You commit a rhetorical sleight of hand here, where you bring up the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, formulate an argument to dismiss the Copernican revolution, and then proceed as though by doing so you've repudiated both. In fact, I'd argue that Darwin is - both in popular understanding, and in historical fact - the greater pivot point here, not Copernicus. The Earth going around the sun is less a blow to Biblical narrative than the evolution of man from ape.
To be clear I don't think you're being glib. I suspect you were just trying to avoid miring your argument in some long and thorny weeds. I'm sure you've thought long and hard about Darwin, as you strike me as the kind of person who thinks long and hard about these kinds of things. But I'd be far more interested in hearing your thoughts on Darwin than on Copernicus, so I was disappointed by the elusion.
As for miracles... An atheist might say that human psychology is the constant baseline here, not the existence of miracles. People have a natural tendency to believe things that aren't true.
Amusingly, this very comments section contains both people saying that the reported incidence of miracles actually *has* decreased over time, and people saying that psychology or neuroscience or whatever implies that we should not expect it to. As I said in my review, I think atheism is totally compatible with either story, it just doesn't have a great predictive track record.
I didn't mean to slip one past you with Darwin, I was just already pushing 6,000 words and thought that section in particular was far too long. The discussion of evolution in Douthat's book is also very brief. One interesting claim he makes is that you can find proto-evolutionary tendencies and arguments in a wide variety of religious traditions. He then argues that the discovery that God sometimes works through secondary causes wouldn't have really alarmed or surprised anybody.
In this case, I think *Douthat* is the one who's being glib. In my opinion, natural selection creates all sorts of problems for the believer that have nothing to do with how literally we should interpret Genesis. To take just one example: saying "God sometimes works through secondary causes" elides billions of years of suffering and death (or mere hundreds of thousands of years if you think that only our hominid ancestors have moral worth). It seems more fruitful to me to say that evolution is a consequence of whatever primordial cataclysm left the world in this shape than to say that God affirmatively wills it.
Admitting the possibility of retrocausality also defangs the IMO quite powerful argument that blind natural selection makes teleology a joke. But this is a very complicated topic and I certainly don't have all the answers (and no, alas, I have not read anything on this topic that really satisfied me either).
While your pen remains as sharp as ever, I find the arguments here lacking their usual point.
First: are you and Douthat really suggesting Genesis holds up better than Enlightenment cosmology? You allow Genesis to be metaphorical while mocking atheists for failing to anticipate 21st-century physics. But by any standard, the Bible’s cosmology isn’t accurate—and letting scripture be “basically right” while demanding literal foresight from secular thinkers is a stacked deck. If anything, the most accurate religious cosmology is probably the Old Norse, they got the beginning AND the end, for what is Ragnarok but the heat death of the universe, or a Big Crunch if the energy density is sufficient? I joke, but you see my point here.
Second: from a previous piece—you’ve still misunderstood the teleology of Lagrangian mechanics. The endpoints or boundary conditions are imposed by the problem. The teleology is formal, not metaphysical, and vanishes in a differential formulation, just like in local and global formulations of Maxwell’s equations. It’s not evidence of purpose—it’s just math.
Third: your claim that miracle frequency has stayed constant (even normalized!) is unsupported and likely wrong. Reports of miracles clearly track cultural trends—dropping during Enlightenment cessationism, rising with Pentecostalism, declining as the Vatican tightens standards for healing miracles at Lourdes. That’s exactly what you’d expect if they’re socially constructed, not supernaturally driven.
And even if I granted the whole structure—fine-tuning, miracles, moral profundity—none of it uniquely confirms Christianity. One could just as easily use this framework to rationalize Islam, or Hinduism, or Atenism. You and Douthat address this a bit in the article, but not enough. If everything vaguely theistic counts as “confirmed,” then nothing in particular is. And what’s faith anyway, if it’s just empiricism after all?
Thanks for the intelligent comment, some (very brief) replies:
(1) Neither I nor Douthat think that modern scientific cosmology presents a slam dunk argument for Christianity or any other religion. We are making the much weaker claim that it undermines a certain sort of secularist triumphalism. I tried to be clear about this, but you're not the only one who came away with the wrong impression, so I probably needed to make it even more explicit.
(2) I am not actually a physicist, I just play one on TV, so it's entirely possible that I misunderstand all of this. But here are some things I believe: (A) It's easy to invent universes with a time evolution whose equations of motion have all the usual nice properties (coordinate invariant, etc.), but do not admit a Lagrangian formulation. This suggests to me that if our best laws *do* support an extremal as well as a differential formulation, this is actually telling us something about the physics of the situation. And the fact that this trick works again and again suggests to me that we didn't just get lucky. (B) When one moves from the classical to the quantum case, first of all the mathematical connection between the two formalisms gets a lot murkier, and secondly the Lagrangian approach resolves a number of interpretational challenges. On this topic, I really like this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.7081
(3) I am less of a miracle-believer than Douthat, but I am somewhat swayed by his argument here. I think it all depends on what you mean by "reported." If you mean "in the official news," then clearly reporting frequency tracks social trends, and this does not surprise me. Douthat's claim is that "reports" in the sense of people telling their friends and neighbors have not declined at all, even if "reports" in the sense of the town crier and the paper of record have. This seems pretty much right to me, and note that it's fully compatible with materialism (people experience hallucinations, weird coincidences, whatever).
(4) I believe in a God who is essentially shouting about his existence to us every second of every day, but that our antennae have grown too damaged to reliably pick up the signal. That means empiricism, learning about the universe, reading the book of nature, should all point us back towards the creator of the world. Moreover, I think this is what we are meant to do. Also, a God who demanded a form of faith that was orthogonal or even contrary to reason would be pretty lame. (This is one reason I'm not a Muslim -- apologists for Islam will totally bite that bullet and tell you this is what God demands.) Yes, I'm aware that not every Christian shares my opinions here. They're wrong about something important (but right about something else important!).
Thanks for the thoughtful response to my somewhat snippy comment!
(1) This is a much weaker claim, and I don’t find it nearly as objectionable. I’m happy to let it pass without argument. It’s certainly true that modern cosmology doesn’t provide any evidence against a creator—unless you take the scripture(s) literally.
(3) I think this weakens the claim to the point of uselessness. If I can rephrase, the argument becomes: people tell their neighbors about surprising things they can’t explain, and they’ve always done so at roughly similar rates. That may well be true, but it doesn’t help the case.
(4) This is actually quite consonant with the interpretation of religion I picked up during my Jesuit education, and one I broadly agree with. I ended up an agnostic, but: shrug.
As for (2), this one’s more in my wheelhouse.
As far as I understand it (and while I am a physicist, I’m an experimentalist by training, so any theorists out there, please feel free to weigh in), the action principle isn’t generally taken to reveal any ontology about the universe. Among physicists, it’s seen as an elegant and powerful formulation of known physical laws—especially valuable because it makes symmetry and locality manifest, and because it generalizes cleanly across classical mechanics, field theory, and quantum physics.
So I think the real philosophical question here is whether mathematical elegance and unifying power should count as evidence for a designer. The action principle is beautiful—it’s hard to deny that. But whether that beauty implies a mind behind nature is a separate metaphysical leap. For example, Nima Arkani-Hamed’s amplituhedron formulation of scattering amplitudes (which I do not claim to understand by a long shot) makes no reference to action or Lagrangians at all, and ends up with the same results!
What I can say with confidence is that the apparent teleological flavor of Lagrangian mechanics is not a fundamental feature of reality. It’s a result of how the variational problem is framed: we fix the endpoints externally, and vary the path in between. That may look goal-directed, but it’s just the formal structure. Or, if you take Feynman’s view, it’s simply the result of quantum amplitudes constructively interfering near the classical path.
As for the Wharton paper, I read the abstract and skimmed the argumentation. It’s interesting, but seems to miss the point that it’s the physics that is fundamental, not the formulation. Beyond that I’d need to read much more closely.
Your "deflationist" attitude towards Lagrangians is probably the standard one among physicists. And you're in good company, because it was Lagrange's own opinion! I continue to think, however, that if we were aliens approaching these equations without preconceived ideas about the world, it is not the interpretation we would pick.
Also I think turning to Feynman path integrals makes your argument weaker rather than stronger. Remember that these are trajectories in *configuration space*, not actual space. What does it even mean for amplitudes and paths to interfere in configuration space? I take Feynman to be speaking metaphorically here, or maybe the better term is "instrumentally." I think at the very least you will admit that this is not a causal or mechanistic account of why path integrals work. (Wharton also claims that Feynman never found a physical interpretation of the path integral that didn't involve negative probabilities, but I don't know enough to evaluate whether that is true.)
Anyway, my sense is that recovering Lagrangians in the classical limit strengthens rather than weakens the case for teleology, but I'm far from an expert. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am not a physicist, but I think your train of thought misses a key point. Lagrangian mechanics is about unifying successive causes into a big cause.
To give a less esoteric example, say Joe ate a pizza. Why? Because he is hungry and bought it. Why? He has money, and a shop sells pizzas. Why? He has a job, and the shop has cooks, and capital to buy flour, vegetables and meat. Why? ...
You get my point. Although my example may not be easily formalized, physical causes are simple enough to do so, and 'adding' 'small' Newtonian causes, the result is the lagrangian. Hence the mathematical equivalence.
