I thought I was the target demographic for Ross Douthat’s new book Believe. As I’ve mentioned before, I was raised Christian and I have strong respect for the Christian faith. It has its fingerprints all over my life, even if I don’t identify as a believer. In many ways, my life would be easier if I could make myself believe.
But Douthat’s arguments fell short. In fact, they were more often bad and lazy than they were interesting.
There’s only one good argument in the book: that humans still experience purportedly mystical experiences in the present day, even among people who are not predisposed to believe in them, and some of them don’t abide by a “script” that’s culturally received. If you’re a metaphysical naturalist or believe the probability of alien abductions to be near-zero, you will dismiss these claims out of hand. To Douthat, this is a bias or dogma that gets in the way of understanding the truth of the world.
But that’s the only good argument Douthat puts forward in this book, and it's undermined on every page by his inability to properly understand those who disagree with him, to properly check his Christian bias, or to even understand the purpose and methods of science. He tries to present an objective case to be religious, but his incuriosity toward worldviews that disagree with him creates another Christian apologetic book that won’t convince any atheist or scientifically literate “none.”
In this review, I’m not going to debunk or argue his grand arguments in depth, as this blog has done, but I want to draw attention to Douthat’s laziness and failure to understand his detractors.
I gave this book two stars because I wasn’t expecting much, and though it surpassed my low expectations, I don’t advise anyone to read this book.
Sneaking in Christian Assumptions
The crux of Douthat’s argument is that there’s mystery in the world today, that there are many philosophical problems that materialism does not solve, and thus there’s good general reason to be religious.
For Douthat, if we put ourselves in the shoes of our pre-modern ancestors, and compare what was mysterious to them to what is mysterious to us today, we are equally justified in adopting religious belief, as the advances of science in solving these mysteries are illusory.
It’s his goal to take you from modern secularism to pre-modern religious belief as universally understood by pre-moderners, then back to modern secularism. After this round trip, we can point out the persistent mysteries of the world, join a traditional religious tradition, and feel secure in our rational evaluation of the fact.
It’s worth noting that Douthat isn’t just making a pragmatic argument (that being religious is useful), but also a general argument, that being religious will bring you closer to the truth of the universe. The main takeaway he wants you to have is that any religious belief is more true than no religious belief. The pragmatic argument is just a gateway to the truth; he wants you to accept the reasonableness of religion from a secular point of view so you can ascend to better knowledge of the universe through a religious tradition.
On its face, this is not a bad way to argue for religious belief. The problem is that Douthat stumbles out of the gate and never gets his footing. He never truly takes us from modern secularism to a pre-modern blank-slate human. He just can’t help sneaking in his Christian beliefs at every turn!
For example, at one point he says that pre-moderners have an intuition:1
“That nothing so vast and complex and beautiful could exist by simple accident. That either some Mind or Power must have made or organized all this matter for a reason, or else the Mind or Power is somehow inherent to the system, and the cosmos is itself divine…So in this initial reaction, your naive self finds religion rational and necessary because you sense your own subordination within a higher order: you recognize yourself as a creature in a created landscape, a small participant in some grand design, a mind in some dependent relationship with higher minds or with the highest Mind of all.”
I hate to be pedantic, but I think we need to have a survey of world religions and what they taught in a pre-modern or pre-global age (when religions interacted less with each other) before we can make this assumption.
The idea that there’s a Mind or Power that consciously organized the world seems very Christian or Abrahamic to me. One need only look at the Ancient Greeks to ponder if they really believed this. Sure, some philosophers may have believed in a World Spirit or Mind, but many of them just believed that Zeus was the King of the Gods, and not anything like the God of classical theism.
Douthat does this multiple times. He gestures in the direction of what pre-moderners supposedly believe, but he doesn’t actually cite those beliefs or a survey of what they were. Any religious studies major or minor student can point this out. Christian buzzwords like “soul,” “creation,” "creator,” “intelligent,” and “design” jump off the page as Christian assumptions that Douthat wants to smuggle in without question.
Some examples:2
“Whatever you call it, self or mind or soul or spirit, something extra seems added to the human race, enabling us to understand more of the world than even the most intelligent of our fellow mammals—and also to invent and create within it, imitating the larger system’s order and beauty on the smaller scales of technology and architecture, literature and art. So if pondering the seeming orderliness of the cosmos, its complex detail and design, points to the existence of some divine intelligence, pondering the nature of the human mind points to the possibility that we are just a little bit divine as well.”
And
“On the other hand, to acknowledge a point of origin, to recognize a moment of creation, makes it intuitively more likely that the universe as we know it now has some specific importance to its creator—that any divinity isn’t just perpetually emanating or sustaining space and time, but using them to tell something we would recognize as a story.”
