I’ve never read or listened to Ezra Klein, who does podcasts and columns at the NYT and elsewhere, but the impression I got from others was that he was wickedly smart. I don’t listen to podcasts, his main metier, so I didn’t know. I have to say, though, that I’m not that impressed by the views he expresses in this 1.5-hour interview (bottom) with Ross Douthat, also of the NYT.
Douthat has been pushing his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, all over the place, including in the NYT and the Free Press . I’ve discussed some of his theses before on this site (see here), and, as you might imagine, I haven’t been a fan. Not only does he say that everyone has a longing for religion to fill their “god-shaped hole,” but he says that Roman Catholicism, which (not coincidentally) is his own religion, is the right faith—the way to a happy afterlife. And Douthat’s bought pretty much the whole Vatican hog, including the afterlife, Satan, assorted demons, purgatory, and angels. I was surprised to see that, released on Feb. 11, the book is only at Amazon position 2,825 this morning; I thought that—given his claim that Americans are longing for faith—his written lucubrations would be in the top 100 at least, since I’ve never seen a book promotion so relentless in the MSM.
But I digress. In the video below, Douthat and Klein, both eloquent and clearly smart people, make a great deal of the unevidenced: the things that science and “materialism” can’t explain and, therefore, constitute for both men evidence for either God or “something beyond materialism.” And I have to say that I was terrifically bored, but don’t let my reaction put you off.
Here are the YouTube notes by Klein with the timings of relevant parts.
I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.
My guest and I come from very different perspectives. Ross Douthat is a Catholic conservative, who wrote a book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” I’m a … Californian. But I think everyone would enjoy this conversation — believers, skeptics and seekers alike. [JAC: I didn’t!]
Some questions touched on: Is the Trump administration Christian or pagan? How do Christian Trump supporters reconcile the cruelties of this administration with their faith? Can religious experiences be explained by misfiring neurons? Should organized religions embrace psychedelics? Can mystery provide more comfort than certainty?
And if you do enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Douthat’s new New York Times Opinion Audio show “Interesting Times,” available wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.
The segments of the video (click to go to them):
0:00 Intro
1:11 Trump: man of destiny?
19:55 Political power, cruelty and Godliness
36:25 Religion and spirituality in the modern world
43:18 The mysteries of the universe…
49:31 Aliens! Fairies! (and some Catholic history)
58:25 Contending with uncertainty and evil
1:07:02 Psychedelic experiences
1:23:36 Official knowledge
1:36:02 Book recommendations
The NYT has a written transcript here (archived here). I did not read it exept to check the quotes, so my reactions below are based on listening.
I started listening 36 minutes in. after the politics were over, and Ceiling Cat help me, I made it to the end, but still required a stiff dose of Pepto-Bismol afterwards. But perhaps you want to listen to the politics, too.
So here’s the evidence that Douthat takes for the existence of the Christian (and Catholic) god. I’ll make no attempt to be cohesive here; I’ll just give my thoughts, Douthat’s and Klein’s assertions, and some quotes.
First, I was greatly disappointed to see Klein (who appears to be a slightly religious Jew susceptible to the “supernatural”) not pushing back on some of Douthat’s more extreme claims, including the existence of Jesus and an omnipotent loving God, of course, but also of angels and demons (he mentions the efficacy of exorcism), saints, life after death, and even trickster beings (“fairies”). Douthat’s primary evidence for God is the existence of people’s religious and spiritual experiences, which, he avers, have considerable overlap between different faiths. In other words, he bases the existence of his religion—and his being—on what people feel. To him that’s as strong, or even stronger, evidence than scientific evidence and materialism. But it’s nothing new. It’s popular now because it’s being pushed by the press as an “important” book.
In fact, Douthat and Klein both reject materialism, largely because it can’t explain these experiences and consciousness, as well as the existence of a world that, Douthat asserts, was “created with us in mind.” It makes me wonder why God created all those other lifeless planets. Is it for our amusement or wonder? And if there is life on some planets, was that also created by God, and did the aliens experience visitations by Jesus?
As Douthat says, “a new atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world and its complexity, in its unruliness, in the experiences people have, in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe”. . . and then mentions quant-mechanical entanglement and the many-worlds hypothesis as a speculations beyond materialism that makes his faith in God stronger. I don’t think a physicist would find these either non-materialistic or evidence for the divine. As in everything that both men espouse in this show, our failure to understand something gets figured into Douthat’s Bayesian statistic that raises the probability of God’s existence.