Your analogy touches on some aspects of correct physics, most obviously a more formal discretization of the time evolution of some system, but the Lagrangian formulation’s key aspect is that the ENDPOINTS are fixed and the PATH is allowed to vary.
Perhaps an extended analogy would be something like, fix the endpoints at “pizza is eaten by John” and then optimize the successive paths from no pizza to pizza. It turns out that the integral of the Lagrangian for Dominos is lower than Round Table, and delivery lower than pickup, so we end up with dominos delivery. The canonical formulation then corresponds to your analogy, where the reasoning is explicit in each step. Does that make sense?
I mean, isn't Lagrangian formulation all about minimal action is equivalent to successive Newtonian formulation? Or rather, along all possible paths, we want one with minimal variation, and this is equivalent to Newtonian mechanics happening continuously? I really don't know if one can exist without the other. But yeah, I think your specifics are more correct.
To your second, I still think you’re carrying some misconceptions about what the math is actually doing. I realize this probably won’t change your mind, but just to clarify: Feynman’s path integral is fully causal, and that causality is imposed externally—e.g., via the time-ordering operator when you write the Dyson series expansion of the time-evolution operator in QFT. The “interfering paths” picture is entirely consistent with local, causal dynamics; it’s not metaphor, it’s just quantum superposition recast as a sum over paths rather than a solution to a differential equation.
And crucially, the path integral has a completely equivalent canonical (Hamiltonian) formulation—developed first—which looks exactly like the Schrödinger equation: unitary time evolution, no teleological flavor. If there’s any sense of “goal-directedness,” it’s not emergent from the physics—it’s something we impose by choosing to formulate a problem with fixed boundary conditions. That’s a modeling choice, not a statement about how the universe operates.
And as for configuration space—maybe I’m just used to it—but the generalized coordinates don’t really have anything to do with the fundamental issue here. Just think of it as a change of basis.
May I also say that it is genuinely enjoyable to debate things like this at a technical level — you don’t get much philosophy in a physics degree, which may be a weakness of the field!
I'm confused by the claim that bad biblical source criticism in the fault of atheists! Admittedly my own research on the history of higher criticism was focused on Germany from 1780-1850, so I'm much less familiar with stuff that happened later or in England, but at least when the field was being founded and institutionalized, it was completely dominated by religious Lutherans. Julius Wellhausen was the son of a Lutheran pastor and trained to be a pastor himself. B.H. Streeter was ordained in the Church of England. Throughout the 19th century, the center of the movement was universities in Germany or England with explicit Protestant confessional requirements for faculty. My own experience talking to biblical text scholars today is that Lutherans are massively overrepresented. There are absolutely a lot of leaps in 19th century source criticism and the field now differs from their consensus in many ways, but at least to my knowledge it's always been a mostly Protestant intellectual project.
(Also, speaking of Lutherans, you should both really watch the movie Ordet!)
I was probably a little bit sloppy in how I wrote that section, you are absolutely correct that many of the progenitors of the field were at least nominally Christian (and in some notable cases were quite sincere Christians).
Perhaps it's because I'm an atheist but I found the description of what we atheists allegedly believe quite tendentious. All I believe is that there's no good evidence for the existence of God, which is what many other atheists believe. Ascribing to atheists all the wrong turns made by science over its history as it groped it's way to a closer approximation of reality struck me as unfair.
Apart from that, there are different degrees of wrongness. Newton turned out to be wrong in the way he envisaged gravity working yet he still wasn't as wrong as say, Arthur Conan Doyle and his belief in fairies.
After reading the first half of this post I decided I wouldn't read the rest. It was too much like a convinced Marxist giving an account of Capitalism - and coming up with something unrecognisable. I thought Bo Winegard's review at Aporia was more fair-minded and just better.
I don’t think that is what atheism is. Personally, I also don’t believe there is good strong evidence for the existence of God. But I also don't think there is good strong evidence against. I think there is a weak case for both sides—and that makes me an agnostic, *not* an atheist.
What would good strong evidence against God look like? I can imagine what evidence for God would look like, but against? It's like me saying the evidence against ghosts is not strong so I'm therefore agnostic. What would proof for the non-existence of ghosts look like. If we are to be agnostic about all things that don't exist until we are given solid evidence, we would be agnostic about pretty much everything. Prove to me that Adolf Hitler DIDN'T come back to life.
I think some people (not necessarily you) misunderstand what 'atheist' means. Some seem to think that atheists claim to KNOW there is no God when really we just believe that He probably doesn't exist. This is symmetrical with most Christians, who usually only claim to believe that God exists, not that they know he does. If believing rather than being 100% certain makes you an agnostic, then all intellectually honest people should describe themselves as agnostics, including the Pope and Richard Dawkins. But having the same word for people with radically different beliefs is not useful. Therefore people who see no strong evidence for the existence of God are atheists rather than agnostics, though I understand that you are undecided, finding neither side's arguments convincing.
(Note that when I say “God”, I don't necessarily mean the Abrahamic God specifically, but any higher spiritual existence.)
No, my view of what an atheist is is exactly what you describe: “there is no God” is the null hypothesis, the default assumption unless convincing proof otherwise is provided.
That is not my view, for several reasons. First, although there is no *strong* evidence for the existence of God, there is plenty of *weak* evidence. Secondly, most humans throughout history have believed in God, so based on that you could argue that belief should be the null hypothesis, which atheists must conclusively disprove.
Finally, there are several facts that need *some* explanation, such that if you reject God as that explanation, you must accept something else as the alternative. The most prominent example is the fine-tuning argument. The only two plausible theories I have heard for why the universe is so fine-tuned for life to exist are “God exists” and “multiverse + survivorship bias”. And I see no strong reason to privilege one over the other.
All of these arguments have been rehearsed before but let's go through them again:
1. Fine-tuning. The more you insist on how improbable it is that life exists in a universe generally inhospitable to life, the more you should ask yourself why god made it that way. If He was so keen on life, why didn't he make it so that life could thrive everywhere rather than just in our tiny corner? If he had done so, there would be a lot more life in the universe and the whole fine-tuning argument evaporates.
2. '...you could argue that belief should be the null hypothesis, which atheists must conclusively disprove'
I ask again, how is one supposed to prove the non-existence of a thing? All religious people have to do is point to a large hand reaching through the clouds, or a booming voice from the heaven telling us what will happen next Wednesday. But atheists have been set an impossible task, as unfortunately the absence of the giant hand and booming voice doesn't prove that God doesn't exist, only that He hasn't chosen to show himself to non-superstitious peasants yet. Can you see the asymmetry here?
3. 'if you reject God as that explanation [for the existence of a habitable universe], you must accept something else as the alternative'.
It isn't that I have chosen an alternative. I'll wait until the scientists have some concensus on how the universe started, though Lawrence Krauss believes it started from nothing. If you insist on saying that this isn't plausible and everything must start from something, I will ask you who created God. You will answer no one since He was always here, at which point I'll say that if you can simply claim that God was always here, I can simply claim that the universe was always here or started from nothing. 'God did it' is a statement of belief, not an explanation as it explains precisely nothing.
Of course the chance that 'God did it' is not the 50/50 bet some religious people think it is. God is just one among many possibilities. And not putting your money on any specific god is kind of cheating, like a hedging of bets. Would, say, 'electricity' comes under the rubric of 'higher spiritual existence'? If not, can you define what properties this higher spiritual existence has and how you discovered these properties rather than, you know, just making them up?
4. 'most humans throughout history have believed in God, so based on that you could argue that belief should be the null hypothesis, which atheists must conclusively disprove'.
Substitute 'god' for 'ghosts', 'witches' or 'magic'. I would say that in the modern world ghosts, witches and magic no longer constitute the null hypothesis and I would argue the same about God.
My position, in a nutshell, is not that I'm wedded to any particular explanation for how the universe started or why it appears to us to be fine tuned. Even if a day comes where scientists can prove that it all started from nothing I guarantee that someone will say, 'Ah, but who created the nothing before the something?'
My position is merely that 'God did it' is no explanation and doesn't look plausible from my vantage point of a poorly educated 1950's British child. Even so, I do understand why people who lived before the scientific revolution might think god created everything, along with causing the weather. And I also understand why people today remain wedded to the pre-scientific beliefs of their ancestors, partly for reasons of tradition and partly because it's comforting to think that all of this is in His plan and that dying is not really dying but moving to a new, better life where everyone wears white and you and your mates all are in your pomp.
Sorry to intrude - quick questions regarding point 1 as am not well versed on these philosophical/theological arguments. Does it not make perfect sense that God would create an environment suitable such that specific life could flourish rather than life everywhere? If God has a specific plan for human creation why would he create an infinite universe of life everywhere - I think your argument assumes Gods priority is for as much life as possible, which I don’t think is true?
Even if God's plan were to make a universe conducive to the well-being only of humans he did a pretty poor job. Why didn't he make more earth-like planets rather than planets that are either too hot or too cold or too gaseous or too something else for human life to survive?
If He was so fixated on humans, why bother to make 400,000 different species of beetle? Did he do it specifically to keep our entomologists entertained? It seems to me that for someone so crazy about us he included an awful lot of redundant stuff, not to say stuff detrimental to our well-being. Like, why include asteroids that strike the earth and cause impact winters? What's the point?
If He wanted to make humans, why didn't he just, you know, make them, rather than waiting 13 billion years for humans to evolve out of earlier, simpler animal forms?
