Ross Douthat joins John Hirschauer to discuss his book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
Audio Transcript
John Hirschauer: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is John Hirschauer, associate editor of City Journal. Today I am joined by Ross Douthat. Ross has a very challenging job. He writes a regular opinion column for the New York Times as a Catholic conservative and does so with grace and wit. Before joining the Times in 2009, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review and is a multiply published author with seven books that touch variously on religion and public life, including one, Grand New Party, co-authored with Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam. Today, Ross is here to discuss his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross, thanks for joining the show.
Ross Douthat: Thanks so much for having me, John.
John Hirschauer: I had mentioned in our email exchange that if all goes well, we might dock a decade or so off of our stints in purgatory. I can’t promise anything, but even if we shave 15 minutes, I think it will have been worth it.
Ross Douthat: A decade out of a million is honestly, we’re not going to notice it either way, but that’s no reason not to try.
John Hirschauer: That’s right. So I make the Catholic joke, but this book is really about the case for religious faith in general. You argue that belief in God, or at least in some sort of creative power is more rational than unbelief, and that science gives us reason to think not only that the universe was created, but that it was created with humanity in mind. What are some of those scientific reasons for belief and how do they reveal our place in the story of creation?
Ross Douthat: Essentially the argument I make has it argues that there’s a kind of integration between what you see at the highest level of the universe in terms of overall architecture and design, the fundamental forces that give shape to the universe as we experience it, and then also what you experience as it were from below, right, from the experience of being a conscious human being in the world. Modern physics has revealed is that it’s not just that the universe appears to be orderly and law bound and predictable and mathematically beautiful in some sort of general kind of way. It’s also that the universe very specifically seems to be calibrated in an incredibly narrow range of possible ranges that a universe could have in order to give rise to that basic order, and then stars, planets, life, us.
So this is what gets called in these debates “fine tuning” which is not something I think overall that most scientists a hundred years ago would’ve expected to discover about the cosmos. It would’ve seemed much more plausible that the cosmos just sort of operated on general principles and that there was incredible either that the cosmos was sort of necessary in some profound way that no other set of laws could possibly exist, or that there was an extremely wide range of laws that would give rise to the kind of universe like ours, and neither of those is true as far as we can tell at the moment. It appears that there are many, many on the order of quadrillions, quadrillions of possible universes, and out of all of those quadrillions, just a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction could ever contain life, and it yields from atheists and materialists an argument that, well, maybe this means that all of those other universes in all their near infinite numbers actually also exist and we are experiencing the apparent “fine tuning” of our universe through a kind of selection effect where of course a conscious observer would find itself in the kind of universe that produces conscious observers because there’s no one around to see all of the other universes that don’t give rise to conscious life.
I think this puts atheists in kind of an awkward and unusual position where the traditional perspective of the sort of atheist materialist project is that you are making advances to rout a kind of “God of the gaps,” sort of recourse to theistic explanation where you’re saying, actually, we can show how this arose and that arose empirically and experimentally in ways that are reproducible and observable, and the multiverse is not reproducible, it’s not observable, it doesn’t belong to the normal categories of science at all. It is essentially a retreat into a rival form of metaphysics in order to reject or avoid religious metaphysics. That in itself is at the very least interesting and changes, I think, the kind of habitual position that people think of religion being in vis-a-vis science, but then at the same time, at our level of the cosmos so stipulating that the cosmos appears to be fine-tuned so as to give rise to beings like us, beings like us turn out to have all kinds of remarkable powers of first of all sort of basic comprehension, the ability to not just observe the cosmos, not just to be sort of conscious within it, but to get down to the very heart of things to figure out what the actual laws of the universe are to manipulate reality in almost godlike ways to split the atom, to rewrite our own genetic code and all of this.
I think it’s very easy to imagine lots and lots of universes that had forms of consciousness in them that never had any of these capacities. So we seem to be given this sort of very particular capacity that maps onto an overall structure that seems to be designed with us in mind, and then to just go one bit further into weirdness, the other feature of our consciousness is that at least if you believe the discoveries of quantum physics is that our consciousness seems to be entangled with material reality in some peculiar way where conscious observation actually gives rise to material reality in terms of taking it from the potential to the actual, in which case, that seems to imply that a material universe needs some kind of conscious observation to ever take full existence in the first place, and I think if you put these different pieces together, the evidence for fine tuning to produce us, the evidence that we have mysterious capacities to understand that fine tuning, and the fact that those capacities are seemingly entangled with the material reality itself, I think you get very close to a version of what you get in the book of Genesis where God makes the universe and human beings are made in the image of God and what does that mean?
