it discovers questions that our minds are simply unequipped to answer—what would that show? Only that we don’t know everything. The likely possibility that omnipotence is beyond us in no way suggests that our intuitive religious revelations are correct. If anything, it suggests the opposite.
That of course is the usual argument against “The Argument for God from Ignorance”: throughout history, one baffling phenomenon after another imputed to God has later been found out to be purely naturalistic (lightning, disease, epilepsy, eclipses, and so on).
The single argument by Douthat that Rothman finds somewhat persuasive is that lots of people have had religious or spiritual experiences. Why are they so common unless they’re showing us the presence of a supernatural being?
At any rate, the version of me that exists today found Douthat’s case for faith unpersuasive. But I still enjoyed “Believe,” and found myself challenged by it. Douthat is right to call attention to the “brute fact” of religious experience, which apparently remains pervasive in a supposedly secular age. In 2006, an editorial in Slate argued that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism indicated a kind of mental weakness on his part—his apparent belief in its more outlandish tenets, Jacob Weisberg wrote, revealed in Romney “a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.” But if lots of people have experiences of the supernatural, then can belief in it really be understood, tout court, as proof of their fundamental irrationality? What about the award-winning journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who, in her book “Living with a Wild God,” described a “furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once”? In her classic “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” she certainly saw the world as it was.
Well, many of us atheists, including me, have had spiritual experiences, though not religious ones. I remember sleeping out in Death Valley, looking up at the fantastic display of stars unsullied by nearby human lights, and feeling drawn out of myself, a tiny speck in a huge universe. (But of course that raises the question about why there are so many celestial bodies without humans?) And I won’t get into the visions I had when I was on psychedelic drugs in college.
We are emotional beings, with emotions surely partly a result of evolution, and once the meme of religion has spread, it’s easy to ascribe intense emotions to religious experience. We are also ridden with delusions: after my cat died, I used to see it out of the corner of my eye. I’m sorry, but if Jesus/God is so anxious for us to believe in Him/Them (he surely doesn’t want all those nonbelievers to fry forever, as Douthat thinks), why doesn’t he simply appear in a way that cannot be written off as a delusion? (We do have cameras and videotape now.) Carl Sagan himself asked this question years ago.
Further, the religious experiences had by members of different faiths correspond to the different tenets of those faiths. Muslims have dreams and visions of Muhammad, and of course Muhammad himself produced the Qur’an after having a vision of the angel Gabriel, who dictated the book to the illiterate merchant. So if visions of God tell us that God is real, which God who is envisioned is the real one? I’m sorry, but I don’t find experiences or visions of God/Jesus convincing given that, if he wished, Jesus could make himself available in an irrefutable way to all of humanity, and presto!, we’d all be Catholics! (He also said that he’d return within the lifetime of those who witnessed his Crucifixion. Did he come back? No dice.)
No, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any respect for the deluded, especially when they insist, as does Douthat, they they have hit on the “true” religion. (Muslims, of course, believe that Islam is the final and true religion.) Where is Mencken when we need him? The best way to go after someone like Douthat is not with intellectual analysis and respect, as does Rothman, but with all-out satire and mockery.
Still, given the constraints of the New Yorker, Rothman’s review is about as good as it can be.
h/t: Barry
I was expecting to see that it is published by someone big like Simon & Schuster, but it turns out it’s published by Zondervan, who I’ve never heard of. They are a big Christian publisher. But it turns out Zondervan is a subsidiary of HarperCollins, which is ultimately owned by News Corp. They may have a lot of money to throw around for marketing.
George Packer at the Atlantic has a negative review of Douthat’s book. Not sure if it’s accessible to everyone or not, probably not: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/02/how-ross-douthats-proselytizing-falls-short/681842/
I can’t respect Douthat’s tenacity in trying to push his religion or sell his book, and don’t know why Rothman does either. He probably just doesn’t want to seem mean. And “spiritual experiences” are not evidence of anything other than that the brain has the capacity for imaginative interpretation. So what?
Excellent review, thank you for the link.
Two nice excerpts:
“The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.”
“Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.”
Great quotes!
Re: ” . . . Douthat has two main arguments for religion. The Argument from Increasing God of the Gaps, and the Argument from Personal Experience.”
Richard Dawkins has spoken of The Argument from Personal Incredulity. Perhaps that is operative with Douthat. Perhaps also The Argument from Personal Credulity, depending on one’s perspective.
Since there is no new evidence, and no new arguments, all a review really needs to say is something like: “Every argument presented here has been thoroughly refuted many times. Any readers interested in the questions raised can profitably read “The God Delusion”, “God is Not Great”, and many others.”