The idea of God as intelligence is something as far as I know the Christians pioneered. The idea that God is a creator of the world, or that it has a creator, is not exclusively Christian, but it’s also not universal either. If Douthat wants to put us in the shoes of pre-modern Christians, that’s fine, but that’s not what he claims to be doing.
At one point, he even says questions about the order of the universe raise questions of “By whose hand?” in one of the more blatant instances of this question begging.
More explicitly, at about midway through the book, he cites a passage from the Book of Revelation “because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth” as reason to make a commitment to religion, because it’s “Better to face the consequences of even a mistaken commitment or decision than to hear [that], at the last, the fateful judgment.” To be clear: he’s saying you should believe in a religious tradition because Christianity says it’s a good idea. Again, there nothing wrong with arguing this, but you can’t claim it’s a neutral point of exploratory origin.
Later on, he even tries to define religion in a way that would make any religious scholar pull their hair out:
“A system of belief and practice that tries to connect human beings to a supernatural order, that offers moral guidance in this world and preparation for the possible hereafter, and that tries to explain both the order of the world and the destiny of humankind.”
Many religions have minimal supernatural orders, some don’t offer moral guidance in the world (think of the Roman cult) or preparation for the possible hereafter (I think many Jewish people don’t think that’s the point of their religion), or explain the destiny of mankind.
Again, I’ll admit that these criticisms may come off as pedantic, but I’m just holding Douthat to the standard he sets for himself. This may seem like a high standard, but on the Kindle edition, Believe is only about 200 pages. There’s definitely space for a higher level of rigor. People criticized the God Delusion for being shallow, but it was more than twice as long as Believe.
If Douthat wants to convince me to be religious from a secular point of view, he can’t sneak in non-neutral Christian assumptions that I don’t agree with. It’s not just unconvincing, it’s false.
These very simple errors imply to me that Douthat knows less than he claims about world religions. Indeed, in his chapter on consciousness, he dismisses atheist efforts to explain how consciousness is an illusion by saying they basically made it up, not knowing that it’s a somewhat common Buddhist perspective that the self is an illusion, taught in introduction to philosophy classes everywhere.
CopyPasta Apologetics
Even if you grant Douthat neutrality he does not demonstrate, Believe is chalk full of bad, copypasta apologetics. Again, the problem here is not the fact that Douthat is a Christian or that he wants you to be a Christian, but that he argues for Christianity and religious belief poorly. It’s not that his arguments are unconvincing, but that they are bad, lazy arguments that nonbelievers have already heard before.
Douthat winks and nods that he was around for the Great Internet Religious Debates of the late 2000s and early 2010s, but he makes so many basic errors that I don’t think he bothered to understand atheist arguments back then, let alone today. He uses what I’d like to call “CopyPasta Apologetics” to make his points.
CopyPasta Apologetics is a tactic where you cut and paste arguments or points from experts without any consideration of whether or not they agree with you or if they’re qualified to comment intelligently on the issue. Or, you just cite an argument without much or any citation or elaboration. The reason why CopyPasta Apologetics is bad is because it oversimplifies something very complicated to the point of misrepresenting it.3
The reason I think Douthat never paid attention to atheist arguments is because his oldest citation is a 22 years old (2003) work by Fred Hoyle. Hoyle was an atheist, but Douthat doesn’t tell you that. He then explains the Copenhagen Theory in a few short sentences without any citation. He continues, citing a scholar of Classical Greek literature to make a point about physics and consciousness.
Later on, he tries to debunk the late Daniel Dennett’s theories on consciousness, without citing Dennett directly. Instead, he shallowly summarizes someone who disagreed with Dennett.4
More humorously, he refers to Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing as a “recent” book, when it came out 13 years ago.5 I bring this up not for a cheap dunk, but because it’s a good point of evidence that Douthat hasn’t paid attention to these arguments in a decade,6 and he probably had that “recent” note about the Krauss book in an old Word document note, where he found recently when drafting his manuscript, and just copied and pasted it mindlessly.
Little oversights like this, and calling Sam Harris “The New Atheist turned meditation evangelist,” when a cursory overview of his biography will tell you he was interested in meditation long before New Atheism, implies to me a level of unseriousness, laziness, and disengagement with the people he’s purportedly trying to persuade and convert.
As someone who has been very interested in religious arguments for most of my life, one of the many off-putting things religious believers do is not update their arguments or say “that’s a bad argument, stop saying it.” Admittedly, you can’t expect everyone to fall in line, especially in the age of click bait social media, but atheist influencers and thinkers are capable of producing interesting content like “Christopher Hitchens was overrated” or “Richard Dawkins actually sucks.”
