The New York Times highlights faith again

March 2, 2026 • 10:45 am

Originally I was going to call this post “The New York Times coddles faith again,” but there is not all that much coddling in this review of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I am not an Atheist.

What puzzles me is that the review is on the cover of the NYT’s latest Sunday book section. That position is usually reserved for important or notable books, but Timothy Egan’s review doesn’t make the book seem that interesting. Could it be that the cover slot came from the book being about . . . . God? At any rate, given that Beha’s book came out February 17, the fact that its Amazon ranking is only 1,562 (very low for a new book on the benefits of faith), and there are only 8 reviews (all 5-star reviews, of course), is not a sign that this is a barn-burner that will fill the God-shaped lacuna in the public soul.

Beha has previously given an excerpt of his book in the NYer, which I discussed in my recent post “A New Yorker writer loses faith in atheism.” I found Beha’s arguments lame, and I summarized the book this way, as well as provided information on the author. From my post:

Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive, which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortened to simply this:

“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning. This is why I became a theist.”

So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could? But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism. The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.

Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book

You can read the Sunday NYT review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.

Here’s the cover highlighting the book (thanks to Greg for sending me a photo of the paper version he gets). Stuff like this roils my kishkes:

Reviewer Tinothy Egan is somewhat lukewarm about the book, even though he avers that he is a believer and had his own search for faith as well as an inexplicable faith epiphany. The NYT identifies him this way:

Timothy Egan is the author of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith,” among other books, and a winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction.

So both author and reviewer, as well as the MSM (including the NYT), are rife these days with either promotions of religious books or softball reviews of them. And all this manages to center on the search for meaning in these dire times, a search for meaning that always winds up filling the “God-shaped hole” in our being. That is something Egan apparently documents in his own book and is, of course, the subject of Beha’s book.

As I noted when reviewing Beha’s New Yorker piece, he went back and forth from a youthful Catholicism to a materialistic atheism and then found his way back to God again, always tormented by the fact that he saw an angel who spoke to him when he was 15. As reviewer Egan says:

As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”

Not to worry! That statement alone speaks volumes. But Egan continues:

In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.

This tells you two things: the reviewer is soft on spiritual experiences, since he himself had one (see the link three paragraphs back), and that the author bashes the New Atheism as being “passé”, a cheap shot which doesn’t at all give New Atheism credit for pushing along the rise of the “nones” and making criticism of religion an acceptable thing to discuss.

But Beha is still somewhat critical of the scholastic tenor of the book, so it’s not a totally glowing review:

Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.

He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”

But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)

But as for the things I highlighted in my own take on Beha’s NYer article—things like the “faith in science” that we supposedly have, and the “romantic idealism” that is coequal to science in its inability to apprehend universal truths—of these things Egan says nothing. Nor does he point out that many people (I’m one) have found satisfaction without God, though many of us don’t have a God-shaped hole nor are actively looking for meaning. Instead, Egan’s take is anodyne, for one simply cannot get away with pushing nonbelief in the New York Times. What you can do is bash atheism in general and New Atheism in particular.

Egan:

Ultimately, atheism failed [Beha], as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?

I have to interject here to note that “nonreligion”—atheism—is not religion, in the same way that not drinking is a form of alcoholism. The trope that atheists have “faith” is simply ridiculous. What they have is a failure to be convinced of a phenomenon when there is no evidence for it. But I digress. Egan continues his review’s peroration:

Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.

If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.

“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”

The proper response to this conclusion is “meh”.

More god-touting, this time in The Atlantic

October 31, 2025 • 9:45 am

This new column from The Atlantic, arguing that the existence of God is just as likely as that of any scientific phenomenon we can’t see, comes from reader Norman, who said this: “I think that this whole thing is just a passing fad, but God seems to be making a bit of a (local) comeback.”

Indeed. In fact, I was surprised that The Atlantic, a publication I respect, would resort to publishing such ridiculous arguments for the existence of a god. Brooks’s argument comes down to this syllogism (examples come from both me and Brooks):

a.) Science accepts a lot of things we can’t see directly, like quantum phenomenon, electrons, or the use of infrared radiation and electricity as ways animals use to detect their environment. Those phenomena have subsequently been verified, though science still is studying things we can’t yet verify, like dark matter and energy
b.) Similarly, humans accept a lot of things we can’t see—most notably God
c.) Therefore, just as we shouldn’t dismiss the non-seeable phenomena of science, we shouldn’t dismiss the existence of gods.

You’ve probably already detected the fallacy in this argument, but I’ll wait a bit until you read Brooks’s piece. Click on the headline below to go to the archived version.

I looked up the author, and here’s part of the Wikipedia biography of Brooks:

Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow. Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023), From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022), Love Your Enemies (2019), The Conservative Heart (2015), and The Road to Freedom (2012). Since 2020, he has written the Atlantic’s How to Build a Life column on happiness.

This bio implies he’s a conservative whose trade books are mostly of the self-help genre. And this one article certainly is in that genre, because it gives people license to accept God. It’s part of the new spate of books touting belief in divine beings—of a piece with recent works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Ross Douthat, and so on. Why this sudden surge of goddiness? You tell me!

