Ross Douthat wants you to believe in God

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (DOW-thitt) is trying to engineer a renaissance of religion. The phenomenon of the Nones has peaked, he says, and warns of a post-religion population crash while generally lamenting the current state and future of American life without God.

Now, in a kind of preview of his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat has marshaled evidence supporting the existence of God.

Douthat refers generally to what he calls three big examples to support the existence of God: the evidence of cosmic design in the laws and structures of the universe; the place of human consciousness in reality; and the persistence of supernatural experiences, even in our disenchanted culture.

Douthat suggests that all this evidence taken together at least supports a kind of Pascal’s Wager: Why not abandon reflexive dismissal and be open to the possibility of God, given that the universe seems to be calibrated for intelligible order, for life and for us, that consciousness has seemingly supernatural aspects and that nonbelievers keep having religious experiences?

But Douthat admits that people’s experiences of the supernatural—by which he appears to mean the mystical and miraculous aspects of life—are usually too subjective to convince skeptics. So he concentrates his preview on arguments for God that arise out of the beneficence and intelligibility of the universe.

The orderliness of it all

Douthat’s starting point—relying in part on the Substack Bentham’s Bulldog—is that the parameters of the cosmos are fine-tuned to an amazing extent to allow for stable order and the emergence of life.

The universe certainly is a marvel of order supportive of life. Many of us have seen some version of the balloon explanation that if the early universe had expanded at even a slightly slower rate, it would have collapsed. And if it had expanded at even a slightly faster rate, it would have exploded.

In addition, Douthat points to the mysterious capacity of human reason to understand the laws of nature. We find the laws of nature to be rational, coherent, unchanging, universal and even beautiful. As skeptical atheist John Gray points out in his book Seven Types of Atheism, there is no reason for any of this to be true. Gray considers our beliefs about the laws of nature a hangover from a theistic past. He doubts that natural laws are unchanging and universal.

But this is just to strengthen Douthat’s point. If you agree that the universe is rational, you should believe in the intelligence behind it.

Douthat does note the obvious rejoinder to this kind of cosmic argument: If the universe were not like this—orderly, stable and life-affirming—we would not be here to appreciate it.

Nevertheless, he asks, why should the universe be like that? The odds are astronomically opposed to such fine-tuning and intelligibility.

Douthat feels that you would need close to an infinite number of failed attempts to come up with a universe like this one, unless there is a designer who created this universe for us. He acknowledges that one way to come up with such infinite attempts, and thus produce this universe without God, is the concept of the multiverse. There might be infinite numbers of universes, of which this Goldilocks one is just a single instance.

Douthat is skeptical of using the multiverse to supply this need for many failed attempts at universe building. There is, after all, no evidence for the multiverse. And he argues that even so, the fittingness of this universe for us remains difficult to account for.

I share Douthat’s skepticism about the multiverse. But you don’t need an infinite number of current universes to have an infinite number of universes. Time and place have no meaning until the Big Bang. That is when time, as we understand it, begins. Similarly, there was no “place” until the Big Bang, which is why those scientific documentaries that purport to show the Big Bang happening make no sense. There wasn’t anything like a place from which to have watched the Big Bang.

This kind of thinking is difficult to comprehend, but it allows for an infinite number of universes before this one came to be and an infinite number of universes after our universe ends. We cannot have any conception of how many Big Bangs there have been. How many universes have imploded or exploded? How many have drifted away into nothingness? Perhaps the end is always the quantum vacuum out of which our universe began.

On our side

However many instances of universes there have been, this one led to us. So it is not necessary to invent a designer to come up with a universe that works for us.

The other problem with Douthat’s arguments about a universe that works for us is that it does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that God exists, however the universe came about. What it suggests, as theologian Bernard Lonergan put it, is that the universe is on our side — a phrase I took as the title of a recent book.

Lonergan’s insight is very important. A universe on our side supports Martin Luther King, Jr.'s arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. It defeats materialism and nihilism. It give us hope for the future. With it, you can build a secular civilization.

But, as Lonergan understood, a universe on our side does not necessarily imply that there is a God. Any god who designs a universe and sets it in motion, somehow planning for our appearance, could always intervene in its workings. That intervention could be not just in our minds and experiences, but intervention in all the laws of nature. Even people, including me, who have had religious experiences, generally have not experienced floating objects and bodies resurrecting, walking around and then disappearing into heaven. A universe on our side has regularity, not miracles that transcend cause and effect.

There is not a major religion I know that is really and fully consistent with the unalterable laws of nature. Sure, God could intervene to forgive sin and droughts always end, so even prayers to end droughts could be consistent with science. But sticks do not actually become snakes, as in the Book of Exodus, and people cannot actually walk on water, as Jesus does in the Gospels. 

Douthat ends up arguing against himself. The laws of nature do suggest a rational and even purposeful universe, as he says. But their very regularity argues against the kind of supernaturalism that most religions find it impossible to reject.