“It is very hard to maintain the neutral study of mystical experience.”
Ross Douthat’s Believe grounds faith in lived experience, ultimately resting its case for any sort of religious belief over and above skeptical atheism upon the persistent human intuition that materialism provides an insufficient accounting of the universe we inhabit. The lanterns of scientific enlightenment, powerful as they are, seem incapable of illuminating self-consciousness, morality, reason, existence itself. The modern “nones” who would disavow the ancient faiths live closer to religious belief than they’d care to admit; committed, philosophically consistent atheists are a rare breed. Douthat updates Pascal’s wager for our secular age without drifting into culture war polemics, convincing the reader that one cannot abstain from metaphysical commitment (even folding is a play).
He is particularly effective in challenging the widespread assumption that unbelief has simply “won” because history and science have vindicated it. Earlier generations of skeptics made confident predictions (that miracle reports would evaporate as religious beliefs were disproven, that science would reveal a deterministic and eternal cosmos, that mystery would steadily give way to mechanism). Instead, reports of mystical experience persist across cultures; the universe appears to have a beginning (spoiler alert: the big bang theory was proposed by a Christian and long resisted by secularists); physics has grown stranger and revealed more complexity; and consciousness remains essentially unexplained, though not unexamined. None of this proves Christianity, or even theism, but it does undercut the complacent narrative that the grounds for disbelief has been steadily expanding over the centuries. So while it is true that the default setting of educated society has shifted from belief to unbelief, it is not obvious that this shift was earned by decisive discoveries rather than absorbed as part of a cultural inheritance built on unproven hypotheses. Indeed, while the Copernican and Darwinian schools of thought were shocks to the system, it is not clear that they altered our fundamental understanding of the universe we inhabit. It remains orderly, intelligible, comprehensible—all presuppositions of the scientific enterprise that are explained infinitely better by a supreme mind/creator God than naturalism’s view of a spontaneous universe (or multiplicity of universes) springing forth out of nothing for no reason or purpose. We have undoubtedly gained knowledge and technological power, but we have not so much outgrown the ancient metaphysical questions as learned to ignore them.
Though the topics here have received robust treatments elsewhere, I appreciated Douthat’s insistence on common sense; one need not be a learned philosopher to grasp his arguments. He casts a wide net ambitiously, but humbly works through each thing he catches hold of, weighing cosmic order, fine-tuning, the hard problem of consciousness, morality, and religious yearning without posturing as a man with all the answers. I enjoy reading exactly this type of work and was already familiar with several of his lines of thinking, but a few moments genuinely arrested me—especially his reflections on quantum mechanics and the provocative question of who “observed” reality before conscious creatures existed. Rather than wielding such mysteries as blunt instruments, he allows them to reopen a sense of wonder that modern materialism too quickly forecloses.
His discussion of miracles is likewise bracing. Modern educated society tends to treat the supernatural not merely as unlikely but as intellectually disreputable. Yet disenchantment, as an official posture, seems overstated. People across cultures and educational levels continue to report experiences of healing, encounter, and transcendence, even if they are often reluctant to speak of them in respectable company. Douthat does not demand credulity, but he does question the validity of presumptively ruling out possibilities. If our institutions of learning determine miracles cannot happen in advance, the absence of “approved” evidence tells us less than we think.
Douthat, a Catholic, does finally place his wager on Jesus Christ (and accordingly lays out portions of his moral worldview to boot), but one might glean a strong hint of syncretism from his book—the recognition that there are “seeds of truth” scattered across faith traditions. By almost any definition, Christianity is a religion alongside Buddhism, Wicca, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. However, it is utterly distinct in that one of its central claims is that though God has given us minds that seek him, He reaches out to us specifically and individually, and claims exclusive rights. Thus while there is potential societal good in hordes of atheists committing themselves to ancient religions, and while other faiths may contain reflections of the capital-T Truth, the soul of an atheist disbelieving in God is ultimately in no less peril than that of a pagan worshipping a false one.
Ultimately, Douthat makes genuine faith feel neither naïve nor tribal but like a totally rational and reasonable response to a mysterious but intelligible world—one in which Christ has conquered death but demonic powers still exist and will operate until the end of days. In doing so he does much to push the ball into the court of the atheist who would claim that religion is intellectual foolishness. Indeed, they are his target audience—not me. A writer for The New York Times, Douthat presents himself (and is) an astute, rational, open-minded, modern intellectual. He is, in the book, giving his fellow astute, ration, open-minded, modern intellectuals who claim disbelief the permission to give religion a try without feeling like they’re betraying everything they stand for; opening a door through which they might glimpse a fresh perspective on their own experience.