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Why Believe?

Studio – John Dickson:

In May 2024, the Vatican released new guidelines on supernatural phenomena, urging more caution when assessing the truthfulness of those who say they have witnessed a divine apparition.  According to one BBC report, the new guidelines come amidst a soaring number of reports of these things, particularly in the era of social media where someone who claims to have seen a weeping statue can go viral overnight.  It’s rare for the Vatican to weigh in on the veracity of an apparition. Mostly, Catholic HQ leaves things to the local bishops to sort out – with an understanding that personal revelations should remain … personal.  But every now and then, the Vatican does declare something “worthy of belief”.  In 1917, three shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to them once a month for several months, promising a miracle. As the months went by, more and more people showed up to the children’s village of Fatima in Portugal expecting to see a miracle. On October 13, they claim they did – it’s known as the ‘Miracle of the Sun’, and eye witnesses say the sun seemed to dance in the sky.  That apparition was officially recognised by the Catholic church in 1930.  In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume had predicted that, as the world grew more rational and scientific, people would stop having supernatural experiences. Those experiences, he said, were more common among the “ignorant and barbarous nations”. (he definitely should have listened to our episode 148 – The Anthropologists – for more on where that idea came from …)  However, that’s not what has actually happened.  A big study by the Pew Research Centre  two years ago found that 7 in 10 adults in the United States would describe themselves as ‘spiritual’ in some way:

– 83% of US adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. 

– 81% say there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it. 

– 42% believed that the dead can communicate with the living. 

– 30% said they have personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force. 

Religious experience, then, is a “brute fact” of our world – even our modern educated world. We say we’re a secular age, but the numinous, the spiritual, keeps sticking its finger into our lives.  Our special guest today – one of the best known columnists of the last 20 years – has been thinking and researching this for a while, and he has a pretty compelling argument that the ‘spiritual but not religious’ among us have stumbled across something real and that they should take the next rational step from spiritual experience to a community formed by a definite theology.  Formal religion, my guest says, is a more “plausible destination” for spiritual searchers.  Yeah, but which religion, I ask him. All of them, he says — sort of, maybe, or perhaps just one! This was a fun conversation.  I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions. 

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson:
 I must begin by registering, uh, a complaint or maybe just a lament. I, really miss the argument with Michelle Goldberg. I loved that podcast. 

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Ross Douthat, a long time columnist first at the Atlantic and for the last 15+ years at The New York Times. Ross also hosts the Times Opinion podcast Interesting Times, which he started earlier this year. He used to be on another NYT podcast called The Argument, which I loved. I’m lamenting the loss of it here. I listened to it all the time – it was a shining beacon of how to continue to talk well to those with whom you profoundly disagree. Bring back The Argument, I say! Anyway, Ross is a pretty vocal Roman Catholic and he’s written a lot about the Catholic church and the future of catholicism, as well as the role of religion in society. He’s the author of several books including – The Decadent Society – which was published in 2020 which you should go out and read, for sure. His latest book is called Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and it’s that thesis that I’m most interested in for this episode. But the whole idea of decadence is a good starting point for our conversation. 

John Dickson:
Yeah, it’s too bad. Um, that podcast put me onto your 2020 book. Uh, what was it? Decadence, uh, the Decadent Society. Yeah. Which I loved, uh, recommended to tons of people, and I actually think it’s a good setup for what I wanna talk to you about religion. Can you give me the, well, my audience, the 60 second [00:02:30] summary of, uh, what you mean by decadence and what you’re saying in that book.

Ross Douthat:
Sure. So it’s a book. It’s not about decadent meaning long weekends at Las Vegas and chocolate covered strawberries. It’s about the idea of decadence as a era, a decadence society is a society that is sort of stuck. And stagnant at a high level of wealth and development and civilizational accomplishment. So decadent is a condition that sort of you reach as an empire or a society, uh, when you’ve achieved a lot, become extremely wealthy, and are starting to lose confidence in yourself. Your institutions have, you know, grown all kinds of barnacles and function very painfully. Your artistic and cultural forms start repeating themselves and going in circles with, you know, endless marvel superhero sequels. That’s the sort of pop culture example. Um, but it’s not crucially a state of precipitous decline. Part of the argument in the book was that decadence can go on for quite a while. You can sort of get stuck, and especially if you don’t have really strong external enemies, you can sort of just repeat the same patterns, not just for five or 10 years, but for, but for multiple generations. That’s the…

John Dickson:
And do you think,and do you think this, um, decadence principle sort of lies behind the secular malaise that we find ourselves in?

Ross Douthat:
Yes, to some degree. I, I think that, um, part of what’s happened in religion, especially since the middle of the 20th century, is that the religions themselves, um, Christianity in my own Roman Catholicism especially, have gotten stuck in sort of a round of arguments related to the sexual revolution and the cultural revolutions of the sixties and seventies. And no one has quite found a way out of those arguments. So people just sort of go in circles about that particular set of issues. And meanwhile, the wider culture has fallen into a kind of, sort of soft indifferentism, not a kind of hard militant atheism, um, but just a sense of kind of perpetual agnosticism. And, um, yeah, and sort of pessimism about, I, I think part of decadence is a pessimism about the capacities of human beings to actually understand the universe, actually discover secrets and solve problems. And one of my, you know, maybe more eccentric claims in the book is that there is actually a connection between scientific creativity and kind of religious interest and ambition. And obviously the two are not always concentrated in the same people, but you do… There is a sort of link between the belief that, you know, the scientist belief that the universe is sort of made for us to discover and understand and figure out, and the religious belief, uh, that you know, that God created the world for human beings to understand and flourish in. And when, so, so you can get periods of sort of scientific and intellectual torpor that match onto periods of kind of spiritual and religious anomie. 

Studio – John Dickson:

In The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat gives the example of the American space program in the mid 20th century as one of the last times we saw the strange alchemy of the scientific and religious quest for knowledge. He quotes  Kendrick Oliver’s history of the space program which, tellingly, is titled To Touch the Face of God: The sacred, the profane, and the American Space Program: 

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“[Apollo] simultaneously kindled thoughts of God and the death of God. When religion was absent from the program, its absence became a point of religious concern. When religion was present, its presence meant more, to more people, than it did in any other national undertaking of the time. Only for as long as that was true did Americans live in an age of space.” 

Studio – John Dickson:

The late 20th century’s march towards secularism was accompanied by economic stagnation and a lack of scientific imagination. Actually, three years after Ross’ book was published, the esteemed scientific journal Nature published a study that showed the slowing of major scientific and technological advances between 1945 and 2010. We’ll link to that in the show notes. We’re ageing, comfortable, and stuck, Ross says. We need something to move us forward – perhaps a renaissance … or a revival? 