Eh, to me Winegard's seemed biased the other way, but also much like a convinced Marxist giving an account of capitalism. I'm not arguing one of these reviews is more truthful than the other, just that whatever your priors are will dictate where you think the bias is.
Yes, you are probably right. Personally I thought he gave it a reasonable shot and hadn't made up his mind prior to reading it to take issue with it - but then I would think that, wouldn't I?
Like me, Bo Winegard would quite like to be able to believe since he appreciates what belief brings to people's lives and he dislikes the nihilism that often accompanies atheism. He also thinks humans have a natural tendency to believe in gods. It's just that, again like me, he finds no way of overcoming the sheer implausibility of the whole thing. Most people can see this with other current religions or religions that no one now believes in e.g. Norse and Greek gods. Yet strangely when it comes to their own religion they can see nothing implausible about it. It all looks perfectly reasonable.
The multiplicity of religions argument really is quite weak. There are only 2 religions that really make exclusive truth claims about reality, have origins within the historiographical record rather than deep in the sands of time, and have had the kind of global reach you'd expect from the One True Religion: Christianity and Islam. And the arguments for Islam are *terrible*.
Still, Christianity would admittedly be a lot more believable if not for the existence of Islam. A faith founded by a nobody in a random backwater town conquering and converting such huge chunks of the world is so *weird* that you could only chalk it up to divine intervention, except for the fact that it happened twice for two incompatible religions.
I think one can restore the historical uniqueness of Christianity in the sense you discuss by viewing Islam as a Christian heresy. There's some real evidence for this view, including Muhammed's own biography bringing him into close contact with the Byzantines, as well as Christoph Luxenberg's argument that large chunks of the Quran are cribbed from Syriac liturgical texts.
(I have no opinion on the quality of Luxenberg's research, but it doesn't strike me as implausible off the bat.)
I think it is wrong to say that "the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin had a much less dramatic impact on Chinese and Indian religious authorities". In Japan, at least, Buddhism was grounded in the belief that the world was flat and extended out from an enormous mountain called Mount Meru, around which the sun and moon orbited (similar to flat-earth diagrams you might see on the Internet). This was important to the Japanese worldview because the Buddhist hells were understood to exist beneath Mount Meru, while the Pure Land where the Bodhisattvas lived was in the West, around Europe. So, if this flat earth described in the scriptures was not real, the Pure Land Buddhists had been facing the direction of something nonexistent to pray for centuries, and all the Buddhists had been preaching a fabricated hell.
When Western geographical and astronomical knowledge penetrated Japan, it shook the foundations of Buddhism, so the traditionalists put an enormous amount of effort into trying to keep the flat earth plausible. Max Moerman's book "The Japanese Buddhist World Map" has many beautiful illustrations and photos of the devices they invented to try to track the movements of planets and the sun. The government prohibited teaching Mount Meru in the 1870s but belief in it persisted through the 1900s.
"Zen Buddhism" as we know it in the West is the result of a 20th century Japanese rewrite which came out of this Copernican revolution, discarding much of the original scriptures. It's the equivalent of Reform Judaism.
I think we might be violently agreeing with each other. Heliocentrism is as much at odds with (for instance) traditional Buddhist cosmology as it was with medieval Christian cosmology. But when heliocentrism arrived in the East, it did not trigger rapid secularization as it is sometimes implied to have done in the West.
I do think that Japan had a particularly rapid and violent secularization, involving the destruction of Buddhist temples, a civil ban on Buddhist funerals previously practiced by the entire population, the mass secularization of monks, and the removal or disposal of thousands of Buddha images within the space of just two or three years. But I recognize that debating whether this was triggered by a Cartesian moment is probably outside the scope of this post... Anyway, I hope it was an interesting parallel!
Your reviews are always thoughtful but this one is a standout. Have you read A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo? Your account of the Gospels in the third part mirrors it bar for bar.
I haven't read Douthat's book yet, so I'm not sure how much of the arguments you present here are his arguments rather than yours, but (as someone who does believe in God and wants other people to do so!) I can only say that I'm disappointed by their quality.
It seems that at every turn you're holding the atheists/secularists to a very different standard than the Christians/believers. Most 19th century secularists believed in a deterministic and steady-state cosmology, which didn't hold up in the face of 20th century science, therefore secularism loses one to traditional Christianity? Huh? If you can insist that determinism and the steady-state universe (which aren't even logically required by a disbelief in God) are more essential to the atheist worldview than almost anything in Genesis is to the Christian worldview, then you can insist anything. (Yes, it's true that there are some thinkers today who claim that the core of Christian cosmology is creation-ex-nihilo, and that everything else about the Days of Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah's Flood, etc. can be dismissed as so much allegory; also, this would have seemed utterly bizarre to any Christian thinker living before the 19th century!)
Then there is the case of miracles,which you say Christians accept on evidence, while atheists/agnostics reject them on blind faith, since their dogma has already told them what sorts of events can and can't happen in the world. Except that actually, Christians (and Muslims, etc., and any other religion that claims to be the One True Way) also do the same thing! If you're a Catholic like Ross Douthat, then you're going to believe a fellow Catholic who tells you about a healing by a Catholic saint, you'll be somewhat skeptical of (say) a Mormon who claims to have witnessed a healing by Mormon elders ("maybe Christ really did heal that person, but you're mistaken when you say it means Mormons have the true priesthood...") and when you hear a Hindu or a Theosophist claiming to have a child with past-life memories, you'll dismiss it as delusional, since your own doctrine says that reincarnation isn't possible. In that sense, you're hardly any different than the atheist whose doctrine says that ALL miracles are impossible.
Then there is the matter of biblical source criticism and all the things it got wrong in the 19th century, when the biblical minimalists were having their field day. Which is fair enough; those people really did take their theories too far when they said that the Gospels were written hundreds of years after the life of Jesus, or that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah never existed and that the Israelites' entire pre-exilic history was a fabrication. Those claims have been blown out of the water by later scholarship and archeology... but they weren't replaced by biblical literalism; what really happened is just that as scholars gained more knowledge, they ended up settling down somewhere in between the most extreme claims. So for instance nobody really doubts the Crucifixion of Christ, but the Virgin Birth is taken a lot less seriously by secular scholars (due to only showing up in two Gospels, whose nativity narratives contradict in nearly all their details, and being based on a passage in the Greek version of Isaiah that doesn't say "virgin" in Hebrew.) And then in the Old Testament, you have a consensus that Israel and Judah definitely existed, but their history gets less reliable the further back you go, so for instance Solomon wasn't nearly as wealthy as I Kings would have us believe, the Exodus (if it happened at all) didn't involve anywhere near 600,000 families, Noah's Flood is pure myth, etc.
It's also strange to cite the weirdness of Christ's teachings (leaving the ninety and nine, not resisting evil, etc.) as evidence that Christianity is very unique (and thus more likely to be true than other religions) while dodging the question of why so much of that weirdness has been interpreted away by nearly all the big Christian churches - i.e. most Christians are not pacifists, so it's clear they're not actually interpreting "turn the other cheek" in the strictest manner, and even those that are pacifists aren't strictly following the "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink?..." part of the Sermon on the Mount. (Even the Amish gather their grain into barns for the winter). So if you're going to cite these things as evidence of how the Christian faith is uniquely transcendent (and thus it's truth claims are more worthy of being inquired into than those of other members of the this-is-the-one-true-way tradition) then you're going to have to explain why most of the branches of Christianity (including those that have done the most to spread the faith, whatwith the Vikings, Aztecs, etc. not giving up their old gods peacefully) don't seem to be following them. And the fact that different branches of Christianity seem to have very different ideas about what the essentials of Christianity even are (for instance Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants have very different ideas about what authority one must submit to and what sacraments one must receive to be assured of Christ's grace) also makes it difficult to fully trust any one of them.
I apologize if I've been too long-winded here. As someone who believes in God, I really do want this all to make sense. I don't actually find atheism convincing at all, but at the same time it's very hard for me to commit to any of the major religious traditions when they all claim to be so unique, despite looking (to an outsider) like closely related trees or flowers that diverged only recently in their evolutionary history. Ah well, I suppose I will have to keep on being a seeker. The good things in life don't come easily.
Thanks for the long reply, apologies that you will get a short one in return:
(1) Nobody is arguing that the past few centuries of discoveries represent a slam dunk case for any particular religious tradition. A number of commenters have misunderstood this, which I think speaks to the fact that Douthat is saying something pretty subtle and pretty new. His point is that it significantly undermines a commonly-cited source of secularist triumphalism. A lot of the book is like this -- taking the arguments used by the other side, and turning them on their heads.
(2) The discussion of miracles also follows this pattern. I think Douthat would completely accept the claims of the Hindu or the theosophist in your example. And as I point out, that very ecumenical attitude towards miracles is actually quite representative of how the partisans of various religions have talked for a very long time.
(3) I don't think your point about bad Christians does what you want it to. To me, the fact that Christ's followers have so consistently felt the need to sand down the sharp edges of his message is just even more evidence of how unusual and indeed *inhuman* it is.
John, maybe I was misreading your claims on (1) and (2). If Douthat's real point is less of "look at all this evidence that favors my side" and more of "believers don't have all the answers, but secularists' claim that rejecting God makes it easier to explain cosmology, spiritual experiences, etc. has held up very poorly," then I would not quarrel about that.
