The NYRB takes down Ross Douthat’s new book on why we should believe in God

I haven’t read the New York Review of Books in years, even before the editor who made it so good, Bob Silvers, died in 2017. And lot of the great authors who published there, like Fred Crews or Dick Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor) have passed on, and the magazine haven’t seemed able to replace them (I don’t know why; perhaps they don’t exist).  But reader Barry called my attention to two articles in the new issue, one of which is pretty good, and I’ll discuss today, while the other, dire and über-woke, I’ll discuss tomorrow—even though I’m sick to death of its subject.

But today we have Robert P. Baird, a novelist who apparently knows a lot more about science (and religion) than Ross Doubthat, reviewing Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and pretty much taking it apart. Hell, it’s not just taken apart, but destroyed, though politely.  I’ve discussed this book several times on this site, and Douthat has published excerpts and touted it widely, so its contents are no secret.  It makes, as I take it, four major claims, several of which are criticized in extenso by Baird:

1.) Science has failed to explain major things about the Universe, including consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics. This means that there is A Big Explanation Beyond Science, and that explanation is God

2.) Therefore you should believe in God (such belief also brings comfort, says Douthat, but he advocates belief for the next reason, not because it brings comfort).

3.) The religious tenets of faith are true. (He’s never given any evidence for this.) That, and the inadequacy of science and its materialistic viewpoint, is the major reason for belief.

4.) But since different religions make different truth claims, which one should you believe? Douthat zeroes in on Christianity (see below), in particular his own Catholic faith. His reasons are laughable.

All of this is the usual nonsense, and makes one wonder why Douthat is taken seriously as a thinker, since none of these tenets are new, and all have been refuted. Further, why on Earth does the NYT employ him as its house conservative columnist? Is he the best such columnist they can find? The paper already has Bret Stephens, so why do they need Douthat? For balance? That’s like trying to balance a lead sinker with a feather.

At any rate, it’s salubrious, at least, to have a comprehensive takedown of this ludicrous book in one place, since the NYT hasn’t given the book a formal review. Indeed, they’ve allowed Douthat to blather on about his book several times in its pages (e.g., here, here, and here), which almost amounts to journalistic nepotism.

At any rate, you can see Baird’s review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived here.

Baird’s quotes are indented, while mine are flush left. (You can see another good takedown of Douthat’s book by Ron Lindsay at Free Inquiry.) The first quote below gives Baird’s accurate take of the materialist view of the Universe, including biology, a view that Douthat opposes because it leaves no space for God.

There’s a view of the human situation that goes something like this: 14 billion years ago, give or take, the universe exploded into being. The Big Bang didn’t create everything, but it did provide everything necessary to create everything else: a collection of immutable physical laws, a hot soup of subatomic particles, an unthinkably vast quantity of energy. After 10 billion or so years of expansion and cooling, the universe contained some trillion trillion stars, and at least as many planets. Around that time, on one of those planets orbiting one of those stars, a random series of chemical reactions produced self-replicating molecules. Chemistry made way for biology as four billion years of further chance developments generated a bewildering diversity of living organisms. Eventually one of those organisms, a bipedal primate with small teeth and a prominent chin, developed the capacity for complex language and abstract thought. This species called itself Homo sapiens, the wise man, but this was only puffery, the illusory boast of an apex predator at the extremely temporary peak of its powers.

and Baird’s assessment:

Believe, the recent book by Ross Douthat, a conservative opinion columnist at The New York Times,presents itself as a work of apologetics—a case, as the subtitle has it, for “why everyone should be religious.” Though late chapters do make a positive case for religious belief, and the final chapter offers a half-hearted pitch for Douthat’s own strain of conservative Catholicism, I don’t think it misrepresents the book to say that it is mostly interested in disqualifying the comprehensive skepticism I outlined above.

