Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
By Ross Douthat
Zondervan, 240 pages, $29.99
Imagine you meet a young woman who believes that only fools fall in love. Here’s her argument: There’s simply no way to prove that falling in love is a good idea, and there’s no way to know that a particular human is more worth dedicating yourself to than any other person. (After all, what empirical test or logical proof could show this?) She also worries that falling in love biases people; in fact, it can cloud judgment so badly that it leads one to stay in abusive or unhealthy relationships. Furthermore, even if there’s a type of person for whom the disadvantages of falling in love are worth it, she does not consider herself to be that sort of person. She is a practical person, not an artist; she is good at math, rather than mushy things like poetry. Either her parents didn’t teach her to value romantic love, or if they tried to, she didn’t like the way they presented it. Or maybe she just finds the idea of love confining. For whatever reason, falling in love is not her thing.
Now imagine you want to convince her to be more open to falling in love. You might point out that if she’s practical, she can look at studies showing that love and marriage are positively correlated with health and happiness. If she is not terribly practical but cares deeply about the truth (or if she cares about practical stuff, but worries that the benefits of romance won’t apply unless she really believes), you could argue that although falling in love can warp a person’s judgment, it can also refine it, revealing things one would be otherwise unable to perceive. And you could really go to town on her idea that an inability to prove the value of romantic love somehow shows that it does not have value. There are, after all, many, many things that we can’t prove, and our inability to prove something is true generally does not suffice to prove it to be false. (If it did, we could prove that it’s a good idea to fall in love by showing that we can’t prove it to be a bad idea!) The question here is not “Can we prove that falling in love is good or bad?” but rather: “In the absence of a proof, what should our default assumption be? Is it more coherent to be open to romantic love, or closed off to it?”
Many important questions can’t be settled simply by some combination of empirical study and airtight proofs. The question of love is one of them; the question of religious faith is another. And though there may be no proofs, we can often make a great deal of progress by thinking, discussing, and reading. This is particularly important for questions of great importance, like the question of whether life has meaning, whether love is real, and whether God exists.
In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat takes up the last question. He offers a set of converging arguments in favor of the claim that belief in God is a much more reasonable default assumption—that it is more likely, more tenable—than atheism.
His arguments parallel many of those that you might present to the young woman unduly skeptical of love. For instance: it is simply not true that in the absence of an airtight proof in favor of religion, we should adopt an atheistic attitude. Atheism is not a neutral, simple default. It is a culturally specific and historically contingent system of belief which cannot account for many things which are much more parsimoniously explained within a religious perspective. To name a few: the fact that humans exist, despite the astronomically low odds of the universe being such that biological life is even possible; the existence and nature of subjective consciousness; the fact that many people report having supernatural experiences, including people who are not predisposed to believe in such things. I’d add that the atheist also has a difficult time explaining how a moral claim (such as “genocide is always wrong”) can be true, rather than merely expressing a sentiment on the part of the speaker (for instance, merely a very strong dislike for genocide).
Of course, the difficulty of these questions makes passivity—and with it, agnosticism—a tempting option. We are tempted to avoid “wasting our time” on big, thickety questions. Under conditions of uncertainty, disbelief somehow seems less dangerous than belief, holding aloof less scary than commitment, inaction less dangerous than action. We are afraid to make a mistake that involves affirming something or doing something, but unafraid of making equally bad mistakes that flow from our inaction or disbelief.
“Death is waiting for each of us.”
This would all be entirely reasonable, except for the inconvenient fact that death is waiting for each of us. If we really had all the time in the world, we could wait until we had as much information as possible, in order to make the best possible choice. But time is always running out. If you are being chased by a tiger down a corridor, and reach a T, one side of which you believe leads to more tigers and the other leads to safety (but you don’t know which is which), you had better guess and run. The alternative is to stay still and get eaten by the first tiger.
I’m not suggesting that we should choose a love, faith, career or anything else on the basis of frantic anxiety, just that the promise of “safety” offered by disbelief, by staying aloof, by refusing to act, is illusory. Psychologically comforting, perhaps, but not a real form of safety in any sense.