Faith versus Fact!
Maybe Douthat will soon appear on Bill Maher’s show Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO, though you can watch a pirated upload on Friday night/Saturday morning on YouTube – just search for, say, “Real Time with Bill Maher February 28 2025,” assuming that there is a show tomorrow; there wasn’t last Friday*). (Douthat has been a guest at least once before.) After his opening monologue Maher always has a guest whom he interviews for 10-15 minutes. Often these guests are hawking a new book.
*You can check here on Friday whether there’s a show on a given Friday evening: https://realtimewithbillmaher.blogspot.com/
Well, Douthat can’t turn the tide of secularization with his book. I would be surprised to learn that there are new arguments for the existence of god. I mean Douthat did catch my attention when a while ago he argued in one of his New York Times column’s that the forward march of science has made belief in god more plausible. I thought “wow” and “how unconvincing.”
I don’t know if an image will come through, but this seems relevant to the topic: https://imgur.com/gallery/frequency-of-miracles-sk7rC9h
I was thinking about that graph as I read this article.
I am slightly open to the idea that society has a religion shaped hole as opposed to individuals having such holes in their hearts. Traditionally churches served a function of making people feel part of a community. By contrast, atheists don’t gather together once a week to contemplate the meaning of life and enumerate the reasons they doubt there is a supernatural creator. Nor do agnostics gather together to recite prayers that begin “To Whom it may concern”.
Compared to my youth, nowadays (I’m 63) I am somewhat open to the idea of an unfathomable Whatever-The-Hell-It-Is that causes the universe to exist. The problem is I can’t clarify what such words might mean and neither can anybody else. I don’t so much definitely disbelieve in God defined very abstractly like that, but rather I find the proposition to unclear to admit evaluation. As Wolfgang Pauli used to say about ill-formulated scientific propositions, “That’s not even wrong.”
Science and reason can tell me a lot about how the world is, but nothing about why anything exists in the first place. Perhaps it is one of those questions that seems meaningful for psychological reasons rather than logical ones. Philosophers can logic themselves into beliefs about a First Cause or Prime Mover, but I submit that nobody can logic himself into a belief that Jesus walked on water, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a magic horse, or Zeus on his mountain throne throws thunderbolts.
Belief in an abstract Creator, whether right or wrong, is one thing. But belief in the anthropomorphic god that man makes in his own image is absurdity pure and simple. Such beliefs should have gone extinct about the same time humanity stopped believing in vampires and werewolves.
The existence of an alleged abstract creator remains unfathomable, unless it’s abstract creators all the way down. Zeno’s Excrement Eventuates paradox?
Churches also served a function of excluding THIS community from THAT community. Still do.
And all the god-shaped holes I ever see are in the minds of believers.
Science and reason can tell me a lot about how the world is, but nothing about why anything exists in the first place.
Nor do agnostics gather together to recite prayers that begin “To Whom it may concern”. Well, not exactly, Michael, but way back in the day, before we ate, my fraternity bros and I used to recite: “Dear god, if there is a god, bless this food if you can. . . “
Maybe the funniest contradictions in the New Testament is between Jesus speaking in Matthew 7:9-11 Vs Jesus speaking to Peter in Acts 10v11
Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? / Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? / So if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!
Vs Acts 10v11 11Peter saw the underside of a spaceship opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. 12 It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. 13Then Jesus told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” But Peter replied, “Why don’t you offer me the delicious foods native to the Americas like potatoes, tomatoes, turkey, strawberries, sweetcorn / cornflour, cocoa? And how come you chose to make do with stones in the desert instead of taking Satan’s kindly advice to take care of your body and make them into bread to feed yourself ? And Jesus replied, “Well i’ll just take this moment to come out as a Klingon. Klingons like eating any / all organisms and can go into suspended animation for months at a time and don’t suffer normal male human sex drive issues.”
Many people use the word “miracle” to describe any lucky break. It doesn’t have to be something that would otherwise be impossible, such as an amputee re-growing a limb; it could be “I had a risky operation and pulled through,” or “I was in a car crash and survived.” They are not using “miracle” as a figure of speech; they really believe divine intervention was involved.
In her autobiography, actress Nichelle Nichols from “Star Trek” recounts having an argument with producer Gene Roddenberry about miracles, insisting that they happen all the time: “A baby is born, that’s a miracle! A plane takes off, that’s a miracle!” Roddenberry answered, “No, those are biology and engineering.” She said “Metal flying!? That’s a miracle!”
In discussing miracles, we need to define the term; otherwise, we may not be talking about the same thing.