But click below to see how low the mighty Atlantic has fallen:

Here is the thesis Brook’s defending (in the second paragraph; his quotes are indented). First, he quotes cosmonaut Gherman Titov—the first human in space—who said he didn’t see either angels or God during his space flight. Bolding is mine:

[Titov’s claim] a very common viewpoint, Eastern and Western, then and now: If you don’t observe something and can’t physically find it, then it is fair to assume it doesn’t exist. If you insist on that thing’s existence because you feel it, believe in it, or have faith in it, you are deluded or a fool.

No matter your stance on religion, the Titovian philosophy is a foolish position. Indeed, life is incomplete and nonsensical without a belief in the reality of the unseen.

It might strike you as unscientific to believe in the unseen, but the truth is the opposite: A good deal of the way today’s scientists understand the world operates at a purely theoretical level. Take modern physics: For many decades, particle physicists have studied the building blocks of matter—the atoms that make up molecules; the protons and neutrons inside atoms; the quarks that make up protons and neutrons.

Quarks are so small that they cannot be observed at any visual scale; they are understood to be pointlike entities that have zero dimensionality. And yet, no physicist believes quarks don’t exist, because the theoretical and indirect empirical evidence that they do is overwhelming.

Here you see his big fallacy. Yes quarks are unseen, and so were electrons or their quantum-mechanical movement (until recently). But they were hypotheses that weren’t accepted until we found empirical evidence for them. This often takes the form of predictions that were later verified. You can see some evidence for quarks here, and below you can see a photograph that actually uses fancy technology to visualize not just electrons, but their predicted orbitals, which shows the probability of finding an electron in a given position. The photo comes from the site of Quantum Physics Lady (caption from her site, too), and the method for generating this “photo” of electrons in a hydrogen atom was outlined in New Scientist as below:

But how on earth do you make an image of such an object? Measuring the position of a single electron “collapses” the wave function, forcing it to pick a particular position, but that alone is not representative of its normal, quantum presence in the atom. “Wave functions are difficult to measure. They’re exquisite quantum objects that change their appearance upon observation,” says Aneta Stodolna of the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Her team decided to make a picture using a technique dreamed up 30 years ago that can be thought of as a quantum microscope. Rather than taking an image of a single atom, they sampled a bunch of atoms. This removes the quantum nature of each individual atom’s electron, forcing it to choose a particular location from those it is allowed to reside in. Do it with enough atoms and the number choosing each spot will reflect the quantum probabilities laid out by the wave function.

Stodolna’s team made a beam of atomic hydrogen and zapped it with two separate lasers that excited the atoms’ electrons by precise amounts. An applied electric field then pushed the excited electrons away from their respective nuclei, towards a detector about half a metre away.

The electrons emitted waves that produced an interference pattern on the detector (see “An atom undressed”). Crucially, the pattern was a projection of the spacings of the energy levels in the hydrogen atom, as laid out in the wave function, with bright rings where electrons were present and dark lanes where they were not (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/mmz). “You can think about our experiment as a tool that allows you to look inside the atom and see what’s going on,” Stodolna says.

Isn’t that fascinating?

(From Quantum Electron orbitals at four energy levels–increasing from (a) to (d). Each image was computer-generated by combining images of many electrons. [Image source: “Smile Hydrogen Atom, You’re on Quantum Camera.” Reporting on the scientific work of Aneta Stodolna and others; FOM Institute AMOLF, Amsterdam, Netherlands]

But of course quantum mechanics and electrons were already accepted as provisional truths before this photo, as their existence (like the earlier existence of atoms) made predictions that were absolutely met. (Now we can actually visualize atoms.) And you can think of lots of physics and chemistry phenomena that we can’t see with our eyes, but whose existence is virtually certain because they make testable predictions.,

But what testable predictions of an unseen God can Brooks make? He doesn’t give us any; he just compares science and religion without mentioning the crucial role of testability.

The eyes, of course, are not the only way to find scientific truth. If a hypothesis or theory predicts other phenomena we can test, we can take it as provisional truth. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted that mass warps space-time, and thus could bend light. Subsequent experiments and observations verified that, so we can have some confidence in the “truth” of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

On a more macro scale, the existence of evolution was doubted for years because “we’ve never seen anything evolving.” Well, now we have: instances of “microevolution” occurring within a human lifetime. But the phenomenon of evolution in general, or of macroevolution (one “type” of organism evolving into another over large spans of time) have now been indirectly proven true (again, I mean “provisionally” true, though I’d bet thousands of bucks that birds evolved from reptiles). The verification of evolution and macroevolution comes from fossils, biogeography, molecular biology, and so on. It’s in WEIT.

Throughout the article, Brooks shows his complete ignorance of how science works by making arguments like the one above, and also pointing out stuff like this:

Although some components of the material world are too small to see, the existence of such facets of reality beyond human perception enjoys widespread and uncontroversial belief. Multivariate calculus, for example, is a rudimentary mathematical tool commonly learned at school that can solve real-life problems such as how to optimize the schedules of, say, five people at once. Yet when it involves more than three variables, calculus is operating in a dimensionality that cannot be depicted graphically in any conventional way. This makes scientific sense, too, because neuroscientists have shown that we can think in dimensions higher than those we can actually see. That itself constitutes a belief in an unseen—indeed, unseeable—reality.

