In his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat notes a shift over the last fifteen years in the public discussion of religious issues. The triumphal confidence of the New Atheists rejecting religion has given way to a new generation conscious of something wrong and largely unfamiliar with the basic tenets of Christianity. Unbelief as the intellectual default of a “Serious Modern Person Who Doesn’t Believe in Magical Nonsense” left many modern people anxious, adrift, and searching for meaning. This void led many to the populism of the right or the wokeism of the left. Douthat thinks the time is right for a book written “to atheists looking to be unsettled in their certainties, to spiritual searchers struggling to imagine a plausible destination, to believers wrestling with doubts and difficulties, and to anyone interested in the ultimate questions of human life.” Douthat’s book “makes the case that religious belief is not just an option but an obligation—and offers a blueprint for thinking your way from secularism into religion, from doubt to belief.”
It is not just that Douthat thinks that religious stories are psychologically helpful but that they are closer to the truth than atheistic naturalism. To make his case for a theistic worldview, Douthat points to the order of the cosmos; the nature of human consciousness as not merely material; and widespread and pervasive religious experience. He then considers various religious worldviews, pointing to the advantages and higher probability of enduring religious traditions over do-it-yourself religions—what sociologist Robert N. Bellah called Sheilaism. Finally, in the last chapter, Douthat looks at his own Christianity.
Douthat believes that supernaturalism never really went away. Individuals reciting the secular materialist creed often also consult horoscopes, see ghosts, and talk to their dead grandmas. Douthat notes that belief in what people now call the “supernatural” is the default human belief, given the order, beauty, and awe-inspiring nature of the universe. Although Copernicus and Darwin adjust our understanding of reality from its premodern default, the insights of neither thinker actually undermine the core tenants of the premodern view. In fact, as Douthat puts it, “the scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order than what was available to either the senses or the reasoning faculties in the premodern world.” Nor can Darwinian evolution account for the cosmic order presupposed—not established—by the evolution of any living organism. Organisms of any kind can only exist given cosmic constants necessary for any life-permitting universe.
Unbelief as the intellectual default of a “Serious Modern Person Who Doesn’t Believe in Magical Nonsense” left many modern people anxious, adrift, and searching for meaning.
Like contemporary philosophers Alexander Pruss and Edward Feser, Douthat calls into question the claim that mind is reducible to matter. He notes that materialist accounts of mind confuse location with causation. Although we know that the prefrontal cortex is the location of certain brain functions and that the limbic system is the location of other brain functions, we as yet know nothing about the causation of these functions. As neuroscientist Erik Hoel points out, “If you ask me how a car works, and I say, ‘Well, right here is the engine, and there are the wheels, and the steering wheel, that’s inside,’ and so on, you’d quickly come to the conclusion that I have no idea how a car actually works.”
In his chapter “The Myth of Disenchantment,” Douthat talks about the fascinating story of what might be called the wedding music miracle that shook the skepticism of Micheal Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. It turns out that even the “Serious Modern Person Who Doesn’t Believe in Magical Nonsense” can actually experience things that puncture the buffered self of the naturalist. As Douthat notes, “Disenchantment as a description of human experience is a false paradigm, fundamentally mistaken about what it’s like to be a human in the modern world. When intellectuals stopped taking mystical experiences seriously, actual human beings kept on having the experiences.”
Douthat also notes that if mystical experiences had disappeared from the modern world, it would have been evidence for a secular view. “Look, once authorities stop embracing these stories, once the power of ecclesiastical authority stops encouraging them, people stop claiming or pretending to experience them.” But this did not happen. Even under conditions of contemporary secular modernity, even though the keepers of “Official Knowledge” in academia deny their possibility, unexpected and dramatic experiences of the supernatural keep happening to people, including educated, skeptical people like Michael Shermer and Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything. These experiences are not matters that are “all in your head” but include documented cures of diseases that are empirically verified. As Douthat notes, “The universe isn’t really hiding the ball from us when it comes to cosmic order and human exceptionalism and even supernatural happenings, and that modern nonbelief often amounts to an attempt to hide the ball from ourselves.”
But some refrain from religious practices because of the long history of wrongdoing done by institutional religion. Douthat responds, “If your reason for avoiding institutional religion is the fear of the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials, or even just the stifling atmosphere of some pre-Vatican II Catholic parishes or Protestant small towns, you are letting a danger that’s increasingly remote push you away from the things that are necessary to mitigating today’s perils, today’s problems—isolation rather than pharisaism, narcissism rather than authoritarianism, a world that leaves you alone in despair rather than a society that’s always nosing in your business.” Why does institutional religion do so many wicked things? There is no doubt that crimes have been committed in the name of God. “It is also true that the history of every organized human activity is steeped in crimes and cruelties. The history of the family, the history of business and commerce, the history of politics and government, are all replete with dramas of cruelty and subjugation and abuse. One might look at this history and conclude that human beings should therefore live somehow without families, without trade, without political relations—but this is a view for adolescents, hermits, and misanthropes.” Indeed, if the Christian view is right, widespread human failure on all levels is to be expected, “We have all fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).