I bought Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, not because I agree with that thesis. Rather, I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them.
After reading 25 pages, I'm impressed with Douthat's lofty goal, but not with his reasoning so far. Being a New York Times opinion columnist and a former senior editor at The Atlantic, it isn't surprising that Douthat is a talented writer.
He makes his points clearly. So kudos to him for that. And I admire how in his Introduction, he says that he doesn't want to take the easy way out when it comes to defending religion. Which is:
In contemporary arguments with atheists and skeptics, religious writers tend to make a few familiar moves. One is to insist that both critics and defenders of religion spend too much time focusing on dogmas and doctrines and specific claims about reality, when religion should be understood primarily as a practice, a habit of being that can be fully understood only communally and liturgically.
...To people who hover on the threshold of religion, open to belief but unable to quite get there, the implied advice is to set aside your skepticism, swallow your doubts, and just act as if you actually believe: pray and go to church, love your neighbor, sing the hymns or keep kosher, immerse yourself in religious literature and art, try to reap the psychological and communal benefits of faith.
The idea is to embrace religious practice somewhat in defiance of the reasoning faculties, making experience rather than argument your guide, and see what happens next.
Instead, Douthat wants to convince the reader of his book that religions are a reliable guide to truth and reality, more so than a secular worldview that naturally includes science.
This isn't a book about how religious stories are psychologically helpful whatever their truth content, or about how religious communities offer a valuable solidarity even if their doctrines are made up, or about how embracing the mystery of existence can make you happy in the day-to-day. Such benefits to religion clearly exist for many people, but those benefits accrue precisely because religious perspectives are closer to the truth about existence than purely secular worldviews.
And the benefits are not the best place to start, if we're after something more than just contentment and good vibes. Rather, we'll start with religion's intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.
Okay. Great. Rather than trying an end run around the formidable structure of modern science and secularism in general, Douthat wants to attack head on, busting right through the castle walls that, in his opinion, do a poor job of containing the truth about reality.
For Douthat, that includes the supernatural.
I'll be defending beliefs and practices that fall squarely on the supernatural and dogmatic side: real belief in a creator God or ghostly ancestors or a divine pantheon, real commitment to following Jesus or Muhammed or the Buddha, not just general ideas about the good life or cultural practices that you'd like to see handed on.
Being a Christian, Douthat admits "there is no way for me to be perfectly fair to the other religions I'm discussing, especially at the level of generality that this book is aiming for." Fine. But someone should have told him that in no way does the Buddha belong in the company of Jesus and Muhammed.
Buddhism famously advises, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Meaning, Buddhist teachings not only don't require a belief in the divinity of the Buddha, such a belief in actively discouraged, since Buddhists are encouraged to be a light unto themselves -- a far cry from Christianity and Islam.
This morning I just made a start at reading Douthat's first substantive chapter, The Fashioned Universe, where he argues for the universe having been created by a supernatural entity, which for him is the Christian God. So far, I'm not impressed.
Amazingly, somehow Douthat finds in the order of the universe as revealed by science evidence for religiosity.
For a general religious attitude to be safely discarded as irrational, modern science would need to have proved more than just the fallibility of the Ptolemaic system, or done more than sow doubts about the historicity of the early books of Genesis. It would need to have demonstrated that it's a fundamental mistake to interpret the universe as a whole as something structured, ordered, seemingly artistically created and mathematically designed.
This shows the flimsiness of his arguments. Modern science does indeed find that the universe is structured and ordered. But science doesn't view the universe as artistically created or mathematically designed. Those are religious sentiments.
Douthat wants us to believe that the orderliness of the universe needs to be explained. Who says? Maybe someday science will be able to do this. But maybe it won't. Perhaps we humans will never know why there are laws of nature rather than chaotic randomness. All we can be sure of is that if the universe wasn't ordered, we wouldn't be here, debating the origin of order.
This makes no sense to me. It is a classic God of the Gaps argument.
Douthat admits that cosmology and evolution are settled truths about the universe. Science has succeeded in presenting solid explanations for how the universe came to be as it is, and how life evolved on our planet. Yet because science only has unproven hypotheses about how order itself arose (the multiverse is one hypothesis), Douthat sees this as a reason to embrace religion's equally unproven hypotheses about a Creator God who designed the universe.
Darwinism established, with uncertainties around the edges of the theory, that an algorithmic process running over an extended period of time can generate increasingly complex and increasingly diverse machines made of cells and atoms. From small acorns, mighty trees; from the building blocks of life and the complex pressures of Earth's environment, stags and fungi, orcas and armadillos, praying mantises and human beings.
But those building blocks, that orderly environment, the system of the world in which the algorithmic process takes place, Hinduism's rta -- all this Darwin assumes as a given, not explained as the result of a blind process in its own right.
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