Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
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.
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.
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.
Something strange is happening to the mainstream media in the U.S. Supposedly objective, its venues now spend a good bit of their time touting something for which there is no evidence: God. The New York Times publishes excerpts of Ross Douthat’s recent book: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (the last word should really be “Christian”), the Free Press does the same, adding other op-ed pieces on the “God-shaped hole” that supposedly is a lacuna in our brain that deprives us of meaning, and everywhere I look there’s jubilation at an apparent (but not real) revival of religion in the U.S.
Although statistics show religion declining everywhere in the West (save in small enclaves inhabited by Muslims), these articles collect anecdotes about former atheists who have, by finding God, found personal happiness and salvation. They are, I think, a reflection of how the MSM thinks the present malaise in the West can be cured. War is everywhere, Trump seems to be ruining American democracy, people don’t feel that they’re doing well economically, and, ironically, in a lot of the West (especially Europe) the “decline” of the West seems to be caused by religion itself: the immigration of Muslims who don’t assimilate into Western culture and, it seems, often want to destroy it. But for all these ills Christianity (and sometimes Judaism) is said to be the palliative. This is, the MSM thinks, “good news.”
These articles, like the new one below from The Free Press (expect CBS to become more religious) tend to follow the same format, to wit:
They begin with an anecdote about how a nonbeliever found God and that brought him or her to a place of peace and happiness.
The articles then recount the sad decline of belief (mostly Christianity) in the West
They suggest the thesis that all people have the damn “God-shaped hole” in their hearts, meaning that we NEED religion to give our lives meaning and purpose. Apparently no other belief system, including humanism, can caulk that hole.
They then recount a number of stories of other people who gave up atheism to find God.
Throughout the article, the tacit assumption (as in the piece below) is that belief in God is not merely a convenience to improve your life, but is based on facts, including Biblical stories about Jesus, the Resurrection, and so on. This is more than what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief”: the idea that if we can just get people to believe, even if we don’t ourselves, society will be better. But, as in this piece, the people they highlight really do seem to believe not just in God but the factual assertions of their faith, even if many of us, like me, can’t force ourselves to base our lives on something we consider unlikely or nonexistent.
Somewhere in the article there’s invariably a slur on Richard Dawkins, who is seen as the Antichrist who keeps the God-shaped hole open. In reality, Dawkins, like the rest of us, doesn’t have that hole, and doesn’t think we need to find a superstition to complete our lives.
The articles finish with a ringing claim that if we could just believe, our lives would have meaning, morality would improve (because, after all, what reason is there to be moral without God?), and the whole world would be better off.
It’s all bullpucky, of course, but it’s interesting to see the proliferation of similar articles on our God-shaped hole, and how nothing but Abrahamic religion can fill it. Below, for example, is a Facebook meme from the Nativity Lutheran Church of Alexandria, Virginia.
The MSM’s tilt towards religion is made clearer when you see that it’s not objective: that is, you don’t read articles on the advantages of atheism, or even the reasons why people give up faith to become nonbelievers. (More of these people exist than do atheists who embrace faith.)
And so we have this new Free Press article from Peter Savodnik, identified as “senior editor at The Free Press. Previously, he wrote for Vanity Fair as well as GQ, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired, and other publications, reporting from the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Asia, and across the United States.” Click to read, or find the article archived for free here.
Here are the requisite components (the bolded headings are mine, while indented bits are from the article):
1. The opening anecdote. It tells of Matthew Crawford, a nonbeliever, who was “always searching” because he had that God-shaped hole (henceforth, GSH). He then gave a talk in a church in Canada and met a lovely woman, Marilyn Simon who was religious. The rest is history:
Suddenly, in this lovely, faraway church—festooned with stained-glass windows and mahogany pews and a baby grand piano and crosses dedicated to the memory of those congregants killed in the world wars—Crawford could glimpse a new future. One that included Simon. And, maybe, God.
Finally, late last year, Crawford converted to the Anglican Church. Then, in June, Crawford and Simon were married at Saint Margaret’s.
“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.” He meant God, but he also seemed to be talking about his wife.
Indeed!
2. Describing the phenomenon of people embracing faith. I’m particularly distressed that Jon Haidt—brought up in a Jewish family but is now an atheist—still mentions the damn GSH. If we all have it, why hasn’t he filled his?
But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”
There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.
3. Why you can’t have a good society without belief.
“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.
Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”
These people have apparently not grasped the concept of humanism: the belief in helping our fellow H. sapiens using not religious principles or superstition, but reason and science. Steve Pinker’s books, especially Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of our Nature, he argues convincingly that society’s improvements over the last few hundred years have been impeded by religion and facilitated by science and reason. Indeed, the subtitle of the first book is “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” It’s well known that the most dysfunctional societies are also the most religious, and that people tend to turn to God only when their societies can’t afford them sufficient well being. (See my arguments in my 2012 “presidential paper” in Evolution. The president of the Society for the Study of Evolution gets to write one paper for the journal, and this was mine. But believe me, I had trouble getting it past the reviewers since I said that religion held back progress, with one of those signs of progress being acceptance of the truth of evolution.)
And as I pointed out, you don’t need God to be moral unless you think there’s a Big Nun in the Sky, waiting to rap your knuckles when you sin. Plenty of moral philosophers (Plato, Kant, Spinoza, Socrates, Rawls, Grayling, Russell, etc. etc. etc.) have constructed moral systems based on humanism and reason.
4. But religion is declining!
The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022. By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States. A majority will comprise people of other faiths and, to a much greater extent, “nones,” meaning those who have no faith at all.
There’s no doubt about this, though some obtuse miscreants like to point out blips in the trend over centuries of declining belief in God. In the Middle Ages, everyone was a Christian in Europe. Now, in places like Sweden and Denmark, you’d be hard pressed to find a real believer. And this trend is also true in America, as the excerpt above notes.
5. Here comes the “evidence”: stories of people who embraced faith.
Now, 17 years after the four horsemen first met, Hitchens is dead. So is Dennett. Harris remains an atheist. “I don’t know if it’s a real trend,” Harris told me in an email about our current religious awakening. “Call me when people start believing in Poseidon.”
I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that the tech geniuses and media personalities and celebrities who once embodied the new atheism are rethinking what we lose when we lose religion.
I’ll just summarize the people cited by Savodnik to show there’s a GSH in us all
5a. Russell Brand
In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”
Could that figure be. . . God? Or Jesus? (They’re really the same thing, of course.) Brand is notoriously malleable, so while I will believe him, I don’t see that “beckoning figure.”
5b. Peter Thiel
In May, tech mogul Peter Thiel, who had espoused a vague spirituality and had been friends with the late French philosopher and religious thinker René Girard, came down unequivocally on the side of God. “God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.
How does Thiel know about this “plan”? It’s curious that everyone who seems to know enough about God to use him to plug that GSH nevertheless starts scratching their heads when asked why God lets good people (often innocent children) suffer horrible deaths. Ignorance kicks in when a phenomenon doesn’t comport with the Abrahamic God. (The article is almost solely about people who embrace Christianity, so we’ll consider that the default option,.)
5c. Elon Musk
Then in July, Elon Musk—the former “atheist hero,” the king of electric vehicles and space exploration, the champion of free expression—sat down with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has studied the intersection of religion and ideology, to discuss God. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”
5d. Jordan Peterson (of course).
hen, last month, Peterson’s book We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine was published. Peterson had always avoided saying whether he believed in a higher power. Now, sporting a jacket emblazoned with the Calvary cross, he was pushing back against the new atheists. “I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting the book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”
More word salad from Peterson. When asked for evidence for his God, Peterson always waffles, regurgitating a completely opaque set of words.
5e. Paul Kingsnorth. His story is long, invoking a nature-shaped hole, a Zen-Buddhist shaped hole, and, finally, he filled his GSH with a true faith: Romanian Orthodoxy. I’ll spare you the details and cut to the chase:
When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”
“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”
“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”
He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”
Yes, and that is what “faith” is: an irrational choice. Pity that the term “a man of faith” is seen as praise rather than denigration. When someone admits that their choice, on which they base a huge portion of their existence, isn’t based on reason or evidence (see Andrew Sullivan below), i tend to think less of them. Not as friends, of course, as I have religious friends, but I secretly take their ability to reason and accept evidence down a notch
5f. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali, who rejected Islam and was an atheist for a long time, embraced Christianity after a long period of depression, during which she tried to fill the GSH with drinking. If religion relieved her depression, who am I to say that she should reject it? She might otherwise be dead, and that would be bad for all of us. Nevertheless, as Richard Dawkins has said (to much opprobrium), her decision was not based on evidence but on despair. (See addendum at bottom.)
Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”
In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?
Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”
In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”
The essay triggered an avalanche of conversations in the independent media universe—including a book, which she is now working on, and a debate, in June, between Hirsi Ali and Dawkins in which she argued that Christianity is a bulwark against “the cult of power, Islamism.” The debate felt like a kind of bookend to the four horsemen meeting in Hitchens’s apartment in 2007.
“It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.
Because I admire Hirsi Ali so much, I’m not going to rag on her. And given that her religion staved off depression, it’s maladaptive to try to talk her out of it. I’m skipping over a lot of other anecdotes her to get to one more believer.
5g. Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is a semi-pious Catholic, and an incisive thinker about most things—with religion being a notable exception. Get a load of this:
The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end?
Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary,” Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. “Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything.”
“The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings,” Sullivan said. “It allows us to express our faith through an act.”
Translation: “The genius of ritual is that you don’t have to give reasons for what you believe, or for why you’re a Catholic rather than a Jew.” It’s all explained because he likes wafers better than latkes. Seriously, though, expressing faith is not the same thing as understanding why you embrace a particular faith.
6. The obligatory smear of Dawkins. Yes, of course it’s there: he’s not depicted in a flattering light. Further, his remark that he is a “cultural Christian” has given believers both grounds to say he’s religious and also to denigrate him for having a bit of faith. That’s unfair, for he’s just describing a tribe, the same way that I say I’m a cultural Jew. I don’t believe in God or any truth claims of Judaism. I just like being a member of a group that not only doesn’t proselytize, but has a number of members who are overachievers. From the article:
When we spoke—via Zoom, Dawkins in a brightly lit room at home in Oxford, England—he was a tad irritable. He was in a navy blazer, and there was a wall of books behind him, and he seemed a little exasperated with all the God talk.
Dawkins had created a furor when, in the midst of the often violent, pro-Hamas demonstrations in London and New York and elsewhere, he appeared on a British radio program and called himself a “cultural Christian.” He went on to say, “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”
“I rather regret” having said all that now, he told me.
. . . .The tendency you’re talking about,” he told me, alluding to Hirsi Ali, “is, I think, mostly people who don’t necessarily believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin, or rose from the dead, but nevertheless think that Christianity is a good thing, that Christianity would benefit the world if more people believed it, that Christianity might be the sort of basis for a lot of what’s good about Western civilization.”
I think Hirsi Ali does believe those tenets of Christianity, but it’s also true that she thinks that belief in Christianity will stave off barbarism (instantiated in Islam) in Western society. I think relief of depression is a better reason for belief than is the supposedly salubrious effects of Christianity in saving Western civilization. What will save Western civilization is an adherence to secular Western values of democracy, reason, and humanism. Why certain parts of Europe are collapsing is not because of a lack of adherence to Christianity. It’s because people are afraid to stand up for democracy and against irrationality, superstition, and authoritarianism. But I’m digressing: a bit more:
And yet, Dawkins did admit he was worried about losing the world that had been bequeathed to us by Christianity. “If we substituted any alternative religion,” he said in his April interview, “that would be truly dreadful.”
It wasn’t just about the danger of what was coming. It was about what we were losing, or might lose.
“Some of the greatest music ever written is church music, music inspired by Christianity,” he told me, echoing Roger Scruton. J.S. Bach would never have composed his Mass in B Minor—with all those violins, cellos, sopranos, and tenors weaving together, pointing us toward the heavens—without the divine, he said. Nor would Dostoevsky, as Paul Kingsnorth said, have written The Brothers Karamazov had he not been a believer. Had the world not been changed in countless unbelievable ways by that art? Had that art not changed us?
When I mentioned Dawkins’s distinction between cultural and theological Christianity to Kingsnorth, he said he thought Dawkins was deliberately sidestepping a deeper conversation about the nature of belief.
“As far as he’s concerned, it’s just chemicals in the brain,” Kingsnorth said of Dawkins. “But the reason religion persists is people keep having experiences of God, and Dawkins doesn’t seem to want to deal with that.”
We’ve recently discussed the “artistic advantages” of Christianity, and readers weren’t impressed by them. And that’s not why I’m a cultural Jew. As far as Kingsnorth is concerned, yes, religion is indeed the result of chemicals (and neurons) in the brain. That is what underlies “experiences of God”, which of course can well be delusions or hallucinations. And the reason religion is declining is because people are realizing that “experiences of God” are not evidence, and while there should be evidence of God, there isn’t any. Why do we lack evidence now when the Bible tells us it was ubiquitous 2 millennia ago? What happened? Why did God decide to start playing hide and seek (actually, just “hide”)?
