My Facebook page is filled with criticisms of all the craziness in the world due to Trump’s actions, and of course most of the news and websites I read are similar.  Because I usually use Facebook to see what my friends are doing, or to look at pictures of cats, ducks, and other animals, I find the constant harping on Trump and his deeds depressing. That’s not because I disagree with these views; as should be clear by now, I think the man is mentally ill and that his presidency has been a disaster, with him veering between one crazy, drastic decision and another. (The threat to take over Greenland was merely the latest dumbass move.)

I say this because I think I need to make my position clear before I ask a question. And the question is this:

What do you think are the beneficial things Trump has done?

Why am I asking this? Well, first, because I think he has done some good stuff, including helping Israel, taking out Maduro, attacking Iran along with Israel, defining sex for official purposes as biological sex rather than self-identification, reducing illegal immigration at the border (I am not, of course, approving of the heavy-handed and often injurious tactics of ICE), and trying to expand the use of mental institutions to reduce the privations suffered by homeless people who are mentally ill.  Again, I am not saying that the net effect of all of Trump’s policies are good for America, as one can easily make the case otherwise—most notably in his changing a checks-and-balance Presidency into a quasi-dictatorship.

However, I don’t think that people’s opinions of policies should rest on an assessment of the person, but should be based on the policies themselves.  It’s both divisive and irrational to refuse to admit that, if someone does something good, it’s really bad because the person is bad (in Trump’s case, he’s often called a “Nazi”, which is hyperbolic and inaccurate).

So, I’m asking readers to answer the question above. If you wish to add a caveat about disliking Trump as I have done above, you’re welcome to do so, but I’m not asking for harangues about the man, as I can read those everywhere on the Internet. (I can guarantee that this  very post will lead me to be called a “right-winger,” just as my opposition to biological men being put in women’s prisons or participating in women’s sports has led to my being called a “transphobe”. More on that later.)

If you don’t think he’s ever done anything good, feel free to say that, too.

I’m not sure that the readers here, though savvier than those on most Internet sites, fully realize how dire the free-speech situation is in Europe. Germany, France, and, especially the UK are rife with “hate speech” laws that would not be be passed in the U.S. because they violate the First Amendment.  And yet there are still calls in America to limit free speech.  One example includes those people who argue that we should ban statements like “Globalize the intifada” because, somewhere down the line, such statements may contribute to someone’s harming of Jews.  But of course all hate speech is of that nature: it may, by demonizing a group or even questioning their principles, lead some loon to go after people (it’s usually minorities at issue, but no group is immune, nor is any religion).

In the post below on his site The Eternally Radical Idea, Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), calls attention to the growing suppression of speech in Europe, giving lots of examples. He does this to warn Americans that we cannot allow ourselves go down that route, and to remind us why “hate speech” banned in Europe should never be banned in America.

I remind you that Lukianoff is a liberal and an atheist, so when he defends the promulgation of religious and conservative ideas that most of us find odious, he’s only adhering to the First Amendment. FIRE, because it promotes free speech, is sometimes demonized by blockheads as a “right-wing organization”. It’s far from it. Promoting freedom of speech is a liberal, humanistic, and democratic idea.

The article is long, but I recommend reading it (it’s free if you click on the link below) to buttress your commitment to free speech and to learn how Europe is convincing itself to punish people who wouldn’t be punished in America. I’ll give extensive quotes in case you’re too busy to read. (But if that’s the situation, you need to chill!)

Lukianoff begins by giving kudos to Kristen Waggoner, president of the conservative religious group Alliance Defending Freedom. Despite their political differences, Waggoner and Lukianoff share a commitment to free speech, and Waggoner won (as did Lukianoff last year) the Richard D. McLellan Prize for Advancing Free Speech and Expression.  Although Lukianoff and Waggoner differ on many isssues, her acceptance speech apparently prompted Greg to write this article.

In what follows, my own headings and comments are flush left, while quotes from the article (or other sources) are indented.