As for my "point about bad Christians," I wouldn't say that Christians not following the letter of Jesus' teachings on nonviolence, indifference to material goods, etc. is a simple matter of them being bad. It's not nearly as straightforward as say lying or unchastity, which all the major churches condemn but which their followers (having the usual human weaknesses) are constantly doing on the sly. The difference with the "hard sayings" is that it's the churches themselves, and especially the Catholic Church, which have "felt the need to sand down the sharp edges," by for instance creating the Just War Theory, or saying that the passages in the Gospels about how we should leave our families to follow Christ, give away our possessions to anyone who asks, not resist evil, etc. are only fully applicable to people with certain vocations, and that the rest of us need to find some sort of compromise between the Sermon on the Mount and the less extreme morality that you find in books like Isaiah, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, or even the Epistles of Paul.
So I think it's incoherent for Douthat to cite the weirdness of Christ's ethical teaching as evidence that Christianity is unique, when he himself belongs to the Catholic Church which has done a great deal to water down the weirdness. Either Catholicism is true, in which case the Gospel message (when properly interpreted by the church Magisterium) isn't as radical as it seems at first sight... or else the Gospel really is radical and the people who water it down are false teachers, just like the Amish and the Quakers and Leo Tolstoy have been saying. But someone who believes that has no business of being a Catholic in the first place.
I think my atheism rests more on philosophical grounds and simple lack of evidence than anything positive that science has proven or predicted.
I look at the world around me, and inside me, and I see no direct evidence of a god and no reason to posit a god as explanation for anything.
I find that in these debates I'm asked to lower my standards for both belief and agnosticism because billions of people happen to have very strong feelings about this particular abstract concept. From what I've read Douthat's book seems no different in this regard so I don't think I'm gonna be reading it.
Wait, do people think that miracles still occur? Serious question. I am under the impression that the Enlightenment thinkers were totally right. The miracles that still are reported, as far as I ever hear, either have zero actual evidence or they're events that could equally easily be explained without religion, such as a cancer going into remission.
Yeah when I got to that point I googled "reported miracles over time" and didn't find anything! Actually my impressions from my childhood growing up in the church is that "why do fewer miracles happen now than 2000 years ago?" was a question that a bunch of Christians actually put a bunch of thought into.
It seems like people still report unexpected healings and unexplainable events that they experienced alone or with a small group, but we don’t see people who were verified dead coming back to life like they do in the Gospels, and we don’t see a lot of miracles in front of large groups with camera phones.
"First you make people jealous, then you make them mad, then you confuse and demoralize your followers, then you refuse to speak in your own defense." So, without the resurrection, Jesus is just Socrates? Still managed to have some reputation as a moral teacher.
The quip about how we all disbelieve in most gods, atheists just include one more, always reminds me of a story told about Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev. So it goes, he was once confronted by an atheist with various claims, and responded, "The same God you don't believe in, I also don't believe in."
There's a whole slice of Christendom that considers Socrates to be a pagan foreshadowing of Christ, in a similar sort of way to how the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs were. In fact Socrates even did a little prophesying of his own -- in the Republic he predicts that if there were ever a truly just man, he would be crucified.
It's interesting to consider what Socrates' reputation would have been in a world without Christianity and its associated moral reprogramming of the human race. Certainly he had a number of fans in the classical world, among his students and the others he influenced. But you can imagine that in a world without the witness of the martyrs, without the Christian emphasis on freedom of conscience, etc., etc., the conventional opinion might match the kid in my high school philosophy class who said: "Socrates is sort of an annoying loser."
The fact that a subset of atheist scholarship has been awful at predicting what science would reveal about the universe seems like a strawman argument to support a conclusion that people should be religious.
To me the most persuasive atheist position is that science establishes the boundary of what it is possible for people to know using modern technology and anyone making eschatological predictions beyond that boundary are equally likely to be wrong. So we should be distrustful of any institution making eschatological claims with certainty regardless of whether they are inspired by an atheist or religious world view. This is an unsatisfying position to many, people are notoriously uncomfortable with uncertainty.
I'd be curious to see a review that positioned religious views against an atheist tradition that embraces uncertainty.
Gotta say, most of the certainty I see comes from the religious. If you were to ask an atheist if he is 100% sure that God doesn't exist or that Quantum Mechanics is right I suspect most of them, including me, would say no to both. All I know is that I haven't yet seen good evidence for the existence of God and scientists tell me that Quantum Mechanics is a good predictor of various outcomes. If evidence for God turned up or scientists decided that QM isn't so great after all I'd change my mind.
Not sure that the same can be said for most religious people, mainly because most of them think less in terms of probability and likelihood and more in terms of faith.
Have you read Francis Spufford's book Unapologetic? Your summary of Jesus' ministry and why it's nuts to think of him as just a "great moral teacher" reminds me of Spufford's take on him.
Yes I have. I like Spufford in general, wasn't a huge fan of Unapologetic, but very much liked the chapter that was a gloss on the Gospels. I'm sure I was subconsciously influenced by it when I wrote that part of this review.
Chesterton also famously makes the argument that the story of Christ is in some way different from other religious origin stories, such that we'd notice something weird about it even if it had happened in China and we were encountering it for the first time.
I always feel like this is special pleading on behalf of Christians. The Gospels have never struck me as especially "weird". It's true that Christianity has its own particular character, but that's also true of all the other major religions. Not sure what the big deal is supposed to be.
I do think there's something pretty odd about how when even the most psychologically alien hunter-gatherer tribe encounters the Gospels, some fraction of them experience a seemingly quite sincere conversion. It's like all those scifi stories where somebody engineers a perfect semiotic virus that carries an unforgettable joke, or the Gödel sentence for a particular sort of mind.
You can make various arguments to dismiss this -- maybe it's all because people like to ape winners, and for a while the Christians had lots of stuff and lots of guns. I don't think that argument stands up to scrutiny, and I don't think it costs you much to admit that the Gospels are an outrageously powerful meme. Perhaps you would have fun analyzing what it is about the meme that makes it so contagious.
Hunter-gatherer tribes already think in magical terms. My suspicion is it's just easy to get them to convert to new religions in general. Islam also seems to have had a certain amount of success in this field.
I'm an atheist, and I used to believe this was true, but after having really dived deeper into more religious I am convinced that Christianity is actually very qualitatively different, or at least part of a distinctive subset of religions including buddhism and Jainism.
Essentially all true moral progress was made by Christians (and of Christians, Quakers very disproportionately).
Jains got there early, and are still way ahead on animal suffering, but were less able to spread their beliefs.
Very good point actually, thank you for making it. Feel like this is helping me think through the problem.
Why Buddhism, specifically? I've gotten a lot out of Buddhist ideas about desire, but I've never thought particularly carefully about their moral system.
On the tangent of how the modern automatic blinkers automatically blocks the widespread evidence for "miracles" from even coming onto the playing floor.
I prefer a different focus. Miracles are straightforward "divine" intervention, meaning God directly intervening by disrupting the physical system He set up. So it's not very valuable to psuh its evidence to atheists, who have as an absolute prior that hey this is all impossible 'cause God doesn't actually exist.
But "Metaphysics", as opposed to Miracles, is much more valuable a focus. And IMO its a much more crucial loss when its widespread evidence is deemed ineligible in the intellectual playing field. Because even the atheists have no absolute reason to dismiss the existence of a level beyond what modern Science knows. Science is actually supposed to accept that possibility, it's a large part of the vanity Scientismists (see Scott Alexander's articles) pride themselves in over their benighted, less knowledgable generations, who were too close minded to accept that "we may not know everything".
This modern certainty that "actually we DO know everything" blocks off whole lines of scientific inquiry, unrelated to Religion. There's ample evidence (I'm not saying "proof") for all sorts of specific metaphysical phenomena, and much that would be very useful and scientifically productive.
Like for example, the enigmatic phenomena of charisma. I'm aware the assumption of the modern intellectual is it's all materialstic; body language and basic psychology. Check out the numerous historical figures who utilized their charisma in ways far outstripping what we'd naively predict possible in that materialistic paradigm. For example the well documented powers of early 20th century's Rasputin, both in social influence and healing power.
Scientists and Historians who look into it are stumped, express amazement, but stop there. Because a (the?) logical explanation -- a concrete metaphysical ability -- isn't even *possible*.
I think you're probably onto something here. I know a guy who's a (secular) philosophy professor, who one day decided as a fun experiment to just make Neoplatonist arguments all day at his undergraduate students. To his surprise, he was pretty quickly able to convince them, and a bunch of them became Neoplatonists, or were at least troubled by it.
His analysis of what happened is that modern people are an *immune naive population* for Neoplatonism. Like, it was a powerful intellectual tradition that duked it out with all kinds of competitors for centuries; but nobody's heard or thought about it in ages. So releasing it on these undergrads was like de-icing some ancient smallpox strain.
This is related to what you say insofar as modern secular people are ideologically "vaccinated" against certain arguments, but not others. If we believe in our own doctrine, then we believe all arguments point in the same direction, so we should preferentially reach for the ones that will be more effective because they haven't been used in a while.
You commit a rhetorical sleight of hand here, where you bring up the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, formulate an argument to dismiss the Copernican revolution, and then proceed as though by doing so you've repudiated both. In fact, I'd argue that Darwin is - both in popular understanding, and in historical fact - the greater pivot point here, not Copernicus. The Earth going around the sun is less a blow to Biblical narrative than the evolution of man from ape.