It means that we have a somewhat God-like relationship to the cosmos that enables us to do the work of science and actually understand it.
John Hirschauer: Yeah, it’s not just that we participate on a conscious level in the universe. It’s also that many people, as you’ve outlined in the book, have individual subjective experiences of the divine, whether it’s a miraculous healing public miracles like the miracle of the sun. I have my own private theories about this as a Catholic, but I wonder what do you think explains the similarities in some of these experiences across cultures, whether it’s in Hindu cultures, Christian cultures, functionally atheist cultures even, we see people having near-death experiences that approximate the Catholic particular judgment looked at in a certain way,
Ross Douthat: In a certain way. This is tricky territory for the evidence from religious experience is a really direct and difficult challenge for the atheist and the materialist. The fact that it’s not just that religious experience persists under formally disenchanted conditions. It’s not just that non-believers as well as believers keep having these experiences even when you’re not living under the rule of any kind of ecclesiastical authority or not being taught about religion. Nonetheless, these experiences seem to be sort of a fundamental part of the human relationship to the world. That’s interesting. But then yeah, you have examples like near-death experiences where we actually know more about this supernatural seeming experience under modern secular, scientific, skeptical conditions precisely because we’ve gotten so good at bringing people back from the brink of death, literally catalog them or at least people who take an interest in this phenomenon catalog them, and we just have lots more of these experiences and you could easily imagine a world where modern science progressed to the point of bringing lots of people back from the brink of death and everyone who came back said, oh man, just before my consciousness winked out, I had this bizarre jumble of hallucinatory images that are just what you’d expect from a misfiring brain as it went extinct, and then nothing.
You could imagine that world. But in the event we live in a world where lots and lots of people come back from these experiences and have had what seem on the surface like very consistent-seeming encounters with a divine light, dead ancestors and relatives, some kind of feeling of judgment and a recall of their life. I think that this is not dispositive evidence for religious belief, but if you combine it with the other indicators, I think you get a pretty strong convergence of evidence. Now, it is also though a challenge for anyone with a particular set of religious dogmas because a lot of these experiences do seem to appear cross-culturally, right? They seem to have similarities across cultures and are Hindu near-death experiences and Christian near-death experiences. If you read about mystical encounter in Catholic literature, there are similarities to Hindu and Buddhist sages as well as Muslim writers.
That does seem like it is a case for some kind of religious relativism, in the sense that it does appear that if there is a God, he is manifest in some form across multiple different religions, and when people have near-death experience in a Buddhist culture, they don’t all come back and say, I died and I met Jesus and Mary, a man with a beard and his beautiful mother or something. There are some interesting cases of people who have sort of cross-religious near-death experiences and end up converting, but it’s not the norm. Anyone who believes in a particular doctrine, Catholic or otherwise, needs to have some sort of theory of what is going on there
John Hirschauer: And the materialist response to what you just said, or at least to if that is presented as evidence of the divine, they’ll say, look, you can give someone LSD and there’s a decent chance that they’re going to have some sort of a religious experience. Hook someone up to an FMRI and see the brain correlates for these various kinds of experiences. You make the point in the book though that simply knowing the biological processes that correspond to spiritual experiences, so the fact that certain parts of the brain light up, doesn’t actually answer the question of what is happening when a person has that kind of experience. Could you unpack that a bit?
Ross Douthat: First of all, it’s always been taken for granted by religious traditions and authorities that the soul and the body are intimately connected, and if you’re trying to have a spiritual experience, which is an experience of a level of reality higher than the bodily level, you probably need to shake up the body a little bit. You don’t just sit there eating a nice meal and watching The White Lotus on HBO and say, and now I will have a mystical experience. You might get one, the divine might break in on you, but that’s not how people usually go seeking. They go seeking by fasting and praying and mortifying their flesh and going outdoors on a vision quest. If you’re in some cultures and you go live in the desert to wrestle with the demons and so on. All of that I think suggests nobody should be surprised that there are modern ways of shaking up your body or your brain chemistry that also conduce to a kind of spiritual experience.