This sounds pretty much like gobbledygook, and if you read the Nature paper on “dimensions of thinking”, you see that those dimensions are very different from the spatial dimensions with which we’re familiar.

But it gets worse. Brooks slots into his specious analogy the fact that some animals have senses using phenomena like infrared radiation or electrical fields—phenomena that we can’t perceive with our own senses. But he forgets that we can perceive how these senses work simply using conventional science: doing empirical tests. We can manipulate radiation and electrical fields, we can remove organs that use them, and so on. Here’s another specious bit:

Beyond the abstract realms of mathematics and physics, the natural sciences (such as zoology and biology) offer similar proofs. We know for a fact that senses beyond the five that humans possess exist for other species. Sharks have specialized sensory organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini, which give them electroreception, the ability to detect electrical fields generated by the muscular and neural activity of other living organisms. Jewel beetles have infrared organs that register the radiation emitted by fires. Many snakes have a sense similar to infrared vision, which enables them to perceive a thermal image of potential prey.

Humans lack these senses, but to assume they don’t exist would be silly, even dangerous.

That made me laugh. How does Brooks think that we’ve verified the existence of these senses? I can assure you that it’s not through faith or revelation.

These existence of these senses would remain as hypotheses, not facts, unless we were able to test whether ther really was electroreception. Now, can we find any direct or indirect empirical evidence for God? No, in fact, if you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God—or, indeed, any kind of divine force that doesn’t act according to physical laws—your predictions flout reality. Such a god would never kill thousands of people with tsunamis, or give children fatal cancers. The theological response, of course, is that “God works in mysterious ways.” If that’s the response, then, we’re not able to make any predictions based on God’s existence, and of course we lack any evidence for that existence in the first place. The “answers”, if there are any, are untestable claims that theologians simply make stuff up. As the late Victor Stenger said,

We have countless examples where evidence for God should have been found, but was not. This absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It refutes the common assertion that science has nothing to say about God.

Similarly, we have no reason to believe that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception. On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware—and which are as yet undiscovered.

You can see this same argument in the famous “invisible dragon” analogy made by Carl Sagan in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World. In this great piece, Sagan describes the arguments of a proponent of the existence of an invisible, fire-breathing dragon in his garage. This proponent is implicitly compared to a theologian who keeps defending the existence of a deity for whom, like the dragon, no evidence can be adduced. The difference between the unseen stuff that Brooks says leaves open the existence of God and the unseen stuff that science doesn’t yet understand is that science does not give credence to unseen stuff until there’s evidence for it.

In contrast, religionists like Brooks tout “feelings, belief, and faith” as things that may point to a God. He should read my Slate article, “No Faith in Science,” which shows how religious faith differs from scientific “faith”, which is merely a synonym for “confidence based on evidence.”

Brooks’s final argument is that God’s existence is plausible because many scientists believe in God:

This can’t simply be dismissed as premodern thinking. In a 2009 survey, the Pew Research Center found that among scientists who belonged to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, just over half (51 percent) believed in “some form of deity or higher power.” Defying the general trend that young adults are becoming less religious than their elders, scientists under 35, who have grown up amid the latest breakthroughs, were the most religious in the survey: 66 percent were believers, as opposed to 46 percent of scientists 65 and older.

But he neglects these data I adduce in Faith Versus Fact—data that are publicly available. This is from p. 13 of my book, and the data are from later than 2009.

Finally, if religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers? The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent were atheists (the rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling.

When one moves to scientists working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62 percent being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23 percent who believed in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than among the general public.

Finally, sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that elects only the most accomplished researchers in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93 percent of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only 7 percent believing in a personal God. This is almost the exact opposite of the data for “average” Americans.

I go on to discuss various explanations for the correlation between degree of scientific achievement and atheism, and you can probably think of at least two. But of course scientists are human, and the fact that some of them believe in God or a “higher power” doesn’t give an iota of evidence for that higher power. Remember, scientists are far more atheistic than members of the general public.

In the end, though, the answer to Brooks’s title question is this: “You can keep an open mind, but as the lack of evidence becomes more pervasive, your mind should start closing.” In this case, the lack of evidence for God compared to the evidence for scientific phenomena that we can’t see directly should start making Brooks doubt the existence of God. Brooks should be even more hesitant because many phenomena previously not understood and thus touted as evidence for God —lightning, plagues, and so on—eventually yielded to empirical study. Revelation and faith are no way to find truth, and no way to find God, either.