To be clear I don't think you're being glib. I suspect you were just trying to avoid miring your argument in some long and thorny weeds. I'm sure you've thought long and hard about Darwin, as you strike me as the kind of person who thinks long and hard about these kinds of things. But I'd be far more interested in hearing your thoughts on Darwin than on Copernicus, so I was disappointed by the elusion.
As for miracles... An atheist might say that human psychology is the constant baseline here, not the existence of miracles. People have a natural tendency to believe things that aren't true.
Amusingly, this very comments section contains both people saying that the reported incidence of miracles actually *has* decreased over time, and people saying that psychology or neuroscience or whatever implies that we should not expect it to. As I said in my review, I think atheism is totally compatible with either story, it just doesn't have a great predictive track record.
I didn't mean to slip one past you with Darwin, I was just already pushing 6,000 words and thought that section in particular was far too long. The discussion of evolution in Douthat's book is also very brief. One interesting claim he makes is that you can find proto-evolutionary tendencies and arguments in a wide variety of religious traditions. He then argues that the discovery that God sometimes works through secondary causes wouldn't have really alarmed or surprised anybody.
In this case, I think *Douthat* is the one who's being glib. In my opinion, natural selection creates all sorts of problems for the believer that have nothing to do with how literally we should interpret Genesis. To take just one example: saying "God sometimes works through secondary causes" elides billions of years of suffering and death (or mere hundreds of thousands of years if you think that only our hominid ancestors have moral worth). It seems more fruitful to me to say that evolution is a consequence of whatever primordial cataclysm left the world in this shape than to say that God affirmatively wills it.
Admitting the possibility of retrocausality also defangs the IMO quite powerful argument that blind natural selection makes teleology a joke. But this is a very complicated topic and I certainly don't have all the answers (and no, alas, I have not read anything on this topic that really satisfied me either).
While your pen remains as sharp as ever, I find the arguments here lacking their usual point.
First: are you and Douthat really suggesting Genesis holds up better than Enlightenment cosmology? You allow Genesis to be metaphorical while mocking atheists for failing to anticipate 21st-century physics. But by any standard, the Bible’s cosmology isn’t accurate—and letting scripture be “basically right” while demanding literal foresight from secular thinkers is a stacked deck. If anything, the most accurate religious cosmology is probably the Old Norse, they got the beginning AND the end, for what is Ragnarok but the heat death of the universe, or a Big Crunch if the energy density is sufficient? I joke, but you see my point here.
Second: from a previous piece—you’ve still misunderstood the teleology of Lagrangian mechanics. The endpoints or boundary conditions are imposed by the problem. The teleology is formal, not metaphysical, and vanishes in a differential formulation, just like in local and global formulations of Maxwell’s equations. It’s not evidence of purpose—it’s just math.
Third: your claim that miracle frequency has stayed constant (even normalized!) is unsupported and likely wrong. Reports of miracles clearly track cultural trends—dropping during Enlightenment cessationism, rising with Pentecostalism, declining as the Vatican tightens standards for healing miracles at Lourdes. That’s exactly what you’d expect if they’re socially constructed, not supernaturally driven.
And even if I granted the whole structure—fine-tuning, miracles, moral profundity—none of it uniquely confirms Christianity. One could just as easily use this framework to rationalize Islam, or Hinduism, or Atenism. You and Douthat address this a bit in the article, but not enough. If everything vaguely theistic counts as “confirmed,” then nothing in particular is. And what’s faith anyway, if it’s just empiricism after all?
Thanks for the intelligent comment, some (very brief) replies:
(1) Neither I nor Douthat think that modern scientific cosmology presents a slam dunk argument for Christianity or any other religion. We are making the much weaker claim that it undermines a certain sort of secularist triumphalism. I tried to be clear about this, but you're not the only one who came away with the wrong impression, so I probably needed to make it even more explicit.
(2) I am not actually a physicist, I just play one on TV, so it's entirely possible that I misunderstand all of this. But here are some things I believe: (A) It's easy to invent universes with a time evolution whose equations of motion have all the usual nice properties (coordinate invariant, etc.), but do not admit a Lagrangian formulation. This suggests to me that if our best laws *do* support an extremal as well as a differential formulation, this is actually telling us something about the physics of the situation. And the fact that this trick works again and again suggests to me that we didn't just get lucky. (B) When one moves from the classical to the quantum case, first of all the mathematical connection between the two formalisms gets a lot murkier, and secondly the Lagrangian approach resolves a number of interpretational challenges. On this topic, I really like this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.7081
(3) I am less of a miracle-believer than Douthat, but I am somewhat swayed by his argument here. I think it all depends on what you mean by "reported." If you mean "in the official news," then clearly reporting frequency tracks social trends, and this does not surprise me. Douthat's claim is that "reports" in the sense of people telling their friends and neighbors have not declined at all, even if "reports" in the sense of the town crier and the paper of record have. This seems pretty much right to me, and note that it's fully compatible with materialism (people experience hallucinations, weird coincidences, whatever).
(4) I believe in a God who is essentially shouting about his existence to us every second of every day, but that our antennae have grown too damaged to reliably pick up the signal. That means empiricism, learning about the universe, reading the book of nature, should all point us back towards the creator of the world. Moreover, I think this is what we are meant to do. Also, a God who demanded a form of faith that was orthogonal or even contrary to reason would be pretty lame. (This is one reason I'm not a Muslim -- apologists for Islam will totally bite that bullet and tell you this is what God demands.) Yes, I'm aware that not every Christian shares my opinions here. They're wrong about something important (but right about something else important!).
Thanks for the thoughtful response to my somewhat snippy comment!
(1) This is a much weaker claim, and I don’t find it nearly as objectionable. I’m happy to let it pass without argument. It’s certainly true that modern cosmology doesn’t provide any evidence against a creator—unless you take the scripture(s) literally.
(3) I think this weakens the claim to the point of uselessness. If I can rephrase, the argument becomes: people tell their neighbors about surprising things they can’t explain, and they’ve always done so at roughly similar rates. That may well be true, but it doesn’t help the case.
(4) This is actually quite consonant with the interpretation of religion I picked up during my Jesuit education, and one I broadly agree with. I ended up an agnostic, but: shrug.
As for (2), this one’s more in my wheelhouse.
As far as I understand it (and while I am a physicist, I’m an experimentalist by training, so any theorists out there, please feel free to weigh in), the action principle isn’t generally taken to reveal any ontology about the universe. Among physicists, it’s seen as an elegant and powerful formulation of known physical laws—especially valuable because it makes symmetry and locality manifest, and because it generalizes cleanly across classical mechanics, field theory, and quantum physics.
So I think the real philosophical question here is whether mathematical elegance and unifying power should count as evidence for a designer. The action principle is beautiful—it’s hard to deny that. But whether that beauty implies a mind behind nature is a separate metaphysical leap. For example, Nima Arkani-Hamed’s amplituhedron formulation of scattering amplitudes (which I do not claim to understand by a long shot) makes no reference to action or Lagrangians at all, and ends up with the same results!
What I can say with confidence is that the apparent teleological flavor of Lagrangian mechanics is not a fundamental feature of reality. It’s a result of how the variational problem is framed: we fix the endpoints externally, and vary the path in between. That may look goal-directed, but it’s just the formal structure. Or, if you take Feynman’s view, it’s simply the result of quantum amplitudes constructively interfering near the classical path.
As for the Wharton paper, I read the abstract and skimmed the argumentation. It’s interesting, but seems to miss the point that it’s the physics that is fundamental, not the formulation. Beyond that I’d need to read much more closely.
Your "deflationist" attitude towards Lagrangians is probably the standard one among physicists. And you're in good company, because it was Lagrange's own opinion! I continue to think, however, that if we were aliens approaching these equations without preconceived ideas about the world, it is not the interpretation we would pick.
Also I think turning to Feynman path integrals makes your argument weaker rather than stronger. Remember that these are trajectories in *configuration space*, not actual space. What does it even mean for amplitudes and paths to interfere in configuration space? I take Feynman to be speaking metaphorically here, or maybe the better term is "instrumentally." I think at the very least you will admit that this is not a causal or mechanistic account of why path integrals work. (Wharton also claims that Feynman never found a physical interpretation of the path integral that didn't involve negative probabilities, but I don't know enough to evaluate whether that is true.)
Anyway, my sense is that recovering Lagrangians in the classical limit strengthens rather than weakens the case for teleology, but I'm far from an expert. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am not a physicist, but I think your train of thought misses a key point. Lagrangian mechanics is about unifying successive causes into a big cause.
To give a less esoteric example, say Joe ate a pizza. Why? Because he is hungry and bought it. Why? He has money, and a shop sells pizzas. Why? He has a job, and the shop has cooks, and capital to buy flour, vegetables and meat. Why? ...
You get my point. Although my example may not be easily formalized, physical causes are simple enough to do so, and 'adding' 'small' Newtonian causes, the result is the lagrangian. Hence the mathematical equivalence.
Your analogy touches on some aspects of correct physics, most obviously a more formal discretization of the time evolution of some system, but the Lagrangian formulation’s key aspect is that the ENDPOINTS are fixed and the PATH is allowed to vary.
Perhaps an extended analogy would be something like, fix the endpoints at “pizza is eaten by John” and then optimize the successive paths from no pizza to pizza. It turns out that the integral of the Lagrangian for Dominos is lower than Round Table, and delivery lower than pickup, so we end up with dominos delivery. The canonical formulation then corresponds to your analogy, where the reasoning is explicit in each step. Does that make sense?
