“The world is intelligible,” Ross Douthat said to Jonah Goldberg on “The Remnant” podcast.

Douthat, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, has a new book coming out on religion and why “everyone should be more religious,” and he joined Goldberg to discuss the book along with our current political landscape.

Douthat, a Catholic, referenced fine tuning and the profound evidence of intentional design in nature as one of the motivations for his own faith. He told Goldberg that it’s remarkable that we have minds that are able to accurately comprehend the world around us, let alone the chemical makeup of the universe.

Our questioning natures, bent on discovering the truth of things, demonstrate that we live in something of an ordered existence. We can come to know the world because the world was made to be studied and understood.

Several prominent intellectuals, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Matthew Crawford, Jordan Peterson, Paul Kingsnorth, and others have either converted to Christianity or stressed religion’s role in creating a thriving and healthy society. And as journalist Rod Dreher seeks to demonstrate in his book Living in Wonder, interest in the supernatural and the spiritual are seeing revival in the West.

Enter Douthat and his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. His book is yet another call to recognize the important place of religion, and moreover, why it’s not irrational or crazy to have faith.

Douthat apparently consults a lot of science in his new book, including physics, which will be interesting to read. Is the tide in the sciences somewhat turning? Many are saying yes. Philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer wrote an influential book Return of the God Hypothesis arguing that it’s entirely plausible to infer God’s existence on scientific grounds.

Ever since the Enlightenment and the dawn of Darwinism, God and divine explanations for the mystery existence have tended to be sidelined by the “consensus.” Suppose, though, that science itself suffers if we preemptively rule out certain conclusions? Scientists and theorists should be open to following the evidence, wherever it leads.

Douthat’s new book looks to be a provocative read by one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, and centers on a topic that seems to weigh on the minds of many.