Ross Douthat’s Believe argues religious belief—rooted in cosmic order, miracles, and human significance—is more plausible than secular materialism, citing quantum theory’s limits on explaining consciousness and persistent supernatural experiences ignored by science. He critiques the "myth of disenchantment," warning against dismissing spiritual realities while allowing flexibility in faith exploration, like Paul Kingsnorth’s journey from Zen to Eastern Orthodoxy. With 66M+ abortions since Roe v. Wade and Pre-Born’s reported rescues, Douthat links faith to moral urgency, suggesting belief isn’t just reasonable but essential for addressing life’s deepest questions—and its most urgent crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Ross Dauphat.
His new book is called Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
And I just think this is a really important topic.
Before I started podcasting, which is like 10, 12 years now, I was still predicting that there would be a religious revival from the top down, meaning from the intellectual set down.
And I think that's actually happening.
There was a piece in the free press by Peter Savodnik, which says, something profound is happening.
Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it.
I knew this was going to happen for a lot of different reasons.
Many people say to me, how do you make such brilliant predictions?
No one ever says that to me.
No one has ever, not even my wife.
My wife, I'll say, do you remember I predicted that?
She will be like, yeah, I wasn't listening.
But among the truly intelligent people talking about religion is Ross Dalthat, a columnist for the New York Times and a great columnist for the New York Times.
I recently made a joke about the New York Times opinion page, which I sometimes call Knucklehead Row, being like a cocktail party in an insane asylum where every now and again Ross Dalthat comes up to you and grabs you by the arm and says, I'm not supposed to be here.
Please get help.
His column is terrific.
His books are terrific.
I'm reading this book, Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
I recommend it highly.
Ross, it's great to see you again.
How are you doing?
It's great to be here.
And Andrew, I've always wanted to ask you, how do you make such correct predictions?
I've been thinking this to myself for years.
And finally, I have the chance to ask you.
It's just amazing how many people don't say that to me.
So let's talk about this.
It's called Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
What do you mean by believe?
And the reason I ask you this is that my friend Jordan Peterson is a wonderful, wonderful guy, really interesting guy.
He's talking all the time about religion, but he always talks about it in these Jungian terms, in terms of meaning and archetypes.
And to me, I think believing is something actually a little bit more down-to-earth than that.
Do we believe in the things we read in the Bible, for instance?
Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
And, you know, obviously, as the subtitle suggests, this is a book for everyone.
Everyone should buy it.
But it is specifically pitched among other groups, people who are in a kind of Jordan Peterson position.
And in the position, I think, of some of the figures profiled in that Peter Savodnik piece you recommended too, which is to say people who have sort of moved beyond the new atheism, beyond Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, into a zone where they aren't hostile to religion.
They think religion is good for society.
They think maybe it captures deep Jungian archetypes, provides positive guides for life and so on.
So they want religion on those terms, but they think that in order to become fully religious, they have to essentially give up on some aspect of their reason, right?
Their seriousness as modern scientific people who don't believe in miracles.
And if they believe in a God, it must be some sort of distant, very conceptual kind of God, and so on.
And so I'm sort of making an argument that says, you know, this is not a book about how religion is just good for you or how it's just good for society.
I think people are sort of persuaded of that already.
It's an argument that the religious picture of reality, and it's an ecumenical book.
It's not just the Christian picture, right?
It's a sort of a picture that I think is common to most of the great world religions, where there is an underlying order to the universe.
There is some kind of originating creator.
There is some kind of moral architecture.
There is the possibility of miracles, the supernatural.
Human beings are placed here for a reason.
We are central to the drama of the universe, whatever it may be.
All of that, I'm arguing, is actually more reasonable, more grounded in what we know, not just from human experience, but from science itself, than the sort of materialist, naturalist, purely secular alternative.
So when you talk about that science, I mean, this has been a big topic lately.
My son wrote, I think, a very good book about it, which I- A terrific, a terrific book, yes.
Yeah, which you mentioned in your column.
And you write about the fact that how much do we feel?