For Klein, the unexplainable experiences can be spiritual ones as well as religious ones. But Klein leaves no doubt that religious and spiritual explanations, as well as other phenomena that science doesn’t (yet) understand, are supernatural explanations, and “supernatural” means “nonmaterialistic.”
Douthat:
I mean the view that all of existence — life, the universe and everything — is finely reducible to matter in motion. That matter is primary and mind is secondary, rather than the other way around. I don’t mean materialism in terms of Madonna’s “Material Girl” or something like that — although the two can be connected.
He clearly thinks it’s the other way around (i.e. mind isn’t material), and firmly rejects the view—Klein seems to agree—that consciousness and the mind are nonmaterial phenomena that give Douthat evidence for God and Klein evidence for the supernatural. Douthat, it seems, is apparently unaware of the advances that science has made showing that consciousness is indeed a material phenomenon (for one thing, you can predictably remove it with anesthesia and then restore it).
Now to be fair, Klein, who apparently has tried drugs like ayahuasca, notes that predictable effects on the mind can also be effected by psychedelic substances, Douthat rejects this materialism, claiming that religious experiences are very different from psychedelic ones (having taken psychedelic drugs in the past, I have strong doubts about this, though I haven’t experienced Jesus). And, to further counteract this, Douthat argues that the religious experiences of all religions are pretty much the same. As I recall from reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, this isn’t true, even for Western religion. I wonder, for example, if the religious experiences of a Buddhist monk living his whole life in a cave are the same as those of a Christian talking to Jesus. The only common factor is something beyond the worldly.
Giving a sop to other religions—though Douthat thinks that Roman Catholicism is the “right” one (and by that he clearly means you don’t go to heaven if you embrace the wrong one, don’t confess, don’t take communion, and the like)—he does say that all religions have a core set of “truths” that are pretty much the same. I doubt it. Hard-core Muslims not only reject the divinity of Jesus or the necessity of believing in the tripartite God if you want to live in Paradise after death. And the morality of faiths is very different. If you’re an apostate Muslim, you should be killed, and you have to pray five times a day. (I haven’t mentioned the cargo cults, which to me qualify as religions, too.)
Further evidence that Douthat adduces for God are the fact that the universe seems “fine tuned” for life (I won’t go into the many alternative explanations), and that a broken radio started playing spontaneously at Michael Shermer’s wedding with no materialistic explanation (I kid you not; read the transcript).
Now Douthat’s Achilles’s heel, which Klein mentions, is the existence of natural evil: childhood cancers, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like—things that kill innocent people for no obvious reason. These don’t evince an omnipotent or omniscient God. Why do they happen?
Douthat says we don’t know:
I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved.
I’m not here to tell you I’ve resolved the problem of evil. The problem of evil is a real problem. It’s a real issue. Again, I think it’s an issue that’s there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testaments.
So, although he hasn’t resolved this HUGE problem, Douthat is confident that it’s part of God’s plan. (What an evil God it must be to give children leukemia!). Yet I see no difference between his view one one hand and his denigration of science for having confidence that materialism will someday resolve the problem of consciousness on the other. After all, science is making progress on consciousnes, but has made no progress in understanding the existence of natural evil. And it never will, for all we have are smart people like Douthat, and a coterie of theologians, who get paid to simply ruminate on the problem but, in the end, can make no progress. How can your mind tell you why God permits natural evil? Through a revelation?
And I’d like to ask Douthat this: “If the Chcristian God says that we can get to heaven only by believing in him (and going “through Jesus”), why doesn’t God make his presence more clearly? He could, you know, and then everyone would have the “right” religion!” And here I don’t mean “religious experiences,” but a physical manifestation that could be documented to such an extent that it can’t be doubted. (I give an example of this scenario in Faith Verus Fact.) God surely wants everyone to go to heaven, for he’s a good God, so why didn’t he show up in first-century Palestine. What happens to all those Egyptians and Babylonians?
At the end, Klein asks Douthat to recommend three books for the audience. Here they are:
Stephen Barr, “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”
After” by Bruce Greyson (about the afterlife)
“Mind and Cosmos” by Thomas Nagel
Of these I’ve read only Nagel’s book, which is teleological without being religious and somewhat confused. You can find several critiques of the books by Big Minds online.
