“If I recall correctly, Bertrand Russell was once asked if there were any conceivable evidence which could lead him to a belief in God. He offered something similar to Cleanthes’s suggestion. He was then asked what he would say if, after dying, he were transported to the presence of God; how would he justify his failure on earth to be a believer? ‘I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!'” (source here)

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All of a sudden Ross Douthat is everywhere, touting his new book  Believe: Why Everyone Should Believe in God.  He wants to make it a best seller, and I’m sure it will be given the number of people still yearning for religion despite its delusional nature.  And, in fact, in his new Free Press article on the book, it’s clear that Douthat wants people to be deluded—or at least wants them to swallow the unevidenced tenets of religion—tenets like a god, Jesus as god’s Alter Ego/son, the Resurrection, and even Heaven and Hell.

The point of this piece is to criticize those people who don’t really accept the full-on Catholicism apparently embraced by Douthat, but rather have embraced what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief”: the notion that while one may not accept religion or its claims oneself, you can still think that religion is good for society as a whole.  We’ve called that the “Little People’s Argument” on this site, because it’s explicitly condescending. And it’s widespread.  I can think right off the bat of several people who appear to embrace belief in belief, including Jordan Peterson and the late Michael Ruse.

Here is the target of Douthat’s lucubrations: those who “convert for some of the wrong reasons” (i.e., who convert, or profess religion, simply because doing so is seen as good for society):

As the author of a new book urging religious belief on, well, everybody, some of these critiques get my hackles up. In writingBelieve: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which came out this past week, one of my assumptions was that there are a great many people in our culture who hover on the threshold of religion, and they need both reassurance that faith can be reasonable and a friendly but sharp-elbowed shove. But the idea that there exists some kind of ideal version of this process, some perfectly high-minded religious conversion unmediated by secondary influences, political inclinations, tribal loyalties—well, maybe among the greatest saints, but ordinary mortals are always likely to convert for some of the wrong reasons as well as some of the ideal ones.

And what are the wrong reasons? Douthat explains below, getting in a hamhanded swipe at Dawkins, who of course neither believes in the tenets of religion nor thinks religion is a net good, though he is glad he lives in a society that evolved from an earlier Christian one rather than from a Muslim one:

There is, however, a different kind of relationship to religion that does deserve critique. This is the category of person who likes religious ideas when other people believe in them, who wants religion to exist for its civilization-shaping qualities without personally accepting any of its impositions, who draws pleasure from what the late Richard John Neuhaus called “regretful unbelief,” who only really believes in belief.

This is a special temptation for the intellectual. Think of the sociologist who has a thousand data points proving the advantages of joining and belonging and practicing a faith tradition, and an indifferent attitude to the tradition’s truth. The psychologist who stands ready with a thousand fascinating mythic readings of the Old or New Testament but dances away whenever he’s challenged about whether the events in question actually took place. The self-proclaimed “cultural Christian,” whether of the Elon Musk or the Richard Dawkins school, who loves some aspect of the Western inheritance and fears some dark post-Western future—but not enough to actually embrace the West’s metaphysical foundations. The political philosopher with many religious friends and allies in front of whom he would never explicitly use the term “noble lie,” even though you know he’s thinking it.

This tendency is especially suited to eras like our own, when the pendulum has swung away from militant atheism and toward some recognition that religion might be useful for society after all, though it takes somewhat different forms on the right and on the left.

Such people are, says Douthat, “mediocre converts” because they won’t nom the whole hog along with its belief in demons, Gods with supernatural powers, messiahs, and an afterlife either floating on a cloud or burning in eternal flames. And yes, it’s clear that Douthat swallows this stuff:

But I come not just to criticize this tendency, to poke gently at any figure you might recognize in the sketches just above. Some of the critique has to be aimed at the religious as well, for not pushing hard enough against this spirit, not arguing more directly with friends and allies who occupy this space.

We (the religious) like being liked, we appreciate being appreciated, and belief-in-belief provides a useful language to translate between the strangeness of some of our convictions and the world of secular priorities and routines. To talk about faith’s benefits rather than its truth claims. To promise therapeutic advantages when talk of heaven seems embarrassing. To remain in the natural and material and psychological because that way you don’t lose anyone by mentioning the Devil.