7. The Closing: Faith is Good! And it’s increasing!
“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger,” [Jordan] Hall said. “It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”
He meant plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. “The horrifying brokenness of people.”
This brokenness may explain why, for the first time in American history, young men—who have been especially hard hit by the opioid crisis, and are getting fewer college degrees, and finding it harder than ever to land a job—are more religious than young women. A survey of Orthodox churches in the United States, for example, reported a 78 percent rise in converts from 2019 to 2022, with the new male believers outnumbering the female.
It may also explain why so many young people are pushing back against the idea that religion is unfashionable. One of the largest Christian revivals in U.S. history, which happened in 2023, in Wilmore, Kentucky, was led almost entirely by young people. The Latin Catholic Mass is making a return, partly driven by young parishioners craving a greater sense of tradition and ritual. Young Catholic women are donning veils to express their devotion.
. . .But the fact of our existence is a testament to God’s love for us, he said. “We are always wanted,” Father Jonah said. “We are always loved. This is the most important thing. God is not a mindfulness hack or a wellness exercise. It’s not—‘I found this ethical system that gets results, and therefore, I will choose it.’ It’s not a choice. It’s an encounter with an actual, personal love.”
Hall acknowledged that accessing that love, incorporating it into one’s life, was a process—shedding the rhythms and mores of secular society, burrowing deep into oneself. “You’re not going to solve anything if you don’t go down deeper,” he told me. “That’s where the heart of the crisis lies.”
No, the fact of our existence is a testament to materialistic evolution: the same thing that allows malaria to kill hundreds of thousands of babies and for cancers to grow in the brains of infants. It’s the same thing that kills millions of people in earthquakes and floods. The “we are always loved” stuff doesn’t ring true with those people, and is simply made up by humans. For if God is loving, he has a strange way of expressing it, like a man who is usually okay but occasionally beats his wife.
It is shedding religion, not shedding secular values, that has led to the increase in our well-being, for, as Steve Pinker argues, our progress is nearly always dependent on resisting religious values in favor of humanistic ones.
**********************************
UPDATE: In the last hour Richard Dawkins has posted a very apposite piece on his website The Poetry of Reality. Click to read it (I don’t know if you need a subscription, as I have one):
An except:
Jordan Peterson, an even more famous soothsayer of the so-called Christian revival, not only ignores facts, he openly disdains them. Drunk on symbolism, he seems sincerely not to care whether something is factually true or not. In a filmed conversation, I asked him point-blank, “Did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus? That’s a factual question.” After a long pause in which Peterson declined to answer, I added, “It’s not a value question.” The moderator, Alex O’Connor, an extremely intelligent young man who read Theology at Oxford, then chimed in: “You must understand what you’re being asked here.” And he continued to cross-question Peterson, trying in every possible way to get him to answer the simple factual question. Did Jesus have a human father or no? Time and again, Peterson made it abundantly clear that he has not the slightest interest in whether such propositions are factually true or not, Well, I suppose that’s his privilege, just as it’s my privilege to hate beetroot. But some of us think factual questions matter. To put it mildly, scientists do, lawyers do, police officers do, journalists do, historians do (at least they damn well should care) and I strongly suspect you do too.
Earlier this year, a dear friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity. We then had a public discussion in New York, during which her sincerity shone like a beacon. She believed that Christianity had saved her from a severe bout of depression. I could sympathize with that, and the audience clearly did. But I still pressed her with my one fundamental question. “IS IT TRUE?” Not, “Is it true that it saved you from depression?” It surely was true in her case. Not, “Does Christianity do good in the world?” Maybe it does. Not, “Would it be a good thing if most people were Chistian?” Maybe it would. The latter two questions are value questions, not factual questions at all.
I meant none of those things. I meant, “Do you think the truth claims of Christianity are valid? Is it factually true that the universe was designed by a supernatural intelligence, God? Is it true that Jesus was born of a virgin? Is it true that he rose from the dead? Is it true that people have a soul that can survive bodily death?” There are three respectable answers to any of these questions. “Yes (I think the evidence supports a yes answer).” “No (I think the evidence supports a no answer).” “I don’t know (not enough evidence).” Ayaan’s answer was, “I choose to believe.” I don’t think believing is something you can choose to do. What do you think?