When the existence of God likewise starts yielding to empirical study, then we can start thinking about Brooks’s claims. Right now they are just foolish, bespeaking an ignorance of the difference between science and religious faith. It should embarrass The Atlantic for having published this stuff.

h/t: Norman

Charles Murray finds God, loses rationality, gets criticized by Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer

October 27, 2025 • 9:30 am

About two weeks ago I called attention to a new book by Charles Murray, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, famous (or infamous) for his book coauthored with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (1994). Murray apparently had long neglected the god-shaped hole in his being, but eventually found God (implying the Christian God), and wrote a book about his conversion to belief, Taking Religion Seriously (click on book cover below to go to its publisher):

Murray followed with an excerpt in the Free Press called “I thought I didn’t need God. I was wrong.” As I mentioned in my piece about the FP article, Murray relied heavily on God-of-the-gaps arguments, finally filling his “God-sized hole” (yes, he uses those words), by encountering difficult questions whose answers, he averred, pointed toward the existence of divinity. These questions are familiar: they include “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and what accounts for “the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena—most famously E = mc2″?

Murray finally settled on a Quaker-ish god:

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.

But if God is everywhere, the god-shaped hole must be pretty damn big! Of course of all the gods in all the world’s religions, Murray settled on the one for which there can be no evidence. (As Victor Stenger pointed out, most gods can be investigated empirically.)

Well, so be it. Murray is free to adopt his superstition, so long as he doesn’t bother anybody else with it. Unfortunately, he has: not only issuing a book, but also the Free Press excerpt above and now an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Here he adduces adduces another hard question—consciousness—as evidence for a human “soul”, ergo God.

Click below to read it if you subscribe to the WSJ, or find Murray’s misguided piece archived for free here.

Of course Murray is not the first person to use the phenomenon of consciousness as evidence for a “soul”—something he actually never defines. But for evidence beyond consciousness he gloms onto the supposed phenomena of near-death experiences and “terminal lucidity”, defined below.

A few excerpt from Murray’s piece, which he starts by saying he used to be a materialist. And then. . . .

I’ve been back-pedaling. Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. I read C.S. Lewis, who raised questions I couldn’t answer. I scrutinized New Testament scholarship and was more impressed by the evidence supporting it than that discrediting it.

I’m curious what that evidence is, since there are no contemporary accounts—and there should be—of Jesus’s miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection. (This, by the way, makes me think that Murray is a secret Christian.) And then he pulls out his “evidence” for God.

Example: A central tenet of materialism is that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain. I first encountered claims to the contrary in the extensive literature on near-death experiences that grew out of Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life” (1975). The evidence now consists of dozens of books, hundreds of technical articles and thousands of cases. I read about Ian Stevenson’s cross-national studies of childhood memories of previous lives. He assembled a database of more than 3,000 cases, and more has been accumulating in the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

The evidence for both near-death experiences and childhood memories of previous lives is persuasive in terms of the credibility of the sources and verified facts, but much of it is strongly suggestive instead of dispositive. It doesn’t reach the standard of proof Carl Sagan popularized: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This led me to seek a subset of cases that exclude all conceivable explanations except that consciousness can exist independent of the brain.

But Murray is most impressed by “terminal lucidity”:

Certain near-death experiences approach that level, but the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.

Terminal lucidity can last from a few minutes to a few hours. In the most dramatic cases, people who have been unable to communicate or even recognize their spouses or children for years suddenly become alert and exhibit their former personalities, complete with reminiscences and incisive questions. It is almost always followed by complete mental relapse and death within a day or two.

The phenomenon didn’t have a name until 2009, but case studies reach back to detailed clinical descriptions from the 19th century. Hospices, palliative-care centers, and long-term care wards for dementia patients continued to observe the condition during the 20th century but usually treated it as a curious episode that didn’t warrant a write-up. With the advent of social media, reports began to accumulate. We now have a growing technical literature and a large, systematic sample compiled by Austrian psychologist Alexander Batthyány.

Two features of the best-documented cases combine to meet Sagan’s standard: The subjects suffered from medically verified disorders that made their brains incapable of organized mental activity; and multiple observers, including medical personnel, recorded the lucidity.

A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.

Given the complexity of the brain, is it surprising that we don’t fully understand what it’s capable of? Murray assumes that we do, and so has abandoned a materialistic explanation of consciousness. He ends by adducing the divine once again:

We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.

The implications are momentous. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow observed that for a scientist trying to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory “ends like a bad dream”: “As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Neuroscientists who have been trying to explain consciousness may have to face their own bad dream: coming to terms with evidence for the human soul.

“MUST eventually lead to a paradigm shift”? Murray is pretty damn sure that our ignorance of the brain and its capabilities will lead us to a pantheistic God (or a Christian one; it’s not clear)! And what on earth does Murray mean by “a soul”? Is it this undefined “soul” that somehow permeates the brain, making us conscious and sometimes producing terminal lucidity. He doesn’t say, and I don’t feel like reading his book to find out. After all, if he’s advancing an argument for God, the Free Press and Wall Street Journal article should suffice to summarize Murray’s arguments.

A few of us, including Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer, were discussing Murray’s conversion and his “evidence”. Steve emailed a short rebuttal of Murray’s thesis, which he allowed me to publish here. It’s a good attack on the “soul of the gaps” argument:

Pinker (I put in one link):

Let’s assume for the moment that the reports of terminal lucidity are factually accurate. At best Murray would be making a “soul of the gaps” argument: There’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it. But when it comes to the brain and its states of awareness, there’s lots we don’t understand. (Why do you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason? Why can’t you fall asleep even when you’re exhausted?)

