Category: religion

More God-touting in The Free Press, this time by Charles Murray

October 15, 2025 • 9:32 am

The Free Press keeps publishing articles by people who found God, though they never publish articles by people who gave up belief in gods. Two recent God-touting pieces are are “How the West Lost its Soul” by Paul Kingsnorth (see my post here) and “How intellectuals found God“, by Peter Savodnik (see my post here).

Now it looks as if a series of intellectuals are going to testify to faith in their own Free Press articles.  The latest is political scientist Charles Murray, famous (or infamous) for his work on IQ, including his much-discussed book The Bell Curve. (I never read it because I’m too lazy, but it also keeps me from getting involved in another brouhaha.)

In the Free Press article below, Murray describes his embrace of a sort of pantheistic spirituality, so he doesn’t clearly embrace Christianity (but see below—Jesus manages to sneak in there). But Murray invokes the same old tropes: the God-shaped hole coming from lack of meaning, the invocation of mysteries in physics as evidence for God, the inevitable question of “why is there something rather than nothing?”, and the invocation of a “creative force” that, he says, explains our scientific ignorance. I will give some quotes, but I have to tell you that this piece doesn’t elevate whatever respect I had for Murray.

Here we go, with a denigration of people who are not spiritual. (Murray had tried transcendental meditation but it had failed). Murray’s quotes are indented

Just as people have different levels of cognitive ability or athletic coordination, so too they have different levels of perceptual ability. That’s true in the appreciation of music, the visual arts, and literature. I’m not talking about IQ. People with stratospheric IQs can be tone-deaf, unmoved by great art, bored by Shakespeare—and clueless about anything spiritual.

Thirty years later, watching my wife, Catherine, become increasingly engaged in Quakerism in the last half of the 1990s, that thought forcefully returned to me: People vary in their ability to apprehend spiritual truths.

I’d like to know what Murray means by “spiritual,” and I’d like to know even more some examples of what he considers “spiritual truths”.  Just a few would do!

And here comes the God-shaped hole, not filled by “Western modernity” (presumably stuff like capitalism and antibiotics). Bolding here is mine:

Catherine observed once that she likes being in control as much as I do (which indeed she does). The difference between us, she said, was that her sense of need for belief was greater. I agreed with that, and I also had a suspicion about why. I had distracted myself with Western modernity.

I am using Western modernity as shorthand for all the ways in which life in the last hundred years has shielded many of us from the agonizing losses, pains, and sorrows that came early and often in human life since the dawn of humankind. Most people still suffer at least one such agonizing event eventually, but often not until old age and sometimes never.

So far, that’s been the case with me. I’ve lived my life without ever reaching the depths of despair. I’m grateful for my luck. But I have also not felt the God-sized hole in my life that the depths of despair often reveal. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a hole; it’s just that I’ve been able to ignore it. In the 21st century, keeping ourselves entertained and distracted is easy. And that, I think, explains a lot not only about me but about the nonchalant secularism of our age.

He’s got the hole! Next he dismisses the tenets of secularism:

My secular catechism from college through the mid-1990s went something like this:

The concept of a personal God is at odds with everything that science has taught us over the last five centuries.

Humans are animals. Our thoughts and emotions are produced by the brain. When the brain stops, consciousness stops too.

The great religious traditions are human inventions, natural products of the fear of death. That includes Christianity, which can call on no solid evidence for its implausible claims.

I look back on that catechism and call it “dead center” because it was so unreflective. I had not investigated the factual validity of any of those propositions. They were part of the received wisdom of most Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century. I accepted them without thinking.

I’m not going to go through these one by one, but I will say that I wrote a book justifying the first proposition (Faith Versus Fact).  About the second, yes, human beings are indeed animals, and there’s plenty of evidence that thoughts and emotions are produced by the brain.  When you do things to the brain (take drugs, have brain surgery when you’re conscious, etc.), your thoughts and emotions change.  Where else does Murray think thoughts and emotions come from? I want an alternative explanation. And we have no evidence that people whose brain stops working (i.e., who are dead) still have consciousness.  The parsimonious conclusion is that yes, thoughts and emotions, as well as consciousness, are produced by the brain. Things without brains, like rocks, don’t appear to have consciousness, though some addled advocates of panpsychism have suggested that.

As for the “great religious traditions” being human inventions, yes, of course they are. Biblical scholars tell us how the scriptures came to be, and we’ve seen plenty of religions invented by humans, including Christian Science, Scientology, Mormonism, and so on.  Finally, it is not “unreflective” to think about what evidence there is for the truth claims of Christianity (read the Nicene Creed to see them).  In fact, Murray’s “secular catechism” happens to be rational and, by and large, true.

Murray then lists a series of “nudges” that made him religious.  They are given as “evidence for God” in the new book is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, (see my post on it here), and thety are, once again, simple God-of-the-Gaps arguments.  Here are a few, quoted:

The first nudge, so soft that it barely registered (I cannot recall when it did more than cross my mind) was the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena—most famously E = mc2. There’s also Newton’s second law of motion (which is just F = ma), Galileo’s law of free fall (d = 1/2gt²), and many other examples.

It just seemed extremely odd that so many basic phenomena were so mathematically simple. It was almost as if someone had planned it that way.

Has he looked at the Schrödinger equation?   And of course there are plenty of phenomena—evolution is one—that can be approached theoretically, but the equations are not at all simple. He has picked the simplest equations of physics as evidence for God, euations in which the laws of physics hold, and can be described mathematically. (I’m surprised that Murray doesn’t think that the laws of physics are evidence for God.)  I discuss the Argument for God from the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics on p. 159 of Faith versus Fact.