A block away from my office is University Church, which you can tell has liberals in the pews because there are signs all over the outside about how you should love everybody because Jesus did, you should be the light, and other phrases importuning people to behave as good, nondiscriminatory Christians.
According to its website, University Church does have a denomination but also appears to be rather eclectic. After all, it is right at the edge of the University of Chicago, and if you want butts in the pews, you have to be averse to dogma. Their statement:
We belong to both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and United Church of Christ denominations, and much of our community comes from many other traditions as well. No two Sundays are the same here, and below will show you a bit more about who we are and how we go about being a church.
Every week they post the title of the Sunday sermon, which is often something I do not understand. In such cases I call a good friend, one who used to be a Christian believer but has turned atheist. (I take some credit for that.) He can often explain to me the meaning of sermon titles such as the one I saw today:
Now my first thought about this title was that the phrase “It is what it is” has appeared in the “words and phrases I detest” posts, as it is irritating. In that sense, then, these are words that kill.
But of course it could not mean that. So I called my friend, read out the title of the sermon, and asked him what it meant. Here is his response
“It means that those people who accept the status quo are murderers”.
That was funny, but must be close to the real meaning of the sermon: it must be a call for change, even if you do not think change is possible. But what KIND of change? To find out, one would have to go to the sermon, and I am not prepared to set foot in a temple of mishigass.
I did find out, though, that not only are sermons always based on a bit of scripture, but there is also a cycle of scriptures every week that are the basis of sermons for all churches of a given denomination (sometimes they offer a choice). I did not know that, so I have learned something.
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.
I don’t know if it’s considered ethical to use one’s newspaper column to reproduce excerpts of a book that you’ve written—at least if you get paid for both the book and the column, which would be double-dipping. But let’s leave that aside to consider Ross Douthat’s new book, which he’s excerpted twice in The New York Times. In the latest article, below, Douthat gives several arguments for the existence of God, including his favorite one, which turns out to be humans’ ability to comprehend the truths of the universe. That comprehension is supposedly evidence for a divinity, for Douthat doesn’t see how natural selection could give us abilities beyond those that evolved during most of the six million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps. Click below to see his arguments, which are also archived here. And of course I try to refute his arguments.
First, here Douthat’s book, apparently part of an intellectual/journalist push to argue that religion (despite its disappearance) is really, really, supported by evidence. Click below to go to the Amazon site. The book came out yesterday.
I’ll also leave aside my problem that it’s hard to believe in God if you’ve already rejected that form of supernaturalism. However, Douthat is trying to pull an anti-Hitchens and convince us that, yes, there are very good arguments for believing in God, In other words, he’s trying to reconvert us nonbelievers. The problem is that he recycles the same old tired arguments that have failed to convince most nonbelievers, and so offers at best a lame argument. It sure doesn’t convince me, though, as I said in Faith Versus Fact, I don’t think it’s a 100% absolute certainty that no God exists. That would be an unscientific point of view. But I’m pretty damn sure that we live in a godless universe.
Here are Douthat’s arguments, most of which should be familiar to you (his quotes are indented):
1.) The three big ones. He considers the best evidence for God to be the “convergence of multipole different lines of arguments”, though the convergence of weak arguments do not, to me, lead to a very convincing argument:
Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.
Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.
The cosmic design argument rests on the so-called “fine tuning” of the universe, which of course has alternative explanations, including the fact that we do not know how fine-tuned the universe is since we don’t know what other combinations of constants would permit life; the anthropic principle that since we’re here to observe life, the constants must have permitted life; the view that the constants may be connected in a way that we don’t understand; the idea that there are multiple universes, only some of which permit life, and we happily happen to be in one that allows it (Douthat, not a scientist, rejects the multiverse explanation); that the universe would look very different from how it does now if it really was fine-tuned, and so on. For a good summary of these arguments, see Sean Carroll’s video and my post here, as well as Carroll’s summary at The Preposterous Universe. Douthat apparently has not considered these rebuttals seriously.