The brain is an intricate, probabilistic, nonlinear dynamic system with redundancies, positive and negative feedback loops, and multiple states of transient stability. If circuit A inhibits circuit B, and if A deteriorates faster than B, then B can rebound. If A and B each excites itself while inhibiting the other, they can oscillate unpredictably. Now multiply these and other networks by several billion. Should we be surprised if uneven deterioration in the brain results in some quiescent circuit popping back into activity?

Contra Murray, these dynamics are nowhere near being understood by neuroscientists, since they may be the most complex phenomena in the universe. Yet we can be sure that with 86 billion neurons and a trillion synapses, the brain has enough physical complexity to challenge us with puzzles and surprises, none of them requiring a ghost in the machine. A graduate student in computational neuroscience with a free afternoon could easily program an artificial neural network which, when unevenly disabled, exhibited spontaneous recovery or unpredictable phase transitions.

All this assumes there is a phenomenon to explain in the first place. Claims of “terminal lucidity” consist of subjective recollections by loved ones and caregivers. But we know that people are extraordinarily credulous about the cognitive abilities of entities they interact with, readily overinterpreting simple responses as signs of nonexistent cogitation. The first primitive chatbot, Eliza, simulated a therapist in the 1960s using a few dozen canned responses (e.g., “I had an argument with my mother” → “Tell me more about your mother”), yet people poured their hearts out to it. With so-called Facilitated Communication, therapists and patients were convinced they were liberating the trapped thoughts of profoundly autistic children with the use of a keyboard, oblivious to the fact that they were manipulating the children’s hands. When there’s desperation to commune with a loved one, any glimmer of responsiveness can be interpreted as lucidity, exaggerated with each recall and retelling. What Murray did not report was any objective indicator of coherence or lucidity, like an IQ test, or a standard bedside neurological battery, or a quiz of autobiographical memory with verifiable details.

A great irony in the attempt to use rigorous scientific reasoning to support some theory of an immaterial soul is that the theory itself (inevitably left unspecified) is utterly incoherent. If a dybbuk can re-enter a ravaged brain as a gift to loved ones longing for a last goodbye, why are just a few people blessed with this miracle, rather than everyone? Why did the soul leave in the first place, sentencing the loved ones to years of agony? Why can’t the soul just stay put, making everyone immortal? What about when the deterioration is gradual, as when my disoriented grandmother thought she was lost and searching for her parents in the country she had left sixty years before, bursting into tears every time we told her her parents were dead? Was she missing a soul? Was the God who blessed others with a last lucid goodbye punishing her (and us) for some grievous sin?

The theory that the mind consists of activity in the brain, that the brain has a complexity we don’t yet understand (though we understand why we don’t understand it), and that the brain, like any complex entity, is vulnerable to damage and deterioration, has none of these problems.

Michael Shermer is also skeptical, as he evinced on his podcast below with Murray about the book. In the podcast Shermer also cites this post on terminal lucidity by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, which is doubtful about the phenomenon but says it needs to be studies neurologically, along with other phenomena associated with death. In the interim, Zeleznikow-Johnston mentions observer bias (a “will to believe”) and ignorance as materialistic explanations of terminal lucidity.

Murray and Shermer’s discussion of terminal lucidity, in which Shermer offers a naturalistic explanation, begins 1 hour 24 minutes in the podcast below.

And I’ll leave it at that, but will add a quote from a letter by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis:

. . . . Weizsäcker’s book on the world view of physics is still keeping me busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know;. . . . .

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:

Science editor of Sunday Times touts book “proving” God’s existence

October 5, 2025 • 10:15 am

In the face of declining belief in God in countries like the US and UK, believers are looking for any evidence that God exists. But there’s nothing new to support the existence of the supernatural, though as science finds out more truths about the Universe, and we think of more questions about things (e.g., what is “dark matter”), religionists continue to take unanswered scientific questions as the evidence for God they so desperately need. And so a new book simply reprises the “god of the gaps” argument, a shopworn argument that has been tried–and has failed–many times before, both philosophically and scientifically. First, recent data from the US and UK on declining belief in God.

Here are figures from a 2023 Church Times article showing waning belief in the UK since 1981, though belief in life after death has held steady (belief in God is the line at the top in orange).. Click to read article:

And a similar decline from a 2022 Gallup poll showing a decline of about belief in the US of about 18% since 1950.

In both cases the trends are unmistakable, and, with a few hiccups, inexorable. How do you keep your faith when all around you people are leaving it? You write a book decrying materialism, which of course, like all such books (as well as those recounting “visits to heaven”) become bestsellers due to the many believers desperate for “proof of God.”

This article appeared in today’s Sunday Times of London (h/t Pyers). Click headline to read, or find the article archived here.

The book that gives evidence that God “must” exist is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, published by Palomar on October 14 at £22. It’s already sold more than 400,000 copies in non-English editions (it was published four years ago in France), and U.S. publishers have ordered a print run of 110,000 for the book, which will be published here in a week.