Meanwhile, the supposed best and most influential Christian Apologists repeat the same questionable arguments with the same level of certainty as they did before they were engaged by the skeptics. It’s like they’re not even listening.
I’m a broken record here, but if Douthat is truly trying to convert me to even the most non-committal of religious tradition, he has to try harder than a copypasta. He has to show me he actually understands the skeptic and takes their objections seriously. In writing this review, I feel as if I’m treating him more seriously than he is treating all non-believers.
Douthat Misunderstands Science
It would be one thing if Douthat had a proper understanding of science, atheists, or atheist scientists (or scientific atheists?), but it’s clear he understands none of the above. And many of his misunderstandings are basic.
Across countless pages, he talks about the order of the universe and how science implies a creator, but on a basic level this misunderstands how the scientific method functions. Douthat doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the scientific process of discovering a pattern and discovering order.
Again, this sounds pedantic, but it’s important. When someone says something is ordered, it implies an “orderer” without evidence. That is, someone that commanded or organized something to be in a certain way. He also uses rhetoric about how the universe is governed by certain laws.
This isn’t how science works. I’m no scientist or philosopher of science, so forgive me if this isn’t a perfect illustration. We say that the sun rises every morning because we’ve observed the pattern repeatedly. We can predict that it will happen again tomorrow, given the consistency of the pattern. But it’s not an iron law of the universe that the sun will rise tomorrow; it’s not written anywhere or “enforced” by anyone. It’s just a pattern that we can expect and can test. We explain this pattern in more in-depth ways because we have discovered other patterns in the universe that we can relate to this observation. We call this construction of patterns and predictions scientific “theories” or “laws.”
By Douthat’s conception, it is a law of the universe that the sun will rise tomorrow, but if you know anything about science, it’s not. The sun could explode, Earth could be knocked off its orbit, or any number of things that would prevent the sun from rising in the east tomorrow. Heck, there could be as-yet-unverified mechanisms to physics that destroy our universe in an instant. Who knows!
In science, our theories and laws of the universe are provisional and reliant on something else to be what they are. We’re constantly uncovering those causes, and there’s always unknown causes behind those causes. During the scientific process, we’re not “discovering order” or “discovering governing laws.” We’re discovering patterns and ameliorating theories as human beings can understand them, given our limited information and cognitive capacity.
This thing we call science is an emergent body of knowledge and understanding that results from the process of gathering data, testing hypotheses, and formulating new theories based on their accuracy and predictability.
Scientific discovery isn’t like finding a random law book of written statues that some lawyer left behind, but like building a machine with trial and error. To the extent that we can say something is a law of the universe is only to the extent that it’s been reliably the same way as many times as we’ve observed it. It only takes one discovery to revolutionize the way we understand that law and change it. In the machine metaphor, a human-pulled cart is the best law of the universe until we discover horses; a horse-drawn cart is the best law of the universe until we discover internal combustion; and internal combustion automobiles are the best law of the universe until we discover electric vehicles; and that law will be undermined by something else in the future.
Douthat’s misunderstanding is understandable because it’s common, but his mistake is amplified by assuming the order and consistency we see in scientific observations are a law of the universe, and not an extremely useful human assumption.
Humans are probably evolved to expect consistency in our surrounding environment, so when something changes within it, we can detect it, as it is likely a threat to our survival.7 Today, we probably generalize that instinct to all of reality, as we have a growing understanding of what “our environment” entails. But this assumption isn’t necessarily true: the foundations of the universe could be random, without order, predictably disorderly, or just counterintuitive. We just don’t know!
This long digression, though maybe not 100 percent accurate, is to communicate that Douthat doesn’t understand what the scientific method is, nor does he try to understand how human psychology is predisposed to impose a sense of order on the universe for our common survival. Science is almost always incomplete, while our psychology deludes itself into thinking we have a full picture of everything. By consolidating science with this instinct, Douthat paints a false perception of both.
In this regard, Douthat would also benefit greatly from reading many of Michael Shermer’s books on the topic, which explain why humans believe as they do, the evolutionary pressures toward different cognitive biases, superstitions, weird behaviors, and indeed truth.8
…Or His Detractors
It’s not an overstatement that throughout Believe Douthat asserts that atheists, or whomever he quibbles with, cannot explain something that they can and have, indeed, explained. Given his aforementioned laziness, poor citation, and lack of curiosity, I’m inclined to think he does not find atheist explanations satisfactory because he does not truly understand them.
