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Reason: Why No One Should Be Religious
Commentary on Ross Douthat's book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2025
I admire Ross Douthat's effort insofar as it seeks to ground religious belief in facts and reason rather than in "faith" in the sense of belief without or beyond facts and reason. Yet Douthat places the emphasis with the title of his book, "Believe." My title to this essay is meant as a direct response to Douthat's title to his book, but I do not thereby mean to suggest that Douthat actively abandons reason, as do so many religionists. Rather, in his exuberance to believe, Douthat strays from reason without realizing it. I also do not mean to suggest that this short essay constitutes anything like a comprehensive case against religion.
Atheism Is Not a Positive Philosophy
I begin by readily conceding one of Douthat's main points: atheism (or secularism) is not sufficient. No one ever said it is! I emphasize this point in my own book, Getting Over Jesus. Atheism merely describes a belief that one lacks, specifically a belief in God and the supernatural, not the positive philosophic beliefs that guide one's life. One can at the same time be an atheist and a nihilist, a hedonist, a socialist, a utilitarian, an Objectivist, or whatever. Atheism is not a positive philosophy. It is not enough in life to be an atheist. What matters much more are the positive beliefs and values one embraces.
So when, in his introduction (p. 2—all page numbers herein refer to pages in the 2025 Zondervan hardback edition of Douthat's book), Douthat says that many of his "readers seemed to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default," that they were "unhappy with their unbelief," and that they "missed the consolations of churchgoing," this says absolutely nothing about the epistemological status of atheism. It says only that some atheists are not totally happy and do not find their alternate belief systems totally satisfying. Okay, so what? (News flash: Many religious people also are not totally happy and also do not find their beliefs totally satisfying.) Just as variants of religion are not created equal (humans have come up with some 18,000 gods and perhaps 45,000 Christian denominations), so it is with variants of atheism.
Then we come up against the problem of judging the truth of a belief based on a person's personal response to that belief. I do think that satisfaction with a doctrine can provide some evidence regarding the truth of that doctrine; for example, it is hard for a committed nihilist to be deeply happy. But, obviously, human psychology is not perfectly aligned with truth-seeking. Lots of people find comfort in obviously ridiculous ideas (astrology, racism, MAGA), and lots of people recoil from well-established true beliefs (evolution). So if someone is not comfortable with the truth, that is a sign that the person should seek to change their psychological responses, not that there is something wrong with belief in that truth. Embracing nonsense is not a proper form of psychotherapy.
Christianity as Social Force
Douthat correctly critiques "the idea that simply removing Christianity or Islam from the stage would lead inevitably to greater enlightenment and peace" (p. 2)—again, atheism is not a positive philosophy. But then he credits religion's "foundational place in the development of the modern democratic order" (p. 3).
The claim that Christianity is responsible for modern democratic liberalism is strained at best. Democracy preceded Christianity. Christianity reigned for centuries with no substantial uptick in democratic forms of government. Indeed, through its doctrine of the divine right of kings, Christianity was one of the major impediments to democratic reforms. (Oh, but "that wasn't real Christianity.") The Southern slaveholders were deeply Christian, to take another example.
Yes, Christianity through its Jewish sources tells us that people are created in the image of God, which can be taken through an egalitarian lens. But Christianity also focuses on the hereafter and downplays or even denigrates earthly life, which is why Paul's admonition that slaves obey they earthly masters and Jesus's advice to render unto Caesar seem entirely apropos.
The notion that Enlightenment Lockeanism is fundamentally Christian because many Enlightenment thinkers and Locke were Christian is rash. Obviously Christians living in Christian societies will try to frame their arguments in terms of their religious faith and spin Biblical passages accordingly.