All while telling ourselves, of course, that belief-in-belief is one of the paths to real conversion. As, indeed, it quite often is—but only if you don’t make the position feel too comfortable, too much like a well-appointed destination, rather than a station on the way.

Note the reference to the Devil and heaven, which Douthat clearly embrace. What are the evidence for these? Nothing but what’s in the Bible, which of course brings us to the quote that opens this post.  Douthat is willing to bet his whole existence in the claims of a book that’s clearly fictional. The only reason he’s a Catholic is because a.) he sees no way that human reason alone could comprehend the universe without the help of a god and b.) Jesus appeals to him more than does Mohammad or Krishna. (See my posts here, here and here.).  That’s pretty much it.

We all know that much of the Bible is fiction (there was no census that got Jesus from Bethlehem to Nazareth, there was no Exodus nor a pack of Jews wandering in the desert for decades, no record of the dead rising from the grave after the crucifixion and Resurrection, nor even any non-Biblical evidence for a Resurrection. So what makes Douthat so sure that the miracles of Jesus really happened, or that there really is a heaven or hell? Why are miracles so thin on the ground these days when they were ubiquitous when Jesus lived? Why doesn’t God simply show Himself to us if he wants us to believe in Him.

It’s all pure wish-thinking. What he really has is indeed belief in belief, but a form that applies to himself rather than society.  That’s the only way I can explain why he buys this pabulum  and, in this new piece, tries to force it down our throats. Bolding below is mine:

Having spent 15 years as a religious columnist for an audience that includes a great many nonbelievers, I am as guilty of this kind of incomplete evangelization as any other writer. But my new book is a deliberate attempt to leave this kind of halfway argument behind, and to persuade readers to accept religious ideas on their own terms—to transcend the merely sociological and talk directly about why there’s probably a real God with actual demands and expectations, a real supernatural realm that plays some role in human life and history, and yes, a real heaven and a risk of hell.

One of the liberating things about the stranger world we find ourselves in today, the weirder timeline of plagues and populism, psychedelic encounters and AI voices in the air, is that it feels more reasonable to be straightforward in religious argument—to say that of course belief is good for all manner of secondary reasons, but the primary reason is that the core claims of religion are not a fiction, noble or otherwise, but quite probably just the truth. And in that spirit to bless—with whatever warnings and admonitions—the unruly neophyte, the sinful half-believer, and the slightly embarrassing convert.

“Quite probably the truth”! What are his priors? But which religion has the truest core claims? Catholicism, of course, but Douthat doesn’t given us a reason why.  Indeed, he seems to disdain reason in favor of emotion and revelation, the last refuges of the intellectual scoundrel. I needn’t go further: just read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.

Finally, for people like me who need evidence to embrace a new proposition, what can Douthat say to make me believe things for which there is no evidence—indeed, things like Hell that I find inherently repulsive?  And the biggest question is why the NYT and the Free Press let a man proselytize in its pages about beliefs that lack evidence.  Why don’t they also add ringing defenses of Scientology with its tenets about Xenu:

Xenu (/ˈziːnuː/ ZEE-noo), also called Xemu, is a figure in the Church of Scientology‘s secret “Advanced Technology”, a sacred and esoteric teaching. According to the “Technology”, Xenu was the extraterrestrial ruler of a “Galactic Confederacy” who brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as “Teegeeack”) in DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.

Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But it is no more believable than the Bible. The only reason we mock Scientology is that we were alive when it was made up.

Four days ago I presented NYT columnist Ross Douthat’s favorite argument for God’s existence. (Douthat is a pious Catholic.) That argument turned out to be pretty lame: it was the claim that “the universe was intelligible and we can use reason to understand it.” On top of that sundae, he placed the cherry of “also, humans can go far beyond this: they can do stuff like playing chess or the piano—things we couldn’t possibly have evolved to do.” (I am giving my characterizations here, not his quotes.)

If you have two neurons to rub together, and know something about evolution, you can easily see why this argument is not convincing evidence for a deity, much less the Catholic deity. Nor is it evidence for the existence of an afterlife, a crucial claim that bears on Douthat’s latest column, one that lays out what he sees as the best argument against the existence of God. That argument is what I’ve called the “Achilles heel of theism”: the existence of physical evil that inflicts suffering and/or death on undeserving (“innocent”) people.