Indeed, he not only doesn’t directly engage with detractors via direct citation, throughout the book he makes claims about the beliefs of atheists, satanists, Humeans, people who don’t believe in ghosts yet hire exorcists, and others without actually citing specific people saying they believe those things.9
Douthat’s not really engaging with criticism, so much as he is with the simulacrum of criticism. It’s clear he doesn’t think there’s a good argument against his worldview, but without this engagement, he does a terrible job of showing that there isn’t.
Instead, he portrays the people who disagree with him as dogmatic and close-minded. His section on the multiverse would have you think that the reason why people formulate a multiverse is because they really don’t want to believe in God, when in reality, the scientific endeavor is more about figuring out as much as we can about the universe.
There are religious believers who believe in the multiverse because they understand that “even if God made it,” we want to understand how, and extravagant theoretical physics hypotheses are what the math points (or at least gesture) toward. Neither you or I, dear reader, understand the mathematical underpinnings of string theory and why physicists may or may not hypothesize it, but I believe we can agree that it’s not because scientists came together and said “well, we need to make sure people don’t have a reason to believe in God.”
In this regard, Douthat is a religious conservative through and through. He believes no one could propose a multiverse or non-theistic scientific explanation of the universe without being prejudiced against religious conservatives or God Himself.
He also believes his detractors are sexually libertine. His section imploring people to join a religious tradition, regardless of its conservative teachings on sexuality, leans heavily on appeals to those who want to sleep around and not those who find traditional religious teachings on homosexuality as at least somewhat dehumanizing to gay people.10
He’s unreasonably smug about naturalists, atheists, and skeptics doubting the existence of “wooey” spiritual entities like angels, demons, spirits, djinn, and so on. But because he misunderstands the motives of his detractors and the methods of science, he misunderstands the reason why no one gives these entities credence. Namely: they lack explanatory power. On a personal level, you can live your life assuming their nonexistence and be no worse off.11
But Douthat would like us to think the reason why these things aren’t taken seriously is because of a stubborn metaphysical naturalist dogma. In reality, most people who have a firm understanding of scientific methods face no real consequences for ignoring supernaturalism, outside of experiencing the smug contempt from religious conservatives like Douthat.
I Could Go On.
In all, Believe was a disappointing read. It failed on its own terms of establishing neutral, non-Christian reasons to adopt a religious tradition. It recycled decades-old apologetic arguments that misrepresent science and the views of scientists. It had a misunderstanding of what science is, what science attempts to accomplish, and how non-religious people understand the world.
Throughout the book, there are countless unsubstantiated claims about morality, consciousness, and other issues, which I can only see as red meat for religious conservatives to keep reading through Douthat’s boring writing style. If you’re a “seeker” or a “none” or an atheist, you’ll be turned off by these smug proclamations, bored in some parts, and annoyed at others.
This book won’t be persuasive to anyone who isn’t already a Christian. Though Ross Douthat of the New York Times has a reputation of writing arguments for people who disagree with him, he doesn’t have a reputation for actually persuading them. He upholds his reputation in Believe.
Bolding is mine.
Bolding is mine
A good example of this is when creationists cite Richard Dawkins discussing the complexity of DNA to support creationism.
My guess is that he didn’t want to catch any more strays from Daniel Dennett, dead or alive
For perspective, I remember reading Krauss’s book in high school when I was a baby skeptic. I’m in my 30s now. I’ll admit I kind of agree with Douthat’s criticism of Krauss’s book (Krauss redefines what nothing means), but I think that’s a pretty easy criticism, which is why most people don’t consider Krauss that influential anymore (on top of unsavory allegations)
Think of how fast moving things immediately grab our attention. Our ancestors that evolved this instinct likely survived, and those who didn’t were weeded out by natural selection.
Ironically, Douthat tells an anecdote about Shermer in his book as an example of people who stubbornly reject supernaturalism. But again: Douthat doesn’t let you hear Shermer’s explanation of these events.
Again, though there is one interesting anecdote about Michael Shermer, it comes off as a copypasta. He doesn’t let Shermer speak for himself about his interpretation of this experience.
I understand I’m using a broad generalization to sweep traditional Christian teachings on sexuality under the rug. But if you truly, sincerely examine the implications and assumptions Christians make about gay people, it’s unhinged.
Indeed, supernatural claims, when investigated, are shown either false or, at best, inconclusive. I’m still waiting for someone religious to have a near death experience and come back to learn that their religion was actually wrong, and another religion was actually correct. More interesting is that social scientists today are coming around to studying the nature of common supposedly supernatural experiences, like demonic possessions, and finding interesting insights that seem to undermine their independence from culture. For example: horror movies like The Exorcist had an impact on how Americans experienced demonic possessions.
I'm a believer and I pretty much agree with a lot of this take, I find him a poor apologist recycling cliches.