John Dickson:
Hmm. There was a, uh, a spike in atheist enthusiasm, uh, you know, the old new atheism that, that seems to have fallen out of fashion. Um, in in your book you sort of. Give the impression that, uh, secularism, I mean to personify it [00:06:00] almost regrets its total rejection of religion.

Ross Douthat:
Yes. I, I think right now we’re in a period of, um, sort of regretful unbelief, mixed with stirrings of interest, and that’s quite different from where we were 15 or 20 years ago when, uh, as you say, there was the kind of the, you know, the Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens assault. On what remained of the old forms of institutional religion in their, in their decadence, they were subject to a withering critique by the new atheists that sort of marginalized them further within, within the culture. And so now we’ve had a kind of 15 or 20 year experiment in a deeper form of secularism, especially in the US you know, people disaffiliating from organized religion. More Americans have been raised without any kind of encounter with religion than probably at any point in our history right now. And what we have now is a sort of general sense that, okay, the new atheists were wrong. The decline of religion does not usher in a bright paradise of reason and, and science and, you know, happy fellow feeling. In fact, you know, the decline of religion has left us more polarized, um, more paranoid, more deranged in certain ways, and certainly among young, the younger generation, just unhappy. And more uncertain about people’s place in the universe. And so out of that, you have among some secular intellectuals, a sense of like, well, religion might not be true, but it certainly was useful. Right? And that, and that’s a con, this is by no means the first era when secular intellectuals have sort of swung into that space. Um, but then you also have, I think, a, a genuine openness, which is part of the mood that I’m trying to write the book sort of into and for Right. A, a real openness to religion and religious ideas, um, that you haven’t had in at least a generation, I would say in the

John Dickson:
In fact, you reject the secularism hypothesis. Uh, some are gonna find that confronting.

Ross Douthat:
Yes. I would say that. Well, what, what I reject in particular is the idea that disenchantment is a complete reality or a complete description of the modern world. Right? I, I think that disenchantment, you know, whether in Max Weber’s sense or, you know, any, any other sense is real as a description of sort of  how official knowledge works in the US, right? So like, you know, if you attend a law school and are writing down the facts of a case, uh, you would not add in, and incidentally, the house that the plaintiff purchased was haunted, you know, by an ancestral spirit, right? You wouldn’t put that in the brief. And if you’re writing a Wikipedia page, right, like Wikipedia editors who are sort of the producers of official knowledge right now, they’re pretty hostile to, you know, any sort…

John Dickson:
Sort of An operational atheism?

Ross Douthat:
An operational atheism. But experientially, Um, I think that the world has never ceased to be enchanted in the sense of people having weird, mystical, numinous, miraculous seeming experiences as a kind of ordinary feature of human existence. And in fact, I think we have plenty of evidence that as organized religion declines, these kind of experiences don’t necessarily become any less common. Sometimes they might become more common because more people are just sort of wandering around doing weird experiments to seek them out. Um, and they clearly fall on, you know, the non-believer as well as the believer. There’s lots of what, you know, what I, I’ve called elsewhere, sort of the non-con conversion story, right?That you sort can sort of collect these accounts by people who have something, something that in a different era would’ve been just recognized as a religious experience happened to them, and they’re operating within a secular framework. So they have no idea exactly what to do with it. Right. Um, you know, just, just a few weeks ago, uh, the Sebastian Yunger, the, uh, author of The Perfect Storm and other bestselling books had had a little book come out about his own near death experience. Right. And just a fascinating little text where he’s just sort of reckoning for the first time, right. With, you know, the reality of spiritual experience as a feature of human existence and doesn’t, you know, doesn’t know what to make of it. And I think that’s a persistent feature of our culture now.

Studio – John Dickson:

Sebastian Junger, by the way, is an American journalist and contributing editor of Vanity Fair. He’s won all sorts of awards for his work documenting the war in Afghanistan. His war documentary Restrepo (named after a platoon medic) was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature. So, his latest book, In my Time of Dying: how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife raised some eyebrows.  In a New York Times interview last year, Junger said that he found himself on the operating table after a ruptured aneurysm and he sensed his father (who had been dead for 8 years) in the room with him. He didn’t come out of that experience believing in God, but it changed the way he thought about the world: 

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“Maybe we just don’t understand that this world we experience is just one reality and that there’s some reality we can’t understand that’s engaged when we die. All this stuff happens — ghosts and telepathy and the dead appearing in the rooms of the dying — that’s consistent in every culture in the world.”

Studio – John Dickson:

Ross Douthat reckons there are more supernatural stories like this floating around than most secular-minded folk would care to admit.  And coming up, we’ll talk more about all that ‘woo woo’ stuff – miracles, mysticism and so forth.  So stand by  … Ross’s book Believe takes us from this idea of a decadent, secular malaise to how we might overcome it. He argues that religious belief isn’t actually ‘woo woo’ at all. In fact, it makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it. It explains the persistent reality of our encounters with the supernatural … with stuff like Sebastian Junger’s near death dad sighting.   The so-called disenchanted age isn’t that disenchanted after all. In fact non-belief requires us to ignore what our reasoning faculties tell us about the world.  As Xenophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Cleanthes, Plotinus and all the great Greek philosophers would say, every observant person notices the ‘logos’ in the creation – the imprint of rationality in physical stuff – and it’s spooky beyond all dismissal that our minds can perceive and describe that logos. There’s a logos out there … and in us!!

John Dickson:
I wanna drill down to that section of your book in a in a moment, but I, I sort of wanna do it in order if that’s okay. Um, I hope you’ve read your book recently because, Um, I have. Now I dunno if it was, uh, intentional in your part, but, but, your book is rhetorically very Aristotelian. It goes logos, pathos, ethos. Uh, was this intentional or just obvious to a New York Times writer.

Ross Douthat:
I mean, you know, it’s, it’s been some time since I read Aristotle, so I will not claim any intentionality except insofar as, you know, the philosophers ideas seep deeply into any educated soul, let’s say.

John Dickson:
Good. So let’s start at the logos, because that’s really where your, your argument, uh, begins and in a sense, your first two arguments, they go together and, and, and they are pretty much literally that there’s a logos in the universe. And isn’t it weird that it corresponds to the logos in our minds. And that that resonance, that match is too spooky to be compatible with atheism. I, I’ve just put it in two sentences, but can you give me … 

Ross Douthat:
No. that’s, that’s brilliant. I, I don’t have anything to add. 