I mean, isn't Lagrangian formulation all about minimal action is equivalent to successive Newtonian formulation? Or rather, along all possible paths, we want one with minimal variation, and this is equivalent to Newtonian mechanics happening continuously? I really don't know if one can exist without the other. But yeah, I think your specifics are more correct.
To your first point—maybe so!
To your second, I still think you’re carrying some misconceptions about what the math is actually doing. I realize this probably won’t change your mind, but just to clarify: Feynman’s path integral is fully causal, and that causality is imposed externally—e.g., via the time-ordering operator when you write the Dyson series expansion of the time-evolution operator in QFT. The “interfering paths” picture is entirely consistent with local, causal dynamics; it’s not metaphor, it’s just quantum superposition recast as a sum over paths rather than a solution to a differential equation.
And crucially, the path integral has a completely equivalent canonical (Hamiltonian) formulation—developed first—which looks exactly like the Schrödinger equation: unitary time evolution, no teleological flavor. If there’s any sense of “goal-directedness,” it’s not emergent from the physics—it’s something we impose by choosing to formulate a problem with fixed boundary conditions. That’s a modeling choice, not a statement about how the universe operates.
And as for configuration space—maybe I’m just used to it—but the generalized coordinates don’t really have anything to do with the fundamental issue here. Just think of it as a change of basis.
May I also say that it is genuinely enjoyable to debate things like this at a technical level — you don’t get much philosophy in a physics degree, which may be a weakness of the field!
I'm confused by the claim that bad biblical source criticism in the fault of atheists! Admittedly my own research on the history of higher criticism was focused on Germany from 1780-1850, so I'm much less familiar with stuff that happened later or in England, but at least when the field was being founded and institutionalized, it was completely dominated by religious Lutherans. Julius Wellhausen was the son of a Lutheran pastor and trained to be a pastor himself. B.H. Streeter was ordained in the Church of England. Throughout the 19th century, the center of the movement was universities in Germany or England with explicit Protestant confessional requirements for faculty. My own experience talking to biblical text scholars today is that Lutherans are massively overrepresented. There are absolutely a lot of leaps in 19th century source criticism and the field now differs from their consensus in many ways, but at least to my knowledge it's always been a mostly Protestant intellectual project.
(Also, speaking of Lutherans, you should both really watch the movie Ordet!)
I was probably a little bit sloppy in how I wrote that section, you are absolutely correct that many of the progenitors of the field were at least nominally Christian (and in some notable cases were quite sincere Christians).
Perhaps it's because I'm an atheist but I found the description of what we atheists allegedly believe quite tendentious. All I believe is that there's no good evidence for the existence of God, which is what many other atheists believe. Ascribing to atheists all the wrong turns made by science over its history as it groped it's way to a closer approximation of reality struck me as unfair.
Apart from that, there are different degrees of wrongness. Newton turned out to be wrong in the way he envisaged gravity working yet he still wasn't as wrong as say, Arthur Conan Doyle and his belief in fairies.
After reading the first half of this post I decided I wouldn't read the rest. It was too much like a convinced Marxist giving an account of Capitalism - and coming up with something unrecognisable. I thought Bo Winegard's review at Aporia was more fair-minded and just better.
I don’t think that is what atheism is. Personally, I also don’t believe there is good strong evidence for the existence of God. But I also don't think there is good strong evidence against. I think there is a weak case for both sides—and that makes me an agnostic, *not* an atheist.
What would good strong evidence against God look like? I can imagine what evidence for God would look like, but against? It's like me saying the evidence against ghosts is not strong so I'm therefore agnostic. What would proof for the non-existence of ghosts look like. If we are to be agnostic about all things that don't exist until we are given solid evidence, we would be agnostic about pretty much everything. Prove to me that Adolf Hitler DIDN'T come back to life.
I think some people (not necessarily you) misunderstand what 'atheist' means. Some seem to think that atheists claim to KNOW there is no God when really we just believe that He probably doesn't exist. This is symmetrical with most Christians, who usually only claim to believe that God exists, not that they know he does. If believing rather than being 100% certain makes you an agnostic, then all intellectually honest people should describe themselves as agnostics, including the Pope and Richard Dawkins. But having the same word for people with radically different beliefs is not useful. Therefore people who see no strong evidence for the existence of God are atheists rather than agnostics, though I understand that you are undecided, finding neither side's arguments convincing.
(Note that when I say “God”, I don't necessarily mean the Abrahamic God specifically, but any higher spiritual existence.)
No, my view of what an atheist is is exactly what you describe: “there is no God” is the null hypothesis, the default assumption unless convincing proof otherwise is provided.
That is not my view, for several reasons. First, although there is no *strong* evidence for the existence of God, there is plenty of *weak* evidence. Secondly, most humans throughout history have believed in God, so based on that you could argue that belief should be the null hypothesis, which atheists must conclusively disprove.
Finally, there are several facts that need *some* explanation, such that if you reject God as that explanation, you must accept something else as the alternative. The most prominent example is the fine-tuning argument. The only two plausible theories I have heard for why the universe is so fine-tuned for life to exist are “God exists” and “multiverse + survivorship bias”. And I see no strong reason to privilege one over the other.
All of these arguments have been rehearsed before but let's go through them again:
1. Fine-tuning. The more you insist on how improbable it is that life exists in a universe generally inhospitable to life, the more you should ask yourself why god made it that way. If He was so keen on life, why didn't he make it so that life could thrive everywhere rather than just in our tiny corner? If he had done so, there would be a lot more life in the universe and the whole fine-tuning argument evaporates.
2. '...you could argue that belief should be the null hypothesis, which atheists must conclusively disprove'
I ask again, how is one supposed to prove the non-existence of a thing? All religious people have to do is point to a large hand reaching through the clouds, or a booming voice from the heaven telling us what will happen next Wednesday. But atheists have been set an impossible task, as unfortunately the absence of the giant hand and booming voice doesn't prove that God doesn't exist, only that He hasn't chosen to show himself to non-superstitious peasants yet. Can you see the asymmetry here?
3. 'if you reject God as that explanation [for the existence of a habitable universe], you must accept something else as the alternative'.
It isn't that I have chosen an alternative. I'll wait until the scientists have some concensus on how the universe started, though Lawrence Krauss believes it started from nothing. If you insist on saying that this isn't plausible and everything must start from something, I will ask you who created God. You will answer no one since He was always here, at which point I'll say that if you can simply claim that God was always here, I can simply claim that the universe was always here or started from nothing. 'God did it' is a statement of belief, not an explanation as it explains precisely nothing.
Of course the chance that 'God did it' is not the 50/50 bet some religious people think it is. God is just one among many possibilities. And not putting your money on any specific god is kind of cheating, like a hedging of bets. Would, say, 'electricity' comes under the rubric of 'higher spiritual existence'? If not, can you define what properties this higher spiritual existence has and how you discovered these properties rather than, you know, just making them up?
4. 'most humans throughout history have believed in God, so based on that you could argue that belief should be the null hypothesis, which atheists must conclusively disprove'.
Substitute 'god' for 'ghosts', 'witches' or 'magic'. I would say that in the modern world ghosts, witches and magic no longer constitute the null hypothesis and I would argue the same about God.
My position, in a nutshell, is not that I'm wedded to any particular explanation for how the universe started or why it appears to us to be fine tuned. Even if a day comes where scientists can prove that it all started from nothing I guarantee that someone will say, 'Ah, but who created the nothing before the something?'
My position is merely that 'God did it' is no explanation and doesn't look plausible from my vantage point of a poorly educated 1950's British child. Even so, I do understand why people who lived before the scientific revolution might think god created everything, along with causing the weather. And I also understand why people today remain wedded to the pre-scientific beliefs of their ancestors, partly for reasons of tradition and partly because it's comforting to think that all of this is in His plan and that dying is not really dying but moving to a new, better life where everyone wears white and you and your mates all are in your pomp.
Sorry to intrude - quick questions regarding point 1 as am not well versed on these philosophical/theological arguments. Does it not make perfect sense that God would create an environment suitable such that specific life could flourish rather than life everywhere? If God has a specific plan for human creation why would he create an infinite universe of life everywhere - I think your argument assumes Gods priority is for as much life as possible, which I don’t think is true?
No, intrude away.
Even if God's plan were to make a universe conducive to the well-being only of humans he did a pretty poor job. Why didn't he make more earth-like planets rather than planets that are either too hot or too cold or too gaseous or too something else for human life to survive?
If He was so fixated on humans, why bother to make 400,000 different species of beetle? Did he do it specifically to keep our entomologists entertained? It seems to me that for someone so crazy about us he included an awful lot of redundant stuff, not to say stuff detrimental to our well-being. Like, why include asteroids that strike the earth and cause impact winters? What's the point?
If He wanted to make humans, why didn't he just, you know, make them, rather than waiting 13 billion years for humans to evolve out of earlier, simpler animal forms?
Eh, to me Winegard's seemed biased the other way, but also much like a convinced Marxist giving an account of capitalism. I'm not arguing one of these reviews is more truthful than the other, just that whatever your priors are will dictate where you think the bias is.
Yes, you are probably right. Personally I thought he gave it a reasonable shot and hadn't made up his mind prior to reading it to take issue with it - but then I would think that, wouldn't I?