As far as human consciousness is concerned, Douthat doesn’t see how it could have evolved, and therefore sees it as a product of God. But we are beginning to understand the naturalistic underpinnings of consciousness, which means that evolution—either directly for consciousness or indirectly via evolution that’s produced consciousness as a byproduct—is a plausible alternative. For some reason Douthat ignores the evidence that other species of animals are conscious (some appear to have a “theory of mind,” which implies consciousness, as well as the ability to pass the mirror test for self recognition; see also here). Since Douthat sees human exceptionalism for this trait as evidence for God, what about the consciousness of animals. Why did God make them conscious. Douthat:
[God’s] infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”
Are squirrels and ravens also made in the image of God?
Finally, there Douthat’s argument based on “the plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions”. I guess you’d have to read the book to see what “disenchanted conditions” means (presumably not when you’re in church or taking LSD), but I’m always dubious that one having an experience of God (and I have had “spiritual” experience, which I don’t consider evidence for God) proves the existence of God. After all, people have illusions and delusions and experiences all the time that do not compoart with reality. People with anorexia look in the mirror and think they are too fat even though they are skeletal. But they are not fat. I could go on, but you can think of similar delusions.
But wait! There’s more!
2.) The universe is intelligible and we can use reason to understand it. To Douthat, this is the most convincing argument of all.
Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.
This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. (There is an even more intense argument that even having our thoughts align as they do with physical reality is extremely unlikely and miraculous, but I’ll just direct you down that rabbit hole rather than explore it.)
But the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness and assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning — that the response to stimuli that enabled early Homo sapiens to recognize the patterns, say, of a predator’s behavior ended up having adaptive use beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding.
As we’ll see in #3 below, Douthat doubts the evolutionary hypothesis for other reasons, but in fact I cannot see our powers of understanding the universe as something that defies naturalistic evolution. We have evolved through natural selection to understand what we could over the first six million years of our lineage. Individuals that had correct understandings (snakes might kill you, thunder means that there may be water, cat tracks are a cause of concern) are those who survived, while those who didn’t understand such stuff would not survive. This is of course not unique to humans, for many animals show what seems to be an understanding of their world, and what various signs and signals mean. Some birds know that if another bird seems them cache an acorn, they have to go rehide the acorn. The sure looks like reasoning, but it may be the product of natural selection—or even learning. And, of course, the ability to learn evolved by natural selection as well.
Douthat, though, says that we understand far more than we could have evolved to understand: our powers or reasoning far exceed what was “needed” by natural selection. Ergo Jesus and the last point:
3.) We understand far more about the universes than would be expected if our powers of reasoning evolved by natural selection. We can play chess, we can make music, we can send people to the Moon. How on earth did we evolve the capabilities to do those things? Douthat:
Even then, it seems likely that in many, many potential universes those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, that there would have been either inherent limits on our ape-minds or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration, as the practical gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any obvious evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap.
“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?
This to me seems a really misguided argument, for it neglects two things that have developed through culture, which, of course, though not unique in humans, are most highly developed in our species (advanced reasoning and complex culture). I could add writing, which allows us to pass on knowledge to a distant futurity. Once we have a big brain and an ability to reason, and on top of that culture and communication through writing or syntactical language, the sky is the limit. Playing chess or going to the moon is not a result of evolution, but a byproduct of an evolutionary process that eventually led to the development of culture and communication (both of which, by the way, would also be favored by natural selection, since we are social animals). Further, it’s not just us who have abilities that could not have evolved. Lyrebirds can imitate car doors closing or chainsaws; parrots can imitate human speech and song. While some imitation may have been favored by natural selection, surely the imitation of human speech has piggybacked on other abilities. Dogs and horses can be trained to do things that are completely unnatural to them, and would never have appeared in nature, but they get a reward for successful training. It’s not hard to see that these abilities are simply byproducts of these animals’ evolution. Now horses and parrots have neither the culture, language, or manual abilities to build spaceships, and so they haven’t done so, but one can see in many species potential abilities that could not have been the direct product of evolution.
And if we can see in other species these “piggyback” abilities, then it’s not so hard to see them in our own species. That, after all, is the line of argument that Darwin made in his books, showing that humans could have evolved because there’s a continuum between the features and behavior of other species and of our own species.
And with that I will conclude my argument on this Darwin Day. Douthat, I fear, is simply appropriating old arguments and cobbling them together to argue for God. But of course the best argument for God, which can’t be made because it hasn’t worked, is direct signs of God’s existence, like him spelling out “I am that I am” in the stars (that one is due to Carl Sagan). In Faith Versus Fact I list other arguments that would tentatively convince me, an atheist, of the existence of not just God, but of a Christian God. But no such evidence has appeared, so Douthat relies on The Argument from Lived Spiritual and Religious Experience. The words of the late Victor Stenger come to mind: he said something like, “The absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence—if that evidence should be there.” It isn’t.