We feel now that science, at some point, it might have been fair to extrapolate from Newton that we're living in this clockwork universe, but we've gone way beyond that now.
And it really does seem that science is confirming a lot of, at least opening the path to a kind of realistic faith.
How much, I know this is an ecumenical book in a lot of ways, but how much does science confirm the idea of, let's be just blunt about it, things like demons and angels and miracles and what, you know, what do you think we are allowed to believe in in the scientific world as it is?
I mean, I don't, I think by definition, the science that we do is going to struggle to confirm the reality of incorporeal beings, right?
Right.
Who are not subject by definition to laboratory experiments, right?
You can't put the archangel Gabriel in the laboratory.
You can't, you know, if you're Roman Catholic, you can't, you know, subject saintly interventions to a sort of double-blind controlled trial process, right?
So there's always going to be a sense in which to believe in the miraculous by definition is to believe that there are things that happen in the universe that don't follow scientific regularities.
But there are three reasons why I think that belief is still compatible with sort of the modern, the modern world picture as we have it, right?
The first is that these experiences, these events, these happenings just haven't gone away under sort of allegedly disenchanted conditions.
And if you go back and read, you know, David Hume, some of these late 18th century skeptics and would-be rationalists, there's this strong sense that, you know, once we don't have an established church anymore, you know, once belief isn't imposed on people, that sort of religious experience, miracles, all these things will sort of fade into a kind of mythical past.
And nothing like that has happened.
And to the contrary, there are whole areas like near-death experiences, for instance, this very strange terrain that has been opened more by modern medical science, because guess what?
We bring a lot more people back from the dead or the near-dead than in the past.
So that's one point.
Then the other point is related to the point that your son makes in his book, right?
Which is that, you know, at the frontiers of sort of scientific exploration in stuff related to quantum theory, especially, you really have this strong evidence that mind and matter have this really complex relationship where, you know, the mind is not reducible to matter.
And if anything, consciousness itself seems to play some kind of role in making sort of possibilities, like contingent possibilities collapse into actual material reality, that you can't have material reality as we know it without some kind of consciousness observing it.
And I think that gets you at least part of the way towards, you know, I think the entirely reasonable possibility that you can have forms of consciousness, since we're talking about angels and demons, that are not themselves bound to material bodies.
Again, that's not any kind of proof, but I think it's a zone of plausibility for arguments that the traditional religions have been making all along.
Once you can believe and accept that your consciousness is not, in fact, just reducible to your brain, which I think it very clearly is not, I don't think it's actually that huge a leap to believe in the angelic, the demonic, and other possibilities as well.
You know, it's funny.
I've recently been rereading, I was thinking of this as you were talking, I've been rereading medieval philosophy, which shows you what a dullard I am.
But still, you're on the cutting edge.
But here are you guys thinking about, you know, how can a consciousness of an angel be separated from other consciousnesses?
And they're actually describing reality much more realistically, I think, than a lot of materialist thinkers do.
You know, you talk about this Tom Wolfe essay, which I love.
It's called Something Sorry, Your Soul Just Died, in which he talks about the brain basically being, you know, now we can see into the brain, we can see where everything is taking place.
What is wrong with that depiction of consciousness?
Well, it's precisely that, it's precisely the fact that we can see into the brain, right?
And see, you know, we don't obviously understand how it works in any kind of complete way, but we understand the brain on a scale that, you know, no, no human society or civilization has in the past, right?
And in that Wolf essay from sort of the early days of neuroscience, the 1990s, you have these neuroscientists saying, ah, we're looking into the brain and guess what?
You can't see the soul.
You can't see consciousness.
You can't see the self, right?
And so, you know, this demonstrates, obviously, that the self does not fundamentally exist.
But in fact, it's the inability to perceive and distill the selfhood that we all obviously experience into some kind of material substrate that is part of the evidence that the self has an existence that isn't reducible to the material, right?
So at the same time that Wolf was writing that sort of puckish essay, a philosopher named David Chalmers was coining this term, the hard problem of consciousness.