John Dickson:
Your writing on this topic, I think is near the best I’ve seen for a general market,

Ross Douthat:
Well, I, I, I appreciate it. But that really was a wonderful, wonderful formulation because I am, I’m taking up in those chapters ideas that are, you know, by no means novel in religious apologetics. Right? So on the one hand I’m taking up, um, the, basically the developments in modern physics that have indicated, um, curious features of the cosmos, specifically the extent to which the basic laws that order the cosmos and, um, and sort of give its shape and, um, and being seem to be incredibly carefully fine-tuned at the order of, you know, one in a quadrillion, not one in a hundred or more, even, even a quadrillion underestimates the case, right? To produce, um, you know, constants and forces and all of these things that are necessary to yield the kind of structure of the universe, stars, planets, um, and ultimately, uh, biological life. Right? And so the implication of what physics has uncovered is that there is a near infinity of possible universes that could never conceivably contain conscious life. Um, and so ours is a, you know, one in 10 to the X-X-X-X-X shot. So that’s a, that is sort of a peculiar feature of the cosmos that seems to be, you know, sort of read naively a kind of case for some kind of presiding intentionality purpose or design. Um, now we don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole, but there is of course a materialist alternative, which, you know, is sort of all of the speculations that have also seeped into our popular culture about the idea of a multiverse, right? Which basically says, well. Um, you know, the reason our universe appears so fine tuned, it appears to be one in a you know, one in a quintillion is that the quintillion universes all exist. Uh, all the others are dead. Ours is the only one that has life. And so of course we, you know, we, it, it’s the only one that can be observed, right? That’s why we’re here observing it. Um, so that’s, that’s sort of the choice in cosmology right now between a return of some kind of prime mover or god hypothesis and multiverse theory, which has its own difficulties and problems.

Studio – John Dickson:

Just chiming in to say that you should go look for our episode on The Multiverse – episode 108 with astronomer Dr Debarah Haarsma and cosmologist (and Undeceptions mate) Dr Luke Barnes. Yes… we have an episode on the multiverse… If the multiverse is true we might in fact have many such episodes. Anyway, this universe it’s episode 108. 

John Dickson:
You. Yeah. I mean, not you, you, point out that it has its own problems and there’s a question about, about whether it’s even scientific, but, but, but you say you don’t think it weakens your argument at all.

Ross Douthat:
Well, I think so, I, I wanna be clear, I don’t believe in the multiverse, right? I, I do not. Right. I. I do not th I think that ours is the universe and should be understood as such. I think that is the, both, the more scientific and more philosophically credible perspective. Um, that said, I also think that the arguments around the multiverse do not, in fact, as far as I can tell, do away with the problem that the multiverse is trying to solve. Right? Because you end up with these peculiar situations where, you know, you essentially need a new form of fine tuning to explain how you get, you know, the universe generating machine of the multiverse in the first place. Right there, there does not seem to be an escape from some version of the fine tuning problem. The multiverse seems less like an attempt to do away with the possibility of God and more an attempt to restore human beings insignificance, right? To say, well, maybe there’s purpose or intentionality somewhere, but it’s so many levels Of universe away, right? That that, you know, at the very least human beings can be said, can be said to be, um, insignificant. And that, that in turn brings me to the second question, right? The, the issue of, um, our own capacities and the, the sort of logos from below rather than logos from above. Um, because of course, the curious thing about our universe is not merely that it includes conscious beings capable of some form of basic observation, right? It includes conscious beings capable of deep and profound understanding and capable of attaining small g god-like power over the basic elements of the universe. And I don’t think any of that is obviously predictable from any kind of sort of multiverses conceit, right? It’s a very peculiar matchup. Between design at the top and understanding at the bottom that I think just looks a lot like the traditional religious portrait of a creator God and human beings who are made in the image of God. What does in the image of God mean? If not that we share with the creating mind some form of understanding and some form of power over the material reality in which we find ourselves.

John Dickson:
Yeah, some listening might say, ah, doubt that all you’re doing is saying the old caveman’s argument, the caveman was in awe at the supposed heavenly order, but we now know or can replace that or with mathematical explanation. You in fact say the opposite. You, you say the mathematical explanation is the key.

Ross Douthat:
Yes. Yes, I mean, I, I think that, that, I think that a caveman in awe of the universe is more likely and less surprising than a caveman who turns out to be able to, you know, do calculus and astrophysics and figure out quantum physics and hyper, you know, and develop speculations about the multiverse, right? If the multiverse actually exists, it’s absurdly fantastical that, you know, jumped up apes cavemen from, you know, a random planet supposedly, you know, in the midst of the Milky Way, could have figured out this, you know, invisible, impossible to discern reality. Right? And that, I, I think you know, this is, this is a slightly tricky point because I think a lot of people are conditioned by, uh, Darwinism to assume that, well, you know, the, the mind, you know, human minds evolve to solve problems. And, um, so it makes sense that, you know, the toolkit that solves one set of problems on the savanna would also, you know, happily yield, yield, you know, the capacities to solve ever more complex

John Dickson:
Yeah, there’s not much difference between working out how to escape a tiger.

Ross Douthat:
Right. And I think the answer is pretty clearly there. There is and more, and there’s, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of, again, rabbit holes we don’t have to go down. But first, there’s interesting evidence that I didn’t actually get into in the book, right? That some of the laws of the universe that we have discovered themselves seem to be curiously fine tuned for discovery, right? That there are sort of realms of our understanding where we wouldn’t, even with our, even with sort of God-like capacities, we wouldn’t have been able to understand certain things had the universe been arranged slightly differently, right? So there is actually an availability of evidence in interesting ways.

John Dickson:
It could have obscured itself, but instead it seems to be saying, look at the maths.

Ross Douthat:
Exactly, and, and there’s a way in which too, the, the ability, you know, there’s some interesting papers on this, again, not written by religious believers on how curious it is that the math that people do in their heads. You know, not you and I, or maybe not, maybe maybe just not I, right. But, but, but you know, the most capable mathematicians can do maths in their heads and then have it turn out that the mathematical speculations they’ve done map onto, um, experimental evidence that hasn’t been conducted yet. Right. That, and again, I don’t think that there is any, you, you have to describe it as an incredible, incredibly fortunate cosmic accident to say that the intellectual toolkit that evolved under the pressures of dodging, you know, saber-tooth tigers or what, or what have you, would also would also turn out to enable kind of this level of abstract speculation that maps onto physical reality. That’s e especially since you aren’t actually dealing with, you know, millions of years of evolutionary pressure between the, you know, 10,000 BC and the present. Right. It’s not like we’ve had, you know, a million years of pressure to create, to get us to the capacity for calculus. Not at all. That that’s something that evolved pretty rapidly in the context of human cultural exchange, and it is, I think, an underappreciated mystery that the key of our consciousness, our conscious reasoning, fits the lock of the universe in all of these different ways.

John Dickson:
So why don’t scientists fall on their knees and worship the creator? That’s a question you actually ask from the book.