Finally, there are arguments against God, especially Douthat’s Christian variety. One was made by Stephen Fry: Why does God let innocent children die of cancer, or kill millions through earthquakes and tsunamis? Presumably an omnipotent and loving God would have the ability to prevent needless suffering. I’m sure Douthat deals with that in his book, but I’ve heard all the justifications for that (“God gave us free will,” “God gave us a planet with tectonic plates,” “We don’t understand God’s ways,” and so on), and find none convincing.
Douthat is merely buttressing a faith that he probably learned as a child (he’s not a Hindu or Muslim, after all), and I’m betting that his book will be an extended exercise in confirmation bias. We shall see.
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Douthat has also touted his book on a podcast with Catholic believer Andrew Sullivan. I’ve listened to about half of their 1½-hour conversation (link below), but you can listen to it by clicking on the screenshot below, and you can see Sullivan’s notes here. An excerpt:
Ross is a writer and a dear old colleague, back when we were both bloggers at The Atlantic. Since then he’s been a columnist at the New York Times — and, in my mind, he’s the best columnist in the country. The author of many books, including Grand New Party and The Decadent Society, his new one is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (which you can pre-order now). So in this podcast, I play — literally — Devil’s advocate. Forgive me for getting stuck on the meaning of the universe in the first 20 minutes or so. It picks up after that.
For two clips of our convo — on the difference between proselytizing and evangelizing, and the “hallucinations of the sane” — see our YouTube page.
Other topics: Creation; the improbable parameters of the Big Bang; the “fine-tuning” argument I cannot understand; extraterrestrial life; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Hitch; the atheist/materialist view; the multiverse; quantum physics; consciousness; John von Neumann; Isaac Newton; human evolution; tribal survival; the exponential unity of global knowledge; Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; the substack Bentham’s Bulldog; why humans wonder; miracles; Sebastian Junger and near-death experiences; the scientific method; William James; religious individualists; cults; Vatican II; Pope Francis; the sex-abuse crisis in the Church; suffering and theodicy; Lyme Disease; the AIDS crisis; Jesus and the Resurrection; Peter J Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels?; and the natural selection of religions.
There are also shorter YouTube clips of the discussion here and here. The longer discussion is pretty much a precis of the article above, at least the bit I listened to. Sullivan says he pushes back just to be the devil’s advocate, but I haven’t yet gotten to that part.
Much of Chapter 5 of my book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (the chapter’s called “Why does it matter?”) deals with religiously-motivated child abuse, mostly in the form of religious parents denying medical care to children. Some of the stories are horrific, especially the first one I tell involving a girl with bone cancer. While Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are major culprits, with their faith often mandating that God rather than doctors will cure children, there are other groups like them. And when the children die, as they often do (Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibit blood transfusion, and the kids, indoctrinated with that dogma, may die if they don’t get blood), the parents used to get off with light prison sentences or even parole. After all, it’s religion, Jake, so it’s okay to let your your kids die in its name! For some reason, all the cases I described in my book involve Christian parents.
Well, it’s still happening The Guardian reports today about on eight-year-old diabetic (type 1) girl whose father, converted to an evangelical sect, decided to deny his daughter the insulin she needed to live. (I am SO familiar with this kind of behavior. It’s not ubiquitous, but it’s not vanishingly rare, either.) The daughter died, of course (this was in 2022), and the death was likely a painful one.
The difference between this case, described below (click on screenshot to read), and similar cases in the U.S., is that the parents—and 10 other people—were convicted of manslaughter yesterday, a much more serious charge than often levied against such parents in the U.S. I suppose manslaughter is an appropriate charge, but one shouldn’t rule out murder charges, either since sane persons know what will happen if they withhold insulin from a diabetic child. (I know of no murder charges ever filed against these odious parents.) Anyway, I get quite exercised when helpless kids die because God is supposed to save them, and often this happens with the child’s assent, because they get propagandized. Religion often comes with the need to propagandize, especially to your kids.
An excerpt from the article:
It took Jason Struhs 36 hours to call the ambulance after the death of his daughter Elizabeth.