And the hard problem is precisely the one that the scientists in Wolf's story don't seem to get, right?
Which is that if you don't have an account of how your self, your experience of, you know, what it's like to have this kind of conversation, what it's like to, you know, taste food or listen to a symphony and so on, how that emerges from neurons and synapses and so on, then you don't have an account of consciousness at all.
And 20, you know, 20 or 30 years later, we still don't have that account.
And I think the best, you know, this is obviously debated, but I think the best minds in the philosophy of neuroscience will concede that basically when it comes to consciousness, neuroscience is almost like it's pre-theoretical.
It doesn't even have a sort of theory of what is going on in the experiences that we have as selves in the world.
And those experiences, and this is, I'm sort of stealing this from the theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, but there's a way in which the experience of being a human being is already supernatural in the sort of very literal sense of the term, right?
Saving Babies00:02:20
That you don't have to wait for the angels and the demons and the miracles to show up to have a supernatural experience.
You can just say, ah, I'm, you know, I'm picking up a book.
I'm reading Lord of the Rings.
I am communicating with the consciousness of J.R.R. Tolkien via media, you know, ink and paper and molecules that, you know, do not actually contain in any material way the thing that is being communicated.
It has to be, it is imposed somehow upon that material substrate in a way that almost by definition we can't understand or reduce to atoms and molecules colliding.
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Enchanted Backdrop of Faith00:15:24
You know, I have to tell you that, I mean, the closer, as close as I've now come to actually finding out whether we're right or not about the afterlife, the closer I come, the more I find that the whole world is shot through with the miraculous.
I mean, it's just amazing the simply simple experience of being conscious in the material world.
You use this great phrase, the magical thinking of emergence, the idea that out of flesh can arise consciousness is in itself, it's ridiculous, basically, to say that these things are dependent on one another instead of saying they're sort of interfused in some mysterious way.
You use another great phrase, the myth of disenchantment.
And this is an interesting thing because I find myself a little annoyed, like when I'm reading G.K. Chesterton, and he starts going off on fairies.
I don't know what it is with the British and fairies, but I think of Arthur Conan Doyle falling for that cheap photographic trick of these plastic fairies or whatever they were in somebody's background.
I actually showed my kids that photograph recently because I was telling them the story and I hadn't, I don't think I'd seen the photograph before.
And it really is a blow in a way against believers that Conan Doyle went for that photograph because it is so obviously fake.
Anyway.
And, you know, I've written about the invention of the lightning rod and the fact that monks used to go up to scare the lightning demons away by ringing the bells.
And of course, they were up high with metal bells out there and they'd be hit by lightning all the time.
And like lightning rods work better than things.
So what does it mean when people start to talk about re-enchanting the world?
We obviously don't mean this kind of superstition.
What do we mean?
I mean, I think, so I use the term the myth of disenchantment just because I think that it is, it is the case that supernatural, mystical, numinous, spiritual, whatever term you want, those experiences have all continued and persisted throughout the history of the last few hundred years, right?
So the idea that we are in a world in which those experiences have disappeared and no one, you know, no one, no one can possibly believe in them anymore is just sort of false.
I think what has been disenchanted is what in the book I call official knowledge, right?
So people keep, you know, hearing the voice of God.
They, you know, they, they, you know, if you're in Pentecostalism, you are, you know, people are having experiences of the Holy Spirit.
People report healing miracles.
People have all kinds of mystical visions.
But if you're writing, you know, a Wikipedia entry, right, or a scientific paper and so on, you are supposed to operate within a paradigm of disenchantment.
And I don't think that that's necessarily bad for some of the reasons that you just described, right?
The reality of the enchanted is that it is irregular, unpredictable, right?
If there are fairies, they show up when they want to, not when Arthur Conan Doyle has, you know, has, has, has, happens to have a camera trained on them, right?
So you can't actually build, you know, you can't build sort of effective systems of predictable knowledge on enchanted experience.
And this was what sort of the early modern scientists figured out when they set aside alchemy, right, in favor of modern science.