We do not need the idea that people are made in God's image to embrace the fundamental moral equality of all human beings. What distinguishes people from other animals is our capacity to reason, something the Greeks recognized centuries before Jesus walked the earth. We can see that individuals have their own thoughts and values and ends. Yes, Aristotle and his fellow Greeks failed to recognize the fundamentally egalitarian implications of their insights. What some of the Greeks (Aristotle, Epicurus) have over the Christians is a recognition of the fundamental importance of a person's life on earth. It is this combination of a respect for the human individual and for the value of earthly life, both at least implicit in Greek thought, that gives rise to modern democratic liberalism.
Supernaturalism Versus Meaning
Douthat is not arguing for a deist God, a "prime mover." Rather, he is promoting "the God of the old-time sort of religion," "supernaturalist and scriptural religion, angels-and-miracles religion, Jesus-was-resurrected religion" (p. 3). Douthat says that "religious belief is not just an option but an obligation," and he claims to offer "a blueprint for thinking your way from secularism into religion, from doubt into belief" (p. 4).
Douthat rejects the view that religion is purely a matter of psychology, ritual, or enactment. "Joining and practicing [a religion] is fundamentally a rational decision," he argues (p. 5). This stance puts him very much at odds with most Christians, who actually do mean by "faith," in part, belief without or beyond reason. Paul is perfectly content to recognize that the doctrines of Christianity should seem foolish to the philosophically "wise"; not so for Douthat. "Reason . . . points Godward," Douthat says (p. 6). No it doesn't, I reply. This is the right sort of debate.
Unfortunately, Douthat immediately clouds the issues by tying me (as an atheist) to various doctrines that I reject. I'm okay straightforwardly accepting that "this life is . . . all there is" for an individual (p. 7). But then Douthat suggests that, as an atheist, I must (or probably do) accept "that mind and spirit are . . . just an illusion," that "the world as we experience it is . . . a cruel trick," that "our conscious experience is . . . a burst of empty pyrotechnics," and that "materialism and pessimism and reductionism" are true. As an atheist, I reject all those positions, and I deny that a religious outlook is necessary to embrace their opposites. (I don't think the "spirit" is supernatural, of course.) Again, I refuse to carry all the baggage with which Douthat tries to load me down.
Douthat clearly sees secularism (all forms of it) as an intellectual, emotional, and moral dead-end. He contrasts the religious skeptic with "a seeker" (p. 7), as if secularists can have nothing worth seeking. He sees the religious view as full of "mystery and magic and enchantment" (p. 9), as if secularists cannot appreciate mystery or wonder at the flowers and the stars and the birth of a child.
Douthat claims, "Without eternal possibilities, the stakes of every human life are lowered" (p. 10). This is the opposite of the truth. As I point out in my own book, weighed against a stipulated eternity in heaven, the value of life on earth, except insofar as it is a means to heaven, is literally nothing. Any finite fraction of eternity rounds to zero. When your measure of value is eternity, the finite can have no value in itself. This explains at the most fundamental level why Christianity at best tolerates earthly values and at worst actively negates them (think of Simon of the pillar). Only those who fully accept that this life is the only one we have can fully appreciate the unique and ultimate value that is (or can be) each person's life on earth. Douthat claims that a secular life must be "meaningless"; the reality is that only a life free from religious dogma can be fully meaningful.
I've now made my way through Douthat's introduction; I will comment selectively on his remaining chapters insofar as I think additional discussion is useful.
Gods and Gaps, Mystical Experiences, and Consciousness
In the universe we see "regular-seeming, complex, and predictable systems" (p. 15), therefore God.
Early humans extrapolated from their own conscious causation to imagine a consciousness behind the seasons, the movement of the stars, and so on. Even the more nature-minded Greeks such as Aristotle and the atomists imagined some sort of mover or mind to get or keep the organization of matter going. There has to be a stirrer of the pot, it has seemed to most people.
But this is a basic mistake of failing to grasp that things are what they are and act how they act by their natures (as Ayn Rand puts the point). Once we grasp the idea of emergent systems we can understand at some level how two gaseous atoms can come together to make water, how ecosystems can move toward balance without a balancer, how life can adapt to different environments without a watchmaker, how a market economy can exhibit order without a central planner, how consciousness can arise from natural biological systems (although as they say this last problem is hard).