There are two big problems with this discussion. The first is Douthat’s uncritical embrace of Roman Catholicism and all its doctrine. And the mask slips a bit when he says this:
I don’t know what your metaphysical perspectives were as a kid. But I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins and believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else.
I just think it’s, in fact, more probable than not that after you die, you will meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life and so on. And that’s not inherently comforting. It’s quite terrifying.
Well, what is comforting–or discomforting–need not be true. But since neither Douthat nor Klein is a materialist, there is very little discussion about the evidence for Jesus, God, Satan, angels, demons, and so on. They are taken as a given, presumably evidenced through revelation or experience.
And that brings us to the second problem. Though Klein and Douthat are buddies, Klein does not push him hard on his views. It’s more a spiritual bro-fest than a discussion, which is perhaps why I found it so tedious. Douthat is making a name for himself even though he spouts the same old pieties (worse–he buys the whole Vatican hog)
Here are some quotes from a reader who called this to my attention.
Ezra Klein interviewing Ross Douthat. Klein hardly endears himself to rationality. But Douthat is talking about the reality of angels, demons, fairies, and that Christianity and Judaism being divinely founded – poor Buddhists left out… The NYTimes gives Douthat uncritical time. Shame on them for giving him prominence in the paper of record.
. . .Perhaps I am being harsh and insensitive to their friendship. But Klein’s failure to challenge RD’s belief in demons, angels, fairies, etc saddened me. Hence my “Klein hardly endears himself to rationality” comment.
If there is a religious revival going on, the juggernaut is being pushed by the mainstream media. I have no idea why save for the tiny flattening of the curve showing the proportion of “nones” over the last two years.
Infiltration of the church with socialists – or in this case the temptation appears to be some New Age theosophic spiritualism as well – is intended to subvert and destroy its hegemonic power because the church traditionally inhibits Revolution (Gramsci).
One of the hypotheses we might consider is that this is an attempt to pull religious voters away from the Republican/Trump orbit and get them to vote Democratic line. Or that NYT supports Douthat in that he is anti-Trump and serves as an example of a religious anti-Trump person which would indirectly help Democrats.
That there could be a “Gramsci angle” is new to me, thanks for this observation.
It’s kind of depressing to hear the same old justifications year after year. Materialism doesn’t [i.e., hasn’t] explained everything, so I am just going to assume that there’s a good fairy that will make it alright. If neither materialism or religion can explain something, what’s the point in falling back on the one that doesn’t provide new answers?
“We don’t know, therefore the gods must have done it” is surely the least successful hypothesis in the history of mankind, but probably still the most popular and the most common.
Too true. I see appeals to Luck or Fate as supernatural entities all around me. I recognise the oft underrated influence of random chance, but don’t burn incense to Fortuna.
“I’ve never read or listened to Ezra Klein, who does podcasts and columns at the NYT and elsewhere, but the impression I got from others was that he was wickedly smart.”
Years ago, Klein was on Sam Harris’ podcast. I tuned in expecting a great conversation (based on a similar impression from others that Klein was super smart), and instead it was one of the worst podcasts Sam has ever had. No so much due to Sam, but to the obtuseness and disingenuousness of Klein.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/featured-op-ed-sam-harris-was-right-ezra-klein-should-know-better/
+1 I had the same impression after this podcast. Klein went on my “ignore” list.
You posted this before I could. I had followed Klein and thought he was a smart progressive. Then I listened to the Harris podcast. Klein’s bias was evident from the first interaction. He buys into the woke ideology that religions must be tolerated but not questioned. He believes that Sam is an Islamophobe and nothing Harris has to say will convince him otherwise. The exchange was embarrassing to Klein. And I have ignored him since.
Likewise
I just want one interviewer to ask Ross one of the following questions:
“You are a Roman Catholic. Why do you believe that your faith is more accurate than that of a Jew, a Protestant, or a Hindu?”
“With regard to the Bible, why are Protestants wrong to not include the Deuterocanonical books in their Bible? How do you know these books are inspired?”
“Why are women excluded from occupying the leadership hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church? A woman cannot be a priest, a bishop, a Pope. The direction of the Church is entirely controlled by men. What are women lacking that prevents them from being in these positions? How do you defend this level of institutional sexism, which would be patently illegal in any organization, such as the NYT?”