A miracle to me means that God interfered with the laws of physics in some way. He inserted himself to add a slight altering of the angular momentum of the football so that your favorite team would win at the last minute. Or, he interfered with the synapses of the person deciding whether to give you that job or not, and somehow did not violate that person’s free will.
The mechanics of miracles don’t even survive more than a minute or two of thought, and seem completely implausible the more you know about physics.
Only a very simple-minded person would seem to believe in miracles.
So I have no idea how people like Douthat think they happen, or think that science somehow supports their existence.
Given that there is no “should” in life, Ross Douthat’s Book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” deserves a more honest title: “Believe: Why Everyone Must Think Like Me.”
“Religion” means “to tie together” and “to tie back.” It forms communities that stifle people while pretending the stifling is a feature. It continues to exist not because it is true, but because it is forced upon people through social pressure and violence.
Douthat says religious experience is a “brute fact.” He fails to mention that “religious experiences” are a subset of common “changing experiences,” experiences that affect a person’s outlook on life. The publicity given religious experience misleads because it hides the importance and frequency of non-religious experience, which often turn people against religion.
It’s a pity that secular groups don’t catalog changing experiences. Were they to do so, the brute facts would reveal religious experiences as mere special pleading.
I was caught in the Christian web for years but i was always embarrassed by the threat of hell. I think hell is an immoral Greek idea and wouldn’t a loving god take everyone to a happily ever after ? But i can understand some people aren’t happy that those who have done violent crimes against humanity could rest in peace so i guess they would just have to cease to exist. However i am ashamed that the risen Christ victorious over all hasn’t prevented these crimes by terminating those folk before they did the deed. Also ashamed of the doctrine of hell. Also ashamed that Christ didn’t return before the first disciples had died. But hey, i’m sure it is easy to get lost in the Milky Way let alone navigating through all the other galaxies. I think Einstein’s theory was that a person travelling at the speed of light might think only a day had gone by but on returning find those left behind were 1000 years older.
Luke 9v26
26 If anyone is ashamed of Me and My words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when He comes in His glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. 27But I tell you truthfully, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”…
It’s been 2,000 years now–he’s all out of excuses!
I believe there is a logic shaped hole that gets misinterpreted as a god shaped hole. Existence, as a whole, is non-logical and non-understandable. All understanding comes through relationships. To understand an entity is to understand its internal and external relationships. Without those relationships the entity can be recognized only as a non-understandable given. Existence, as a whole, has no “other” to relate to and therefore, as a whole, must be taken as a non-understandable given. I believe that many brains have a vague understanding of this but feel like something important is missing – that existence must have a cause if only it could be found. And so, superficially, positing god seems to fill in the missing logical link.
There are, of course, two problems with this. First, it depends on a supernatural being for which there is no evidence. But more importantly to posit god is to posit god’s existence. But the whole of existence remains non-logical and non-understandable. By positing god one simply extends the logic by one link and then dead ends it in magical thinking.
Some believers recognize that this is a problem and solve it by simply positing that god created itself. This creates an unbroken logic but it’s circular and still based on a supernatural entity for which there is no evidence.
It seems that many people are much more at ease with believing in a non-logical supernatural being for which there is no evidence than in believing in a non-logical physical reality for which there is much evidence. Positing the supernatural is a bit like a “get out of logic jail free” card – it gives one the satisfying (false) sense that one, at least partially, understands that which is non-understandable.
Douthart thinks science has strengthened, rather than weakened the case for Faith? According to evangelical social scientist George Barna, Generation Z members are twice as self identifying as Atheist or Agnostic as Americans as a whole. 21% collectively. 20% assert science refutes too much of the Bible to believe in the Bible.
https://www.barna.com/research/atheism-doubles-among-generation-z/
The fine tuning argument is actually an argument against the existence of god, not in favour. The universe is observed to confirm exactly to the conflicting forces that act upon it, without the least deviation. In other words, exactly what physics would predict. If there were a god then it would be able to intervene in such a way that ‘fine tuning’ wasn’t necessary. There are no such variations of course.
I don’t want to push the editorial policy here but maybe we should forget this Dotard Ross. His cultural impact isn’t that great, his thinking not impressive and his arguments unconvincing. I read his tiresome column for years. He’s not a moron, sure, but very tiresome and his arguments are done better by smarter people.
D.A.
NYC
Sorry but I do not respond well to people who tell me what and what not to write about. Douthat is well know and with a wide reach and he is preaching to a LOT of people. He is the C. S. Lewis of our era. If you do not want to hear about him, the answer is simple: do not read my posts about him!