It may be a very unwise form of spiritual experience. It may be that by taking certain strong hallucinogens, you can get to a spiritual level that you would normally only get to through some kind of long intensive process of spiritual discipleship, right, and instead you’re just doing it on a weekend in Vegas and bad things might happen in that scenario, and in fact there are plenty of people who have bad experiences on some of these stronger hallucinogens. I don’t think it makes sense at all for religious people to sort of say, well, if a drug can induce a spiritual experience, that spiritual experience can’t be real. I think if you assume that the soul exists in some kind of equilibrium with the body, then the fact that you can do some things that upset that equilibrium and change your perception is not surprising at all and doesn’t mean that the soul spirit doesn’t exist. And with near-death experiences, you really are dealing with a case where whatever is happening in the brain, it’s not a matter of like, oh, death is stimulating the random vision center over here and producing your near-death experience. The near-death experiences happens. Some people would argue it happens after brain activity has ceased. This is hotly contested, but at the very least it happens while the brain is in a really advanced stage of shutdown. The fact that you get the most powerful of spiritual experiences when the physical form of your mind is in extremis and in theory is in the worst possible shape, I think is evidence for the view that Aldous Huxley, a famous dabbler in hallucinogen expressed that the mind, in order to live in the material world, your mind by sort of interacting with your brain is also limited by it, and so in a weird way, by weakening your brains hold on life itself, you can actually get a more intense experience of mind because the mind is no longer contained by the instrument it needs to use to live as an embodied human being.
Again, just in saying that, I do sound a bit like a guy offering you peyote right outside an ashram. I guess they wouldn’t be doing peyote in an ashram. I’m mixing my religious traditions a little bit here. Yeah, there is a sort of unavoidable, slightly embarrassing new agedness to any close analysis of spiritual experiences, but I think if you do do that close analysis, you should come away convinced that there is something really significant here that goes beyond just the materialist idea that, oh, well, it’s a hallucination or an expression of mental illness or wishful thinking or anything like that. Spiritual experience is much stranger than the kind of reductionist descriptions make it sound
John Hirschauer: Your columns, this book seems to be written for people who disagree with you. You definitely seem to be presenting the case for non-believers to take a second look and to say, maybe there’s something more to these religious traditions that I either discarded or never got interested in the first place and the first part of the book laying the foundation of this is why it’s reasonable on rational to have religious faith or at least faith in God or in a creator, but then you spend the second part of the book kind of getting more specific and saying that for people who are religious seekers, they don’t have any one particular tradition to return to, maybe, that the major traditions, the old religions are a better place to start than joining a cult in a basement in Monterey or something. Why do you think that the old religions, I mean I have my own theory of that of course, but why do you think the old religions contain more wisdom than maybe the new upstart?
Ross Douthat: There’s a train of reasoning that you can follow once you’ve accepted my debatable premises, right, that the universe appears to be made with us in mind and that religious experience indicates that divinity is interested in being in communication with us. If that’s the case, then I think a reasonable assumption is that whatever being or purpose created this world and did so with us in mind is not just out to mess with us or screw with us, pardon my language, right? Is not just trying to trick us or create an impossible set of dilemmas for us and so on by literally hiding the entire truth about the universe in a basement in Monterey where only a very small number of people will be able to access it. I think it makes more sense to assume that it is possible for human religions and religious practices to have some kind of convergence towards divine truth, and that if you see a religious body or institution or tradition that has lasted a long time and won a lot of converts and shaped one of the major human civilizations or cultures, that’s probably a good sign that that religious tradition is getting at least something right.
Doesn’t mean that it’s getting everything right. It doesn’t mean that you can reason your way to figuring out which is the one true faith or church. Absolutely, but I think you can reason your way to the point of saying the religions that have endured and lasted have done so for a reason under God’s providence and they have some important role to play in history and they’re therefore safer harbors and safer bets, either the kind of random religious startup or also just do-it-yourself spirituality, which I’m fairly critical of in the book and fairly skeptical mostly on just the grounds that there are very few things in life that are best done in isolation, making things up as you go along without sort of coaches and teammates and forms of discipline and protection as well against some of those darker spiritual experiences.
John Hirschauer: It’s taken all of my restraint to keep the ecumenical frame and not go full Father Coughlin, but your final chapter is my favorite, makes the specific case for Christianity and for the Catholic Church. What is it about the New Testament and the gospel specifically that qualifies them, I’m paraphrasing you here, to serve as the interpretive key for the other world religions?
Ross Douthat: Earlier in the conversation I was saying that if you just look at the general pattern of religious experience across cultures, I don’t think it does make a case for one particular faith or another. It makes a case that God is present in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways, which is a very ecumenical way of looking at things. At the same time, I do think that if you look specifically at the origin stories of the major religions at teachers and spiritual masters and figures who are there at the beginning, at the claims of divine intervention and miracle involved in their inception, that Christianity stands out and it stands out in a lot of different ways. It stands out in the sheer power of the story itself. It stands out in the remarkable historical credibility, which is sort of its own long argument, but I think is the correct description of the gospels in particular, that the gospels are by the standards of secular history, let alone religious history, a remarkably detailed and credible and impressive historical record that tries to be very self-consciously a memoirist historical record that isn’t just trying to sort of impose a theological narrative on the story that’s still in each of them still sort of wrestling with mystery and contradiction and uncertainty.