We now have meteorology, astronomy, and biological evolution to explain the seasons, the stars, and life. But our knowledge by its nature always is limited; we are not omniscient; and so always there is something we do not know, some gap into which mystics can squint to find God.
Mystical Experiences
But wait, there's more! People's experiences with the "spiritual," "mystical," or "numinous" do not merely reveal aspects of our psychology, they "vindicate religion" (p. 18). In other words, "I strongly feel like there is a God, therefore, God."
Douthat says that, in "a world that takes [religious] belief for granted," "nobody would deny the availability of enchantment, the inevitability of transcendence sometimes breaking into the ordinary workings of the cosmos—the half-visible spiritual order over and above the hierarchies of the natural world" (p. 18).
But so what? We shouldn't take such belief for granted. Douthat again is suggesting, "Many people feel or imagine the supernatural realm exists; therefore, it does."
What nobody would deny is that often people can feel like they are connected to a broader universe (as, in a very real and natural sense, we are) or something like that. Lots of things can cause such feelings: meditation, exposure to art or nature, intense exercise, deep reflection on philosophic questions, the consumption of various drugs, brain damage, self-induced religious frenzy. But Douthat wrongly associates such feelings necessarily with beliefs in the supernatural (they often but not always are so linked), and then he pretends that feelings about the supernatural, psychological states tied with certain beliefs, have some bearing on the metaphysical status of the supernatural. They don't.
Randomness and Order
Returning to intelligent design, Douthat suggests that the alternative to created order is randomness (p. 19). This is mistaken in an important sense. The secularist view (or a secularist view) that nature is self-ordered based on the natural identity of things is the opposite of the view that the universe is ruled by metaphysical randomness. This requires some explanation. I see randomness primarily as an epistemological, not a metaphysical, concept. In this view, what "random" refers to is a complex system that humans cannot predict. In this sense, the roll of a die is random, but at a deeper level how a die rolls is determined by the complex interaction of atoms. Yes, it is "lucky" that life appeared on Earth, but this just means we humans easily can imagine scenarios in which life did not turn up here. In one sense, my origin from a specific sperm and a specific egg is "random"; in another sense, it was part of a natural process. Anyway, even if (for sake of argument) there is metaphysical randomness at some level, that doesn't negate the natural orderliness of the second-order things of our universe.
The deeper point is that Douthat finds comfort and meaning in a universe created by a god and sees the alternative as "chaotic and terrifying and ultimately random" (to expand the quote). Obviously a lot about the universe is "chaotic" and "random" in the sense of being driven by complex systems often of immense energy. The formation of a star is "chaotic" in this sense (while still being orderly in a deeper sense). But notice that Douthat is building into the naturalist worldview (his term "materialist" is substantially misleading) an emotional reaction of terror. Okay, if somehow I found myself hurtling toward a "chaotic" star I'd be terrified. But, from my relatively safe perch of Earth, my emotional reaction to the universe is not fundamentally terror but wonder.
More Gaps
Douthat happily acknowledges that Copernicus and Darwin disrupt certain parochial religious views (p. 20), yet he emphasizes "the scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order" (p. 21). More gaps! Whereas Douthat automatically ties order to an orderer, I naturally tie order to nature.
Douthat's Cosmology
Douthat takes an ex nihilo view of the Big Bang (pp. 25–6) that is completely unwarranted. No serious person thinks there was literally nothing prior to the Big Bang. The reasonable questions are what precipitated the Big Bang and what preceded it.
Then we get to the modern "tuning" argument (p. 27). No, I don't know why the universe expands as it does, why the nuclear forces are what they are, or why gravity functions as it does. What I do know is that "therefore God" is not a warranted conclusion from such ignorance. Because humans (and conscious beings generally, by their nature) cannot be omniscient, Douthat and company never will run out of gaps.