And I think that remains true today.
So arguing for a greater appreciation for enchantment isn't an argument that we need to send the monks up with the bells, right, to ward off the demons.
It's more an argument that we need to recognize that, you know, hey, there's still this wide range of highly unpredictable and yet fairly consistent experience ranging from demonic possession to,
you know, near-death experiences to miraculous healings to just sort of a baseline of weird mystical experiences of the world that hasn't gone away, that's part of human experience, and that has to be fitted into any kind of comprehensive portrait of reality.
If your portrait of reality says about these things, well, they're all just illusions generated by the brain through some process we can't understand via a mind that we can't understand, then you aren't actually wrestling with the scale and reality of these phenomena.
But look, I mean, as a Christian, right, I think there's actually also a danger here, which is that if these phenomena exist, if there are spiritual realities, they include dangerous and potentially hostile realities, right?
And you don't actually want people going out and saying, you know, well, we're going to, you know, we're going to systematize this and build some sort of consistent model of communication with enchanted beings.
The applications of that end up in the zone of, you know, you've probably, the C.S. Lewis's novel, That Hideous Strength, right, which gets is this great sort of sci-fi fantasy where, you know, you have this agency, like a health and science bureaucracy, right?
And as the as the protagonist penetrates ever deeper into this health and science bureaucracy, you know, first he thinks it's all scientific technocracy, you know, then he thinks they're conducting supernatural experiments.
And then by the end, he realizes they're actually communicating with the devil himself.
And you don't want to go down that road.
You want to leave the enchanted realm where it belongs, but you also want to recognize its resilient role in human affairs.
And that is in keeping with a lot of these great Catholic thinkers and philosophers, the medievalists, were very cautious about this stuff, even though they believed in it.
They were not systematic about it and they understood the dangers of it.
Talking to Ross Dauphat, the terrific columnist for the New York Times, his new book is Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
I have to say, it's really good and it's not just very smart and informed, but it's also incredibly readable.
You have a thing where you quote from the Sopranos, which is, I think, one of the best TV shows ever.
I know I'm not alone in saying that, but one of the things I loved about The Sopranos was that it's undercurrent that amidst all this evil that's going on, there actually is a spiritual world of good that is being played up against.
I call it silhouetting in the arts when you're showing you the black stuff, but the white stuff is all around it.
And that was something that's in the Sopranos.
It's not in a lot of stuff like Breaking Bad or lesser shows.
And you have this hilarious quote where after, I think, a vision of the Virgin Mary, Tony Soprano says, yeah, you know, this stuff is around, but you got to get down to business and actually do your job, which is killing people and extorting things.
So what difference, what practical difference does it make?
If there is a God.
Let's put it that way.
What's the difference?
Yeah, I mean, because that's, I think you're absolutely right about part of the greatness of the Sopranos, right?
Is that it is a case study in what we were just talking about, how there is this sort of enchanted backdrop to these characters where they keep having, you know, they have near-death experiences.
One of the mobsters has an experience where purgatory is being an Italian in an Irish bar forever and ever, world without end.
And Tony, in the season that includes that conversation, Tony has this extended near-death experience, right?
At the beginning of the, I think, the final season of the show that leads to this sort of temporary attempt to change his life, right?
That then ultimately goes nowhere and he reverts back to back to being a mobster.
And I think that's, you know, the mobster part is the extreme version, but I think that's actually quite commonplace, right?
That you have people who have sort of brushes with ultimate reality, maybe their sort of personal encounters and mystical experiences, or maybe their intellectual encounters and so on.
But it doesn't change their life, right?
You could call these sort of non-conversion stories.
And in a way, I think in the book, I express a certain kind of frustration with that attitude, right?
I think ultimately, you know, the sort of basic old-fashioned pitch for religion that you are going to die.
Your life is finite and time bound.
If you think there is any chance at all that you are a player in some larger drama that extends beyond your death, then you should be really, really interested in it, right?
You know, this is obviously a version of Pascal's Wager, but I think Pascal's Wager makes a great deal of sense.