Baird goes on to discuss Douthat’s tenure with the NYT and why they continue to employ him, supposing that he’s a “serious and reasonable conservative.”  The first adjective is correct, the second wrong. And Baird adds that Douthat, while pretending to oppose some tenets of the Republican Party, appears, says Baird, to blame them on the Left:

Douthat’s punditry has long struck me as glib and sententious, and it particularly rankles when you notice how many of his arguments borrow the look-what-you-made-me-do rhetoric of domestic abusers and playground bullies. Whether his subject is immigration, or abortion, or gay marriage, or trans rights, or free speech, or the broad rollback of civil rights taking place under the cover of the “anti-DEI” backlash, Douthat likes nothing more than telling his liberal readers that conservative extremism is in fact all their fault.

But the ridiculous train of argument for God, and then Christianity is in fact all Douthat’s fault. On to his major points:

Douthat’s presumed motives: 

But the deeper I read into Believe, the more I began to see why the idea of mere religion appeals to Douthat. He is a pundit, not a theologian, and he admits early on that he has no interest in debating the kinds of questions that have traditionally animated Christian apologetics—about Christology, say, or apostolic succession. (You will find Tyler Cowen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the Claremont Review of Books cited in his notes but only passing mentions in the text of Augustine, Aquinas, and Kierkegaard.) What Douthat does want to do is argue with atheism, especially with the lingering legacy of New Atheism, the Anglo-American media phenomenon from the early Aughts that sought to disqualify religious belief tout court.

This is where mere religion comes in. Though it makes little sense as a rigorous conceptual category, it does work reasonably well as a catchall for everything the New Atheists despised. By stripping away the thorny and often mutually contradictory truth claims of this or that faith tradition, Douthat is able to focus his rhetorical energies in a way that suits his polemical style. It allows him to argue, in other words, by means of a familiar double negative: not the case for religion so much as the case against the case against any kind of faith.

Douthat’s stupid argument for God from ignorance: Granted, the second paragraph above isn’t written well, with the double negative confusing the reader, but it’s okay. While Baird himself seems to be uncomfortable with atheism, and wishes that Douthat had indeed made his case (I guess Baird harbors that God-shaped lacuna), he can’t resist showing the flaws in Douthat’s Big Argument from Ignorance, and to the problems with using that tired old Bucephalus to tout religion:

Part of the trouble is Douthat’s tendentious misunderstandings of basic science. He appears to think, for instance, that when physicists talk about the observer effect in quantum physics, they mean that human consciousness is “the only thing that transforms quantum contingency into definite reality, wave into particle, probability into certainty.” But this is not what most physicists mean at all. As Werner Heisenberg noted, “The introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature.” A quantum observation is a type of physical interaction; it has nothing to do, contra Douthat, with any “mysterious but essential role” for specifically human observation.

Another part of the trouble is Douthat’s dependence on the argumentum ad ignorantiam, a fallacy so common in apologetic literature that it has its own Wikipedia page. Arguments of this type, known derisively as “the God of the gaps,” look for holes in our scientific understanding of the world and claim those as proof, or at least a heavy suggestion, against the secular hypothesis. Douthat wants us to see mysticism, near-death experiences, our own consciousness, and even the physical constants that make life possible in the universe as evidence that a superreal Something Else must be going on.

. . . At one point Douthat suggests that the physical laws that govern the universe ought to be seen as evidence of a divine mind. He compares the universe to a house and scientific laws to “finely wrought schematics” that imply a Great Architect in the sky. But here the double-negative reasoning that Douthat loves so much shows its limits. The fact that science can’t explain where physical laws come from is an epistemological nullity; it can’t be tweaked to reveal some esoteric alternative. Maybe physical laws do come from God or the gods. Or maybe they’re the local manifestation of the multiverse. Or maybe they simply are, for reasons we’ll never grasp. The possibilities are endless, and nothing allows us to prove which option is superior.