One more God-of-the-Gaps argument from Murray:

The first unmistakable nudge involved the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I first heard it put in those words by the late columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer during a session of a chess club we started in the early 1990s. That I thought Charles had come up with it himself is proof of how unreflective I had been. Anyone who had taken any interest in theology would have encountered it long since. It’s one of the most famous questions in metaphysics.

But I hadn’t heard it, and it caught me by surprise. When I had thought about the existence of the universe at all, I had taken it as a given. I am alive, I am surrounded by the world, the fact that I can ask the question presupposes that the universe exists. There’s nothing else to be said. It is a mystery with a lowercase m.

Hearing the question stated so baldly and so eloquently made me start to take the issue seriously. Why is there anything? Surely things do not exist without having been created. What created all this? If you haven’t thought about it recently, this is a good time to stop and try to come up with your own answer.

How about the simple answerm ” There is something because ‘nothing’ is unstable and a fluctuation in nothingness can produce what we call “something”?

The unreflectiveness of Murray, and his failure to investigate what philosophers and scientists have to say about this stuff, is exemplified in the video below, one in which physicist Brian Cox takes on these questions and tells what science has to say about them. For many issues, the answer is “we don’t know but maybe some day we will.” But for Murray the answer is always “THE CREATOR”.

In the end, the unanswered questions of physics have led to Murray becoming a pantheist. I’ll leave you with his own description of his god:

None of that had ever made sense to me. Once I decided that there had to be an unmoved mover and was intellectually committed to accepting that conception of God, I was free to think about a truth that, once you stop to think about it, must be a truth: Any God worthy of the name is at least as incomprehensible to a human being as I am to my dog.

. . .Two other useful concepts entered my thinking sometime during the 1990s. One was that God exists outside of time—as taught by Aristotle but elaborated by Thomas Aquinas. Just trying to get your head around the concept of existing outside time is a good way to realize how unknowable a being we are talking about.

Quaker teachings are also helpful in de-anthropomorphizing God. They emphasize that God is not a being with a location. He is everywhere—not just watching from everywhere but permeating the universe and our world. And there is the most famous of Quaker precepts: “There is that of God in everyone.” It is not the same as saying, “There’s some good in everyone.” God is in you in some sense, along with permeating everything else.

How does Murray know that there is an unmoved mover (see Cox’s video above)? And how does he know that “God exists outside of time”? What does that even mean?

In the end, we get the same arguments for God that are endlessly recycled, and endlessly rebutted. It looks as if each generation comes upon these questions themselves (e.g., “Why is there something instead of nothing?:), and each generation has to be given the arguments why ignorance does not equate to God, whether he’s in heaven or permeating everything.  But why is the MSM, especially the Free Press, so concerned with recycling the same old calls for faith? Is CBS going to start touting religion, too?

And Murray’s got a book. Click on the cover to go to the page. It turns out that Murray does indeed embrace a Christian god. Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.

I wonder how Murray decided that Christianity was the “right” religion. In the article above he doesn’t especially tout Christianity, and in fact says that most people’s view of Christianity don’t appeal to him. Is he a Christian pantheist? Is Jesus everywhere, too: in blades of grass, rocks, and sparrows’ wings? In the article, though, Murray seems to reject simple Christianity:

The New Testament’s verbal imagery of God as a father and Jesus sitting at God’s right hand reinforces the anthropomorphic view of God. That image has been reinforced still further by Christian art—think of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel depiction of God as a formidable old man with flowing hair, touching Adam’s finger.

None of that had ever made sense to me.

Voilà: the new book:

The Free Press touts faith again

October 13, 2025 • 11:35 am

On October 9 I highlighted a Free Press piece called “How intellectuals found God,” which I now see is part of a series of pieces on that site touting the benefits of religion.  One of the intellectuals highlighted was Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer who found the “right” religion—Romanian Orthodox Christianity—after going through a long search to fill the God-shaped hole in his being. He had previously investigated Zen Buddhism and even Wicca before he was baptized as a Christian. He’s quoted in the Free Press explaining his conversion to Peter Savodnik:

When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”

“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”

“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Now, in this new piece (Sept. 13), also in The Free Press, Kingsnorth himself dilates on his choice, excoriating the West for embracing materialism and for filling the “God-shaped hole” (henceforth GSH) with dollars (capitalism) rather than the divine. He sees a decline in our internal well being and morality since 1500, leading one to believe that he’s an opponent of progress.

I’m not going to take this apart as I suspect somebody else will; I want only to give some quotes from the article itself showing the recent trend to embrace Christianity (why not Judaism?) as a personal palliative.

As the Free Press notes, this is a book excerpt:

From AGAINST THE MACHINE: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth, published by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Paul Kingsnorth.

 

 

Headers are mine, while Kingsnorth’s words are indented:

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.  Clearly for Kingsnorth, Genesis is a very serious metaphor for the downfall of humanity:

So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked, and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions; the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly now here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. We can never go home again. We fall into disintegration and out of the garden forever. Armed angels are set at the gates. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.

The earth is our home now.This earth is a broken version of the garden, of our original integration with creator and creation. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. There is war and dominion and misery.

There is beauty and love and friendship too, but all of it ends in death. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. We forget the creator and worship ourselves.

. . .The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love, and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

This raises two questions.  How does Kingsnorth know there’s a god? Presumably he’d say, as he did in the earlier piece, that he gets God vibes:

And how does he know that Christianity is the right religion—the true faith that must be embraced to earn everlasting life( “we have to go through the cross)?  I don’t know the answer, but if you have to go through the cross, most of the people on earth are doomed to hell.

Our civilization has gone downhill for the last 500 years.  In this Kingsnorth is truly anti-Whiggish, and presumably a bitter enemy of Pinker, who maintains that in nearly all ways—well-being, health, morality, reduced violence, etc.—we are better off now than in 1500. Or would Kingsnorth prefer to live in, say, 1350. I’d seriously like to know the answer:

Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation, and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.

Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.

If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among those ruins, and you have been all your life. Many of them are still beautiful—intact cathedrals, Bach concertos—but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called “Christendom,” a 1,500-year civilization into which this particular sacred story seeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in its image.

This clearly implies that the “good” Christian culture disappeared about 500 years ago.

But wait! There’s more!:

Post-Enlightenment “morality” was no substitute for a higher purpose. If the correct path for society or the individual is based on nothing more than that individual’s personal judgement, then who or what is to be the final arbiter? Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it—without, in other words, a sacred order—society will fall into emotivism, relativism, and ultimately disintegration. This was MacIntyre’s prediction. It’s starting to look like he was spot-on.

Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu, or Taoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

This is a puffball; although atheistic societies, like those in northern Europe, don’t seem to be bereft of meaning and purpose, Kingsnorth can always say that, well, those societies are behaving using the legacy of Christianity. But given that there is substantial overlap between humanism and Christianity, that is not convincing. Plus, how, exactly, does Kingsnorth (or we, for that matter) decide what God’s “instructions” are?

There is no social unity or morality in the West without Christianity.

In his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War II, the medieval historian Christopher Dawson explained it like this:

There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity. . . . Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.

Your personal attitude to that “living faith” is beside the point here. So, come to that, is the entirely legitimate question of whether “Christendom” was even Christian much of the time. The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: Everything will be up for grabs.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued in his classic work, After Virtue, that the very notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no telos, or higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything. MacIntyre’s favored teacher was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and his prediction of its ultimate failure were based on a clear-sighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom, and of the partial, empty, and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it.

If you think that there is no source of virtue or morality without religion, you’re wrong.  You don’t have to rely on God’s dictates (the absolute WORST way to determine what’s good), but on reason and humanism. After all, the Islamic or Hindu notions of virtue are very different from those of Christianity.  And all of them differ from secular humanistic morality.  We haven’t abandoned the notion of virtue; we’ve simply abandoned the dumb notion  (whose dumbness was first realized by Plato), that virtue comes from obeying what we think God wants. Islam generally regards the murder of apostates, atheists, or nonbelievers as a sin worthy of death. Is that the kind of religious “virtue” we want? I won’t go into the numerous dictates in the Bible that we now see as immoral (God ordering the murder of entire non-Israelite tribes, for example), but I’d like to see Kingsnorth discuss them. But I am sorry to say that I won’t be reading his book; this critique is based solely on the Free Press article.

Materialism, money, and capitalism have brought society so low that we’re doomed. We have no source of morality and everything is permissible. Shades of Dostoevsky!:

In the West, the final taboos are falling like ninepins, and from all across the cultural spectrum the effects are being felt.

If you’re broadly socially conservative, the questions are coming at you in a rolling barrage. Why should a man not marry a man? Why should a man not become a woman? Why should a child not have three fathers, or be born from a uterus transplanted into a man’s body? Why should the state not assist people to commit suicide?

Things are not much better, though, for those on the left who are concerned about the destructive inequalities created by the modern economy. “Woe to you who are rich,” said Jesus, in one of many blasts against wealth and power in the Gospels. “Greed is a sin against God,” wrote Thomas Aquinas. Not anymore. Now our economy runs on greed, and it laughs in the face of any foolish and unrealistic romantic who rejects it. The shaky binding straps with which medieval Christendom kept the traders, the merchants, and the urban bourgeoisie tied down have long since broken, leaving us with no better argument against rampant greed and inequality than against total sexual license or the remaking of the human body itself.

If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalize away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name—if that.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? The end of the taboos doesn’t bring about some abstract “freedom”; it strips a culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but once the formal architecture is gone too, there is an empty space waiting to be filled—and nature abhors a vacuum.

. . . This has been the terrible irony of the age of reason, and of the liberal and leftist theories and revolutions which resulted from it. From 1789 to 1968, every one of them ultimately failed, but in destroying the old world and its sacred order, they cleared a space for money culture to move in and commodify the ruins.

. . . We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.

From this we can discern that Kingsnorth thinks that gay marriage and assisted suicide are wrong, and perhaps transgenderism as well.  As for a child having three fathers, well, that’s not yet possible; we’ll deal with that issue when it becomes a possibility. The man is not only an Orthodox Christian, but akin to a fundamentalist Southern Baptist.

Kingsnorth winds up harping again on the GSH, which apparently used to be filled until about 1500, but now is stuffed with only money, and we lack all meaning and purpose since we abandoned Jesus:

What if we are in that passage now? It would explain the strange, tense, shattering, and frustrating tenor of the times. It would start, too, to get to the heart of what we are lacking, for we modern creatures are people with everything and nothing all at once. We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.

You may remember that in 2018 I asked readers what gave their lives meaning and purpose, and although we have a biased sample of nonbelievers here, people confected meaning and purpose post facto: they did what they found gratifying, and then said that was their meaning and purpose. Presumably Kingsnorth would hate that because it doesn’t involve Jesus.

But the big question here is why did the Free Press once again publish a piece saying that the West has lost its way, and we need to reclaim religion to get back on the tracks?  This may be part of a greater phenomenon connected with social discord in the last few decades, but whatever is happening, it seems to be a trend.

 

The Free Press touts God again, celebrating some intellectuals who have embraced Christianity

October 9, 2025 • 10:30 am

Something strange is happening to the mainstream media in the U.S.  Supposedly objective, its venues now spend a good bit of their time touting something for which there is no evidence: God.  The New York Times publishes excerpts of Ross Douthat’s recent book: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (the last word should really be “Christian”), the Free Press does the same, adding other op-ed pieces on the “God-shaped hole” that supposedly is a lacuna in our brain that deprives us of meaning, and everywhere I look there’s jubilation at an apparent (but not real) revival of religion in the U.S.