Why America should not crack down on ‘hate speech” and maintain our present construal of free speech

Here’s the thing: censors always think their motives are pure. From inquisitors to commissars to modern “hate speech” units, they all believe they’re preventing some existential harm. That has never made it okay to strip people of their basic rights, and it doesn’t change the fact that this is precisely what they’re doing.

In the United States, we (still) recognize that. In the EU and the UK, they increasingly do not. And that’s more dangerous to how we treat speech in the US than the abuses that happen in places like China or Iran, because we aren’t likely to turn into China or Iran. But we may turn into the UK, or Germany, or Finland, where they purport to maintain their belief in free expression but have rationalized it into a corner where it can do very little good. So while we’re never shocked at horrifying censorship in China or Russia, we should continue to be shocked by the retreat from liberalism that we’re seeing in the Anglosphere and in Europe. We also need to be vocal in opposing it, because it really could happen here.

If the forces arrayed on the left have their way, we will look a lot more like the UK. And if the forces on the right have their way, we will look a lot more like Hungary. Either way, we won’t be recognizably American.

. . . .Equal citizens in a free society have a right to:

• Object to immigration policy.
• Quote their religious texts on sexuality.
• Say “there are two sexes.”
• Insult a rapist or abuser in a private text or message without becoming the one the state prosecutes.
• Quote the Bible.

If you can be arrested, prosecuted, fined, or professionally shattered for any of that, you are not living under free speech in the sense the First Amendment enshrines.

The Supreme Court has a blunt way of putting this: Speech on matters of public concern is “at the heart of the First Amendment’s protection,” because speech about public affairs is “the essence of self-government.” In other words, we don’t protect speech because it’s polite. We protect it because we are supposed to be citizens — voters — whose judgments matter. And voters can’t do their job if the state trains them to speak in euphemism, or only in whispers, or not at all.

And if we, in the United States, start to lose faith in that — if we decide that the European model is more “civilized,” that being spared offensive opinions is more important than retaining equal rights — then the strongest bulwark for free expression left in the world will have fallen.

A decent way to measure whether you’re actually free is to ask what you’re allowed to say about the subjects that matter most: rape, child rape scandals, violent crime, immigration policy, religious doctrine, war, and even basic claims about sex and the human body. If you have to watch your language on questions that cut to the very heart — because the wrong phrasing can bring the police, a prosecutor, or a professional tribunal — then you’re not a free and equal citizen in the ordinary sense. You’re a subject being managed.

And, once again (we can’t hear this too often), we learn why free speech was instituted by the Founders:

Here’s another radical idea: you are an equal citizen, not a subject. You get to hear ideas, weigh evidence, change your mind, or not, without the government protecting you from other people’s thoughts. If your rights end where someone’s feelings begin, you don’t have free speech of any kind. China is just as willing to let you say things that don’t offend anyone; it’s just more honest about whose feelings are really determining when the cops show up at your door.

Probably the most important point to make here is that, if you have even one example of someone being arrested, getting a visit from the cops, or being charged for taking an unpopular position on one of the biggest political hot-button issues in a society — immigration, crime, religious fundamentalism, religious expression — they will not trust what they hear in the media, or even what they hear in society, as being genuine or authentic.

This leads to a genuine epistemic crisis, where people cannot tell what their countrymen honestly think, or what the world actually looks like in terms of public opinion and perception — and that is a disaster. People in control, or at the top of society, can be such fools in thinking that if they could just better control the opinions people express, popular opinion will go right along assuming the preferred ruling class’ position is correct. But that relies on a model in which people are even stupider than ruling class people often assume they are.

What happens instead is people conclude that no one is saying what they really think, and that the media, politicians, and even their fellow citizens cannot be counted on to show what they really think — because if there’s even the slightest risk of being arrested or punished for it, who would?

That’s what a chilling effect is, and it is poison to any society — particularly a democratic one, or at least nominally democratic one.

Lukianoff concludes that Europe, with its bans on hate speech, is going down the wrong road, for those bans chill you from speaking up, and, by quashing what we know about other people’s views, put democracy in a vise.  I agree. The examples that he gives are telling.