The two authors are both believers, of course (excerpts from the Times are indented):

These authors — like Dawkins and Hawking — consider themselves men of science. Bolloré, 79, from Brittany, is a computer engineer who has founded a series of successful heavy industry, engineering and mechanical firms; Bonnassies, 59, from Paris, studied science and maths before a career as an entrepreneur in the French media industry.

Both are also men of faith. Bolloré is a lifelong Catholic. Bonnassies, who did not find his Christian faith until his twenties, said he thought before his conversion that “believers were irrational people”, adding: “God, the Resurrection, the Virgin Mary — I found it crazy.” Yet it was logic, he said, that won him around: “The surprise was there were many rational reasons to believe in God.”

And here is the book’s argument summarized by the Sunday Times. It amounts to no more than this (this is my characterization.

We do not understand how the universe began or how life began. If everything occurs by materialistic processes, what caused the Big Bang, and how did life originate? The most “rational” solution is a creator.

And some excerpts from the laudatory review in the Times (why are they touting superstition?):

Science and religion have never been easy bedfellows. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1820, priests “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight”. Five centuries of scientific breakthroughs — from Galileo to Darwin to Crick and Watson — have eroded our belief in the divine.

But now, according to a new book, a “great reversal” is under way. Science, its authors argue over 580 pages, has come full circle and “forcefully put the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table”.

Good Lord: has the argument ever been off the table? William Lane Craig has been banging the drum about it for years. But I digress; here’s more:

In a striking challenge to the academic consensus, two French authors, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, argue that the latest scientific theories lead to only one logical conclusion: an all-powerful deity created the universe and all life within it.

. . . .Instead, the authors have written a critique of materialism — the theory that all reality, including our origins, thoughts and consciousness, can be explained solely by physical matter and physical processes.

The materialist narrative for the beginnings of the universe and life on earth is so full of holes, he and Bonnassies argue, that every modern scientific advance increases the strength of the case that a “creator” is the only rational explanation.

The authors insist that their book is not a religious one, or one touting the advantages of faith. No, it’s a critique of one of the underpinnings of science, materialism.

The authors’ ideas have received support from unexpected quarters. The renowned physicist Robert Wilson, who was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, agreed to write the foreword to the book. “Although the general thesis … that a higher mind could be at the origin of the universe does not provide a satisfying explanation for me, I can accept its coherence,” he wrote. “If the universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation.”

Yes, but if God exists, how did He/She/They/It come into existence? Why terminate the regress of causes at the creator God instead of going back even further. After all, God is not simple, as Dawkins has emphasized, so how do an immaterial being of such complexity and power come about?

Here are the two main arguments described in the Times (my headings, indented matter from article).

The Universe:

For the past century, for example, scientists have known the universe is expanding. If stars and galaxies are always moving further apart, logic dictates, the universe must have started at a single point, in a state of immense density. In 1931 the Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître termed this the “primeval atom”. We now call it the Big Bang.

But if all matter originates from that single explosion, and materialism dictates there is nothing outside of matter, what caused the bang?

Evolution:

According to the theory of evolution, this incredibly sophisticated data storage system — 40,000 billion times more dense than the most advanced computer today — emerged from the primordial soup quite by chance. The authors write: “While we still do not know how that gap was bridged, or a fortiori, how to replicate such an event, we do know enough to appreciate its infinite improbability.”=

Finally, I find this bit pathetic:

Bolloré acknowledged that the book does not present proof of God’s existence. “You cannot prove it,” he said. “You have evidence for one theory — the existence of God. And you have evidence for the other one, which is the non-existence of God. The best you can do is to compare the two sides of the scale.”

But he said that many areas of science require as big a leap of faith as that demanded by faith in God. “We are all believers,” he said. “Believers in God believe, with some evidence — and believers in materialism, they believe in plenty of things which are a little bit weird.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest critics of the French edition of the book have not been scientists, but priests. “Some theologians say we don’t want evidence of God because it would reduce the merit of faith,” he said. “‘We don’t want proof’, they say. ‘Because proof would mean that we don’t have faith.’”

Here we see that the authors offer only two alternatives: God or not-God, but the alternative is really materialistic processes that we do not understand but might with more work. And faith in materialism or science is not at all the same thing as faith in religion, an argument I dispelled in Slate some years ago.

The rejection by believers of the need for evidence is what is most pathetic. Faith, some say, is based not on empirical evidence but on revelation or authority (priests, Bibles, epiphanies, etc.) alone. Yet when believers see something that looks like evidence, they glom onto it. That’s why books like this are always best-sellers, why two documented “miracles” are required for canonization of a saint, and why people flock to Lourdes to be cured. It’s all because unexplained. cures and miracles count as evidence for God. So do books like Heaven is for Real!

And so we get “evidence” from unexplained origins—of both life and the Universe. To the authors, both of these fit into to a combination of The Cosmological Argument (or “First Cause” argument) and the “God of the Gaps” argument. Readers should know the problems with both of these, and if you don’t, simply look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the relevant sections of Wikipedia. Since we don’t know how the Universe came into being (i.e., what is the physics behind the Big Bang?), or how the first form of “life” originated, it’s foolish and impossible weigh ignorance against a belief in God—and not just God, but clearly the Abrahamic God— the god of both authors.