Although statistics show religion declining everywhere in the West (save in small enclaves inhabited by Muslims), these articles collect anecdotes about former atheists who have, by finding God, found personal happiness and salvation.  They are, I think, a reflection of how the MSM thinks the present malaise in the West can be cured.  War is everywhere, Trump seems to be ruining American democracy, people don’t feel that they’re doing well economically, and, ironically, in a lot of the West (especially Europe) the “decline” of the West seems to be caused by religion itself: the immigration of Muslims who don’t assimilate into Western culture and, it seems, often want to destroy it.  But for all these ills Christianity (and sometimes Judaism) is said to be the palliative. This is, the MSM thinks, “good news.”

These articles, like the new one below from The Free Press (expect CBS to become more religious) tend to follow the same format, to wit:

  1. They begin with an anecdote about how a nonbeliever found God and that brought him or her to a place of peace and happiness.
  2. The articles then recount the sad decline of belief (mostly Christianity) in the West
  3. They suggest the thesis that all people have the damn “God-shaped hole” in their hearts, meaning that we NEED religion to give our lives meaning and purpose. Apparently no other belief system, including humanism, can caulk that hole.
  4. They then recount a number of stories of other people who gave up atheism to find God.
  5. Throughout the article, the tacit assumption (as in the piece below) is that belief in God is not merely a convenience to improve your life, but is based on facts, including Biblical stories about Jesus, the Resurrection, and so on. This is more than what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief”: the idea that if we can just get people to believe, even if we don’t ourselves, society will be better. But, as in this piece, the people they highlight really do seem to believe not just in God but the factual assertions of their faith, even if many of us, like me, can’t force ourselves to base our lives on something we consider unlikely or nonexistent.
  6. Somewhere in the article there’s invariably a slur on Richard Dawkins, who is seen as the Antichrist who keeps the God-shaped hole open. In reality, Dawkins, like the rest of us, doesn’t have that hole, and doesn’t think we need to find a superstition to complete our lives.
  7. The articles finish with a ringing claim that if we could just believe, our lives would have meaning, morality would improve (because, after all, what reason is there to be moral without God?), and the whole world would be better off.

It’s all bullpucky, of course, but it’s interesting to see the proliferation of similar articles on our God-shaped hole, and how nothing but Abrahamic religion can fill it. Below, for example, is a Facebook meme from the Nativity Lutheran Church of Alexandria, Virginia.

The MSM’s tilt towards religion is made clearer when you see that it’s not objective: that is, you don’t read articles on the advantages of atheism, or even the reasons why people give up faith to become nonbelievers. (More of these people exist than do atheists who embrace faith.)

And so we have this new Free Press article from Peter Savodnik, identified as “senior editor at The Free Press. Previously, he wrote for Vanity Fair as well as GQ, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired, and other publications, reporting from the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Asia, and across the United States.” Click to read, or find the article archived for free here.

Here are the requisite components (the bolded headings are mine, while indented bits are from the article):

1. The opening anecdote. It tells of Matthew Crawford, a nonbeliever, who was “always searching” because he had that God-shaped hole (henceforth, GSH).  He then gave a talk in a church in Canada and met a lovely woman, Marilyn Simon who was religious. The rest is history:

Suddenly, in this lovely, faraway church—festooned with stained-glass windows and mahogany pews and a baby grand piano and crosses dedicated to the memory of those congregants killed in the world wars—Crawford could glimpse a new future. One that included Simon. And, maybe, God.

Finally, late last year, Crawford converted to the Anglican Church. Then, in June, Crawford and Simon were married at Saint Margaret’s.

“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.” He meant God, but he also seemed to be talking about his wife.

Indeed!

2. Describing the phenomenon of people embracing faith. I’m particularly distressed that Jon Haidt—brought up in a Jewish family but is now an atheist—still mentions the damn GSH.  If we all have it, why hasn’t he filled his?

But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

3. Why you can’t have a good society without belief.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

These people have apparently not grasped the concept of humanism: the belief in helping our fellow H. sapiens using not religious principles or superstition, but reason and science. Steve Pinker’s books, especially Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of our Nature,  he argues convincingly that society’s improvements over the last few hundred years have been impeded by religion and facilitated by science and reason. Indeed, the subtitle of the first book is “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”  It’s well known that the most dysfunctional societies are also the most religious, and that people tend to turn to God only when their societies can’t afford them sufficient well being. (See my arguments in my 2012 “presidential paper” in Evolution. The president of the Society for the Study of Evolution gets to write one paper for the journal, and this was mine. But believe me, I had trouble getting it past the reviewers since I said that religion held back progress, with one of those signs of progress being acceptance of the truth of evolution.)

And as I pointed out, you don’t need God to be moral unless you think there’s a Big Nun in the Sky, waiting to rap your knuckles when you sin. Plenty of moral philosophers (Plato, Kant, Spinoza, Socrates, Rawls, Grayling, Russell, etc. etc. etc.) have constructed moral systems based on humanism and reason.

4. But religion is declining!

The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022. By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States. A majority will comprise people of other faiths and, to a much greater extent, “nones,” meaning those who have no faith at all.

There’s no doubt about this, though some obtuse miscreants like to point out blips in the trend over centuries of declining belief in God. In the Middle Ages, everyone was a Christian in Europe. Now, in places like Sweden and Denmark, you’d be hard pressed to find a real believer. And this trend is also true in America, as the excerpt above notes.

5. Here comes the “evidence”: stories of people who embraced faith. 

Now, 17 years after the four horsemen first met, Hitchens is dead. So is Dennett. Harris remains an atheist. “I don’t know if it’s a real trend,” Harris told me in an email about our current religious awakening. “Call me when people start believing in Poseidon.”