Douthat notes that, by his assumptions, the existence of life on Earth as it currently exists is extremely unlikely (p. 28). But so what. Douthat refers to the Powerball drawing, but people do actually win that. The very existence of Ross Douthat (or me) is extremely unlikely, even given the present cosmological backdrop, if you think about all the specific sperm cells and eggs that had to join going back to the beginning of sexual reproduction more than a billion years ago. If even one of those pairings among Douthat's ancestors had been other than what it was, Douthat would not exist.
I'm no astrophysicist. But I'll allow myself to paint a few broad alternatives to Douthat's "tuner" argument (with the presumption that tuning requires a conscious tuner). Maybe we just don't know yet why the constants in question are the way they are, and we'll figure that out (or not) down the road. Maybe the universe as we know it is one in an infinite cycle, in which a Big Bag in a transition event, and maybe almost all of those universes are lifeless (here we're straining against the etymology of "universe"). Maybe our universe is one "bubble" among many, and most universes do not contain life. Maybe Lee Smolin is right that life-friendly universes tend to reproduce themselves via the generation of black holes. I have no idea which if any of those theories it true. But I do know that "therefore God" does not follow.
Then we get to Douthat's dubious interpretation of quantum mechanics as affirming the primacy of consciousness (pp. 30–1). (Tyler Cowen and ChatGPT are skeptical.) Generally I agree with Rand's critique of the primacy of consciousness (even though she did not formulate her case with a view toward quantum mechanics).
The Epistemology of Miracles
Douthat regards the scientific presumption against miracles and divine intervention as merely "bias" and "guild rules" (p. 33).
If supernatural entities intervened often and capriciously in the natural order, scientists indeed could not make any headway, for they'd never know when their results stem from nature and when from some angelic or demonic force. But if, with Descartes, we presume that God is not a deceiver and that he promotes science, and we otherwise minimize supernatural forces (such as demons planting fossils to deceive us), then we could still be scientists and supernaturalists. But then we'd often be on the fence as to whether something had a natural or a supernatural cause.
A person reasonably could say, "We've looked around, and we keep finding natural explanations for phenomena, and we've found no clear evidence for supernatural intervention, so it's reasonable to reject supernaturalism." I make a stronger point in my book: A supernatural God is not merely unproved but impossible. Why? In brief: The supernatural could not mingle with the natural, an uncaused being is impossible, an energy-exerting entity that does not need energy is impossible, consciousness necessarily is emergent and delimited. If these sorts of claims are correct (as I think they are), then the presumption against religion is hardly a bias but a recognition of basic reality.
Douthat is biased against order without an orderer, naturally emergent properties, the law of identity.
Mattering in the Universe
I share Douthat's skepticism about certain theories of the multiverse (p. 35). But Douthat is fundamentally confused about the relationship between the broader universe and our meaningful lives. Douthat posits that, in a multiverse, it could not be the case that "human beings matter much at all" (p. 36). This point applies even if we're just talking about our regular old universe with sparsely populated planets spinning in galaxies. My reply is that our mattering does not depend on being created by a deity or mattering to a deity or playing a role in some cosmic plan. Rather, our lives mattering arises in the human context. (In a lifeless universe nothing would matter; there would be nothing to which things could matter.) Our lives can and do matter to us—and that is enough!
The Self and the Brain
Douthat claims that recognizing the mind as rooted in the "material" brain (the term "material" is too narrow) eliminates "free will" (p. 41). In my book I argue for compatibilism and have nothing to add here. (The atheistic Objectivists argue for a more-traditional theory of free will. So does Michael Huemer.) Naturalism does not preclude free will of a sort that matters.
Douthat also suggests that, with a scientific understanding of the brain, psychological problems succumb to "mostly chemical solutions" (p. 42). Of course no reasonable person thinks that. The popular field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy depends on a person's thoughts and ideas mattering. Or maybe CBT is what Douthat would categorize as "software updates in the brain"?
