'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious' - Ross Douthat

Amazon

---

I was quite excited to open this book. Influential New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was going to explain why Catholicism is literally correct in essentially all of its supernatural claims. He was going to defeat the atheists and secularists in the field of combat: compelling arguments were about to be unleashed.

I wondered where these new compelling arguments were going to come from. We've played the game of rational proofs of God's existence from the days of Aquinas, Anselm and Descartes: today they're a curiosity in introductory philosophy classes: find the fallacy.

The smart Catholic knows that it's impossible to prove the existence of God from science (or logic) because methodologically these fields of enquiry stem from skeptical empirical enquiry, or in the case of logic and mathematics, have no empirical content at all (in writing this review, today I'm a formalist, not a Platonist).

So Douthat throws himself into the quagmire of badly-understood science. He combines the unedifying traits of: ignorance and misunderstanding of the science; tendentiousness; gullibility. Here are a few examples.

John von Neumann might have believed consciousness was necessary to 'collapse the wave-function' and therefore fix reality - an idea influenced by his Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932). But that hasn't been the scientific position for decades. Since the 1970s, work on decoherence, initiated by H. Dieter Zeh and later expanded by Wojciech Zurek in the 1980s–1990s, has shown that the universe can manage that feat all by itself. It doesn’t need an observing deity.

Evolution does not need a little helping hand on the tiller: its operation is completely consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry together with the physical boundary conditions on this planet.

Amazon

It is perfectly conceivable that the universe emerge spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, from 'nothing at all' - a parsimonious concept compared to a theistic entity imagined to be in some sense prior to spacetime but with the conceptual and instrumental powers to create spacetime and cosmology by its own willpower.

'Out of Body' instances and religious encounters are psychological experiences by definition. We are so far from understanding the pathologies of consciousness - it's hardly parsimonious or even helpful to rush to premature and speculative claims of verisimilitude.

Amazon

Contra Douthat, the New Testament is not to be taken as a body of text expressing historical truth by default (except when its own contradictions and inconsistencies prove otherwise). That's to reject decades of historically-informed scholarship in favour of wishful thinking.

On and on we stumble, through the swamp of unconvincing arguments. Douthat twists and turns to accommodate his desired conclusions. Yet the resulting flimsy structure doesn't survive scrutiny: perhaps that's what you'd expect from a journalist.

The universe is a strange entity; we are strange entities. Pushing our understanding forward is one thing - that's the mission of scientific research.

Meanwhile, creating our sense of ourselves, our values and our place in the scheme of things is ascientific, it is indeed the domain of faith and religion. Douthat would have written a more honest and compelling book if he'd taken that on board, although the Catholic Magisterium might not then have been quite so supportive. 

A missed opportunity.

Religion is everywhere. It provides important benefits and norms we sorely miss when absent. The Catholic Church says that reason and faith can't contradict each other and sometimes believes it. 

Douthat would have been better situating himself in that paradigm - he might then have crafted a narrative strong enough to confront secularism and actually win.