I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that the tech geniuses and media personalities and celebrities who once embodied the new atheism are rethinking what we lose when we lose religion.

I’ll just summarize the people cited by Savodnik to show there’s a GSH in us all

5a. Russell Brand

In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”

Could that figure be. . .  God?  Or Jesus? (They’re really the same thing, of course.)  Brand is notoriously malleable, so while I will believe him, I don’t see that “beckoning figure.”

5b. Peter Thiel

In May, tech mogul Peter Thiel, who had espoused a vague spirituality and had been friends with the late French philosopher and religious thinker René Girard, came down unequivocally on the side of God. “God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

How does Thiel know about this “plan”? It’s curious that everyone who seems to know enough about God to use him to plug that GSH nevertheless starts scratching their heads when asked why God lets good people (often innocent children) suffer horrible deaths. Ignorance kicks in when a phenomenon doesn’t comport with the Abrahamic God. (The article is almost solely about people who embrace Christianity, so we’ll consider that the default option,.)

5c. Elon Musk

Then in July, Elon Musk—the former “atheist hero,” the king of electric vehicles and space exploration, the champion of free expression—sat down with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has studied the intersection of religion and ideology, to discuss God. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

5d. Jordan Peterson (of course). 

hen, last month, Peterson’s book We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine was published. Peterson had always avoided saying whether he believed in a higher power. Now, sporting a jacket emblazoned with the Calvary cross, he was pushing back against the new atheists. “I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting the book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

More word salad from Peterson.  When asked for evidence for his God, Peterson always waffles, regurgitating a completely opaque set of words.

5e. Paul Kingsnorth. His story is long, invoking a nature-shaped hole, a Zen-Buddhist shaped hole, and, finally, he filled his GSH with a true faith: Romanian Orthodoxy. I’ll spare you the details and cut to the chase:

When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”

“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”

“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Yes, and that is what “faith” is: an irrational choice. Pity that the term “a man of faith” is seen as praise rather than denigration. When someone admits that their choice, on which they base a huge portion of their existence, isn’t based on reason or evidence (see Andrew Sullivan below), i tend to think less of them. Not as friends, of course, as I have religious friends, but I secretly take their ability to reason and accept evidence down a notch

5f. Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Hirsi Ali, who rejected Islam and was an atheist for a long time, embraced Christianity after a long period of depression, during  which she tried to fill the GSH with drinking. If religion relieved her depression, who am I to say that she should reject it? She might otherwise be dead, and that would be bad for all of us. Nevertheless, as Richard Dawkins has said (to much opprobrium), her decision was not based on evidence but on despair. (See addendum at bottom.)

Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”

In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?

Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”

In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”

The essay triggered an avalanche of conversations in the independent media universe—including a book, which she is now working on, and a debate, in June, between Hirsi Ali and Dawkins in which she argued that Christianity is a bulwark against “the cult of power, Islamism.” The debate felt like a kind of bookend to the four horsemen meeting in Hitchens’s apartment in 2007.

“It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.

Because I admire Hirsi Ali so much, I’m not going to rag on her.  And given that her religion staved off depression, it’s maladaptive to try to talk her out of it. I’m skipping over a lot of other anecdotes her to get to one more believer.

5g. Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is a semi-pious Catholic, and an incisive thinker about most things—with religion being a notable exception. Get a load of this:

The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end?

Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary,” Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. “Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything.”

“The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings,” Sullivan said. “It allows us to express our faith through an act.”

Translation: “The genius of ritual is that you don’t have to give reasons for what you believe, or for why you’re a Catholic rather than a Jew.” It’s all explained because he likes wafers better than latkes.  Seriously, though, expressing faith is not the same thing as understanding why you embrace a particular faith.

6. The obligatory smear of Dawkins.  Yes, of course it’s there: he’s not depicted in a flattering light. Further, his remark that he is a “cultural Christian” has given believers both grounds to say he’s religious and also to denigrate him for having a bit of faith. That’s unfair, for he’s just describing a tribe, the same way that I say I’m a cultural Jew. I don’t believe in God or any truth claims of Judaism.  I just like being a member of a group that not only doesn’t proselytize, but has a number of members who are overachievers. From the article:

When we spoke—via Zoom, Dawkins in a brightly lit room at home in Oxford, England—he was a tad irritable. He was in a navy blazer, and there was a wall of books behind him, and he seemed a little exasperated with all the God talk.

Dawkins had created a furor when, in the midst of the often violent, pro-Hamas demonstrations in London and New York and elsewhere, he appeared on a British radio program and called himself a “cultural Christian.” He went on to say, “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”

“I rather regret” having said all that now, he told me.

. . . .The tendency you’re talking about,” he told me, alluding to Hirsi Ali, “is, I think, mostly people who don’t necessarily believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin, or rose from the dead, but nevertheless think that Christianity is a good thing, that Christianity would benefit the world if more people believed it, that Christianity might be the sort of basis for a lot of what’s good about Western civilization.”

I think Hirsi Ali does believe those tenets of Christianity, but it’s also true that she thinks that belief in Christianity will stave off barbarism (instantiated in Islam) in Western society.  I think relief of depression is a better reason for belief than is the supposedly salubrious effects of Christianity in saving Western civilization. What will save Western civilization is an adherence to secular Western values of democracy, reason, and humanism. Why certain parts of Europe are collapsing is not because of a lack of adherence to Christianity. It’s because people are afraid to stand up for democracy and against irrationality, superstition, and authoritarianism. But I’m digressing: a bit more:

And yet, Dawkins did admit he was worried about losing the world that had been bequeathed to us by Christianity. “If we substituted any alternative religion,” he said in his April interview, “that would be truly dreadful.”