Douthat then claims that with AI "the supernatural has returned to haunt the scientific project" (p. 44), because AI shows that consciousness is complicated. But this complexity hardly supports supernaturalism.
Douthat says, "The mind is not reducible to matter in any way that we can ever expect to understand" (p. 45). The mind in terms of our subjective conscious experiences is not reducible to "matter" at all. So what? That does not support supernaturalism. And the mind is so hyper-complicated that we probably never will completely know how a particular mind operates in terms of its natural systems. That doesn't support supernaturalism, either. Douthat's argument amounts to the claim that, because the experience of red is not reducible to wavelengths of light and body parts (as an example), and because the living brain is extremely complex, therefore, God. At least at some point Douthat recognizes that the consciousness gap does not automatically or obviously fit God (p. 53).
Magic and Emergence
Conveniently given what I've written, Douthat has a section in which he calls the invocation of emergence "magical thinking" that tends "to tacitly concede . . . supernaturalism" (p. 53). No.
I can't explain in detail to you why, when two hydrogen atoms join with an oxygen atom, and you get a bunch of such molecules together, you get water, with its properties quite unlike those of the same atoms when unjoined. (ChatGPT offers the start of an explanation.)
No one can explain to you in complete detail the workings of a complex market economy, although economists and business leaders can comment on important aspects of it. The global economy consists, at the upper limit, of all the human beings on the planet, over eight billion people.
Well, the human brain has "some 86 billion neurons form[ing] 100 trillion connections," plus a bunch of neurotransmitters and other chemicals and connections to the rest of the body and other stuff, so is it really so surprising that it's hard to give a full accounting of consciousness as it emerges from the brain? It would be surprising if we could well-explain such a hyper-complex phenomenon. I mean, we can't even accurately predict the weather more than a few dozen hours into the future.
Ah, but my consciousness "remains fundamentally inaccessible to everyone" else (p. 54). So? This is just saying that the consciousness that emerges from my brain is my consciousness, not yours. How could it be otherwise? That's just the nature of consciousness. The fact that it's peculiar in that way hardly makes it supernatural.
Douthat complains that "'emergence' is just another way of redescribing the gap without bridging it at all" (p. 55). Perhaps, but that is at least better than trying to fill the gap with fantasies. "Consciousness, wow that's strange" is a more respectable position than "consciousness, therefore supernaturalism."
I join Douthat in rejecting the notion that consciousness or the self are mere illusions (starting on p. 56).
I want to clear up a possible confusion. Douthat says that consciousness "is intertwined with physical reality without being reducible to physical substances and their interactions" (p. 58). In a sense I agree with Douthat that subjective consciousness is something fundamentally apart from, different from, and atop of the brain. My subjective conscious experience (of, say, eating an apple) is nothing like the scientific description of a person eating an apple. So in a sense subjective consciousness is quite different from the underlying structures.
But when I say that consciousness is emergent, I want to say that the subjective experience of consciousness always accompanies specific physical systems that give rise to it. This does not at all deny the causal efficacy of consciousness, as Douthat seems to fear; it merely recognizes that consciousness must come from somewhere. Douthat very much seems to want to preserve consciousness as a "ghost in the machine," in the body but not of the body (at least in part), something metaphysically distinct in the classic dualist sense, whereas I want to say that consciousness is a natural (although distinctive!) phenomenon that completely owes its existence to the underlying physical systems. There's no separability, in my view. Consciousness emerges from natural systems without being reducible to those systems. Even if we entertain the science-fiction scenario of uploading our consciousness into a computer, if that's possible (I doubt it), the consciousness still arises from the underlying systems and cannot jump over one to the other through non-physical means. We're not ghosts.
Abstraction
Next Douthat wonders how evolution could give rise to the human capacity for intellectual and scientific progress (p. 60). There must be something spooky about that! The exact genetic advances are lost in the mists of time, of course, but the general idea is that at some point humans developed the capacity for abstract thought. We became conceptual creatures. I found Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology useful in explaining how this faculty works (if not precisely where it came from). Douthat's reaction is something like, "I can't explain where conceptual consciousness came from; therefore, God." More gaps!
