Ross Douthat, who has written opinion columns for the New York Times since 2009, is used to writing for a skeptical readership. A conservative Catholic, he occupies a unique, or at least very unusual, spot in American letters: He is a religious man writing to a generally non-religious audience. 

His new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, published by Zondervan, and it, too, is written largely with the agnostic or full-on atheist in mind. Religious people, though, will also benefit from the book (as I certainly did). 

Douthat’s book is not intended as a defense of Christianity in particular but a nudge toward religious belief in general, and he uses several supporting pillars, composed in his calm, intelligent prose, to make the case that religious belief is reasonable. 

Darwinism and the multiverse

He kicks off the book by talking about the evident design in nature and the fine-tuning of the universe. Douthat doesn’t cite philosopher of science Stephen Meyer directly, but he includes an endorsement from Meyer, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if he had read at least portions of Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. Douthat discusses the inherent limits of the Darwinian framework and how it fails to account for the system of life itself, or how life originated in the first place. He also points out the insufficiencies of the multiverse theory, and how the notion of an infinite number of universes doesn’t solve the problem of origins or the fine-tuning of cosmological variables that allow for life. While Douthat doesn’t specifically mention the modern intelligent design movement, the opening chapter is rife with mentions of design. He writes, 

Just as Darwinian theory did not actually resolve the metaphysical questions raised by the universe’s beautifully ordered existence, these moves [multiverse theory] do not sweep away the persistent fingerprints of God. p. 36

Clearly, the universe did not appear by chance; some kind of directed intelligence must be behind the beauty, order, and design so evident in the world and throughout the cosmos. 

To explore the cosmos

This notion of “mind” spurs Douthat’s next chapter. Here he elaborates on consciousness, materialism’s failure to explain away subjective experience, and the mind’s seemingly miraculous capacity to make sense of the world around us. If our brains evolved merely to help us stay alive, then it’s strange that those same mental states could invent the telescope to explore the cosmos, or compose a poetic masterpiece like Hamlet. Materialistic explanations for consciousness fall short, and moreover, fail to uncover the mystery of our personal experiences — what some call qualia. The mind is uniquely fitted to perceive matter and organize the world into meaningful patterns. 

Douthat also uses this chapter to touch on artificial intelligence. Some of this new technology’s more optimistic developers are confident that we can create consciousness within AI, replicating the processes of the human mind. While AI enthusiasts who believe this may be staunch materialists, they are courting notions of magic and mysticism as they try to put “the ghost into the machine.” In short, the mystery of the mind remains. “For all the advances in brain mapping,” writes Douthat,

the mind itself is still irreducible, an enigma, a mysterious substance unto itself. Science can tell you how certain atoms in combination create water or carbon dioxide, or how mass and speed and distance combine to predict movements and trajectories, but it’s powerless to tell you how the physical elements of book and brain give rise to the personal experience of reading. p. 47 

Douthat goes on to talk about the “myth of disenchantment,” noting how just because the intellectual consensus of the day rules out the supernatural or miraculous, people still experience such phenomena daily. Tao Lin, a novelist and essayist, recently put up a lengthy post on his blog recounting dozens of “paranormal encounters,” and he prefaces the piece by stressing how materialism, in its inherent limits and biases, is blind to the supernatural category of experience that most cultures in world history have taken for granted. 

A need for commitment

The second of half of the book focuses more on the need for commitment in a culture that overvalues open-mindedness and individual freedom. If we remain open-minded forever, we will never choose a roadmap to guide us toward truth. He also talks more specifically about navigating how one might go about choosing a religion, and ultimately concludes the book with a personal testimony and a missive on the case for Christianity. 

Douthat gives a compassionate but urgent call to make a conscious choice in favor of belief, even if the starting point might be different from where he might have begun. In a world “shot through” with beauty and design, and with conscious minds that can make sense of the order of things, Douthat gives a simple but compelling imperative: Believe.

Crossposted at Evolution News.