It wasn’t just about the danger of what was coming. It was about what we were losing, or might lose.

“Some of the greatest music ever written is church music, music inspired by Christianity,” he told me, echoing Roger Scruton. J.S. Bach would never have composed his Mass in B Minor—with all those violins, cellos, sopranos, and tenors weaving together, pointing us toward the heavens—without the divine, he said. Nor would Dostoevsky, as Paul Kingsnorth said, have written The Brothers Karamazov had he not been a believer. Had the world not been changed in countless unbelievable ways by that art? Had that art not changed us?

When I mentioned Dawkins’s distinction between cultural and theological Christianity to Kingsnorth, he said he thought Dawkins was deliberately sidestepping a deeper conversation about the nature of belief.

“As far as he’s concerned, it’s just chemicals in the brain,” Kingsnorth said of Dawkins. “But the reason religion persists is people keep having experiences of God, and Dawkins doesn’t seem to want to deal with that.”

We’ve recently discussed the “artistic advantages” of Christianity, and readers weren’t impressed by them. And that’s not why I’m a cultural Jew.  As far as Kingsnorth is concerned, yes, religion is indeed the result of chemicals (and neurons) in the brain. That is what underlies “experiences of God”, which of course can well be delusions or hallucinations. And the reason religion is declining is because people are realizing that “experiences of God” are not evidence, and while there should be evidence of God, there isn’t any. Why do we lack evidence now when the Bible tells us it was ubiquitous 2 millennia ago? What happened? Why did God decide to start playing hide and seek (actually, just “hide”)?

7. The Closing: Faith is Good! And it’s increasing!

“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger,” [Jordan] Hall said. “It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”

He meant plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. “The horrifying brokenness of people.”

This brokenness may explain why, for the first time in American history, young men—who have been especially hard hit by the opioid crisis, and are getting fewer college degrees, and finding it harder than ever to land a job—are more religious than young women. A survey of Orthodox churches in the United States, for example, reported a 78 percent rise in converts from 2019 to 2022, with the new male believers outnumbering the female.

It may also explain why so many young people are pushing back against the idea that religion is unfashionable. One of the largest Christian revivals in U.S. history, which happened in 2023, in Wilmore, Kentucky, was led almost entirely by young people. The Latin Catholic Mass is making a return, partly driven by young parishioners craving a greater sense of tradition and ritual. Young Catholic women are donning veils to express their devotion.

. . .But the fact of our existence is a testament to God’s love for us, he said. “We are always wanted,” Father Jonah said. “We are always loved. This is the most important thing. God is not a mindfulness hack or a wellness exercise. It’s not—‘I found this ethical system that gets results, and therefore, I will choose it.’ It’s not a choice. It’s an encounter with an actual, personal love.”

Hall acknowledged that accessing that love, incorporating it into one’s life, was a process—shedding the rhythms and mores of secular society, burrowing deep into oneself. “You’re not going to solve anything if you don’t go down deeper,” he told me. “That’s where the heart of the crisis lies.”

No, the fact of our existence is a testament to materialistic evolution: the same thing that allows malaria to kill hundreds of thousands of babies and for cancers to grow in the brains of infants. It’s the same thing that kills millions of people in earthquakes and floods.  The “we are always loved” stuff doesn’t ring true with those people, and is simply made up by humans.  For if God is loving, he has a strange way of expressing it, like a man who is usually okay but occasionally beats his wife.

It is shedding religion, not shedding secular values, that has led to the increase in our well-being, for, as Steve Pinker argues, our progress is nearly always dependent on resisting religious values in favor of humanistic ones.

**********************************

UPDATE: In the last hour Richard Dawkins has posted a very apposite piece on his website The Poetry of Reality. Click to read it (I don’t know if you need a subscription, as I have one):

An except:

Jordan Peterson, an even more famous soothsayer of the so-called Christian revival, not only ignores facts, he openly disdains them. Drunk on symbolism, he seems sincerely not to care whether something is factually true or not. In a filmed conversation, I asked him point-blank, “Did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus? That’s a factual question.” After a long pause in which Peterson declined to answer, I added, “It’s not a value question.” The moderator, Alex O’Connor, an extremely intelligent young man who read Theology at Oxford, then chimed in: “You must understand what you’re being asked here.” And he continued to cross-question Peterson, trying in every possible way to get him to answer the simple factual question. Did Jesus have a human father or no? Time and again, Peterson made it abundantly clear that he has not the slightest interest in whether such propositions are factually true or not, Well, I suppose that’s his privilege, just as it’s my privilege to hate beetroot. But some of us think factual questions matter. To put it mildly, scientists do, lawyers do, police officers do, journalists do, historians do (at least they damn well should care) and I strongly suspect you do too.

Earlier this year, a dear friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity. We then had a public discussion in New York, during which her sincerity shone like a beacon. She believed that Christianity had saved her from a severe bout of depression. I could sympathize with that, and the audience clearly did. But I still pressed her with my one fundamental question. “IS IT TRUE?” Not, “Is it true that it saved you from depression?” It surely was true in her case. Not, “Does Christianity do good in the world?” Maybe it does. Not, “Would it be a good thing if most people were Chistian?” Maybe it would. The latter two questions are value questions, not factual questions at all.

I meant none of those things. I meant, “Do you think the truth claims of Christianity are valid? Is it factually true that the universe was designed by a supernatural intelligence, God? Is it true that Jesus was born of a virgin? Is it true that he rose from the dead? Is it true that people have a soul that can survive bodily death?” There are three respectable answers to any of these questions. “Yes (I think the evidence supports a yes answer).” “No (I think the evidence supports a no answer).” “I don’t know (not enough evidence).” Ayaan’s answer was, “I choose to believe.” I don’t think believing is something you can choose to do. What do you think?