Ross Douthat:
Yes. And I think, and it’s a reasonable question for the reader to ask, right? It’s, you know, you were saying kind things about my explanation earlier, but I’m obviously a layman, not a great physicist. Uh, my understanding of these things I think is generally correct, but, You know, I’m not presenting myself as an expert here. And many of the actual experts, while they might not be militant atheists, Allah, Dawkins, are at the very least agnostic, skeptics and so on. Um, and I think a few things are going on here, but the, the basic one is that, you know, the methods of science work best if you exclude, you know, if, if you exclude age agentic explanations and supernatural happenings, right? You learn much more in the end about the orbits of the planets if you don’t just default to the idea that, well, if there’s a squiggle in the orbit, that must be where the Archangel Gabriel stepped in, steps in and pushes the planet a little bit around, right? Like all, almost all of what modern science has achieved has been based on the idea that, you know, there are impersonal regularities in the world, and that’s what we’re looking for. That’s what we’re trying to understand. And if you bring the personal in, you sort of throw the whole system into the danger of becoming arbitrary and, and uncertain. Right. Um, and I don’t think that’s completely true in the sense that, you know, I, I think you can have a sort of a physical system that exhibits regularities and predictable and study those regularities and also assert that, okay, whoever’s running the system maybe steps in from time to time and tweaks things. But even allowing for that, it’s not crazy to say that the practice of science should be functionally a bit atheistic. The problem is that if you have a sort of functional atheism in your habits of everyday work, it’s very easy to shift from that to a kind of philosophical assumption that is again, I think not only not warranted by the evidence, but actively, um, actively contradicted by the evidence.

Studio – John Dickson:

In 1936, a little girl wrote a letter to Albert Einstein. 

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My dear Dr Einstein, 

We have brought up the question: Do scientists pray? in our Sunday school class. It began by asking whether we could believe in both science and religion. We are writing to scientists and other important men, to try and have our own question answered. We will feel greatly honored if you will answer our question: Do scientists pray, and what do they pray for? We are in the sixth grade, Miss Ellis’s class.

Respectfully yours,
Phyllis

Studio – John Dickson:

Five days later, Einstein wrote back. 

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January 24, 1936

Dear Phyllis,

I will attempt to reply to your question as simply as I can. Here is my answer:

Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish.

However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.

But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.

With cordial greetings,

Yours,
Einstein

Studio – John Dickson:

I’m not claiming Einstein for Christianity. I’ve said before – and perhaps this deserves a whole episode – Einstein rejected both Atheism and formal religion. He once told a New York rabbi, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns Himself with fates and actions of human beings.” He believed in God the way Aristotle believed in God, as the Source of reality and rationality – but not a personal being involved in our affairs directly. Some people call this ‘deism’, as distinct from ‘theism’. Both words come from the same indo-european root word meaning ‘god’ – which is why the Greek and Latin words sound almost identical – theos and deus. But people began using Deism and Deist (as distinct from Theism and Theist) in the 17th century (1682 according to the OED) to talk about a more distant notion of God, God behind nature rather than God involved in our lives. Anyway, that’s just for free. The point is: the way Einstein spoke about God – the author of books in a library, as he once put it – makes him sound like an early adopter of the category ‘spiritual, but not religious.’ 

Ross Douthat:
And some version of that clearly happened between the early modern phase of science and the contemporary phase. And it’s a curious thing a lot of people have written about this, right? That, you know, early modern science presumes some kind of creative power and presumes that in the end the, you know, the work of science works and makes sense and can be trustworthy because you’re uncovering some underlying design. And I still think that is a better and more coherent grounding of the scientific project than philosophical atheism. Um, I. But the practical, the practical atheism required of, you know, doing ordinary scientific research has over time displaced That original assumption, I think undercutting some of the foundations of science in the process, but again, not in a way that necessarily undermines people’s everyday scientific work. So you don’t necessarily even notice that you have a kind of philosophical problem undergirding your practical efforts.

Studio – John Dickson:

Love it. Much more to come. 

Break

John Dickson:
Let’s turn to what Aristotle might call pathos, the sort of the emotional, psychological, experiential dimension, uh, of our decision making, decision making and, and, and, and of persuasion. Um, you spend quite a lot of time, uh, on religious experiences, uh, the sort of thing. David Hume, uh, the Scottish philosopher said, would disappear from our world. Uh, once we got, uh, once we got more education. Uh, but you say not so fast. Spiritual experiences are everywhere. Tell me what you think are the most important spiritual experiences that you raise in the book and, and what do they tell us?

Ross Douthat:
I mean, I think the, the most important ones are the ones that challenge materialism and materialist conceptions most directly. So the most commonplace spiritual experiences are sort of a, I call them generic spiritual experiences. I don’t think there’s anything truly generic about ’em. It’s just a way of saying that they’re, they’re the most common, right? But you know, these sort of feelings of oneness with the universe. Connection with the universe, a sense of sort of the self dissolving or this, the alternative end, this sort of sudden sense of like the self’s immortality, right? It’s sort of separation from the material. Um, and there’s a lot of really interesting writing on these things. But I think, I think those kind of experiences. Uh, you know, the, the materialist doesn’t have that hard of a time saying, well, these are, you know, interesting brain states. You know, something in your brain chemistry is causing some kind of dissolve of the separation you normally feel between other things. And that’s all that’s going on here. Right. Um, again, I think with all of these experiences, it’s important to imagine a world in which they did not exist, right? Like, it is pretty easy to imagine a world where spiritual experiences weren’t commonplace. And as you said, I think a lot of enlightenment philosophers expected that world to obtain once you got rid of, you know, priests, priests telling people to believe in miracles. So it is, I think it is, you know, always a point in religion’s favor just the general persistence of these things. But, but I do think it is, you know, the more, the more specific and concrete and harder to explain. Experiences that challenge materialism the most. And so that starts with, you know, sort of direct, direct and personal encounters running the gamut from sort of intense experiences that feel like a mystical encounter with a supernatural person to sort of more like literal encounters. Like the, the tendency of, for instance, people to report encounters with dead loved ones around the time of the dead person’s passing in situations often where they didn’t even know the person had passed on. And where it’s just a very concrete, you know, not I had a vision, but you know, I saw this person here in this way. It was just a normal part of my everyday reality. Right. And you know, what makes these experiences interesting is that they just don’t map onto. Other, other dynamics of, um, understanding consciousness, right? Like, you know, they’re, they’re not, they’re not really equivalent to hallucinations. They don’t correlate with mental illness. They aren’t at all like the experiences that we have in dreams. They’re just their own category, right? And there’s this a term a, I think a 19th century researcher used for some of these things called them hallucinations of the sane, right? So it really is a striking thing that people who have no other, uh, there, there’s no other obvious explanation in their psychology or their personality for these experiences, nonetheless have them. Um, and then you push on beyond that and, you know, you get into things like near death experiences, which, um, you know, are a, you know, a topic of great contestation and debate. But the basic thing you can say about them is that we know a lot more about them. In the early 21st century, then people in the more religious past did, because thanks to modern science, we bring many more people back from the brink of death, and they, again, have a bunch of persistent, coherent features that obtain across cultures. Um, you know, the, the, you know, the, bright light, the ancestors who have passed some kind of life review, moral scrutiny of your life, and also the sense of them being reported as sort of more real than real. Again, sort of the opposite of like the fragmented dream-like hallucination or a dream itself. And the fact that they have profound effects on the people who experience them. They lead to, you know, they change people’s views about the cosmos. People who have them, who are atheists and materialists and certainly atheists and materialists have these experiences  tend to change their perspectives. People undergo moral transformations. There’s all kinds of curious things about them, and that doesn’t mean that you have to. You know, definitely believe that they correspond to a literal afterlife. Although I think, you know, I think there’s some good reasons to think that they do, but at the very least, you have to say, look, you know, imagine a world where modern science progressed. We started bringing people back from the brink of death, and everyone came back reporting either nothing at all, or just, [00:29:30] you know, dream logic hallucinations. Like, you know, you’re seeing a giant chicken attack, your uncle as a purple sunset falls over the, you know, just you, you can, you can easily imagine a world where 98% of near death experiences were incoherent and indicative of nothing waiting after death. and that is probably the world that, you know, the atheist paradigm would’ve predicted. So the fact that instead we have a world with. Consistent recurring near death experiences that are difficult to explain as evolutionary adaptations because people weren’t reporting them thousands of years ago ’cause they weren’t coming back from the dead on the regular. The fact that we have those experiences is a point for religion.Whatever else you make of it, it’s a win.