Douthat’s argument for God also uses evolution, and again Baird shows his ability to tackle those claims. Douthat appears to be in the 34% of Americans who think that humans evolved, but their evolution was guided by God:

A related innumeracy shows itself when Douthat turns to evolution. He seems to accept a version of the Darwinian theory, even as he wants to argue that the emergence of the human species is too complex, too mind-bogglingly unlikely, to have occurred without divine guidance. It’s true that if you tallied the likelihood of all the billions of events that led up to the evolution of human beings on Earth, you would end up with a probability that, on any human scale, looked indistinguishable from impossibility. But the long process that led to our species did not take place on a human scale. It happened over billions of years, in a universe with something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets—a universe old enough and big enough, in other words, to offer statistical room for a lot of approximately impossible events to take place.

Does this mean that science can rule out the possibility that evolution was directed by a divine intelligence? Of course not. But it does give the lie to Douthat’s desperate claim that “the universe isn’t really hiding the ball from us when it comes to cosmic order and human exceptionalism.” Reason can tolerate the belief that God had a hand in evolution, but only at the price of admitting that He took pains to conceal public evidence of His interventions.

The Argument from Ignorance seems to be making a comeback these days; you see it everywhere. And it always involves the same stuff: science hasn’t explained the laws of physics, “fine-tuning”, human consciousness, why math is so effective in helping understand the Universe (presumably God created math, too), and so on.  One would think that a refutation like Baird’s would prevent future misunderstandings, but each generation (particularly the younger ones who don’t read) have to be presented with the rebuttals anew. Fighting religious arguments against science is a battle that won’t end until religion ends, and that’s never.

Douthat’s stupid argument for why Christianity is the best and truest religion. This argument and others like it. fascinate me, for every religion has its own set of truth claims,—and many are incompatible.  Since those claims can’t be adjudicated because there’s no relevant evidence, you have to more or less make up reasons why your religion happens to be the best and “truest” one. Here’s how Douthat does it:

Perhaps the most serious weakness of Believe is its poor handling of religious pluralism, which is in many ways a far more difficult challenge to belief than scientific skepticism. Douthat clearly wants mere religion to help him dodge the problem as long as possible; arguing for a general acceptance of religion—which is to say, a general rejection of secularism—allows him to hold off questions about specific religions until well after the midpoint of the book. But eventually he turns to the hard question left open by his title: Believe in what?

To answer this, Douthat downplays all the fantastically complicated disagreements that have marked religious history for centuries. Instead he narrates a tidy tale of convergence toward a handful of broadly similar, and mostly monotheistic, major faiths. With the unearned confidence of a Whig historian, he allows himself grand and absurd pronouncements like “The more popular, enduring, and successful world religions are more likely than others to be true” and “If God cares about anything, He cares about sex.” Claims like these are so theologically preposterous, especially coming from a practicing Catholic, that it’s hard to know quite what to make of them. If nothing else, though, they reinforce my sense that the existence of Believe is its own best counterproof: in a world where religious truths were as obvious and reasonable as Douthat wants them to be, there would be no need for him to write it.

The book’s strangest feature is its enervating conception of belief. Douthat claims that he doesn’t look to Christianity primarily for comfort, and yet he writes about religion as though its major purpose were to banish any thought of our insignificance. He wants religion to assure him not only that “our conscious existence has some cosmic importance, some great consequence,” but that the universe was designed with one end in mind: “Toward making us possible, the readers that the book of nature was awaiting all along.”

There is more, but the review, sadly, ends rather lamely. But never mind: Baird has focused on, and dismantled, the key points of Douthat’s argument.  The two I find most important are the claims that, first, science hasn’t explained everything, and therefore there is a God whom we should worship, and second, that the “right” God just happens to be the Christian God.  It’s time to put this nonsense to bed, but it refuses to get under the covers.  So I’m glad that people like Baird keep fighting the good fight: the fight against believing stuff not because it’s supported by evidence,but because it makes you feel good.

The NYT really shouldn’t keep Douthat on, or use its pages to tout his ludicrous ideas, but they want a couple of house conservatives (Stephens is far, far better), and, as I’ve pointed out before, the paper, like the Free Press, is curiously soft on religion.  Why that’s so is beyond me.