Douthat considers various figures who express “a kind of helplessness in the universe’s mystery, and default to simply doing nothing in response.” Against this tendency, he argues that it’s extremely important to decide whether or not you believe in God, that thinking can help you assess whether you should believe, and that belief is a much more reasonable default stance than atheism or agnosticism. He also argues that if you believe in God, you should probably join a religion. His argument against DIY religion is both amusing and sound: “You are probably not a religious genius.” If you are uncertain about any of these claims, you should read the book.
That said, I have two quibbles with Douthat’s discussion of science. One involves his discussion of quantum physics: I believe he overrates the likelihood that “the conscious observer places a mysterious but essential role in collapsing quantum possibility into physical reality.” Whether or not consciousness plays a role is something we could not even in principle test, and so I’m skeptical about drawing a conclusion from it one way or the other. Douthat is right that quantum mechanics may create room for a non-deterministic universe, but it does not necessarily tell us something positive about the nature of consciousness.
The other quibble involves his discussion of the evolution of human intelligence. Douthat suggests that it’s striking that our ancestors developed a level of intelligence that allows us to build rockets and write computer code, despite not having computers around when our brains evolved; what evolutionary pressure could have possibly led to this? While this is a suggestive point, there are evolutionary psychological hypotheses available. One being that our “unnecessarily” powerful general intelligence was a result of sexual selection (smart people are attractive), another being that it was a result of natural selection via war (an intelligence arms race).
To be clear, neither of these quibbles fundamentally undermine the main arguments he makes in that section, namely that scientific discoveries tend to support theism. As we have refined our understanding of the world, the “watchmaker” argument for a creator has not been discredited. It has simply moved to a higher plane. As Douthat puts it, “the complex watch that you need to explain isn’t the individual body of an ape or armadillo; it’s the larger life-generating system of the universe itself.” And as we’ve refined our understanding of physics and biology, we’ve come to understand that our existence is much more improbable than it had seemed in the past.
My more fundamental complaint about the book can be illustrated by returning to the young woman who claimed that only fools fall in love. We can imagine that you and she have all manner of interesting discussions about this subject, refining your views in various ways. Perhaps you convince her that falling in love is, in general, a good thing, something she chooses to be open to and perhaps even pursue.
But it would be odd to suppose you could fully settle this question in the abstract. To really settle it, the potential lover needs to come into the picture. And not just some potential lover, but the potential lover. She needs to see this person as he reacts to her in certain ways, as he flirts with or pursues her—or rebuffs her at times. Abstract discussion of love may have some use, but she will have trouble falling in love until she meets someone. For this reason I would have liked to see a more lengthy and involved discussion of the lover whose existence Douthat is defending. Not just God in the sense of “theism is more likely than atheism,” but the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob—not of the philosophers and scholars,” as Pascal called him. The God who, in Scripture, is presented as the bridegroom of his Church.
To be clear, Douthat discusses God in the final chapter of the book, which offers compelling arguments for the truth of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular; nonetheless, the only bridegroom mentioned by Douthat is Michael Shermer, the atheist editor of Skeptical Inquirer, at whose wedding some apparently paranormal things happened. There are, alas, zero references to Song of Songs. And this is too bad, because the story of Christianity is not so much about us questing to find the right God, as of the bridegroom coming to find us, of his espousal to Israel, to the Church, to the individual soul.
Although Believe offers many convincing arguments for the truth of theism—and of Christianity in particular—it really doesn’t give the reader the sense of being pursued. Debated? Yes. Desired? Not so much. Of course, it’s possible that this is just because Douthat’s intended reader is easily spooked. Like the young woman who thinks that only fools fall in love, this reader doesn’t really want to be pursued; at least, this is what the reader believes at an intellectual level. In both these situations, a conversation about whether this reluctance is warranted may reveal itself to be more than a philosophical inquiry; it could also turn out to be a good first move.