Douthat says, "Our own consciousness seems improbably capable when it comes to discovering . . . fine-tuning, like a key fitted to a lock" (p. 61). This just presumes a tuner and a supernatural consciousness. The alternate view is that that we are physically part of the universe and our natural conceptual faculties enable us to learn abstract things about the universe. Yes, our consciousness is "improbable" in the sense of rare. So? Life existed on Earth for billions of years before giving rise to human consciousness. If other creatures in our universe are comparably conscious, we haven't met them yet. "Conceptual-level consciousness is rare; therefore God." Sorry, no.
(Here Douthat mentions panpsychism, which I regard as mystical nonsense.)
I did want to record Douthat's clear Platonism (he explicitly invokes Plato on p. 36): God "doesn't just coexist with matter but precedes and shapes and organizes it. . . . Mind is more fundamental than matter" (p. 62). This is a perfect summary of religious Platonism. (I've been listening to the excellent podcast Philosophy without Any Gaps, and much of it deals with the interplay between Plato and religious thinkers.) There is nothing new under the sun.
The Great Rehaunting
Douthat in his third chapter exuberantly promotes the existence of a demon-haunted and generally supernatural-filled world. His basic argument is that, because many people believe they interact with ghosts and such, therefore, ghosts exist.
Douthat begins with Michael Shermer's story of an old radio strangely coming back to life (p. 67). Okay, weird stuff happens all the time. People find the face of Jesus in toast. But how many old radios did not oddly come back to life? And, if the supernatural influences are so powerful, why does it take a radio? Why didn't, say, Shermer's coffee mug start playing music, or his bicycle? Douthat's chapter is a grandiose exercise in confirmation bias. My basic response to his claims is that we should look to human psychology, not imagine ghosts.
Douthat delivers a gilded invitation for irrationalism and superstition. In a world of rampant conspiracy mongering, in one case leading to the violent assault of the U.S. Capitol, Douthat's celebration of flights of fancy is the last thing we need.
Douthat is of course not blind to cultural mediation of "transcendent" experiences: "You are more likely to have a vision of a saint if you're raised Catholic, of Jesus if you're raised evangelical, of a Hindu god if you're raised Hindu. . . ." (p. 79) But he insists that, beneath that cultural mediation, are real supernatural confrontations.
Douthat spends several pages discussing "miraculous" healings without mentioning the orders-of-magnitude more people who prayed for healing that never came. (He does finally get around to this on p. 154.) Only the survivors tell their stories. Douthat's God is capricious and cruel. Or we could just say that, given the extraordinary complexity of the human body and the human mind, in a world in which maybe 117 billion people have lived, sometimes people's health takes a turn (for both good and ill; Douthat focuses on the former) that we cannot readily explain. (Douthat at least considers this possibility on p. 100). More gaps.
Douthat closes this chapter by suggesting that, through incidents such as Shermer's radio, "God might be giving [the atheist] a wink" (p. 103). But why would God be content with a wink? God is, by stipulation, all-powerful. He could, for example, write a message brightly in the sky for all to see, and at the same time speak in a booming voice for all to hear, telling us whatever he thought we should know (maybe starting with "Hey, you people should knock off all the murdering"). If God wanted to get Michael Shermer's attention he could raise him up in the air and fly him around the world like Superman or fly him to Jupiter and back. Yet this all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God instead turns on Michael Shermer's old radio in a drawer to play some old song. This seems . . . underwhelming? At least the God of the Christian Bible told Moses some things that mattered and raised the dead and such.
Reason and Agency
Douthat in his fourth chapter fears that rejection of God leads to "the default to helplessness" (p. 109). No. Atheism means disbelief in God and the supernatural, it is not a general commitment to epistemological skepticism or moral nihilism. (Some atheists succumb to such failings; again, atheism is not a positive philosophy.)