So you have historical credibility, you have narrative power, and you have historical impact. You have a long list of features that I think, again, if you assume God isn’t trying to trick you, if you assume that the patterns of history reveal something about the divine plan, and I think within that pattern, I think in the book I say it’s like a seismograph or something of there’s all this divine activity in history, but the New Testament looks to me like a really big spike, and if it’s a really big spike, then I think it is a good place to stay. Okay. God may be present in a lot of different places, but he’s present in a very particular and particularly important way here, and therefore it makes sense to treat this as an interpretive key for the wider landscape of religion to read the larger run of religious evidence and arguments in light of Jesus of Nazareth.
John Hirschauer: Last question is just about strategy for churches, synagogues, places that want to attract people who have been disenchanted from religion or no longer practice. I think for the last 60 years we’ve seen churches, and churches, synagogue, et cetera, in an ecumenical gesture or even to kind of capitulate to the world in certain ways, move away from their hard sayings, move away from maybe their more restrictive claims about salvation, and over that same period of time, we’ve seen a massive decline in church attendance and religious observance. Do you think that churches, religious institutions are more likely to win converts among non-religious people by returning to a more, let’s call it muscular version of their faith, or do you think that the problem is that these churches haven’t really gone enough or accommodated enough?
Ross Douthat: My view is that sort of formal doctrinal accommodation is almost always a mistake and doesn’t reap you the benefits that you expect it will, but at the same time, there is a form of sort of personal accommodation might be the way to put it, that while it isn’t my style of religion, if you look around America, you can see a lot of churches that are doing quite well with a kind of seeker-sensitive like, we’re meeting you where you are, we’re helping you along the way, we’re not making absolute demands of you immediately kind of faith. I think a healthy religious landscape would probably include a mixture of extremely strenuous doctrinally, serious liturgically rich churches that are in some kind of relationship with a wider array of more seeker-sensitive, let’s get you in the door and see what happens kind of churches, and again, the latter group wouldn’t be standing up every day and saying, we are a welcoming community, and we think that everything the New Testament says about sex is bigoted and homophobic.
I think that strategy does fail, but speaking as a conservative who goes to a liturgically traditional church, I do think that there is a place for a theology of welcome and almost handholding, if you will, in outreach to non-believers. Everybody’s different, so if there are people who read a book like this one, like mine and say, I don’t like this kind of argument at all. Somebody said this to me at a book event just the other day, because I was attracted to religion because I felt like it led me beyond rationality. I feel like the modern West is too hyper-rational and we need to be more right-brained and mystical, and I’m attracted to that in religion. There obviously are just people for whom that is going to be the path to religion. It’s not something that I’m going to be reasoning about all the time. It’s going to be something that I experience in the experience is primary, and liturgy and mystery, that kind of traditionalism is essential, but then there are also people who are left-brained. The brain dynamic one side is supposed to be rational and one side poetic or whatever. There are people who are just not going to be satisfied with a kind of mytho-poetic vision of what religion is are not going to be satisfied when someone says, we’re going to go beyond reason, are not going to love it when Jordan Peterson tells Richard Dawkins, “no, dragons are more real than you and me, Richard.” It’s like I can vibe with that, but I get why Dawkins is not persuaded. I’m both writing for people who are explicitly in that camp and also for people who maybe have a more experiential and mystical attachment to religion, but when they go through a hard time, when their faith is troubled or shaken, I think it’s a good thing to have a basic foundation underneath, right, where if you aren’t feeling the presence of God at a particular moment, if you aren’t sure what you’re doing, if your church has let you down to feel like you can still feel confident in the basics, feel confident that you are by being religious or trying to be religious, you are doing something sensible and rational even if it isn’t delivering what you hoped in that particular moment.
John Hirschauer: Well, the book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It was a pleasure to read. It’s already on the Times’ bestseller list
Ross Douthat: For one week. It’ll be off next week, I’m sorry to say, but your listeners can bring it back in the future.
John Hirschauer: That’s right. We will link to a place where you can buy the book in the show notes you can find City Journal on X @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI. As always, if you like what you heard on the podcast, please give us a five star rating on iTunes. Ross, thanks for joining the show. Hope we shaved a few years off of our sentences.
Ross Douthat: God willing. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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