What’s happening in Europe.

Professor and philosopher Peter Singer talks about the “expanding circle”: the way moral concern spreads over time to include more groups — slaves, women, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, and so on. That’s real, and often good.

But there’s a dark twist. In much of Europe and the UK, we’ve now used that expanding circle logic to shrink the circle of free speech. We say, “To show compassion for vulnerable groups, we must criminalize speech that offends them. It’s not really censorship if we do it to protect people.”

From the UK:

If you want to see what speech policing looks like in a country that still considers itself a liberal democracy, look at the UK.

Between the Communications Act of 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, British police have broad power to arrest people for messages that are “grossly offensive,” “annoying,” or likely to cause “distress” or “anxiety.” Recent statistics show more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 for online speech — over 30 people a day. (For a sense of scope, If the US were to arrest people at the same rate per capita, it would be 60,000 a year.)

Behind that number are real people in real handcuffs.

A 51-year-old army veteran named Darren Brady shared a meme that arranged pride flags into a swastika to make a heavy-handed point about authoritarian tendencies in parts of the LGBT movement. Hampshire Police turned up at his house, arrested him, and, in a bodycam clip, an officer calmly explains that someone has “been caused … anxiety” by his post, and that’s why he’s being taken away. He was offered a “hate awareness” course in lieu of prosecution — ideological homework as punishment. Only after national outrage did the police back down and scrap the course.

Catholic commentator Caroline Farrow was making dinner for her kids when Surrey officers came through her front door in 2022, arrested her on suspicion of “malicious communications” and harassment over a feud with a trans activist, and seized phones and laptops — including her children’s devices. She was taken into custody, questioned for hours, then released without charge.

Here’s one of the most surreal cases I’ve seen: a 34-year-old mother of four, Elizabeth Kinney, who says she was beaten badly enough by a man to require hospital treatment. In private text messages to a friend afterwards, she called him a “faggot.” The friend reported her, and prosecutors charged her under the Malicious Communications Act. She pled guilty and was convicted of a homophobic offense, receiving an enhanced community order, unpaid work, and rehabilitation days. As of the last reporting, no one had been charged for the assault.

Note that being able to call someone a “faggot” is legal in America, yet also outs the person who says it.  One could argue, I suppose, that letting people use names like that could, in the future, promote violence against gays. But that’s not a good enough reason to prevent this kind of name-calling, odious as it is.  Lukianoff also argues against the tendency in the UK to “avoid recording or analyzing ethnicity in organized child-abuse cases,” for such recording could presumably promote demonisation of ethnic groups.  But he claims this is misguided, since suppressing that information not only fails to deter predators in a group, but conveys information that could be essential to the safety of young girls. Frankly, I don’t see why recording ethnicity (which also occurs in the U.S.) should be formally or informally banned, as it’s useful not only for “grooming gangs”, but for compiling statistics important to society. I believe John McWhorter recently discussed how Americans tend to drastically overestimate the number of African-American shot by white police officers. One example:

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed”, 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000. There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book Woke Racism notes, this never makes the news because it doesn’t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.

By withholding information from the public so as note to pollute a favored narrative, the press promotes misinformation that exacerbates racial tensions.

From Germany:

Germany, because it may have learned some of the wrong lessons from its history, has long had strict speech laws — among them, bans on Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial. But the logic has spread.

In Berlin, police raided the apartment of American novelist and political satirist C.J. Hopkins in November, seizing his computer and interrogating him on suspicion of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda. The basis for the accusation was a book critical of COVID-19 policies, its cover using a swastika-and-facemask image as political satire.

That’s it. That’s the “Nazi material.” Never mind that its use is to make an unflattering comparison between modern health policy and national socialism. Nobody who can read is going to look at the book cover and say, “Well, I was just in favor of mandatory masking, but now that I see this book cover, maybe death camps are a good idea.” Hopkins had already been prosecuted in 2023 for tweeting the image of the book cover.