Re misogyny, “because the bible [St Paul in particular] says so”. The followers of an obsolete Road Code are gonna have crashes.
But other Christian denominations have women pastors. There are now female rabbis in the Jewish faith. So this cannot be purely a Judeo-Christian, Bible-based doctrine.
The Catholics are institutionally sexist and its frankly incredible that Ross is never, ever questioned about this.
I worked with an ex-priest many years ago who had a somewhat startling answer to the question. Catholic priests acquire their priestly abilities, especially the power to perform various sorts of magic, from the implantation of divine substance into their bodies during their ordination. Women are physically and spiritually unable to absorb this power, much of that inability springing from women’s reproductive functions, which for priests is polluting.
The difference with other Christian denominations, Judaism, etc, is that ministers and rabbis are merely teachers. Ministers may be able to communicate with their god, but they lack the power to perform magic.
Or so said my ex-priest friend. Who insisted that he was still a priest, technically, since he had not had that supernatural substance removed from his body or soul, and thus he could still perform a Catholic mass, magically convert wine into blood, etc.
When you quit an employer they automatically remove your security pass etc. Why don’t the RC senior magicians cast one spell that automatically removes that supernatural substance from all future ex employees? Presumably it’s no more difficult than the initial insertion (but IANA magician, so there may be various obscure difficulties).
Well, who could argue with that?
Why do I have the feeling that despite what I presume would be Ross’s failure to answer these (and any number of further) questions in a coherent fashion, it would not dent his faith in the slightest?
I’ve been playing the Assassins Creed Shadows video game recently. It’s set in feudal Japan and like most Assassins Creed games it includes cultural issues within the setting. In the Shadows case this includes a great deal of religious architecture and the complex relationship between Shinto and Buddhism.
From the Wikipedia article on Shinto:
A polytheistic and animistic religion, Shinto revolves around supernatural entities called the kami (神). The kami are believed to inhabit all things, including forces of nature and prominent landscape locations. The kami are worshipped at kamidana household shrines, family shrines, and jinja public shrines. The latter are staffed by priests, known as kannushi, who oversee offerings of food and drink to the specific kami enshrined at that location. This is done to cultivate harmony between humans and kami and to solicit the latter’s blessing.
I carry no particular affection for Shinto, but it arguably fills a ‘spiritual hole’ more satisfyingly than Christianity. Does Douthat consider the quality of the stuffing used to fill the God hole – or is it just his special pleading?
Ezra K. is indeed very smart but he is totally slimeball.
He was a HUGE wokester – enough to scream that Sam Harris was an irredeemable “ISLAMAPHOBE!” and “RACIST” often, and for a long time. He went all out.
And all in for BLM and a big huckster for the shrill department of #metoo.
Then… about last year-ish, he decided he wasn’t woke at all!
Depends on the wind.
He’s an intelligent fraud. He is a big part of the decline of the NYTimes.
HA! Ross Dotard – is a Holy Fool of course, but he’s honest in his stupidity and has his (almost completely wrong) principles he stands on consistently. I respect him more.
D.A.
NYC
“Though Klein and Douthat are buddies, Klein does not push him hard on his views. It’s more a spiritual bro-fest than a discussion.”
Douthat’s media buddies are why his asinine book is getting so much media attention. He’s opportunistic enough to ingratiate himself with the MSM by cultivating the image of himself as a reasonable right-winger (even though he really isn’t). So when book promotion time rolls around, cue logrolling from NYT colleagues like Klein.
The only publication I’ve seen that has been reasonably critical of Douchehat is the Economist (presumably he has no buddies on staff). Its review can be read at https://archive.is/Y6Da5
Some excerpts:
“Have you ever wondered about the problem of evil?…Ross Douthat, a columnist at the New York Times and Catholic convert, has also thought about the problem of evil, and he is not that bothered by it. He thinks it is ‘ridiculous’ to dismiss ancient religions over some ‘moral intuition’ about whether suffering should exist. So that’s fine then. Don’t bother with Augustine. Put away Aquinas. Just read Mr Douthat.
“…Reading [his book] feels a bit like being cornered by a Christian at a party, for he wants not merely your attention but your soul. And he really does want it: the abandonment of organised religions is, he says, ‘the late-modern world’s great mistake’. Not the first or second world wars, nuclear weapons or even zip-off hiking trousers—but religious decline.
