New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat’s Remarkable (And Reasonable) Case For Religious Faith
(ANALYSIS) “God seems to be having a moment, culturally speaking,” observes John Stonestreet of the Colson Center, whose founder, the late Chuck Colson, was a famed convert as Nixon White House “hatchet man” turned “born-again” prison evangelist.
Stonestreet’s debatable claim cites various occurrences that include the recent Christian conversions of two celebrity atheists, also noted in a December piece by The Free Press’s Peter Savodnick.
Those conversions coincide with a new case for choosing faith over against atheism by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in a book boldly titled, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” He finds ample “empirical reasons to think that the divine is real and worth pursuing.”
Think how Colson (and countless others) were affected by “Mere Christianity,” a 1952 compilation of BBC radio talks by scholarly Anglican layman C.S. Lewis. That appealing little book remains to this day the most effective invitation for popular audiences to consider Christianity. Believers might hope Douthat rouses some Lewis-like impact with his similarly fluent and perfectly reasonable examination.
Douthat figures seekers in our secularized age must first be convinced that “mere religion” of whatever sort makes sense. So, unlike Lewis, he does not defend specifically Christian truth claims and only at the end explains “why I am a Christian” — to be specific, a traditionalist lay Catholic.
Lewis’s starting point is the necessity of explaining humanity’s inborn sense of right and wrong. Douthat begins from established facts about the structure of the material universe that suggest a designer with a purpose for humanity. Secondly, he asserts that the conscious mind each human experiences logically requires an underlying “highest Mind.” Those familiar arguments are updated scientifically with rare flair and effect.
Sample: “Whatever you call it, self or mind or soul or spirit, something extra seems added to the human race enabling us to understand more of the world than even the most intelligent of our fellow mammals — and also to invest and create within it, imitating the larger system’s order and beauty on the smaller scales of technology and architecture, literature and art.”
Perhaps, as believed by 16th Century pioneer Copernicus or modern-day Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich (“God’s Universe,” 2006), a God-given humanity is conceivable despite the vastness of the cosmos. But didn’t Darwin’s theory of ascent “from bacteria to Bach” extinguish such wonder?
“It has done no such thing,” Douthat contends. Modern biology “emphatically” cannot explain away “the fundamental ordering of the world” that’s required for evolution to operate, or “the larger life-generating system of the universe itself.” Similarly, neuroscientists cleverly map impacts upon the human brain without knowing how and why the system operates.
Then there’s the “anthropic” argument, the scientific evidence that our universe is no accident but “made for us” carbon-based beings on the “fourth planet from a minor sun.” Necessary laws of matter display the “very narrow range” of factors that could produce “a universe hospitable to our kind of complex life.” For one example, a microscopic shift in the force that binds elements within atoms would make hydrogen impossible. “No hydrogen, no water, no water, no us.”
On goes the reasoning. But then Douthat honestly faces down three chief factors that might hobble belief. First, “Why does God allow so many wicked things to happen?” Douthat capably manages classic “theodicy,” as ancient as the Bible’s Book of Job, with added credibility because (elaborated in 2021’s “The Deep Places”) he himself long suffered severe incurable pain. Second, there are the wicked things religious institutions sometimes do. Third, modernized people may recoil because all religions impose rules about sex.
A particularly original aspect of “Believe” is Douthat’s suggestions about how to pick a path among so many religious options on offer. He proposes that quests focus on tried-and-true religions that attract the most adherents, in order of size Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. (Judaism, far smaller, broadly fits the Christian outlook). That’s a notably open-minded approach coming from Zondervan, an evangelical Protestant publisher.
Are there “wrong” ways to pick a path? Douthat assures us it’s perfectly acceptable to choose a religion that’s familiar and comfortable due to family heritage or friendships. This matter of how and why to choose a faith brings us back to two Stonestreet’s two test cases of ex-atheists baptized as Christians with their two sons in September, 2023.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist heroine, was among Time magazine’s 100 “most influential people in the world” after rejecting her Muslim heritage and defying death threats when a member of the Dutch parliament. In her atheist days, she wrote the popular books like “Infidel” (2008) and “Heretic” (2015).
Her dramatic 2023 column on “Why I am now a Christian” emphasized her newfound faith as essential to save western civilization. But “I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?”
Ali said more during a God debate with friend Richard Dawkins, one of the early 21st Century’s “New Atheism” stars. After years of “intense depression and anxiety and self-loathing,” hitting “rock bottom” and contemplating suicide, a therapist diagnosed “spiritual bankruptcy.” She “prayed desperately,” and miraculously felt “connected to something higher and greater than myself.” She discovered that Christian love provides “renewal and rebirth. … My zest for life is back.”
Her husband is prominent British-American historian Niall Ferguson, currently a fellow at Harvard and Stanford Universities. He told Greg Sheridan of The Australian that lifelong atheism dissolved when he considered that all attempts to base a successful society on atheism have proven “catastrophic.” Later came the personal realization that “no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith.” For him, “atheism requires much more magical thinking, a much more radical ordering, or disordering, of the facts of life and the universe, to sustain itself than does Christian belief.”
Does he feel he prays to someone real? “Absolutely.”
What about all those miracles, especially Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead? He thinks we cannot know “with certainty” but Christian substance “is so powerful I prefer to live as if it’s true.”
As for Ali, she told Dawkins: “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. … If you come round to the idea that there might be something much more powerful than we are, something that caused everything else, then something like Jesus rising out of the dead and these other miracles, Jesus being born out of a virgin, for that higher power is not a big deal.”
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.