The previous column was an excerpt from his new book, Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and I’m sure the “evil” issue is also an important one in his book. But this column doesn’t say it’s an excerpt, so it’s not self-plagiarism. Nevertheless, I find Douthat’s reasoning still pretty weak, for he gives five lame arguments why we should dismiss the existence of evil as a telling argument against God.

Douthat is turning into the C. S. Lewis for Generation X, someone who proffers superficially appealing but intellectually weak arguments simply to buttress the longings of those who want there to be a God.  I think the NYT itself is catering to this slice of society, for it’s increasingly touting religion to its readers. Do you agree? And if you do, why would the NYT be doing this?

You can read Douthat’s arguments by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can find the full article archived here:

Douthat begins by again dismissing naturalism as strong evidence against a god:

The most prominent argument that tries to actually establish God’s nonexistence is the case for naturalism, the argument that our world is fundamentally reducible to its material components and untouched in its origins by any kind of conscious intention or design. But unfortunately, no version of the case for naturalism or reductionism is especially strong.

Well, I’d say that two things do strengthen “the case for naturalism.” The first is that the laws of physics appear to apply everywhere in the universe, and quantum mechanics predicts what we see to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. There is no “god parameter” in these laws; they are perfectly naturalistic. (I suppose Douthat would respond that our ability to discern the laws of physics is itself evidence for God.)

Second, even in our own everyday life, the known laws of physics seem to account for everything without anything major missing. I won’t go into this; just read Sean Carroll’s two pieces,  “The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood” and “Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood.” Carroll is not maintaining that we understand everything about physics (e.g., black energy); his thesis is this:

Obviously there are plenty of things we don’t understand. We don’t know how to quantize gravity, or what the dark matter is, or what breaks electroweak symmetry. But we don’t need to know any of those things to account for the world that is immediately apparent to us. We certainly don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world — we don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, or for that matter human consciousness, or a cure for cancer, or predicting the weather, or how best to regulate our financial system. But these are manifestations of the underlying laws, not signs that our understanding of the laws are incomplete. Nobody thinks we’re going to have to invent new elementary particles or forces in order to understand high-T_c superconductivity, much less predicting the weather.

But I digress, but so did Douthat, who says that “the anti-reductionist argument” (against god) “clearly wins out.” Perhaps in his mind it does, but he’s hardly unbiased!

Douthat then specifies the argument from evil that he finds the most telling argument against God, but for the rest of the article he manages to argue that it’s not very telling:

So instead of talking about an argument for disbelief that I struggle to take seriously, I’m going to talk about an argument that clearly persuades a lot of people not to have religious faith and does have a form of empirical evidence on its side. That’s the argument from evil, the case that there simply can’t be a creator — or at least not a beneficent one — because the world is too laden with suffering and woe.

He then, like C. S. Lewis, hastens to reprise what he just said: that this is an argument against a particular kind of god, one that is beneficent or omnbeneficent. And that god, of course, is the Abrahamic God, including Douthat’s. So if God is kindly and all-good, why does he let little children die of leukemia, or get other diseases that cause immense suffering, not to mention the same suffering in innocent adults (or are they all sinners?).  And why do tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes kill millions of people, many of whom don’t deserve to die regardless of your criteria for whether someone is a “good person”.

Douthat responds with some answers that I’ve put under headings I invented. His responses rest largely on his claim that we don’t know that there is too much suffering.

We don’t know that there’s too much suffering!

The other interesting point about this argument is that while its core evidence is empirical, in the sense that terrible forms of suffering obviously exist and can be extensively enumerated, its power fundamentally rests on an intuition about just how much suffering is too much. By this I mean that many people who emphasize the problem of evil would concede that a good God might allow some form of pain and suffering within a material creation for various good reasons. Their claim, typically, is that our world experiences not just suffering but a surfeit of suffering, in forms that are so cruel and unusual (whether the example is on the scale of the Holocaust or just the torture of a single child) as to exceed anything that an omnipotent benevolence could allow.’