I have spent more than half my life dealing with these arguments, and will say just one more thing before I show a few of the Times readers’ comments. The existence of a creator God, especially of the Christian subspecies, should not be accepted simply because it’s hard at present for materialism to explain some things. Instead, look to the Universe itself for positive proof of God: do we see signs of a loving, omnipotent creator God in the universe?

Carl Sagan discussed what evidence could count in favor of not just God, but the Christian God, as I do as well in Faith Versus Fact. But we don’t have any of that evidence. Why did God create so much of the Universe that is inhospitable for life? Why do little kids get cancers that kill them? Why do tsunamis and earthquakes happen that kill thousands of innocent people? These things cannot be explained rationally by positing a beneficent and omnipotent creator God. In the absence of these explanations, and of positive evidence for God (e.g., Jesus coming back and doing real miracles documented extensively by film and newspapers, or, as Sagan noted, the stars arranging themselves to spell “I am that I am” in Hebrew), the best alternative is atheism, the view “there is no positive evidence for God.” Thus the “god” side of the scales becomes lighter over time, continuing the trend begun when one after another “unexplainable” miracle or phenomenon was been explained by materialism. And of course physicists haven’t given up trying to understand the Big Bang, nor have biologists given up trying to understand how life originated. Will the authors give up their thesis if one day, under early life conditions, scientists see a primitive form of life originating in the lab, or create a theory of how there could be cyclical universes or multiple Big Bangs creating multiple universes? I doubt it, for they are “men of faith”.

A few readers’ comments. The first one was upvoted the most:

And some more. (The readers are clearly smarter than the authors, though there are some believers in there, too.)

There are 1100 comments, so knock yourself out! As for the Sunday Times, well, they decided to present an argument for God without interviewing detractors.

Douthat again—in The New Yorker

February 27, 2025 • 10:30 am

I swear, NYT columnist Ross Douthat must have a huge publicity machine, because his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is appearing everywhere, usually as excerpts. The point of the book is to assert that religion’s decline in America is slowing, and that readers having a “God-shaped hole,” denoting a lack of religious meaning in their lives, should not just become religious, but become Christian. (Douthat thinks that Catholicism is the “right” religion, and of course he happens to be Catholic).

And by “believe,” Douthat doesn’t just mean adhering to a watered-down form of Christianity that sees the New Testament as a series of metaphors. No, he really believes the tenets of his faith, including the miracles of Jesus, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the existence of Satan and the afterlife. (See my posts on this delusional book here.) It is a sign of the times that this book, which calls for people to embrace claims that are palpably ridiculous and totally unevidenced—unless you take the New Testament literally, which you can’t because it’s wrong and self-contradictory—is getting not only wide press, but approbation. Even the New Yorker summary and review of the book, which you can read by clicking below (the screenshot links to the archived version here) is pretty mild in its criticism. Author Rothman is a nonbeliever, and gives good responses to Douthat’s “evidence” for God, but at the end says the he “respects [Douthat’s effort to persuade.” What does that mean? He respects Douthat’s efforts to proselytize people with a divisive and harmful faith, and to believe stuff without evidence? Well, the New Yorker has always been a bit soft on faith (despite the fact that most of its writers are atheists), because some of their rich and educated readers have “belief in belief”.

Rothman’s summary of the book (his words are indented):

“Believe” is different: in it, Douthat proselytizes. His intended readers aren’t dyed-in-the-wool skeptics of the Richard Dawkins variety, who find religion intellectually absurd. His main goal is to reach people who are curious about faith, or who are “spiritual” but not religious. (According to some surveys, as many as a third of Americans see themselves this way.) If you’re in this camp, you might have a general sense of the mystical ineffability of existence, or believe that there’s more to it than science can describe. You might be agnostic, or even an atheist, while also feeling that religion’s rituals, rhythms, and attitudes can enrich life and connect you to others; that its practices draw our attention to what really matters. At the same time, you might not be able to accept the idea that Jesus actually rose again on the third day.

But Douthat needs to persuade the audience that yes, Jesus rose like a loaf of bread, and more:

Douthat argues that you should be religious because religion, as traditionally conceived, is true; in fact, it’s not just true but commonsensical, despite the rise of science. His most surprising, and perhaps reckless, assertion is that scientific progress has actually increased the chances that “religious perspectives are closer to the truth than purely secular worldviews.”

From what I’ve read here and elsewhere, Douthat has two main arguments for religion. The Argument from Increasing God of the Gaps, and the Argument from Personal Experience.

In “Believe,” Douthat rebels against these attempts to adjust the scale of God; he resists both the minimizing God-of-the-gaps approach and the maximizing abstraction proposed by thinkers like Armstrong and Tillich. First of all, he maintains that the gaps are actually widening: from a survey of speculative ideas in physics, neuroscience, and biology, he draws the conclusion that a “convergence of different forms of evidence” actively points toward the existence of a traditional God. Second, he argues that, even in our supposedly secular world, it’s still eminently reasonable to believe in a supernatural God who reaches down to Earth and affects our lives. David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher known for his pursuit of empiricism, predicted that, as the world grew more rational and scientific, people would stop having supernatural experiences, which he thought more common among “ignorant and barbarous nations.” Douthat points out that this hasn’t happened. [JAC: No data are given, however, about any decrease over time.] About a third of Americans “claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing,” he notes, and regular people continue to have mystical experiences of various kinds. (A 2023 survey conducted by Pew Research found that nearly four in ten respondents believed that the dead can communicate with the living.) Religious experience is a “brute fact,” Douthat writes, shared among billions of people, and its “mysteries constantly cry out for interpretation” just as they always have.