Douthat's claim is, again, near the opposite of the truth. A person who believes in divine intervention is more likely to pray for deliverance rather than take action to resolve some problem. A person who believes in coming eternal life in heaven is at some level aware that fleeting values on earth ultimately are meaningless in comparison, except as means to an end. Many Christians absolutely celebrate the end of the world, hardly an attitude that promotes making the world a better place.
A rational secularist, by contrast, can know a lot (not everything!) about the world, can understand that meaning arises in the context of human life, and can formulate and pursue values in reality. Secularism entails the view that God is not going to save us; we must save ourselves. That is fundamentally a call to action.
Douthat says that either we live our lives in accordance with ancient books of mythology or we go "wandering onward, willfully blind without a compass or a map" (p. 110), as though no other source of wisdom might help us. Yes, we can learn a lot from the Judeo-Christian Bible, just as we can learn a lot from Homer's works and Plato's dialogues and Buddha's teachings, but we can't learn what we need to learn by presuming the only things worth knowing pertain to communing with the supernatural and preparing for an afterlife.
Hell and Commitment
Most religious people say basically one of two things: Either "you must believe the tenets of my specific religion or else you will go to hell" (or the equivalent), or "if you're basically a good person you'll make it into heaven whatever your beliefs."
Douthat takes neither of those approaches. Instead, he insinuates that the nonbeliever risks hell (or at least separation from God; p. 112); he says that a person needs to commit to a specific religion. But then he says that, at least according to "the optimistic view," "all the religious maps, or at least most of them, lead to the same destination in the end" (p. 114). The idea seems to be that a person needs to commit to one particular religion, then hope either that he picked the right one or that any of the relevant choices is okay. What's not okay, in this view, is to be casually and eclectically religious or to be irreligious.
I agree with part of what Douthat is saying: You should live life and not use uncertainties as an excuse not to. I quite agree that it's better to be a committed Christian (of a saner sort) than to wander through a meaningless life of cheap affairs and pointless pleasures. Take a stand! Make your mark! Do something that matters! I hold that a rational, naturalist philosophy can offer real guidance, while religion often takes people down dark paths.
A Moral Community
Douthat is right (starting on p. 116) that living as part of a community, as many churchgoers do, can reinforce one's commitments to rituals and to acting to improve the world. Secularists are not nearly as organized as religious people (largely because secularism is not a positive philosophy, partly because there are fewer secularists). But people who happen to be secularists can and do often join groups (often with religious people) to improve the self and do good. Hopefully secularists will read Douthat as a call to action to build stronger communities outside the bounds of religious worship.
Douthat Follows the Crowd
Douthat argues in his fifth chapter that the big, longstanding religious traditions "are more likely than others to be true" (p. 130). I concede that religions that last are more likely to serve human psychological or social needs. But Douthat leaves out some points. Religions that succeed also are those more likely to develop intellectual defense mechanisms, to proselytize (by persuasion or through force), to gain state backing (as Christianity did), and to suppress and murder opponents and heretics (as Christianity also did). And organized religion offers power, status, and a comfortable living to the priestly class. Let's not pretend that growth of religious movements is only about how well a religion serves people's values or conforms to the truth!
I find Douthat's discussions of different religions a bit humorous in that he basically offers religions as items on a menu. "I'll have the lobster this evening." Many Christians will regard Douthat's approach as wrong, dangerous, and heretical (I'll take Douthat over them).
Douthat's Moral Subjectivism
Douthat takes seriously the idea that without God morality is impossible (p. 153), and he argues that our ability to discern moral truths counts as evidence for God (pp. 154–5). Morality arises from the fact that things really can matter for us in terms of our lives and quality of lives. Meanwhile, by Douthat's account, what counts as moral does so because somehow it emanates from God or is commanded by God. In other words, Douthat (like most theists) ends up in moral subjectivism, only the subject of their focus is God rather than a human person.