What would Western art have been like without religion?

September 19, 2025 • 11:15 am

Here’s a quick question.  After the arrival of Christianity in Europe and before the Renaissance, much of the music, painting, sculpture, and architecture produced in the West had a religious subject or was inspired by religion. And yes, I know that there are exceptions (ballads, secular portraits, Dürer’s rabbit, etc.), and I know that much of the religious music was commissioned by sponsors or employers (Bach, etc.). And yes, there were hardly any novels until secularism had taken hold in the Renaissance.  But the great cathedrals, the Last Supper, some of the great sculptures of Michelangelo, and some of the greatest paintings of Leonardo would not exist without religion, whether it was a subject of the art or simply an inspiration for it.

And so my simple question: if religion had not existed at all in the West (I’m not talking about the Middle East or Far East), how would art be different?

Would the greatest artists, sculptors, and composers simply have devoted their talents to depicting or writing music about secular subjects: portraits, scenes of everyday life (e.g., Vermeer), landscapes, and the like.  Maybe we’d have works as great as The Last Supper, The Passion of St. Matthew or the Pietà, but they wouldn’t have Christianity as their subject.

If you say, well, patrons were responsible for great religious art, and the artists simply did their bidding, my response would be: so what? Patrons may have been imbued with religious sentiments, for everyone was a believer, and those patrons simply commissioned art that corresponded to their sentiments. That is still religious art produced because of religion.

One thing I know for sure: we wouldn’t have the great cathedrals of Europe. But would we have other buildings just as beautiful? I don’t think so.

I am not of course saying that religion has been a net benefit to civilization. But perhaps it was for art, at least for a while.

As Richard Dawkins would say, “Discuss”.

Oh, and here’s a great piece of religious art to inspire your answers:

original file by Stanislav Traykov, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

NYT launches column apparently touting religion and spirituality, thin on “nonbelief”

September 15, 2025 • 10:20 am

Is there some reason that progressives are starting to embrace religion? I’ve previously mentioned a number of MSM pieces that basically tout religion: presenting it without criticizing it or saying that its evidential bases are nil. Remember when both the Free Press and the New York Times published excerpts from Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, Ross Douthat’s new book?  This kind of stuff is appearing more often now, and it puzzles me.  Are liberals experiencing the much-discussed “God-shaped hole in their soul”: the lacuna of meaning that supposedly appears when you give up faith? There has been an uptick in American religiosity in the last two years, but it was small and, I thought, temporary. Maybe not. But for sure the press is making a huge megillah about it.

This notice appeared in yesterday’s New York Times email newsletter, announcing that they’re going to have a regular column dealing with “modern religion and spirituality.” And although they say they’ll include “nonbelief” under that rubric, atheism and agnosticism isn’t mentioned any further. No, this will be a column about real religion.

The paper itself (click on headline) announced the column in greater detail. It will be written by Lauren Jackson, a NYT editor. She’s a nonbeliever, which is good to hear, but I’d like to know that she deals with nonbelief when she deals with belief.

Below: quotes from Ms. Jackson’s introduction to the column. (Bolding is mine. except for the “Why are we doing this?” headline.)  It is not at all clear to me what they mean by trying to speak of God in a secular fashion

In the 1940s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a dissident German pastor, wrote hundreds of letters while facing execution inside a Nazi prison. From his small, dank cell, Bonhoeffer asked: “How do we speak in a secular fashion of God?”

The line has both inspired and inflamed theologians in the decades since. It’s also a question that animates this newsletter: The mission of Believing is to speak about the sacred, in all its forms, in a very secular space.

Why are we doing this?

Earlier this year, we published a series of articles about how people experience religion and spirituality now. In response, thousands of you told us you wanted more: You wanted us to expand our reporting on how ancient ideas are appearing in our very modern lives. You wanted a space for both believers and nonbelievers to share their stories. You wanted, above all, for us to take the subject seriously.

Well yes, religion has to be taken seriously. About 81% of Americans believe in God, and, surprisingly, the Barna site says, “According to Barna’s latest data, 66 percent of all U.S. adults say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus that is still important in their life today.” (This is scary given the lack of evidence for a Jesus person who was divine.) But these beliefs motivate much of Americans beliefs (e.g., abortion), politics (the Christianity of the Right), and morality.  So yes, understanding religion is important if you want to understand America. It’s a vital part of our sociology.

That said, it’s also important to realize that most Americans rest their religious beliefs, and the morality that grows from them, on no evidence at all.  They were either brought up to be religious, or had it hammered into them by peers and church before they learned to think for themselves. This means that much of American behavior is based on wish-thinking instead of evidence.

If you think that the clash of ideas in American life produces truth, as intended by the framers of the First Amendment, well, it hasn’t worked with religion. On one side are the vast majority of religious Americans; on the other are the 10% of Americans who are atheist or agnostic, and the approximately 20% that identify as “nones,” i.e., people who don’t necessarily reject God but aren’t affiliated with a church.

I would expect, especially because Lauren Jackson says she’s a nonbeliever, that there would be ample space given to nonbelievers and their writing. But the one mention of nonbelievers above is all we get.  We do get a bit about Jackson’s own nonbelief, but she clearly has that god-shaped hole when she explains who she is below. First, the column’s raison d’etre:

Over the past few months, I’ve heard from so many different readers — MAGA bros, wellness influencers, climate activists, professors, actors and high school students. They all had something in common: seeking a space where they could think about the sacred.

Have a look at that link: it is all readers who have a God-shaped hole and want to believe because they want to belong. And if Jackson really wants to deal with nonbelief, she’s going to have to provide a space where where Americans can “think about the nonexistence of gods.”