Like me, Bo Winegard would quite like to be able to believe since he appreciates what belief brings to people's lives and he dislikes the nihilism that often accompanies atheism. He also thinks humans have a natural tendency to believe in gods. It's just that, again like me, he finds no way of overcoming the sheer implausibility of the whole thing. Most people can see this with other current religions or religions that no one now believes in e.g. Norse and Greek gods. Yet strangely when it comes to their own religion they can see nothing implausible about it. It all looks perfectly reasonable.
The multiplicity of religions argument really is quite weak. There are only 2 religions that really make exclusive truth claims about reality, have origins within the historiographical record rather than deep in the sands of time, and have had the kind of global reach you'd expect from the One True Religion: Christianity and Islam. And the arguments for Islam are *terrible*.
Still, Christianity would admittedly be a lot more believable if not for the existence of Islam. A faith founded by a nobody in a random backwater town conquering and converting such huge chunks of the world is so *weird* that you could only chalk it up to divine intervention, except for the fact that it happened twice for two incompatible religions.
I think one can restore the historical uniqueness of Christianity in the sense you discuss by viewing Islam as a Christian heresy. There's some real evidence for this view, including Muhammed's own biography bringing him into close contact with the Byzantines, as well as Christoph Luxenberg's argument that large chunks of the Quran are cribbed from Syriac liturgical texts.
(I have no opinion on the quality of Luxenberg's research, but it doesn't strike me as implausible off the bat.)
I think it is wrong to say that "the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin had a much less dramatic impact on Chinese and Indian religious authorities". In Japan, at least, Buddhism was grounded in the belief that the world was flat and extended out from an enormous mountain called Mount Meru, around which the sun and moon orbited (similar to flat-earth diagrams you might see on the Internet). This was important to the Japanese worldview because the Buddhist hells were understood to exist beneath Mount Meru, while the Pure Land where the Bodhisattvas lived was in the West, around Europe. So, if this flat earth described in the scriptures was not real, the Pure Land Buddhists had been facing the direction of something nonexistent to pray for centuries, and all the Buddhists had been preaching a fabricated hell.
When Western geographical and astronomical knowledge penetrated Japan, it shook the foundations of Buddhism, so the traditionalists put an enormous amount of effort into trying to keep the flat earth plausible. Max Moerman's book "The Japanese Buddhist World Map" has many beautiful illustrations and photos of the devices they invented to try to track the movements of planets and the sun. The government prohibited teaching Mount Meru in the 1870s but belief in it persisted through the 1900s.
"Zen Buddhism" as we know it in the West is the result of a 20th century Japanese rewrite which came out of this Copernican revolution, discarding much of the original scriptures. It's the equivalent of Reform Judaism.
I think we might be violently agreeing with each other. Heliocentrism is as much at odds with (for instance) traditional Buddhist cosmology as it was with medieval Christian cosmology. But when heliocentrism arrived in the East, it did not trigger rapid secularization as it is sometimes implied to have done in the West.
I do think that Japan had a particularly rapid and violent secularization, involving the destruction of Buddhist temples, a civil ban on Buddhist funerals previously practiced by the entire population, the mass secularization of monks, and the removal or disposal of thousands of Buddha images within the space of just two or three years. But I recognize that debating whether this was triggered by a Cartesian moment is probably outside the scope of this post... Anyway, I hope it was an interesting parallel!
I thought that was due the nationalists choosing Shinto over Buddhism.
Your reviews are always thoughtful but this one is a standout. Have you read A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo? Your account of the Gospels in the third part mirrors it bar for bar.
Haven't read it, but now I want to!
is this the one? ChatGPT says there's a different translator that's better (Gessel?) but I don't know if it's hallucinating as I can't find it on the internet: https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-life-of-jesus/shusaku-endo/9780809123193
Schuchert translation is the one I have read and the only translation I know of.
I haven't read Douthat's book yet, so I'm not sure how much of the arguments you present here are his arguments rather than yours, but (as someone who does believe in God and wants other people to do so!) I can only say that I'm disappointed by their quality.
It seems that at every turn you're holding the atheists/secularists to a very different standard than the Christians/believers. Most 19th century secularists believed in a deterministic and steady-state cosmology, which didn't hold up in the face of 20th century science, therefore secularism loses one to traditional Christianity? Huh? If you can insist that determinism and the steady-state universe (which aren't even logically required by a disbelief in God) are more essential to the atheist worldview than almost anything in Genesis is to the Christian worldview, then you can insist anything. (Yes, it's true that there are some thinkers today who claim that the core of Christian cosmology is creation-ex-nihilo, and that everything else about the Days of Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah's Flood, etc. can be dismissed as so much allegory; also, this would have seemed utterly bizarre to any Christian thinker living before the 19th century!)
Then there is the case of miracles,which you say Christians accept on evidence, while atheists/agnostics reject them on blind faith, since their dogma has already told them what sorts of events can and can't happen in the world. Except that actually, Christians (and Muslims, etc., and any other religion that claims to be the One True Way) also do the same thing! If you're a Catholic like Ross Douthat, then you're going to believe a fellow Catholic who tells you about a healing by a Catholic saint, you'll be somewhat skeptical of (say) a Mormon who claims to have witnessed a healing by Mormon elders ("maybe Christ really did heal that person, but you're mistaken when you say it means Mormons have the true priesthood...") and when you hear a Hindu or a Theosophist claiming to have a child with past-life memories, you'll dismiss it as delusional, since your own doctrine says that reincarnation isn't possible. In that sense, you're hardly any different than the atheist whose doctrine says that ALL miracles are impossible.
Then there is the matter of biblical source criticism and all the things it got wrong in the 19th century, when the biblical minimalists were having their field day. Which is fair enough; those people really did take their theories too far when they said that the Gospels were written hundreds of years after the life of Jesus, or that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah never existed and that the Israelites' entire pre-exilic history was a fabrication. Those claims have been blown out of the water by later scholarship and archeology... but they weren't replaced by biblical literalism; what really happened is just that as scholars gained more knowledge, they ended up settling down somewhere in between the most extreme claims. So for instance nobody really doubts the Crucifixion of Christ, but the Virgin Birth is taken a lot less seriously by secular scholars (due to only showing up in two Gospels, whose nativity narratives contradict in nearly all their details, and being based on a passage in the Greek version of Isaiah that doesn't say "virgin" in Hebrew.) And then in the Old Testament, you have a consensus that Israel and Judah definitely existed, but their history gets less reliable the further back you go, so for instance Solomon wasn't nearly as wealthy as I Kings would have us believe, the Exodus (if it happened at all) didn't involve anywhere near 600,000 families, Noah's Flood is pure myth, etc.
It's also strange to cite the weirdness of Christ's teachings (leaving the ninety and nine, not resisting evil, etc.) as evidence that Christianity is very unique (and thus more likely to be true than other religions) while dodging the question of why so much of that weirdness has been interpreted away by nearly all the big Christian churches - i.e. most Christians are not pacifists, so it's clear they're not actually interpreting "turn the other cheek" in the strictest manner, and even those that are pacifists aren't strictly following the "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink?..." part of the Sermon on the Mount. (Even the Amish gather their grain into barns for the winter). So if you're going to cite these things as evidence of how the Christian faith is uniquely transcendent (and thus it's truth claims are more worthy of being inquired into than those of other members of the this-is-the-one-true-way tradition) then you're going to have to explain why most of the branches of Christianity (including those that have done the most to spread the faith, whatwith the Vikings, Aztecs, etc. not giving up their old gods peacefully) don't seem to be following them. And the fact that different branches of Christianity seem to have very different ideas about what the essentials of Christianity even are (for instance Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants have very different ideas about what authority one must submit to and what sacraments one must receive to be assured of Christ's grace) also makes it difficult to fully trust any one of them.
I apologize if I've been too long-winded here. As someone who believes in God, I really do want this all to make sense. I don't actually find atheism convincing at all, but at the same time it's very hard for me to commit to any of the major religious traditions when they all claim to be so unique, despite looking (to an outsider) like closely related trees or flowers that diverged only recently in their evolutionary history. Ah well, I suppose I will have to keep on being a seeker. The good things in life don't come easily.
Thanks for the long reply, apologies that you will get a short one in return:
(1) Nobody is arguing that the past few centuries of discoveries represent a slam dunk case for any particular religious tradition. A number of commenters have misunderstood this, which I think speaks to the fact that Douthat is saying something pretty subtle and pretty new. His point is that it significantly undermines a commonly-cited source of secularist triumphalism. A lot of the book is like this -- taking the arguments used by the other side, and turning them on their heads.
(2) The discussion of miracles also follows this pattern. I think Douthat would completely accept the claims of the Hindu or the theosophist in your example. And as I point out, that very ecumenical attitude towards miracles is actually quite representative of how the partisans of various religions have talked for a very long time.
(3) I don't think your point about bad Christians does what you want it to. To me, the fact that Christ's followers have so consistently felt the need to sand down the sharp edges of his message is just even more evidence of how unusual and indeed *inhuman* it is.
John, maybe I was misreading your claims on (1) and (2). If Douthat's real point is less of "look at all this evidence that favors my side" and more of "believers don't have all the answers, but secularists' claim that rejecting God makes it easier to explain cosmology, spiritual experiences, etc. has held up very poorly," then I would not quarrel about that.