As for “religious”, “spiritual”, or “mystical” experiences:
“From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions. Normal perceptions, since they have to be useful in the struggle for life, must have some correspondence with fact; but in abnormal perceptions there is no reason to expect such correspondence, and their testimony, therefore, cannot outweigh that of normal perception.
The mystic emotion, if it is freed from unwarranted beliefs, and not so overwhelming as to remove a man wholly from the ordinary business of life, may give something of very great value—the same kind of thing, though in a heightened form, that is given by contemplation. Breadth and calm and profundity may all have their source in this emotion, in which, for the moment, all self-centred desire is dead, and the mind becomes a mirror for the vastness of the universe. Those who have had this experience, and believe it to be bound up unavoidably with assertions about the nature of the universe, naturally cling to these assertions. I believe myself that the assertions are inessential, and that there is no reason to believe them true. I cannot admit any method of arriving at truth except that of science, but in the realm of the emotions I do not deny the value of the experiences which have given rise to religion. Through association with false beliefs, they have led to much evil as well as good; freed from this association, it may be hoped that the good alone will remain.”
(Russell, Bertrand. Religion and Science. 1935. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. pp. 188-9)
I don’t want to push the editorial policy here but maybe we should forget this Dotard Ross. His cultural impact isn’t that great, his thinking not impressive and his arguments unconvincing. I read his tiresome column for years. He’s not a moron, sure, but very tiresome and his arguments are done better by smarter people.
D.A.
NYC
This is the second time you have posted this and I tender the same response I gave above. Please do not tell me what to write or not write about. Just skip posts if you do not want to read them. Is that a problem?
The problem is that he has a giant megaphone at the New York Times, and his book is getting a lot of publicity. Without a contrary voice, his ends up being the only voice. It’s a challenge. Does speaking out make his position weaker or—by giving him attention—make it stronger? Hard to know for sure. In the long running creation/evolution controversy, speaking out has been very helpful—maybe even decisive.
Douthat has convinced people to think of him as a modern-day C. S. Lewis. Which is hilarious, because it’s not the flex he thinks it is.
I think that what’s not really being addressed here in all these posts is that both the skeptic and the believer both suffer from a pervasive fantasy. They assume they are in control of their running narrative with their strong convictions (in either camp) built on the fallacy of a central meaner who determines the veracity of their strongly and confidently held opinions. To verbalize is unique in our human primate world, at least to the degree that certainly prevents any other mammals from contributing their opinions to this moral mess of religious rectitude. They know better. I take comfort in accepting that on some ”merely” physical level of chemistry and physics, I am a clever adaption using words to insulate me and define my boundaries like a spider’s web, or a beatle’s armor. What a gift. That Ross Douthat feels that is not enough, that there must be something more and worthy of sublimation to, is fine by me, but incredibly sad and delusional at the same time. Ross rejoices in the eternal spirit. I welcome the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. To each his own.
You seem to be saying that reality testing is no better than indulging in the fancies of the imagination as an arbiter of truth. You also seem to be ignoring the harm the indulgers have done, do, and seek to do.
There is no such thing as a “religious experience”. There are only ambiguous experiences to which people give religious interpretations. The brain’s ability instantly to come up with an interpretation obscures the need to distinguish between an experience itself (“I felt a chill in my spine.”) and an interpretation (“I was filled with the Holy Spirit!”).
We also often fail to make that distinction in everyday life, as when we assume motives in others based on their words and actions. All we experience is what we hear them say and see them do. The rest is our interpretation, frequently incorrect.
I think the argument that religious experience is evidence for God is among the weakest of assertions. As they say in the study of Religion: There is no such thing as religious experience, only experience deemed religious. And, after all, consciousness is biological; it is not perfect, or perfectly stable, and so strange occurrences and system failures are natural. What I always ask believers is that, if God created me, and in his image, why the hell do I need to lie down unconscious for an entire third of my life?!
Of course the notion that Catholicism is the “right” religion is absurd for soooo many reasons, if one were wanting to select a religion in the first place. The fact that so many people are spiritual but not religious and that atheists/secularists have spiritual experiences (including JAC) suggests that an underlying driver of religion— spirituality —has a biological basis.
Religion is an individual’s cognitive experience and a social and political construction, which makes it impossible to sort out. Spirituality is the place to start understanding where religion originated (evolved) in individuals and why it persists in our scientific information age.
https://medium.com/the-quantastic-journal/spirituality-has-a-biological-basis-because-humans-have-brains-01f856c15fc2?sk=ba5fb543d36f5521856385c1acb8955f