John Dickson:
When we, um, when we edit this show, uh, uh, we might try and convince my wife to tell her story of a very potent, uh, near death experience. I think that it? uh, might be a nice addition.

Ross Douthat:
Has she written, has she written 

John Dickson:
She, she hasn’t, she’s talked about it, uh, in public, but she’s never written about it. But, um, I might be able to get her to talk about it on this show.

Studio – John Dickson:

Well, I asked my darling Buff and she reluctantly said … okay! It was 7 June 1999. We were staying with family in Melbourne. Buff was three months pregnant. One morning she woke up in … pain. She has a very high pain threshold. We knew something was wrong. We turned up to hospital — sadly, it was a long weekend, and the specialist was an hour away having a well earned rest. When the doctors on duty watched Buff go into convulsions, they called the specialist — an hour or so later, she arrived. I’ll never forget that amazing, calm, professional, Scottish voice! Buff had deteriorated. Blood oxygen levels were – I think I remember rightly – in the 70s. They were worried she was about to stroke! The specialist immediately realised Buff had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. The baby had been growing in the fallopian tube and it had burst open. By now, Buff had internally hemorrhaged half of her body’s blood. We all raced to the surgery room. Some poor patient was in there, already prepped for surgery, but they were shoved out of the way … and within what seemed like only 60 seconds Buff was unconscious and being opened up. I was moved out of the way, told to call the family, and waited for the longest hour of my life. During those convulsions and the confusion I mentioned, I was, of course, terrified. Buff had a different perspective in that room, literally! 

Buff Dickson media

John Dickson:
You, um, push beyond. You know, that experience of the NUNUs, uh, the experience of, You know, near death through to miracles, uh, you’re, you’re actually pretty chipper about the, uh, the ongoing miracles that happen in our world.

Ross Douthat:
Yes. I mean, there are two, right? You are dealing with a phenomenon that. In the late 18th century would’ve been assumed to be something that is, you know, is reported in legendary form. Garbled stories passed down through would be mythologize and re repeated by Catholic priests to, you know, keep people enthralled to the church. Right. That, I mean, that would be a very sort of volter view of, of miracles. Right. And, you know, the 18th century, uh, skeptics would’ve also said, well, they’ll probably persist in some form because people are credulous. Right. So they wouldn’t have been entirely surprised by their persistence. But, you know, yes, we do continue in the developed scientific world to have lots and lots of people who report themselves to have experienced miraculous healings. There is an institution, my own Catholic church that only approves canonization of saints. When you have two of these supposed miracles attested to by medical experts as otherwise inexplicable and connected to some sort of prayerful intercession. And really, you know, again, I, one of the points I try to make is that, you know, I was saying earlier that the world isn’t disenchanted, just official knowledge is, but the disenchantment of official knowledge means, I think that even when people have these kind of experiences themselves, they underestimate just how many weird experiences like them there are out there because it’s a little bit de class a right to talk, to talk, to talk too much about it. But there, you know, there are both Catholic and other, you know, and other faith scholars who’ve tried to sort of assess like how many people, you know in the world report having some kind of miraculous healing developed world developing worlds, just really large numbers. You know, the, I think there too, the, the difficulty for the materialist is that, um, in order to explain the features of a lot of these experiences, if you don’t want to assume some sort of, uh, divine intervention and perfectly free not to, um, you really have to ascribe some kind of mystical potency to consciousness itself, right? You have to basically say, okay, you have these people who, you know, get prayed over in these ways and have these, you know, really serious medical conditions with no obvious prognosis for recovery. Just get better really, really quickly in ways that baffle medical science. So if it’s not God, well you can say it’s obviously some kind of mind over matter, right? It’s, you know, your, your mind believes in the healing so intensely. That, uh, you know, it, it ends up flooding your body, uh, with, you know, antibodies or, you know, protein, you know, whatever, whatever vector or pathway you you wanna You wanna make, right? You wanna offer. And I just think that is, that idea, well, not impossible, is then in deep tension with the other determination of materialism, which is to make as little of consciousness as possible, right? To say that consciousness is essentially an illusion sort of stapled together on top of processes that are fundamentally just deterministic biological processes working, working themselves out. And I, I don’t really think you can have one, have both of those things be true, right? I think at the very least, the evidence for miracles should get you to a kind of mystical view of consciousness itself, even if it doesn’t get you all the way to believing in, you know, the Christian God directly, directly healing people. This is a, a subject that comes up a lot in these conversations ’cause interviewers are always interested in it. But, you know, I think the follow up question from, from the secular person is, okay, healing miracles are all well and good, but they’re very, you know, sort of, they’re very internal. Whatever is miraculously happening is happening deep inside your, you know, inside the human body. Where are the levitating saints? Right? Where are the things that, uh, we can, you know, we can put on video as evidence of the miraculous. And that’s, I think a perfectly fair question. Um, I do think that, you know, the, the book that I recommend to some of them is a book by Carlos Eire, who’s a professor at Yale here in New Haven, Connecticut, where I, where I live, and it’s called, They Flew. And it is about literal levitations in the 16th and 17th century of Catholic Saints and others, um, who were widely reported to levitate in ways that would’ve passed any kind of test of historical reality, um, that you care to offer apart from the photographic, because there were no cameras and no, no videotapes, right.?And I think an interesting question for both religious and  non-religious is, you know, what was going on there? And, could it happen nowadays? Could it happen again? I would not be surprised if over the next hundred years we, something happens in the world that challenges the materialist paradigm a little bit more directly.