Indeed, various apologists have countered the Argument from Suffering by saying that suffering is an inevitable concomitant of the kind of world that God would want to create, presumably the best of all possible worlds. (Unless, that is, he’s created the world as a theater for his own amusement.) Suffering, they say, is an inevitable byproduct of free will, which we must have because to get to Heaven we must freely choose Jesus as our savior.  Putting determinism aside (while accepting its truth), this is not a satisfactory answer. God knows already (as do the laws of physics) whether we’ll choose Jesus, and he could make us all choose Jesus while still thinking that it really was a free choice. (It’s not free if God knows it in advance!)  Besides, how does a kid with a terrible, fatal disease result from free will? Free will for cancer cells?  And what about other non-moral “physical evils” like earthquakes?

Well, theologians have worked that one out, too. To have a viable planet, they say, we have to have tectonic plates, whose shifting results in earthquakes and other sources of mortality.  But if God was omnipotent, he could have created such a world!  Here we see another dumb argument, but theologians are paid to make such arguments, not to find the truth.

Finally, I see “too much suffering” as is “any more suffering than is required by God’s plan”. But how do we judge that? Even if everything is made right on Judgment Day, with the kids who die young automatically going to Heaven (this is another inane theological response), there was more suffering than necessarily to achieve that end. Kids could die painlessly! I say that any suffering at all that cannot be explained by human reason is too much suffering, and if Douthat responds, “well, we don’t know God’s plan,” I would say, “Well, you don’t seem to know much about God. How do you know that he’s benevolent and that there’s a Heaven?”  And here I must stop to recount a passage from Hitchens’s book attacking Mother Theresa: The Missionary Position:

Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.”

At any rate, it’s in this section of this article that Douthat reveals his confirmation bias. He’s making counterargument only to knock them down, because, of course, he has to believe. (I’d love to ask him, “Ross, since you can rationalize evil this way, is there anything that would make you reject belief in God?” Look at this:

Of course, as a Christian, I don’t think [the Argument from Evil is] a good reason to choose against my own tradition, which brings me to the second challenge. . .

Of course!  He will never find a good reason to choose against his own “tradition.” (Note: In Faith Versus Fact I at least lay out a scenario that would make me tentatively accept the existence of Jesus and the Christian God.)  This brings us to Douthat’s second reason to downplay the force of the Argument from Evil:

The Bible shows a lot of evidence for undeserved evil.  This is a “this-I-know-because-the-Bible-tells-me-so” argument, and it’s dumb, because it doesn’t touch the problem. It only says that God was not omnibenevolent in the Bible.

To the extent that you find the problem of evil persuasive as a critique of a God who might, nevertheless, still exist, you would do well to notice that important parts of that critique are already contained within the Abrahamic tradition. Some of the strongest complaints against the apparent injustices of the world are found not in any atheistic tract, but in the Hebrew Bible. From Abraham to Job to the Book of Ecclesiastes — and thence, in the New Testament, to Jesus (God himself, to Christians) dying on the cross — the question of why God permits so much suffering is integral to Jewish and Christian Scripture, to the point where it appears that if the Judeo-Christian God exists, he expects his followers to wrestle with the question. Which means that you don’t need to leave all your intuitive reactions to the harrowing aspects of existence at the doorway of religious faith; there is plenty of room for complaint and doubt and argument inside.

This is the kind of palaver that C. S. Lewis shoveled down the gaping maws of British Christians, as if they were baby birds begging for a meal. Because there is contradictory evidence for an omnibenevolent God in the Bible (cf., the story of Job), God wants us to ponder the question and raise doubts. The problem with this is that the Bible doesn’t give us any answers to the question of evil.

We shouldn’t rely on our intuitions about whether there’s “too much evil” to count against God’s existence.  This is simply the first argument above, repeated:

Then the third challenge: Having entered into that argument, to what extent should you treat your personal intuitions about the scale of suffering as dispositive? I don’t just mean the intuition that something in the world is out of joint and in need of healing. I mean the certainty that those wounds simply cannot be healed in any way that would ever justify the whole experience, or the Ivan Karamazov perspective that one should refuse any eternal reconciliation that allows for so much pain. Those are powerful stances, but should a mortal, timebound, finite creature really be so certain that we can know right now what earthly suffering looks like in the light of eternity? And if not, shouldn’t that dose of humility put some limit on how completely we rule out God’s perfect goodness?

This is the “suffering will be compensated in ways we can’t understand” argument.  But if Douthat believes in God because experience tells him it’s right to believe,  how can his experience allow him to dismiss arguments against his benevolent God?  This is just a “God works in mysterious ways” argument, but I could note that it’s more reasonable to assume that God is playing with people for his own amusement, and doesn’t really care whether good always prevails. But wait! There’s more!

