The title of Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe, is a verb in command form referring to God. Yet the ambition of the author is hardly on par with that of a revivalist preacher or a biblical prophet warning of God’s coming justice. Rather than a command, Douthat offers an invitation—to set aside the modern secular prism through which most of our assessment of contemporary morals, manners, and politics refracts and to reopen our eyes to the possibility of reasonable belief that God created our world and ourselves, has intervened in it from time to time in the past, may be doing so now, and may again.
Discourse that isn’t avowedly religious these days is instead thoroughly secular. Douthat, a believer and a columnist for the New York Times whose work often takes up religious matters, is the exception who proves the rule. I wouldn’t proffer the claim that no one else at the Times believes in God. But if they do, they certainly don’t let it affect their work. The world the journalists describe is one of natural causes exclusively, straight back to the Big Bang or some other “forever.” They believe human existence itself, including the thoughts we harbor and the actions we choose to take, emerges from an evolutionary process that began with life far less than human. History is one thing after another, perhaps bending toward progress, but certainly not providential. The Times will report as needed on opinions human beings have about supernatural or God matters—the fact that people believe. But the truth or falsity of any such belief is a nullity with regard to explaining how the world works.
For example, as Mark Lilla remarks in a discussion of modern religious revivalism in his recent book Ignorance and Bliss, “A national poll in 2012 revealed that well over half of all Americans believe in the possibility of demonic possession.” He notes, “The exorcist for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis told a journalist in 2018 that he had received seventeen hundred phone or email requests for exorcisms in that year alone.” He adds: “Which is madness.” I have little doubt Lilla is mostly correct in his judgment. But entirely? It falls to Douthat to inquire whether one reason the numbers are rising is that demonic possession is real. He holds that possibility open—and even cites the profusion of such beliefs and cases in a supposedly secular age as evidence that we are missing something. That something would be the ongoing “enchantment” of a world supposedly “disenchanted,” that is, done with God and the supernatural.
_____________
Douthat asks us to conduct a thought experiment: Imagine living in a world in which pretty much everybody believed in God. This is not necessarily a closed off and benighted Dark Ages in which all secular activity must defer to ecclesiastical authority. It’s also the predecessor to our world now. You could pray to God for a good harvest, but doing so would not relieve you of the responsibility of being a competent farmer. You could wonder at God’s creation while rigorously investigating how it works, from the movement of celestial objects to the workings of the human body—in order to more fully appreciate and give thanks for God’s handiwork.
His conclusions from this thought experiment are twofold. First, there is nothing essentially incompatible about a world of belief and a world in which science and technology proceed apace. Second, the conclusion that secularization is an irreversible process that has permanently supplanted belief in God among rational human beings is nonsense. God remains a distinct possibility.
The first chapters of Believe spell out Douthat’s case for why believing is reasonable and indeed preferable to nonbelief. What caused the Big Bang, that light in the void? What caused a lifeless world to sprout vegetation and, a couple of days or eons later, to teem with living creatures? How is it that humans have consciousness and minds, including free will? Douthat is neither a physicist nor a biologist nor a neurologist investigating the workings of the brain. Rather, he is a journalist of an endangered species, endowed with seemingly limitless skeptical curiosity to find out as much as he can about subjects that really matter. He has read widely and deeply enough to bring others up to date on the latest science and its compatibility with belief. In other words, he has updated the maps of the various cul-de-sacs in which science and reason find themselves in their search for a godless explanation for all that is—the final ruling out of the Almighty.
At times, however, Douthat wants to go further, inferring the necessity of a designer from the appearance of design in the makeup of the universe, life, and mind—that is, a rational human necessity to believe. Science has shown that the universe is constructed according to such rigorous specifications that if even one step in the instruction manual had varied infinitesimally, the whole thing would be impossible. Without an omniscient and omnipotent creator, there could be no creation or universe at all. This argument attempts to fill with a logical leap the gap between the limit of what science can aspire to know and a creator-god.
The problem here, as I see it, is that it makes no sense to speak of our universe in terms of its probability or improbability. It’s here, and we’re in it. Though those of us so inclined should investigate its workings as thoroughly as possible, its factuality is self-evident, requiring no explanation by us. William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, recounts how the 19th-century transcendentalist philosopher Margaret Fuller declared, “I accept the universe”—to which her contemporary Thomas Carlyle immortally responded, “Gad, she’d better.” Even the transcendentalists understood they had little choice in the matter. We may believe the universe exists because God created it, but knowledge in the sense of empirically verifiable science eludes us, and the universe rolls on.
_____________
Thus we have the broad contour of Douthat’s case that “the basic justifications for a religious worldview are readily accessible to a reasonable human being.” But his book also has a subtitle: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. That raises the thorny question of which if any religious tradition to embrace beyond one’s personal faith in God. Douthat is Roman Catholic, but he states in his introduction that “my aim for this book is to be useful to readers who might take many different religious paths.” He saves his Catholic apologetics for the last chapter and presents it as a case study of the broader faith formation for which he advocates. He allows for readers who will “choose to close the book just before that chapter.”
At this point, Believe becomes something of a self-help book. Its hypothetical audience comprises those readers Douthat has successfully persuaded of the reasonableness of belief to the point of their actual belief. What then? Douthat imagines a “Spirituality” section of a secular bookshop. Side by side are works on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, the occult, demonology, Wicca, astrology, and more. His advice for pilgrims in choosing a book is to look at those representing the biggest religions first—simply because their success in winning adherents suggests that they’re on to something. And because his case for God opens the door to demons that Mark Lilla keeps shut, Douthat warns off those embarked on his self-help journey from dabbling in the occult and other forms of asking for trouble.
Douthat explicitly acknowledges that he is at risk of “perennialism” here—that is, of judging all major religions to be converging on “permanent truths about God and the cosmos” and perhaps as well on a set of common moral and ethical teachings about the good life and how to lead it, quite apart from the particular revelations at the core of each tradition. His book is at its least attractive with this guidance for seekers: “If you find the general case for faith convincing but Islam’s traditional attitude toward women retrograde or the Catholic Church’s teaching on, say, masturbation ludicrous, then you should seek out the forms of religion that agree with you, build them up and let them try to build you up; become the change you seek in the religious world.”
Taking this statement more seriously than it deserves, I’d say it smacks a bit of reserving for man the right to show God who’s boss—which invites the divine rejoinder “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” And, of course, promoting belief in the premise underlying God’s question to Job is, after all, Douthat’s main point. He’s just too nice to say: Disobey God’s law and his prophets if you wish, but be prepared for the possibility of consequences.
As to where the foundations of the earth came from, that’s not something science or logic can tell us. But apropos of Douthat’s primary contention, it’s entirely reasonable to believe the answer is God.
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