Studio – John Dickson:

We’ve pointed out before that the rationality or otherwise of believing in miracles depends on our background beliefs about the universe. If you assume there’s no Mind behind the logos of the universe, it’s pretty hard to stomach miracles (unless you actually experience one, I guess). It was the 18th-century Scottish atheist philosopher David Hume who wrote: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” 

A miracle can only be established by testimony that is practically impossible to disbelieve—i.e., testimony which is so irrefutable it would be miraculous if it turned out to be false. 

Loads of people used to quote this saying, until an array of philosophers – including atheist ones – pointed out this seems to be a statement designed to rule out miracles from the beginning, not to probe whether they can be rationally accepted. One such book is titled Hume’s Abject Failure, Oxford University Press, 2000. We’ve put a reading list in the show notes. If you hold one view of the universe, you are compelled to deny miracles; if you hold another view of the universe, you are free to accept miracles (under certain conditions). If I hold that the ‘laws of nature’ define the limits of what is possible in the universe—that no Law-giver/God exists behind the laws—then, in principle, ‘miracles’ cannot be viewed as rational, and no amount of evidence could be accepted as evidence that a miracle has taken place. If, on the other hand, I hold that the ‘laws of nature’ do not define the limits of what is possible—that the laws themselves point to a Law-giver/God behind the laws—then, since such a Law-giver could act through and beyond the natural ‘laws’, it is, in principle, rational to believe in the possibility of miracles, and I am free to accept a miracle when there is good evidence in its favour. That evidence doesn’t have to be ‘miraculously’ good. Given the background belief that there is a God who could do a miracle, the evidence just has to be the kind of evidence such a miracle would leave behind and more evidence than you’d expect if it were a fraud or mistake. Anyway, as I said, if you actually experience a miracle, none of this philosophising is relevant. The experience itself is a nudge not just to spirituality but maybe even to formal religion. That’s where Ross takes this whole conversation …

John Dickson:
Despite your, um, endorsement of spiritual experiences, you don’t end up endorsing, I’m spiritual, not religious. The curious thing about this book is you say, no, no, no, you ought to be “Religious” in a formal sense. So let’s talk about that. Um, what’s wrong with just being the captain of my own soul?

Ross Douthat:
Well, the same thing that’s wrong with being the captain of yourself in any serious endeavor, right? I, I think that people treat religion as if it’s in a category apart from other forms of human effort and engagement. But you know, it would be quite curious, let’s say to say, I, you know, I intend to be, I intend to take a strong interest in Football and become the world’s best footballer. And I’m going to do this all by myself in the backyard with a soccer ball and never, you … 

John Dickson:
I was hoping you meant soccer

Ross Douthat:
I, the idea, well, I was try, I, I try and, you know, I, I try and go back and forth between the terminologies, right? Um, I said footballer, so, you know, I don’t mean we don’t say footballer for American football players, but you know, there’s in any kind of athletic endeavor, right? You know, even if it’s, even if it’s a singular solo endeavor, right? The idea that you would do it without a team, without a coach, without partners, without some kind of community is pretty much absurd. Right. And similarly, like if I said, well, I’m really interested in becoming politically engaged, and you know, what that means is I’m going to read books about politics. And, you know, take those books and write a bunch of social media posts on my own about politics and that’s it. Now, that’s actually how a lot of people engage with politics nowadays. But it’s not a good way to engage with politics. It’s not being actually political in the political animal sense, sense of the word. Right? And religion, I think is generally like that there. You know, you should assume if you’re coming to religion fresh, you’re newly interested in it. You should assume that these big evolved antique systems exist for a reason. You should assume that you’re better off, at least initially, in sort of stepping into an existing conversation and an existing set of disciplines rather than trying to just figure things out on your own. You should assume that you will stick, you’re much more likely to stick with any kind of spiritual practice if you have an institution around you encouraging you to actually do it. A community encouraging you to do it. I am, you know, I’m not the most prayerful person  in the world. And when I consider how much praying I do, because the Catholic church requires me to go to mass once a week, versus how much I would do if I didn’t go to mass once a week, I think I can say very clearly that just that one requirement of being Catholic quintuples my prayer, my prayer life every, every week, right? So it, you know, it’s, it’s things like that. But then the final point to, you know, bring it back to the supernaturalist side of things, is if you assume there are spiritual realities out there, there’s absolutely no reason to assume that they’re all friendly or safe or easily navigated or, you know, that, that, you know, once you get beyond the material world, everything is just a, you know, warm, warm bath of new age light and happiness. Um, and in fact there is plenty of evidence and testimony and data from recent human experience in all of human history to suggest that, you know, the spiritual world is, is a landscape of danger. That there are powers, spiritual powers that do not have your good in mind. And so you’ll encounter, like, you know, in the literature of people who take psychedelics, right? To have spiritual experiences. People saying, I, I had an encounter with a negative entity and I, I don’t know what to do about it. What, you know, what, what should I do? Right? And, you know, not the only reason, but not a small reason to join a traditional religion is that traditional religions have a lot of experience with negative entities and trying to figure out how to guide people through spiritual experiences So that they don’t. Accidentally fall prey to what, not only Christians, but you, know, practitioners of other faiths would reasonably call a demon. Um, so the demons are in fact,part of the case, not the whole case, but part of the case for being religious And not just spiritual.

John Dickson:
And in urging people to be religious, you, you really mean go and be a Hindu. Go, go and be a Buddhist, go and be a Muslim. It is The, striking thing about the book. How, um, I don’t know, cosmopolitan, you are, uh, at one level – pluralistic – we’ll, we’ll get to the end of the book in a moment, but but you, you are, this is um, striking to me anyway.