Another case that deserves more international attention involves a group of nine young men who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg. They were convicted but because they were underage, all but one avoided jail time. Later, a woman in Hamburg sent furious WhatsApp messages to one of the perpetrators, calling him things like a “disgusting rapist pig.” The convicted rapist complained and the woman who sent the messages was prosecuted for insult and defamation, convicted, and ordered to spend a weekend in jail.

Yet another German case: politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, from the right-wing AfD, posted about gang rapes involving Afghan men and suggested that welcoming more Afghan refugees risked more such crimes. She referenced real statistics about Afghan suspects. Courts convicted her of Volksverhetzung, “incitement to hatred,” and an appeals court upheld the conviction, saying her post violated the “human dignity” of Afghans by presenting them as dangerous sex criminals.

From Finland (!):

Kristen’s speech in November started with a case from Finland, and once you know the facts, it’s hard to shake.

Päivi Räsänen is not some anonymous troll. She’s a physician, a mother, a grandmother, a long-serving member of Parliament, and a former interior minister. She’s also a conservative Lutheran.

In 2019, she posted a tweet criticizing her church leadership for officially supporting Helsinki Pride. Attached was a photo of Romans 1:24-27 — the standard “traditionalist” passage condemning same-sex relations. Years before, in 2004, she had written a short church pamphlet explaining the Lutheran view of sex and marriage. She also did a radio debate along the same lines.

For that, Finland’s Prosecutor General charged her with “agitation against a minority group” — essentially “hate speech” — under a section of the criminal code that sits next to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola was charged too, for publishing her pamphlet.

Police interrogated Räsänen for hours about her beliefs. Prosecutors pored over her pamphlet and sermons line by line, asking which parts of the Bible she intends to believe. She faced the possibility of fines and a criminal record.

She won. In 2022, a district court acquitted her unanimously. In 2023, the Court of Appeal acquitted her unanimously again.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t, but before we finish, I want to point out that being visited by police and interrogated, even if you’re not convicted are jailed, are still things that will chill your speech.  Räsänen’s ordeal, in fact, continues:

Instead, prosecutors appealed again. In 2025, the Supreme Court of Finland agreed to hear the case. The state is still arguing that quoting Romans 1 and defending historic Christian doctrine about sexuality can be a criminal offense.

Switzerland (!):

It is not an especially controversial idea that sex can be usually determined by examining skeletal remains, even if there are exceptions. Not so in Switzerland, where Emanuel Brünisholz, a musical instrument repairman, was sentenced to ten days in jail for an anti-trans Facebook comment. In a 2022 reply to a member of the Swiss National Council (sort of their House of Representatives), Brünisholz wrote: “If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”

Brünisholz was arrested in 2023 and convicted in December 2024, where he was fined 500 Swiss francs. After exhausting his appeals, he refused to pay on principle, announcing in September of 2025 that he would be serving his alternative punishment — ten days in jail — last month.

I’ve discussed the Swiss case before. If you have a whole skeleton, biological sex can be determined with 96%-98% accuracy, which falls to 90% if you have a skull with lower jaw. The diagnosis is not complete, of course, but if you look at skeletons 200 years old, the guy is pretty much right—the exceptions whose sex can’t be determined are rare. Note as well that there were no drug or surgical interventions back then that would modify skeletons, and even today this is something that should be investigated only in trans people, as LGBQ people undergo no modification of their bones.

The point is that jailing somebody for saying this is heinous, even if the guy were wrong about bones. (I’m not dealing with the “mental illness” comment, which, though odious, should not be illegal.) Because if he were wrong about skeltons, the proper remedy is counterspeech and criticism, not fines and jail time.

Wikipedia gives a long list of other countries with hate-speech laws—laws that can get you prosecuted, fined, or jailed for criticizing religion, ethnicity, gender identity, and even class.  Note that the “United States” entry says this:

The United States does not have hate speech laws, because the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.There are categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group.

Let’s keep it that way.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “absolutely,” came with a terse comment from the artist: “Thanks for clearing that up, Mo.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Baird’s assessment:

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

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

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

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

Douthat’s presumed motives: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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