Should You Be Religious? | The New Yorker

In one of their sketches, the comedy duo Key and Peele are on a road trip. They decide to listen to some music, and Jordan Peele accidentally queues up some private recordings. “This is an audio journal of my experiments on my own human condition,” his voice intones, over the car stereo. Despite Peele’s objections, Keegan-Michael Key insists on continuing—“I want to hear your thoughts on things!” he exclaims—and the journal gets weirder as it goes on. “I’m hours into my daylong commitment to stare at myself in the mirror, nude,” Peele says, at one point. “I’m beginning to see my reptilian self.” Later, an entry consists mainly of Peele’s screams. “Why?!” he wails. “Ahhhhh!”

Sometimes, familiar people turn out to have stranger thoughts than you imagined. That seems to be the case with Ross Douthat, the Times columnist, whose new book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” goes to unexpected places. Douthat, whom Isaac Chotiner described as “liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator” in a Profile for this magazine, is known for a certain levelheadedness. He specializes in presenting progressive readers with ideas they’d ordinarily dismiss, and in articulating questions that tend to vex conservatives—Has America become decadent? Do we need a new “sexual ethics”?—in ways that make them available to left-leaning thinkers. It’s not easy for a conservative to crash the liberal party; the guards at the gate will turn him away. But Douthat sidles in through a side door, mingles a little, and leaves an interesting book on the kitchen table, with a few passages highlighted.

In his Times column, Douthat devotes a lot of space to religion, which he usually examines through a sociological or political lens. (Earlier this year, for example, he asked whether our current and decades-long “wave of secularization” might have crested, giving way to a religious resurgence.) “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.

If this is you, then Douthat wants you to move affirmatively in the direction of concrete belief and formal doctrinal commitment. “This isn’t a book about how religious stories are psychologically helpful whatever their truth content,” he writes, “or about how embracing the mystery of existence can make you happy in the day-to-day.” 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.”

Since at least the nineteenth century, theologians have complained about the “God of the gaps”—a modern version of God that occupies only those parts of reality left unexplained by science. Darwin defines one such gap: before he discovered evolution by natural selection, God was held to have created all life on Earth in artisanal fashion; today, our understanding of evolution has relegated divine influence, if you believe in it, to some pre-Darwinian time, perhaps even before the Earth existed (or before the Big Bang). The problem with believing in a God of the gaps is that the gaps shrink as science advances.

One solution is to believe in a more abstract kind of God. The writer Karen Armstrong, for instance, has argued that, for most of history, God was experienced as something that “exceeded our thoughts and concepts.” Religion, therefore, wasn’t a set of beliefs that could be proved or disproved but a collection of practices, often characterized by “silence, reticence, and awe,” that could bring us closer to a divinity we couldn’t really describe. From this perspective, the God-of-the-gaps problem seems avoidable; it might actually be better to see God more abstractly, as something that doesn’t readily fit into the physical world. In her book “The Case for God,” Armstrong quotes the theologian Paul Tillich, who suggested that the concept of a God capable of “interfering with natural events” was self-defeating: by making God into “a natural object beside others, an object among others,” it brought the divine down to Earth, creating the conditions for “the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.”

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. 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.

Douthat devotes a substantial portion of “Believe” to asserting the validity of supernatural experiences—miracles, ghosts, mystical encounters, divine healings, even demonic visitations. He posits “a realm of supernatural minds above and around the realm of matter.” In his Profile, Chotiner explains that Douthat’s mother, who suffered from chronic illness, sought relief not just from alternative doctors but at church services in which people fell to the floor and spoke in tongues. “The openness to the numinous and supernatural that I’ve urged on secular readers in these pages was, in one sense, organic to my childhood,” Douthat writes. He never had intense, unaccountable experiences himself, but he became certain that what he saw others experiencing “was emphatically not just a trick of mentalist persuasion, a madness of crowds, or whatever other reductive explanation you might seek.”

He wants us, in short, to believe, just as he did. But is he saying that it’s all true—levitating saints, the parting of the Red Sea, “the so-called Miracle of the Sun in Fátima, Portugal,” in 1917, when “the sun appeared to dance before tens of thousands of witnesses”? What about revelatory acid trips, “witchcraft and magic, the fairies or the djinn”? Douthat’s answer is yes, to some extent; in his view, these sorts of experiences should be considered potentially meaningful, even if the ways in which they unfold are eccentric. His theory is that, when the supernatural world breaks through into the real one, our perceptions break, too; we end up experiencing God as best we can, using whatever ideas we have on hand. (In his account, one reason to commit to traditional religion is that it organizes the ideas through which we experience the divine.) Not long ago, the hyper-rational economist Tyler Cowen invited Douthat to discuss “Believe” on his podcast, “Conversations with Tyler,” and asked him for his views on U.F.O.s. The U.F.O. craze, Douthat said, could involve actual aliens zooming around in actual spacecraft. But a “straightforward reading of the data,” he went on, could just as well lead one to “be more of a supernaturalist, and say there are beings out there who like to — pardon my language — fuck with us.” (“I’m trying to be resolutely open-minded,” he added.) The possibility of spiritual fuckery, as it were, opens up a lot of wiggle room for belief. It means you can believe in the big picture without believing in the small stuff—or believe in the small stuff, too, if you want. The main thing, Douthat urges, is that we shouldn’t dismiss as inherently implausible the lived experiences of your fellow human beings.

Full disclosure: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic—a materialist, with a mainly scientific view of things—and so I’m not really the intended reader for Douthat’s book. I found myself objecting to nearly all of his arguments, especially the scientific ones. Douthat invokes “fine tuning”: the idea that, if the physical laws and constants of the universe were even slightly different, life on Earth and existence itself would be impossible. That could be true: we might not be here if gravity worked differently, or if the speed of light were faster or slower. But some people take it further, arguing that the fine tuning of the universe suggests that it was designed by God for our benefit. Douthat presents this faith-friendly view as though it’s a discovery of modern science. Yet it is far from a consensus perspective—the vast majority of physicists don’t embrace it—and it doesn’t make much sense as a matter of logic. Even if you think of humanity as having won some sort of physics lottery, winning the lottery doesn’t mean you were meant to win it. You may feel that you won “for a reason,” but the fact that a random process has an outcome doesn’t make it any less random. The “reason” comes from you.

Douthat raises what some philosophers call the “hard problem of consciousness”—the question of how the physical matter of the brain gives rise to the subjective experiences we have as conscious beings. (How does a gloopy network of neurons become an individual who can say “I”? How does stimulation of the visual cortex create the sensation of the color red?) According to Douthat, there has been no substantive progress on the hard problem, and its intractability opens the door to supernatural explanations for mental life (among them the idea that “mind might well precede matter”). It’s absolutely true that some philosophers believe in the existence of the hard problem; some neuroscientists acknowledge it, too. But even among those who have adopted the term, there’s no consensus that “hard” means absolutely impossible, requiring an entirely different view of reality. Douthat simply breezes past the ideas that could provide alternatives to the most extreme characterizations of the issue. Similarly, he mounts a brief excursion into quantum physics, invoking the observer-dependent aspects of quantum reality. (Remember Schrödinger’s cat, which is both alive and dead until you look in the box?) He maintains that this line of thought requires that someone or something has been watching the universe since its beginning. But the notion that the observer has to be a conscious entity—as opposed to an instrument, like a Geiger counter, or simply another physical system—is a speculative idea, which most physicists would not endorse.