Miraculous healing? Talk to me when an amputee regrows a leg, or someone without eyes regains the ability to see. Why can’t God cure ailments that medicine is impotent to cure?

I’ve discussed some of the God of the Gaps arguments made by Douthat, the two most prominent being the “fine-tuning” argument (the physical parameters of the universe were cleverly adjusted to allow our existence) and the consciousness of humans, which Douthat says cannot be explained by science. Rothman is good at refuting both in brief responses, and I’ll let you read what he wrote. Plus remember that animals like dogs, cats, squirrels, and other primates also appear to be conscious (of course we can’t prove that), but are these other creatures made in God’s image, too? Rothman makes a good point here:

Throughout “Believe,” the implication is that work at the frontiers of science has increased the amount of mystery in the world by uncovering impenetrable unknowns. But this is misleading. Science has vastly expanded our understanding of how things work, reducing mystery; along the way, it has inevitably shifted the landscape of our ignorance, sometimes drastically. This new landscape can feel unfamiliar; strangeness comes with the territory. But just because we don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean that we face the ultimately mysterious; we’re probably still dealing with the ordinary, earthly unknown. And if science really does hit a hard limit in certain areas, or if it discovers questions that our minds are simply unequipped to answer—what would that show? Only that we don’t know everything. The likely possibility that omnipotence is beyond us in no way suggests that our intuitive religious revelations are correct. If anything, it suggests the opposite.

That of course is the usual argument against “The Argument for God from Ignorance”: throughout history, one baffling phenomenon after another imputed to God has later been found out to be purely naturalistic (lightning, disease, epilepsy, eclipses, and so on).

The single argument by Douthat that Rothman finds somewhat persuasive is that lots of people have had religious or spiritual experiences. Why are they so common unless they’re showing us the presence of a supernatural being?

At any rate, the version of me that exists today found Douthat’s case for faith unpersuasive. But I still enjoyed “Believe,” and found myself challenged by it. Douthat is right to call attention to the “brute fact” of religious experience, which apparently remains pervasive in a supposedly secular age. In 2006, an editorial in Slate argued that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism indicated a kind of mental weakness on his part—his apparent belief in its more outlandish tenets, Jacob Weisberg wrote, revealed in Romney “a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.” But if lots of people have experiences of the supernatural, then can belief in it really be understood, tout court, as proof of their fundamental irrationality? What about the award-winning journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who, in her book “Living with a Wild God,” described a “furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once”? In her classic “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” she certainly saw the world as it was.

Well, many of us atheists, including me, have had spiritual experiences, though not religious ones. I remember sleeping out in Death Valley, looking up at the fantastic display of stars unsullied by nearby human lights, and feeling drawn out of myself, a tiny speck in a huge universe. (But of course that raises the question about why there are so many celestial bodies without humans?) And I won’t get into the visions I had when I was on psychedelic drugs in college.

We are emotional beings, with emotions surely partly a result of evolution, and once the meme of religion has spread, it’s easy to ascribe intense emotions to religious experience. We are also ridden with delusions: after my cat died, I used to see it out of the corner of my eye. I’m sorry, but if Jesus/God is so anxious for us to believe in Him/Them (he surely doesn’t want all those nonbelievers to fry forever, as Douthat thinks), why doesn’t he simply appear in a way that cannot be written off as a delusion? (We do have cameras and videotape now.) Carl Sagan himself asked this question years ago.

Further, the religious experiences had by members of different faiths correspond to the different tenets of those faiths. Muslims have dreams and visions of Muhammad, and of course Muhammad himself produced the Qur’an after having a vision of the angel Gabriel, who dictated the book to the illiterate merchant. So if visions of God tell us that God is real, which God who is envisioned is the real one? I’m sorry, but I don’t find experiences or visions of God/Jesus convincing given that, if he wished, Jesus could make himself available in an irrefutable way to all of humanity, and presto!, we’d all be Catholics! (He also said that he’d return within the lifetime of those who witnessed his Crucifixion. Did he come back? No dice.)

No, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any respect for the deluded, especially when they insist, as does Douthat, they they have hit on the “true” religion. (Muslims, of course, believe that Islam is the final and true religion.) Where is Mencken when we need him? The best way to go after someone like Douthat is not with intellectual analysis and respect, as does Rothman, but with all-out satire and mockery.

Still, given the constraints of the New Yorker, Rothman’s review is about as good as it can be.

h/t: Barry

Ross Douthat touts his new book in The Free Press, impugning “believers in belief” because they reject the tenets of religions

February 18, 2025 • 11:20 am

“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.

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