“…Mr Douthat canters across 20-odd centuries of theology, philosophy and science. Though dogmatic about religion, he is surprisingly undogmatic about which one: almost any old god who’s still around will do…But then religion-lite is all the rage…This is not eternal-life Christianity but lifestyle Christianity.
“This Christian book often teeters on the unchristian in tone…Which may give you a serious urge to throw this book across the room. Whether you chuck it will depend on whether Mr Douthat persuades you to, like his title, ‘Believe’. Though if you do, it is worth remembering that you will still disbelieve, too. As Dr Dawkins points out, ‘We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.'”
Douthat, like all of us, has to make a living. The only way he knows how is to write books about his own religion.
The problem of evil—apparently fretted about by Douthat—is readily solved by postulating that god himself (or “itself”) is evil. There, done. Indeed, anyone who reads the Old Testament can see that the god described there is evil. I won’t look it up now but, if I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion provides a massive list of evil characteristics of the Great Being himself (itself) all concentrated into a brilliantly biting, true, and even funny sentence. It seems strange to me that religionists have problems explaining evil. Why should they believe a priori that god is good? I don’t get it.
Because it feels so good to believe that there’s a perfectly good and knowledgeable being, … and that he’s in your corner no matter how bad things get! Now imagine giving up that wonderful feeling. Better not look at or think about the obvious.
God specifically acknowledges that he creates evil. See Isaiah 45:7 (King James Version):
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”
Just the problem of evil? How about slavery? The rather dismal relegation of women to ”property” and the ludicrous ” dominion over the wild beasts” and on and on. Tell Douthat, who I personally don’t think is as smart as people credit him to be, to read and watch a true worthy adversary like Christopher Hitchens, who would see through his superstition and child-like fantasies carried into adulthood. The four horsemen video at Hitchen’s apartment and Hitchens’ brilliant ”ten commandments” ( up-dated) should be more than enough for Douthat to atleast seriously consider as a legitament challenge to the supernatural. If we need some irony here, it is Hitchen’s admission that people like Douthat are, at the very least, fun to ridicule, so they do have some benefits with their embrace of the occult.
“Douthat says we don’t know:”
If only he found that a satisfying answer about 122 fantasies earlier in his tortuous string of phantasmagoria.
“Angels and demons”,
Say the priests and the deacons.
“You must believe me”,
Say the bats in your belfry.
“Says you and what army?”,
Say the somewhat less barmy.
“Says God who is holy”,
As we back away slowly.
Here is a candle to light up your dark,
And here is a ditty with justified snark.
© 2025, no charge for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
I like it!
For myself, when someone, like Douthat, tells me that he is a fantasist and not very clever, I believe him.
Re consciousness and the mind being nonmaterial phenomena, I agree with the podcastants. Mathematics, language, music, food recipes, and much much more are also “nonmaterial” in that they do not themselves consist of material stuff (particles, forces, etc.); they are instead patterns exhibited by the stuff (IMO). But they are very real in that they are experienced as such by almost everyone, without requiring any leap of “faith” or other special mental condition¹. And some are universal across cultures.
(Since philosophers have been banging on about such things for millennia there must be an erudite name for this view, but I don’t know it.)
¹ I’m being polite.
Naturalism?
Wonder why God created all those other lifeless planets? Is it for our amusement or wonder? The Mormons had an answer; look up “Adam-God doctrine”.
Re “The only common factor [in religions experiences] is something beyond the worldly”, I initially parsed that as conman.
Thanks for summarizing this dreadful slop, so that we can know something of its unsurprising contents without taking the time to listen to it.
Regarding your first paragraph: There is an expression, “wicked smart.” It’s a New England idiom. If you say “wickedly smart,” then you don’t mean “wicked smart”; you must be speaking literally, meaning “smart, in a wicked fashion.” But I don’t think that this is what you mean to say about Ezra Klein. I’m not sure that it even makes sense.
There is a reason I refer to him as Russ Doubthat…I doubt he has ever really examined religious belief, his or anyone else’s. And yeah, Epicurus’ Paradox about evil in the world is my fallback when confronted by a really pesky Christian.
In my experience, philosophical discussion has little effect. I’ve not had the opportunity for this yet, but next time I’m confronted by an RPC (Really Pesky Christian, thanks for that) I plan to intone, with a very raspy voice and fixed stare, “Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth?”. When/if I manage this I’ll report on the result.