Here again Douthat argues against sorts of secularism that I regard as weak, saying again that a secularist must see self-consciousness as an "illusion" and "intellectual 'judgment' [as] entirely ordered by our hormones and neurons" (p. 155), as if a secularist could not accept the fact of people having ideas.
Douthat offers a common "solution" to the problem of evil, saying we puny humans cannot know "how even the worst hardships of a timebound human existence will look in the light of eternity" (p. 156). I'm sure such sentiments are comforting to the Texas families who just lost their children to floods. Even here Douthat backtracks, welcoming even a sort of Zoroastrianism or Gnosticism (p. 157). Step this way, folks, he truly has a religion for everyone. (Douthat defends Christianity in his final chapter.)
I join Douthat in rejecting (personal) moral subjectivism when it comes to sex (starting with his p. 165), and I appreciate Douthat's openness to challenging traditional religious doctrines on sex (p. 170); although I suspect that in the end Douthat's approach to sexual ethics remains substantially dogmatic.
A certain moral nihilism is implicit in Douthat's religion, as it is implicit in supernaturalism as such. In his Platonism, in his view of "material" reality as "fallen," Douthat is all too ready to abandon earthly (real) values and even to pine for the world's end. He likens the "self-abnegation" of Christianity to Buddhist "enlightenment" of emptiness (pp. 178–9). There is something essential, of course, to delayed gratification, to working for the benefit of others rather than only self, to not letting cravings or unhealthy preoccupations overtake you, as not only the Buddhists but the Stoics and the Epicureans (!) advise. But the Plato-inspired notion (related to Manichaeism and inspired by Pythagoras) that the physical world is somehow inherently corrupted or evil, something from which the soul rightly seeks escape, shows up in Douthat's Christianity, and ultimately it undermines real-world human values. Thankfully, the Christian doctrine of God becoming man partly militates against this Platonic holdover.
Back to Descartes
One thing that strikes me about Douthat's final chapter is Douthat's reliance on God's stipulated goodness to confirm his beliefs. This causes him to argue in a circle. We can learn something about God from people's near-death experiences (p. 192), and we can trust the particulars of Christian doctrine (p. 203), in part because God is not a deceiver.
Another thing that strikes me is Douthat's absolute obsession with "demonic powers" (p. 204 and elsewhere). A problem for many Christians inhabiting such a demon-haunted world is that they tend to see demons all over the place, especially standing behind and influencing people they happen not to like. And it's pretty easy to speak harshly of, and act harshly toward, people under the influence of demons. But surely no one would be encouraged by Douthat's demonology toward misdeeds toward the demonized. Right? (Ye of little faith.)
Conclusion
Douthat recapitulates the very old arguments that the order of the cosmos, the seemingly mystical experiences of human beings, and the strangeness of consciousness seem to support the existence of God and a supernatural realm.
Obviously I don't buy Douthat's case, but I appreciate that Douthat expects to persuade me through reason and evidence. That is the key. In that respect, I am a lot closer to Douthat, ideologically and spiritually, than I am to religionists who stoke hatreds with irrational dogmas.
When I was younger I took something like Douthat's advice to start somewhere. I started with my childhood religion. Because I share with Douthat a fundamental respect for reason, I ended up in a different place entirely, a secular place.
Douthat tars secularists as irrational "materialist" nihilists who reject the evidence before their eyes, including the existence of their own consciousness, and fail to take their lives seriously. But, once the whorl of straw settles from Douthat's thrusts against the scarecrows, the arguments for his own position seem bare and largely unresponsive to counters.
I agree with Douthat that it is far better to start with religion (of a better sort) than to end with nothing. Yet I am convinced that reason shows that a proper worldview stripped of ghosts and superstitions and, yes, of God ultimately can lead the way to the best, most meaningful, most value-rich, most truth-oriented, most honorable, most awake, indeed most spiritual sort of life. No, I will not live forever. But I will live. And if religionists take Douthat's advice to go consistently by reason, more of them will join me.