I've finished reading Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. He failed to make his case with me, because I'm still not religious.
Not surprisingly, there were few discussions of truth in the book. This is religion's glaring weakness, no matter what faith appeals to you. The key question, how do we know it is true?, can't be answered persuasively by any religion, notably including Christianity (Douthat is proudly Catholic).
So Douthat recommends what he calls "true'ish" belief. Basically this means that if you believe in some sort of divinity inhabiting some sort of supernatural realm, you're closer to the truth about reality than if you're a godless materialist like me.
He writes:
Now suppose that, in fact, the truest religion in the world is not Protestant Christianity but Sunni Islam. Obviously the optimal scenario for you would have been to discover this fact and become a Muslim... So are you worse off, in your relationship to Islam's great truth, as a practicing Christian than a religiously agnostic homeless agnostic?
Surely not. As a Methodist you are arguably worshipping the same God as an observant Muslim, through the mediation of a figure, Jesus, who is revered in Islam as a great prophet, following a moral code that has a great deal in common with Islamic morality, and expecting a second coming that mirrors the hope many Muslims place in the coming of the messianic Mahdi.
They have true belief, but you have at least true-ish belief; you have taken a large step toward the fullness of truth, even if you aren't all the way to where you ought to be.
Now suppose that not Islam but Buddhism, a different and more distant faith, is actually the truest path. As a Methodist you have less in common with an observant Buddhist than you do with a pious Muslim -- but still more in common, most likely, than you would if you practiced no faith at all.
Good try. But the key word in the passage above is right at the beginning, "Now suppose...". We have to suppose that some religion is the truest in the world because there's no demonstrable evidence that any religion is true.
Douthat stains throughout his book, and especially in the final chapters, to make a case for Christianity being the truest religion. He doesn't succeed in this -- unless you're already a devout Christian -- because all his signs of Christian truth are indirect, such as the popularity of Christianity both soon after the supposed life and death of Christ and in today's world.
Belief in a flat earth also used to be highly popular, along with the belief that the Sun revolves around a stationary Earth. Truth isn't a matter of popularity but of solid evidence.
In his final chapter, where Douthat explains why he's a Christian, he examines the question of truth more directly, though still not persuasively.
But isn't all this talking around an essential question, which is whether I think the tradition I've ended up practicing is actually true? Not just true enough, not just pointing toward God, not just generally accurate in its description of the nature of God or the cosmos, but true in its most important claims about reality?
Douthat says that this includes: monotheism, a diversity of supernatural beings, sacramental grace, the goodness of creation, Jesus being born by a virgin, Jesus dying on a cross and rising again on the third day.
He then raises what he considers the strongest empirical challenge to his beliefs: "the tension we have regarding spiritual experience and the specifics of any single faith tradition." Douthat offers mystical experiences as an example of this.
It's also clearly the case that the kinds of mystical experiences that people expect somehow shape the experiences they have. As noted previously, there are more reports of past lives being recalled in countries with a strong belief in reincarnation, more encounters with Krishna in India and Jesus in Indiana, more encounters with ghosts in cultures that believe strongly in ancestral spirits (as in Japan after the tsunami), and so on. And then there are various encounters, like what we see with the UFO phenomenon, that don't necessarily fit with any theology at all.
So how does Douthat explain why people who believe in different religions have mystical experiences that fit with their beliefs? Seemingly if there was an objective truth sitting out there in some supernatural realm, mystical experiences would be much more similar than they actually are.
His response is weak. First he says that some Christian writers consider that non-Christian mystical experiences constitute a deception, a demonic attempt to drive people away from Christian orthodoxy. Then Douthat says:
I do think specific spiritual snares exist, but as ever I am skeptical that God would allow pervasive deception of the kind that would have to be invoked if all non-Christian mystical encounters were traps or misdirections.
Instead, I think the orthodox Christian (or any believer in the specific truth of a particular religion) has to assume both that the divine meets us where we are, even using the imagery and symbolism of other faiths, and also that there is a little more mystery to the supernatural realm than even a theological system founded on divine revelation can completely capture.
Probably this makes sense to some people. It doesn't to me. Douthat just sounds like someone who desperately wants to make a strong case for religious belief in the absence of strong evidence that any religion, including his own, is objectively true.
His book is a valiant effort to do this, but in the end, it fails. Which to me demonstrates the weakness of religion and the strength of science, along with other approaches to learning the truth about reality that rely on facts, reason, and a willingness to admit that a hypothesis could be wrong.
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