When the police followed shortly afterwards, they heard singing. The Saints, a religious sect in Queensland, that has been likened to a cult, were praying for the eight-year-old to be resurrected.
“I’m not jumping up and down in joy, but I’m at peace …” Jason told a police officer that day. “I gave my little girl what she wanted. And I expect God to look after her.”
Justice Martin Burns on Wednesday found Jason Struhs, and religious leader Brendan Stevens, along with Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie, brother Zachary, and 10 other members of the group, guilty of her manslaughter.
Elizabeth Struhs died at her family home in Rangeville, Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, on 6 or 7 January 2022, of diabetic ketoacidosis.
“I have to be patient. I have to keep praying. I didn’t sit there and think that I had killed my daughter, I was thinking that she was in a better place now,” he said.
The delay before calling the ambulance after a child’s death is quite common, though I don’t know why. The kid is dead and it has to be reported. At any rate, there was a trial at the end of 2024.
Throughout the nine-week trial last year, the court heard hours of interviews with the Saints filmed by police, at the scene and in the days afterwards.
Recently released to the media, they give an insight into their beliefs.
Jason took her to the hospital in a coma over Kerrie’s objections. She told the police she wasn’t grateful to the medical staff for saving her life.
“What do you think might have happened if she wasn’t taken to hospital the first time?” she was asked by police, days after Elizabeth’s death.
“I believe she would have got better and didn’t need any medical assistance at all,” she replied.
When Elizabeth was returned to the family with no lasting medical problems, she took it as proof of a miracle. She never attended hospital to see her daughter’s treatment.
A month after Kerrie was released from jail, Elizabeth was taken off her insulin after two-and-a-half healthy years and became sick again – but her mother told police she never had any doubts.
She told them she was surprised God was taking the situation “to the extreme … as in, to death”, but saw it as part of his plan for the “last days”.
If Elizabeth had died and was brought back in front of paramedics, more people would see the miracle, she said.
“These are end days. I see this as simply God is needing to show people, give people a chance to see that God is still here. And we are the ones that will declare it faithfully,” she told police.
Jason was originally not religious; it was only when he “found God” that he turned into someone who could kill his daughter:
For 17 years, his wife and many of his children attended the small home-based church service multiple times a week, but Jason Struhs didn’t believe in God at all.
For years he helped her administer insulin four times a day, take her to doctors, prepare specific meals and check her sugar levels.
. . . . After a verbal fight with his son Zachary and counselling by the other Saints, Jason converted in August 2021.
“The next four months after turning to God had been the best four months of my life, because I had peace. I now had family who loved me,” he said in his police statement.
The sentence below, which I’ve put in bold, is what really angers me. These people are so absolutely sure of the fictions they embrace that they are willing to let their offspring die because “they’ll be in a better place,” There is no evidence for such a place! Jason feels no remorse for what he did.
The Saints prayed and sang as a group. Finally, on 8 January, Jason called the paramedics.
“I said to everyone that even though God will raise Elizabeth, we couldn’t leave a corpse in the house, we couldn’t leave her body sitting there forever,” Jason said.
On 8 January, Jason told police his faith was stronger than ever.
“I am fully at peace at heart. I don’t feel sorry, I feel happy because now she’s at peace and so am I … she’s not dependent on me for her life now. I’m not trapped by diabetes as well.”
Burns will sentence all 14 on 11 February.
Only prosecution and strong sentences will curb this kind of behavior, though some of it will go on in secret, for religion is powerful.
I won’t harp on this further; you can read my book to see similar cases. The point, of course, is that this girl would still be alive if there were no religion, for only religion would make a parent stop giving medical care to their offspring. (Well, I suppose there are other forms of such lunacy as well, but these are doctrines of Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other fringe Christian sects like the Saints.) And the courts, in the U.S. at least, used to go much easier on parents like this than, say, parents whose kids died from malnourishment or related abuse. Religion used to give you somewhat of a pass, though that now seems to be changing, thank Ceiling Cat.
Here’s a video about the death of Elizabeth and the trial. Do watch it, because you’ll see how these people remain deluded even though they thought God would “bring her back” after she died.
Finally, I present for your appraisal the cover of the Jehovah’s Witness magazine Awake! from 1994. Every child on the cover of this magazine died because they refused blood transfusions. But it’s okay, because they put God first. I used this slide in the talks I used to give about faith versus fact. In the case of Elizabeth, faith is The Saints; fact is insulin.