Ross Douthat:
Yes, The, the assumption, the assumption of the book is that, um, it, it is a liberal assumption in a certain way. I am a Conservative Catholic and you know, as we parse these things in terms of what I believe about the Catholic faith and its truth claims and so on. But I am a liberal insofar as I think that it is pretty evident that if God exists, he is present in some form across the world’s major religions, not always and everywhere, but you know, if you, whether you’re reading philosophical literature or reading about mystical experience, it seems clear that people in, you know, Hindus in South Asia have some kind of encounter with the same kind of reality as um, Christians in the West. Right? And if that’s true, then while from a Catholic perspective, it is not ideal for someone who feels impelled towards religion to start out in Hinduism or Islam instead of Catholicism because the Catholic does think that Catholicism has core truths that are not available in other faiths, it’s still better generally to have someone start where they feel called to start than to hover permanently in some kind of agnosticism and never actually try or do anything. And yeah, part of this reflects, you know, just the reality of pluralism, right? Pluralism is just an established fact of, you know, the developed world right now. And there’s no obvious path to an American future, certainly where only Christian options are on the table religiously, or to say nothing of only Catholic options or anything like that. So in that environment, I think that the Christian has to have a certain kind of confidence that, you know, the God is not out to trick people, and you know, if people are not, if people’s initial move into religion is not a move into Christianity that God can still work with that. Right? And you know, I have a case study, uh, in one of these, one of these chapters that, you know, is, is a Christian case study in the end. Right. But it’s sort of useful. It’s the novelist, Paul Kingsnorth, who’s  from the UK, and he was raised with just the most attenuated form of English Christianity somewhere in the 1970s or eighties. And there was just no, like, this was presented to him as this completely dead religion that had nothing, you know, no purchase on modern life. And so there was just no obvious scenario once he became interested in religion, where that was going to be the place where he started. Instead, he was an environmentalist. He became interested in eco spirituality, then Zen Buddhism, then even a kind of neo paganism. And only after he had gone on this journey did he suddenly feel drawn towards, in the end, Eastern Orthodoxy, towards Christianity and became a Christian. And I just don’t think a Christian should look at that story and say, oh, Paul Kingsnorth. He made a series of terrible blunders and then he finally chose right, or finally received the grace he needed to choose right. I think you have to look at that and say,you know, there was a journey there that was the only way that Paul Kingnorth was going to end up as a Christian. Right. And I, think that’s, you know, maybe, maybe presumptuous that confidence, but I I think that’s generally the sense that a Christian should have in a pluralistic environment that people trying to reach God, it’s better off and God can do more with people taking steps, even if they aren’t starting in what Christians consider the right place than just holding out for a world where everyone immediately becomes Christians.

Studio – John Dickson:

Here’s how Ross puts this in his book:

Reading

The theme of this book is encouragement: to urge people toward religion generally, to suggest that it’s better to start somewhere even if it isn’t the place I would start, out of a trust that God’s providence will ultimately reward all sorts of efforts and enfold all manner of sincere beliefs. And I do believe this. The difficulty of human life, the burdens that each one of us carries, the mystery inherent even in a cosmos that offers good reasons to believe – all of this makes me optimistic that God will repay even the most mediocre effort, the halting attempt to reach upward to the truth, the good-faith attempt to understand our purposes that doesn’t necessarily reach the mark.

Studio – John Dickson:

Regular listeners will know that the host of this show isn’t super on board with this. I’m a bit more hardcore Protestant than Ross. I agree that God is inclined toward mercy toward everyone. I accept that God’s standard of judgment can’t be ‘how you responded to the gospel of Jesus’ (in the case where someone never learned about Jesus). The criterion must be something more like: Did a person trust the parts of the truth about God they did intuit and encounter? I just worry that people don’t actually respond like that, with simple trust. I also worry that many claims in other religions are flat contradictions of what is true. The Theravada Buddhist claim that no God worth worrying about really exists, or the Islamic claim that God would never become a human and die for the sins of the world. So, full disclosure, Ross goes beyond where this classical Protestant feels comfy. But I find his thoughts compelling. I think I agree that formal religion is, mostly, better than hand-tailored personal spirituality. And I love where Ross really wants to take this conversation!! Stay with us. 

Break

 

John Dickson:
You turn in the book to, um, what I, I would call ethos questions or what Aristotle might call ethos questions. Questions of the morality of formal religion, the credibility questions, and uh, you say there are a big three. And I know this is, um, a crime to ask you to do this. Can, can yougive me 60 seconds on each of the things that turn people off the credibility of religion, they are suffering and evil, the bad behavior of religionists and restrictions on sex.

Ross Douthat:
Right. One is about the credibility of God, one is about the credibility of churches. Um, and one you might say is about sort of the, the, credibility of the moral vision offered. I think, you know, again, you cannot, the problem of evil is not a 62nd problem. It’s a very serious issue. The argument I make in the book is basically that it is a serious issue that should still be wrestled with in light of all the other evidence that there is probably a God, right? So if you are stuck on the problem of evil, you can’t, you just can’t see how the, you know, a perfect, a perfect God outside time and space would’ve made a world that has, you know, suffering in it. Then you, maybe you can’t be a classical theist, right? You can’t say that Thomas Aquinas was right, but you still should believe in some conception of God because all the other evidence for God is still there. And maybe you should be a deist or a pantheist or believe in process theology or something like that, right? There are theologies available to you if you find theodicy a complete stumbling block in some way, but with the other point being that you won’t find, you know, you know, more argument with God, like complaints against God, arguments with God, wrestling with God than inside the pages of the Old and New Testament, right? So you can become a Christian or Jew and be feeling confident that you’re entering traditions that take the problem seriously as something to be wrestled with. And I just think that that’s, that’s the more sensible approach than leaping toward an atheism that would not be justified, even if the argument from evil made a good point against a particular conception of God. So then the sins of churches. I mean, there, I, I, I think the argument, that argument is in a way just fundamentally pretty weak. It’s not fundamentally weak as a case for someone’s relationship to a particular church, right? Again, I’m Roman Catholic. I’ve known people who have lost their faith in the Catholic church because of the sex abuse crisis. You lose faith in the bishops, you lose faith in the hierarchy, and it can be hard to hold onto faith in the institution itself, and that can be totally understandable. But the idea that that’s a reason to walk away from religion is again, like saying, ‘Man, there’s so much, you know, abuse and you know, terrible behavior inside the family, and so we should just abolish the family’, right? Or there’s so much politics, you know, politics leads to so much corruption and abuse, so we should all be anarchists and live in the wilderness, right? Business, there’s so many corrupt businessmen, so we’d be better off … you know, if, if, you know, there’d never been what, there’d never been an industrial revolution or, you know, never been, never been a merchant ship setting sail anywhere. I just think these are fundamentally adolescent stances saying I can’t be in a particular church because it seems corrupted os one thing, but saying I can write off all religious institutions because they include bad people just seems like a big mistake. Especially again, with the point being that, you know, if you read the Old Testament and the New Testament, nothing in Judaism or Christianity advertises perfection. The claim in the Old Testament is, ‘Hi, we’re God’s chosen people. Here’s a long history of all the times we screwed up and failed terribly’. Right? It’s not, there’s no claim there that either the chosen people or the church are pristine in some way, um, which doesn’t, you know, again, doesn’t.It doesn’t license bad behavior, but it is an expectation of the traditional religions, not something that, um, you know, that they aren’t sort of upfront about. And then the sex stuff, again, the particulars like if you just disagree with the Catholic church’s position on contraception or masturbation or any other issue, right? Those particular points can be a valid reason for dissenting from a particular religion, stepping outside a particular religion. But the idea that God would care about sex and would lay down some stringent rules for how and when and with whom you have sex with that idea makes perfect sense if you think God cares about anything at all. If you think God cares about morality, there’s no act, no aspect of human life that has more profound personal and social effects than sexual intimacy, and so the complaint that, you know, the creator of the universe couldn’t possibly care about sex, just seems like a bizarre complaint. It’s like saying, you know, it’s no different from saying, how could God possibly care if I, you know, stole from someone or lied to someone. Right? Like all these areas of human life, uh, if they’re serious, then sex is serious too.