Suffering is overrated. Things aren’t as bad as they seem because privileged atheists exaggerate how bad suffering is. 

This again is a repeat of previous arguments with a twist thrown in. I can’t believe Douthat really makes this argument, but he does:

From what perspective are you offering this critique of God? If you are in the depths of pain and suffering, staring some great evil in the face, adopting atheism as a protest against an ongoing misery, then the appropriate response from the religious person is to help you bear the burden and not to offer a lecture on the ultimate goodness of God. (Indeed, in the Book of Job, the characters who offer such a lecture stand explicitly condemned.)

But given that atheism has increased with human wealth and power and prosperity, we can say that some people who adopt this stance are doing so from a perspective of historically unusual comfort, in a society that fears pain and death as special evils in part because it has contrived to hide them carefully away. And such a society, precisely because of its comforts and its death-denial, might be uniquely prone to overrating the unbearability of certain forms of suffering, and thereby underrating the possibility that a good God could permit them.

I’m dumbfounded. Is this even an argument? I’ll leave smarter readers to deal with it, and pass on to Douthat’s fifth way of dismissing the Argument from Evil:

There’s a lot of good in the world as well, perhaps too much good! So we need God to explain why things are so good. 

This is a defense I haven’t heard before, probably because it’s so weird and lame. Let’s look at it first:

Then the last challenge: If the intuition against a benevolent God rests on the sense that we are surfeited with suffering, the skeptic has to concede that we are surfeited in other ways as well. Is it possible to imagine a world with less pain than ours? Yes, but it’s also very easy to imagine a world that lacks anything like what we know as pleasure — a world where human beings have the same basic impulses but experience them merely as compulsions, a world in which we are driven to eat or drink or have sexual intercourse, to hunt and forage and build shelter, without ever experiencing the kind of basic (but really extraordinary) delights that attend a good meal or a good movie, let alone the higher forms of eros, rapture, ecstasy.

Indeed, it is precisely these heights of human experience that can make the depths feel so exceptionally desolating. This does not prove that you can’t have one without the other, that there is a necessary relationship between the extremes of conscious experience.

But it makes the problem of good — real good, deep good, the Good, not just fleeting spasms and sensations — at least as notable a difficulty for the believer in a totally indifferent universe as the problem of evil is supposed to be for the religious believer.

Well, we’re evolved to seek out those things that increase our survival and reproduction, and that seeking is facilitated by neurologically connecting these fitness-conferring features with pleasurable or appealing feelings. We love sweets and fats because for most of our evolutionary history they were good for us, so natural selection worked on our taste buds and brain to make their consumption pleasurable. Orgasms almost certainly evolved as a form of extreme pleasure that drives us to reproduce: those who get the most pleasure leave the most genes. Further, for most of our evolutionary history we lived in small, close-knit groups in which members knew each other. That would lead to the evolution of reciprocity: doing good and helping others because it keeps the group together (with you retaining your fitness) and leading to various forms of “moral” thinking and behavior. As for “eros, rapture, and ecstasy,” why can’t they be byproducts of seeking the kind of enjoyment associated with higher fitness?  I will grant here that I don’t understand how the widespread making of and appeal of music occurred, but does that give evidence for God? Do music and art simply constitute too much good stuff to appear in a secular world?

In the end, I see naturalism (including evolution) as able to explain good and especially physical evil, while Douthat’s idea of God can explain good by assumption, but has to be stretched further than Gumby to explain physical evil.

But again I would level this challenge at Douthat, whom I see as deluded:  What observations or occurrences would convince you that your belief in the Christian God, and in your Catholicism, is wrong?   If kids dying in intractable pain won’t do it, I don’t think anything will.

Further, Mr. Douthat, what evidence would convince you that there is an afterlife: a Heaven, a Hell, or both?  Even if you accept Douthat’s specious evidence for the existence of a divine being, I have no idea why, aside from the Bible and propagandizing by believers, he accepts the existence of an afterlife. Yet its existence would seem to be crucial for justifying how evil can exist in God’s world.

Here’s a guy far smarter and more eloquent than I making the argument from evil on Irish television. Stephen Fry got into trouble for saying this, and almost was charged with blasphemy or hate speech.