And you don't have to go, it doesn't, I don't think it's a one in a thousand probability that this is the reality of human life.
I think it's a much, much higher probability than that.
So at some level, what I'm trying to do in the book is sort of take people who have this kind of interest with, encounter with religion and sort of, you know, grab them by the lapels a little bit and say, okay, if you are, you know, if you've open to this stuff, then you have to take it seriously.
You have to take it more seriously than you do right now.
But it is also important, you know, for all of us believers, non-believers to, you know, have sympathy for the extent to which our lives are lived in a zone of constant busyness and distraction and so on.
And I don't want to pretend that I myself am constantly aware of my own mortality or constantly praying or thinking about God or anything like that, right?
Like the nature of modern life is such that we are, you know, we are we are very busy.
We are very comfortable.
We are very distant most of the time from death.
You know, not eventually we're not, but, you know, to a degree that was not true in the past.
And that, I think, makes it understandable that whatever the logic of religious commitment, it can sort of slip and drift away from people very, very easily.
Yeah, there's another side to this too, though.
You write about this in believe, but one of the things I have found is that the minute you accept faith, there are all these people whose theology, the details of whose theology are very, very important to them in ways that I feel are kind of off-putting.
I mean, you're a Catholic.
I'm an Anglican Catholic, which is Catholic light, but it's still, you know, the orthodoxies matter to me.
But the orthodoxies do matter to me.
They create the image of the other world that I'm responsible to.
But I find this kind of virulent insistence that you accept the perpetual virginity of Mary or that Jews can't be saved or that all of these kind of things that don't, they create a vision of an afterlife that is not in keeping with any kind of Christian morality I can think of.
The idea that a little girl who was thrown into a gas chamber at the age of five because she was Jewish is going to be waiting online next to a Christian Nazi and St. Peter's going to say, I'll take the Nazi, but the girl's screwed because she's Jewish.
That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.
And I have this great faith that I'm not the judge of things.
God is going to work it out and it's going to be perfect and that's all.
But I don't have to bother anybody about that.
It's not my job.
And I'm wondering, like, is there a way that we can endorse the orthodoxies without just alienating anybody who has questions about it or at least has a personal view that's different?
Well, I mean, I'm here to persuade you of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Mary, obviously as a Catholic.
I can't let that one pass.
But no, I mean, in, well, I was serious about that, but in continued seriousness, I would say that there has to be a balance, right?
Like in certain ways in this book, I'm making a fairly liberal argument, right?
Where I am, for most of the book, at the very end, I talk explicitly about my own Christian faith.
But for most of the book, I'm trying to push people onto serious religious paths, be they Jewish, be they Christian, be they Muslim, be they Buddhist, and say, you know, you need to give God something to work with and see what happens next.
And I do have, without being a universalist, I do have, from my own perspective, a fairly open view of, you know, how many people can be saved and how, right?
I think that there is within Christian theology plenty of room to assume that, you know, virtuous people outside of formal communion with Roman Catholicism can be saved.
So in that sense, I am sort of arguing for a kind of general openness and a sense that the most important thing is that first step into practice and belief.
At the same time, what I would defend is once you are inside a tradition, once you have, you know, once you feel like you are committing to Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Anglicanism of some, you know, particular, particular flavor, right?
Those traditions exist for a reason and have their own internal logic and consistency, right?
And it isn't just an accident that Catholicism has ended up with a particular set of teachings and ideas.
And you do want to take that sort of matrix of ideas seriously as a believer and not just sort of assume, well, you know, it sounds like nonsense to me.
And so I'm going to sort of take 80% and draw the line there.
You want to go, I think, a bit further into consideration of why the system and the tradition has ended up in the particular place where it is.
But I do think, you know, from an intra-Christian perspective, I would say my own perspective, I became a Catholic as, you know, late in my teens.
And 20 or 25 years ago, I would have said, you know, I find it easier to understand why people are atheists sometimes than why they're Protestants, right?
I had a certain kind of Catholic pride and chauvinism.
And today it's the reverse.