Studio – John Dickson:

These three stumbling blocks are episodes of their own on the Undeceptions podcast. We’ll pop our episodes on suffering and on sexuality in the show notes at undeceptions.com.  We’re actually planning an episode for later this year looking at the awful child sexual abuse scandals in the institutional church – I can’t say I’m looking forward to that one, but it’s a definite gap in the Undeceptions episode list that we want to address soon. 

John Dickson:
I got, uh, very near the end of your book and I thought, how fascinating Ross Douthat isn’t, you know, a convictional Christian. After all, he, he’s really happy for people to end up Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists. I thought that’s really interesting. And then whack at the end of the book, you make a pretty strong argument that the New Testament, and Jesus in particular, stand out, you say, on the religious landscape. so let’s, um, let’s hover there. Uh, for the end of our conversation. Why? Why does Jesus stand out?

Ross Douthat:
So the argument, what I’m, what I try to do is basically fit, um, my views about the New Testament and the gospels into this larger pattern that I see with other, other areas, other more general areas of religious inquiry and argument where there’s this sort of, there are these assumptions that modern science has, you know, disproved the case for, for, you know, divine design. Well, actually it hasn’t. Or that modern science has proven that human consciousness does not really exist. Well, it hasn’t. Or modern science has proven that, you know, that, you know, we, we don’t have to argue or think about what religious experience means. Well, it hasn’t, right? And then as a parallel, there’s an idea that modern historiography has shown that, you know, we shouldn’t take the Gospels and the New Testament seriously as real eyewitness accounts of what actually happened,  in, you know, Roman Palestine in that crucial moment in human history. And very briefly, I make the case that in fact, that’s basically rubbish and there are very good reasons to take the gospel seriously as memoirs, eyewitness accounts, real testimony about things that really happened to a group, a large group of people,  in the light of history. And that once you do that, then the story of Jesus, his life, his death, his alleged resurrection, looks like other religious stories, but also different in various important and significant ways. And you know, that it sort of, it stands out in the specificity of its supernatural claims in the way that the, you know, the revelation is transmitted and the effects that it has on society, the mechanism of its spread, a whole bunch of different things that are, again, familiar from Christian apologetics, but which I think are broadly correct. And if they’re correct, then again, go back to the idea that I just expressed, making the case for, you know, sort of being open to people entering religion through different doors, right? The idea that God is not out to trick you. If God is not, if that, if that idea applies to, you know, people sort of making their first foray into religion, then it should also apply to someone who looks at the diversity of religious traditions, looks at Christianity and says, huh, Christianity origins seem, you know, seem to stand out. They seem to be, you know, a more radical breaking in of divinity into history. Okay. If that’s the case, and God is not trying to trick you, then there’s a quite good case that you should treat the Christian story, again, not as the only manifestation of God’s presence, but as a kind of controlling revelation. You should say, okay, as best we have and know this is the story through which I should read the larger diversity of religious experiences, not in a way that afaces or rules out everything that doesn’t quite fit with Christian doctrine, but in a way that sort of provides the basic interpretive framework for thinking about, um, religion writ large. And that provides some confidence for the Christian,right? That if God went to all the trouble to, you know, intervene in history in this very particular and distinctive way, then you should have some confidence in the churches that were set up because of that intervention and the traditions that were handed down that God probably didn’t go. Um, you know, with all respect to my latter day saint friend, friends, sort of full, like, you know, oh, I did this and then everybody got it wrong immediately, right? Like, I think, yeah, that’s, I think you should have some confidence … some confidence that if this seems like the controlling revelation, then probably the institutions founded on it, um, have a certain degree of trustworthiness, um, in our own day, 2000 years later.

John Dickson:
That last section of the book, um, it was, it was delightful. It, it read to me like a list of undeceptions episodes, uh, because, uh, you mentioned the important work of, um, Peter Williams, who, whom we’ve had on the show, Richard Bauckham, who we recently had on the show, and then Tom Holland, of course. And the, the, the impact that Christianity has had on culture is, uh, nearly miraculous. I can’t let you go without asking you, please. Tell us the story of your conversation with Christopher Hitchens in DC years ago.

Ross Douthat:
Well, I mean, I had a few encounters with Christopher Hitchens, and sadly the first one was when I was called upon to actually fill in for a more prominent Christian and debate him at a festival on the, uh, Aisle of Nantucket. 

John Dickson:
What a scary, scary thought.

Ross Douthat:
I was very young and naive, and he was at the peak of his PR powers. So this, this entire book is in, in a sense, sort of, you know, me finally getting the last word in with Hitchens in, after he wiped the floor with me, you know, 20 odd years ago. But sometime later after he, after he defeated me, we encountered one another at a Christmas party, and you know, it was late in, in DC and it was late at night in the kitchen, and he was well known for wanting to have arguments about religion with believers, right? This was one reason that believers were always sort of hopeful that, you know, he would, he would switch sides, right? And he wanted to pursue me on this particular idea where he, he ended up saying, I won’t do the English accent because I’m, if I were with an American, I would do the English accent. But something along the lines of, ‘Well, suppose that it were proven that Jesus of Nazareth – suppose that we could, we knew for sure that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the  dead?’ I said, all right, suppose we did. And he said, ‘But what would that prove’? And again, I didn’t have a brilliant, right. It was very unexpected. Right. Um, but I use, I use that line in, in the book to, to, to basically push against the attitude that he expressed. I think a lot of people who are sort of on the borderland of religion, um, sort of have, right. The idea that, you know, there might be things out there, you know, crazy things happen. Mystical experiences, brushes with brushes with ultimate reality, but who could possibly make sense of them? And, you know, we just need to get on with our lives. Right? And a big, the sort of concluding argument of the book is, you know, drawing from, from Jesus of Nazareth who had a few words to say on this. The idea that, in fact, if you think there’s some reality, some higher reality there, then even if you have no confidence that you can get everything about it right, it’s still a very urgent question that, you know, there is, there should be an urgency about religious questions because they touch on ultimate reality. We’re all going to die and have some encounter with that ultimate reality eventually. And if we’re asked what we did with our life, we shouldn’t we shouldn’t, you know, be in the position of saying to God, well, there were intimations of transcendence, but I kept saying to myself, what does that really prove?

John Dickson:
Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, Evangelist in Chief. Thank you so much.

Undeceptions theme

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