As for my "point about bad Christians," I wouldn't say that Christians not following the letter of Jesus' teachings on nonviolence, indifference to material goods, etc. is a simple matter of them being bad. It's not nearly as straightforward as say lying or unchastity, which all the major churches condemn but which their followers (having the usual human weaknesses) are constantly doing on the sly. The difference with the "hard sayings" is that it's the churches themselves, and especially the Catholic Church, which have "felt the need to sand down the sharp edges," by for instance creating the Just War Theory, or saying that the passages in the Gospels about how we should leave our families to follow Christ, give away our possessions to anyone who asks, not resist evil, etc. are only fully applicable to people with certain vocations, and that the rest of us need to find some sort of compromise between the Sermon on the Mount and the less extreme morality that you find in books like Isaiah, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, or even the Epistles of Paul.
So I think it's incoherent for Douthat to cite the weirdness of Christ's ethical teaching as evidence that Christianity is unique, when he himself belongs to the Catholic Church which has done a great deal to water down the weirdness. Either Catholicism is true, in which case the Gospel message (when properly interpreted by the church Magisterium) isn't as radical as it seems at first sight... or else the Gospel really is radical and the people who water it down are false teachers, just like the Amish and the Quakers and Leo Tolstoy have been saying. But someone who believes that has no business of being a Catholic in the first place.
I think my atheism rests more on philosophical grounds and simple lack of evidence than anything positive that science has proven or predicted.
I look at the world around me, and inside me, and I see no direct evidence of a god and no reason to posit a god as explanation for anything.
I find that in these debates I'm asked to lower my standards for both belief and agnosticism because billions of people happen to have very strong feelings about this particular abstract concept. From what I've read Douthat's book seems no different in this regard so I don't think I'm gonna be reading it.
After reading your review I still have no idea what Douthat's book is about.
Wait, do people think that miracles still occur? Serious question. I am under the impression that the Enlightenment thinkers were totally right. The miracles that still are reported, as far as I ever hear, either have zero actual evidence or they're events that could equally easily be explained without religion, such as a cancer going into remission.
Yeah when I got to that point I googled "reported miracles over time" and didn't find anything! Actually my impressions from my childhood growing up in the church is that "why do fewer miracles happen now than 2000 years ago?" was a question that a bunch of Christians actually put a bunch of thought into.
It seems like people still report unexpected healings and unexplainable events that they experienced alone or with a small group, but we don’t see people who were verified dead coming back to life like they do in the Gospels, and we don’t see a lot of miracles in front of large groups with camera phones.
Google “miracle of the sun.”
"First you make people jealous, then you make them mad, then you confuse and demoralize your followers, then you refuse to speak in your own defense." So, without the resurrection, Jesus is just Socrates? Still managed to have some reputation as a moral teacher.
The quip about how we all disbelieve in most gods, atheists just include one more, always reminds me of a story told about Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev. So it goes, he was once confronted by an atheist with various claims, and responded, "The same God you don't believe in, I also don't believe in."
There's a whole slice of Christendom that considers Socrates to be a pagan foreshadowing of Christ, in a similar sort of way to how the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs were. In fact Socrates even did a little prophesying of his own -- in the Republic he predicts that if there were ever a truly just man, he would be crucified.
It's interesting to consider what Socrates' reputation would have been in a world without Christianity and its associated moral reprogramming of the human race. Certainly he had a number of fans in the classical world, among his students and the others he influenced. But you can imagine that in a world without the witness of the martyrs, without the Christian emphasis on freedom of conscience, etc., etc., the conventional opinion might match the kid in my high school philosophy class who said: "Socrates is sort of an annoying loser."
The fact that a subset of atheist scholarship has been awful at predicting what science would reveal about the universe seems like a strawman argument to support a conclusion that people should be religious.
To me the most persuasive atheist position is that science establishes the boundary of what it is possible for people to know using modern technology and anyone making eschatological predictions beyond that boundary are equally likely to be wrong. So we should be distrustful of any institution making eschatological claims with certainty regardless of whether they are inspired by an atheist or religious world view. This is an unsatisfying position to many, people are notoriously uncomfortable with uncertainty.
I'd be curious to see a review that positioned religious views against an atheist tradition that embraces uncertainty.
Gotta say, most of the certainty I see comes from the religious. If you were to ask an atheist if he is 100% sure that God doesn't exist or that Quantum Mechanics is right I suspect most of them, including me, would say no to both. All I know is that I haven't yet seen good evidence for the existence of God and scientists tell me that Quantum Mechanics is a good predictor of various outcomes. If evidence for God turned up or scientists decided that QM isn't so great after all I'd change my mind.
Not sure that the same can be said for most religious people, mainly because most of them think less in terms of probability and likelihood and more in terms of faith.
Have you read Francis Spufford's book Unapologetic? Your summary of Jesus' ministry and why it's nuts to think of him as just a "great moral teacher" reminds me of Spufford's take on him.
Yes I have. I like Spufford in general, wasn't a huge fan of Unapologetic, but very much liked the chapter that was a gloss on the Gospels. I'm sure I was subconsciously influenced by it when I wrote that part of this review.
Chesterton also famously makes the argument that the story of Christ is in some way different from other religious origin stories, such that we'd notice something weird about it even if it had happened in China and we were encountering it for the first time.
I always feel like this is special pleading on behalf of Christians. The Gospels have never struck me as especially "weird". It's true that Christianity has its own particular character, but that's also true of all the other major religions. Not sure what the big deal is supposed to be.
I do think there's something pretty odd about how when even the most psychologically alien hunter-gatherer tribe encounters the Gospels, some fraction of them experience a seemingly quite sincere conversion. It's like all those scifi stories where somebody engineers a perfect semiotic virus that carries an unforgettable joke, or the Gödel sentence for a particular sort of mind.
You can make various arguments to dismiss this -- maybe it's all because people like to ape winners, and for a while the Christians had lots of stuff and lots of guns. I don't think that argument stands up to scrutiny, and I don't think it costs you much to admit that the Gospels are an outrageously powerful meme. Perhaps you would have fun analyzing what it is about the meme that makes it so contagious.
Hunter-gatherer tribes already think in magical terms. My suspicion is it's just easy to get them to convert to new religions in general. Islam also seems to have had a certain amount of success in this field.
I'm an atheist, and I used to believe this was true, but after having really dived deeper into more religious I am convinced that Christianity is actually very qualitatively different, or at least part of a distinctive subset of religions including buddhism and Jainism.
Essentially all true moral progress was made by Christians (and of Christians, Quakers very disproportionately).
Jains got there early, and are still way ahead on animal suffering, but were less able to spread their beliefs.
How do you distinguish "moral progress" from mere change.
For the record I consider both Quakers and Jains to be insane, and frequently virtue-signalling hypocrites.
Very good point actually, thank you for making it. Feel like this is helping me think through the problem.
Why Buddhism, specifically? I've gotten a lot out of Buddhist ideas about desire, but I've never thought particularly carefully about their moral system.
On the tangent of how the modern automatic blinkers automatically blocks the widespread evidence for "miracles" from even coming onto the playing floor.
I prefer a different focus. Miracles are straightforward "divine" intervention, meaning God directly intervening by disrupting the physical system He set up. So it's not very valuable to psuh its evidence to atheists, who have as an absolute prior that hey this is all impossible 'cause God doesn't actually exist.
But "Metaphysics", as opposed to Miracles, is much more valuable a focus. And IMO its a much more crucial loss when its widespread evidence is deemed ineligible in the intellectual playing field. Because even the atheists have no absolute reason to dismiss the existence of a level beyond what modern Science knows. Science is actually supposed to accept that possibility, it's a large part of the vanity Scientismists (see Scott Alexander's articles) pride themselves in over their benighted, less knowledgable generations, who were too close minded to accept that "we may not know everything".
This modern certainty that "actually we DO know everything" blocks off whole lines of scientific inquiry, unrelated to Religion. There's ample evidence (I'm not saying "proof") for all sorts of specific metaphysical phenomena, and much that would be very useful and scientifically productive.
Like for example, the enigmatic phenomena of charisma. I'm aware the assumption of the modern intellectual is it's all materialstic; body language and basic psychology. Check out the numerous historical figures who utilized their charisma in ways far outstripping what we'd naively predict possible in that materialistic paradigm. For example the well documented powers of early 20th century's Rasputin, both in social influence and healing power.
Scientists and Historians who look into it are stumped, express amazement, but stop there. Because a (the?) logical explanation -- a concrete metaphysical ability -- isn't even *possible*.
I think you're probably onto something here. I know a guy who's a (secular) philosophy professor, who one day decided as a fun experiment to just make Neoplatonist arguments all day at his undergraduate students. To his surprise, he was pretty quickly able to convince them, and a bunch of them became Neoplatonists, or were at least troubled by it.
His analysis of what happened is that modern people are an *immune naive population* for Neoplatonism. Like, it was a powerful intellectual tradition that duked it out with all kinds of competitors for centuries; but nobody's heard or thought about it in ages. So releasing it on these undergrads was like de-icing some ancient smallpox strain.
This is related to what you say insofar as modern secular people are ideologically "vaccinated" against certain arguments, but not others. If we believe in our own doctrine, then we believe all arguments point in the same direction, so we should preferentially reach for the ones that will be more effective because they haven't been used in a while.
Now that is fascinating. I’d be down for a Neoplatonist revival. Sounds edgy.