I think I have become much, much more skeptical of the logic and consistency of any kind of atheism than I was back then, but also more aware of the real divisions within the Catholic Church and the reasons that people who share my Christian faith end up in different places.
But Mary, you know, we can do another show about Mary Andrews sometime.
No, I would love to argue that with you.
But the thing about it is I agree with everything you just said.
I mean, my church, if you came to my church, you would think it was more Catholic than the church that you go to.
I mean, it's an amazing church.
Start with Church00:03:43
Well, let's not go too far.
It's an amazingly conservative Anglican church.
But still, I agree with you about the Orthodoxies, but I also agree with what you just said.
I mean, what it comes down to is some of the smartest people who have ever lived for 2,000 years have been thinking about this faith.
And when some post-grad comes out and tells you that it's all nonsense, you have every reason to doubt them.
I'll give you, let me finish with this because we're running out of time.
Where do you think people should start?
How do you think people start to find faith again?
I think it obviously depends on the person, right?
And sort of where you are situated in your life.
There's a certain kind of person, the most intellectually minded person, who, you know, if they said, all right, I want to take religion seriously.
I think there might be a God.
What should I do?
I would say, all right, you want to sit down and read the Bhagavad Gita, read the New Testament, read in the Quran, and sort of work your way from there intellectually through sort of a few different traditions and see how your mind and soul react, right?
There might be another person for whom, you know, that's not how it's going to work.
And they might be someone who has, you know, someone who has a strong connection to a particular church or faith tradition that they've drifted away from or that they have an ancestral connection to that sort of, that just feels like a really natural place to start.
Right.
And that, and, and there, I think the best advice is go to church, right?
Go to church again if you've stopped going to church.
Go to church for the first time if there is an obvious place, place to start.
And then also be open to, you know, different things that happen to you once you start being interested, right?
Because again, if there is a God, an ultimate purpose, a pattern to our lives, right?
Then that pattern should manifest itself once you start trying to live in accordance with whatever the pattern may be.
And again, this doesn't mean that you should go to church five times and demand to hear the voice of God.
And if you haven't heard the voice of God, declare that this is all a flop or a failure.
Obviously, human life doesn't work like that, right?
But I cite this in the book.
I'm really struck by the sort of personal conversion story of the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, right?
Who's a guy who's a novelist who's ended up as an Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox Christian.
And he was raised in the UK with like the most attenuated form of Christian faith, where Christianity was like, you know, the old religion that no one could possibly believe in.
And when he became interested in religion, he started out, I think, you know, sort of as in some kind of eco-spirituality, went from there through Zen Buddhism, briefly was, you know, involved in Wicca and white magic, and then ended up with some, you know, weird supernatural stuff into the mix as a Christian today.
And, you know, that's one of the wilder kinds of journeys.
But I think it's an example of how you don't know exactly what the path is going to be, right?
That takes you where you are supposed to be in the end.
And that's part of why the effort of sort of setting out on the path is such an important thing to, you know, it's so important to take that first step because you can't get anywhere until you give God something to work with and push around a little bit, I guess, is the other point.
Ross Douthat Believes00:00:56
Yeah.
And I think it's really well said.
I mean, it leaves room for the individual path.
I think we're made, each of us is a path to God.
And I think we have to respect that individuality in other people to the extent that it leads, it will trust God to lead them to it.
Great book, Ross.
Ross Douthat, believe why everyone should be religious.
It's always great talking to you.
You can come back and argue with me anytime.
And it's good to see you.
I'll bring my rosary next time.
I really appreciate it, Andrew.
This has been great.
Thanks a lot, Ross.
Take care.
Once again, Ross Douthat, D-O-U-T-H-A-T, Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
Don't hate him because he's at the New York Times because without him, the New York Times would crumble to dust.
He really is a terrific columnist, a terrific observer.
And this book is just, it's just so readable.
And yet it gets to some of the core issues facing the non-believer and the believer today.
So worthwhile.
More, if you want more of the core issues, come to the Andrew Clavin show on Friday.