Even her own atheism is hedged as she writes. From the intro above:

In reporting on belief, I’ve found that the fastest way to build trust is to share where I’m coming from. So here it is: I was raised a devout Mormon, or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Arkansas. I know how luminous and enchanted life can be when you really believe in something. I also know what it feels like to leave a religion, which I wrote about here and here.

Yes, she’s being rightfully honest, but there was a reason she left Mormonism.  Are we going to hear from other people who aren’t religious, too? And if you look at the two links in the preceding sentence, you see Ms. Jackson showing every evidence of a God-shaped hole. Quotes from the two pieces:

From the first article, called “Americans haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion”:

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

I want. . . I want. .  I want. . .   Well, I want a personal chef and a bottle of 1982 Château Pétrus, but I ain’t gonna get it.

Source.

The second link goes to an article by and about Jackson, called, “She almost went on a Mormon mission. She became a journalist instead.” This is simply an account of how she left Mormonism, and is reportage. But when she explains leaving Mormonism, she neglects one thing: She doesn’t tell us why:

I faced pressure to go on a mission, and I wrestled for years with the decision. At the same time, I won funding to attend a secular university, an opportunity I was too curious to decline. At school, I fell in love — with ideas, my classes, a boy. I found a new reality, inescapable and contradictory to everything I once knew. On that sidewalk in Rwanda, I looked at the missionaries and felt a distance between us for the first time. They were living a life I was slowly leaving.

I am no longer a member of the church. I ultimately chose to spend my college years becoming a journalist, not proselytizing. Still, I maintain an abiding curiosity about belief, one that has animated my reporting. I often see missionaries around the world and wonder how their work is shaping their nascent adulthoods, their hopes and desires. So I spent the last eight months reporting for The New York Times on how missionary work is evolving and influencing the church’s future.

So why did she “choose” to give up Mormonism? We don’t know.  Did she realize that its tenets were wrong, its story, involving the golden plates and a peepstone, ludicrous? We’ll never know. I hope, but don’t think, that she’ll devote substantial time to nonbelievers and why the ‘nones”—I still think a lot of them are atheists—don’t belong to any church.  And of course Europe, particularly the northern parts, are far less religious than Americans. Will she report on nonbelief there, too?

But I digress, for I’m just tired of the MSM constantly focusing on and touting beliefs that aren’t based on evidence but wish-thinking.  At any rate, you can find her first article of the new series clicking on the headline (or find it archived here). It’s about how American are turning to AI on apps to answer questions about religion, quell doubts about their faith, or to act as a sort of electronic father-confessor.

It’s not that enlightening, as it reproduces a lot of conversations people have about belief and God with the bot, and also quotes a few religious detractors who say a bot can’t do the same job as a pastor, which is true.  Here’s one conversation:

Pretty boring, eh? And the AI shows through clearly. Yet many Americans apparently find solace from this kind of algorithmic pap. But as they do it more, the bot will get better as it absorbs more and more answers, with all of them designed to dispel rather than exacerbate doubt. In fact AI therapy has recently been banned in Illinois!

Jackson’s debut is, sadly, a pretty boring article full of boring chats—not a good start to the column.  But as I read these chats, I was reminded of Carl Rogers (1902-1987)—a famous psychologist who jettisoned psychoanalysis to simply become a robot, reflecting back patients’ views and not adding much.  He was basically an AI therapist.

I put a video below of what I see as Rogers’s completely ineffective therapy. But he was famous!

The only advantage of a human acting like a bot is, as you’ll see below, their ability to look at a patient’s behavior and affect, which may give them clues to help them. Unfortunately, Rogers’s “help” was limited to stuff like “I can see that you’re nervous because you’re trembling.” To me, at least, he had little to offer. But Americans think AI has a lot to offer in lubricating their relationship with God. I think that’s unfortunate.

All in all, this is not a good start for the NYT’s new “religion” column.

And, of course, the Free Press is also mentioning God to help us in these troubled times. From their newsletter just this morning:

 

The Sunday Sermon

September 7, 2025 • 2:37 pm

A block away from my office is University Church, which you can tell has liberals in the pews because there are signs all over the outside about how you should love everybody because Jesus did, you should be the light, and other phrases importuning people to behave as good, nondiscriminatory Christians.

According to its website, University Church does have a denomination but also appears to be rather eclectic. After all, it is right at the edge of the University of Chicago, and if you want butts in the pews, you have to be averse to dogma. Their statement:

We belong to both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and United Church of Christ denominations, and much of our community comes from many other traditions as well. No two Sundays are the same here, and below will show you a bit more about who we are and how we go about being a church.

Every week they post the title of the Sunday sermon, which is often something I do not understand. In such cases I call a good friend, one who used to be a Christian believer but has turned atheist. (I take some credit for that.)  He can often explain to me the meaning of sermon titles such as the one I saw today:

Now my first thought about this title was that the phrase “It is what it is” has appeared in the “words and phrases I detest” posts, as it is irritating. In that sense, then, these are words that kill.

But of course it could not mean that.  So I called my friend, read out the title of the sermon, and asked him what it meant. Here is his response

“It means that those people who accept the status quo are murderers”.

That was funny, but must be close to the real meaning of the sermon: it must be a call for change, even if you do not think change is possible.  But what KIND of change?  To find out, one would have to go to the sermon, and I am not prepared to set foot in a temple of mishigass.

I did find out, though, that not only are sermons always based on a bit of scripture, but there is also a cycle of scriptures every week that are the basis of sermons for all churches of a given denomination (sometimes they offer a choice). I did not know that, so I have learned something.

It is what it is.

Ezra Klein interviews Ross Douthat on his Christian religious beliefs (they include angels and demons)

May 6, 2025 • 10:00 am

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.