Plain English with Derek Thompson - Is There a Scientific Case for Believing in God?

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

This is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. It's about the decline of religion in America, the value of faith, the case for belief, and the rational reasons to believe in God. My guest is the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He is a Catholic conservative. From an identity checkbox standpoint, we are very different people. But Ross is one of my favorite writers from any point of the ideological spectrum. His new book is 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' and it begins with an extremely compelling description of Ross reading the feedback he’s getting at the Times, watching that feedback evolve from “You stupid idiot, how could you possibly believe in a magical man in the sky?” to “I think I’m missing something in my life, a religion-sized hole at the center of my community or myself. Can you help me find it?” We talk about his religious journey and mine, the history of religion in America, the popular misconception that science automatically rolled back religiosity, the rational, scientific case for the existence of God, why I find that case emotionally lacking, and the case for even secular people to believe in God. And, finally, I invite Ross to give me his single best case that Christianity is true. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ross Douthat Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up everybody? It's Austin Rivers here and we are back for another season of OffGuard. Me and my guy, Pasha Giggy, are hitting your podcast feeds every Monday and Thursday talking everything hoops. Austin is bringing that 11-year NBA veteran perspective and of course keeping you guys entertained throughout the season. Make sure you tap into OffGard with Austin Rivers on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to follow everything we've got going on social media. The OffGar podcast, Ringer NBA, and of course check us out on Ringer NBA's YouTube channel. We're getting better. Today, the existence of God, the decline of faith, and what the West loses when it loses its religion.

I grew up a reformed Jew in McLean, Virginia, which is a suburb of Washington, D.C., and my relationship to the Jewish faith was always tenuous enough to be frankly comical. My dad grew up a Southern Baptist and converted to a kind of staunch anti-theism. I mean, he hated Christianity with a passion that would have embarrassed Christopher Hitchens. My mom descended from a family of Jewish Germans, but she had this flavor of spirituality that resulted in our bookshelves, often having more titles about reincarnation than Moses. We went to temple for the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I had a bar mitzvah, which I enjoyed not only for the excuse to have a party to impress the girls I had a crush on at 13, but also because I genuinely loved learning how to chant from the Torah. Like many Reformed Jews of my age, I think the pinnacle of my religious experience was the six months leading up to my bar mitzvah. But the truth is, my family was the ultimate archetype of that old joke that some folks are Jewish with the emphasis squarely on the ish.

Yeah, we love Passover and Purim and even Tubeshvot. But we also celebrated Easter. We were the only Jews in the neighborhood, but for some reason I don't quite remember and can't even attempt to explain right now. We were the ones hosting the neighborhood Easter egg hunt in our backyard. We celebrated Christmas in a way that was totally indistinguishable

from, say, elapsed Protestant. It's not just that we had a Christmas tree or that we put out cookies for Santa, whom I believed in until an embarrassingly late date. It's also that when I was 12, I was cast in a play at the Folger Shakespeare Theater in D.C. The play was called A Child's Christmas in Wales, and it was a review of old-timey Christmas carols

organized around a reading of the poet Dylan Thomas's beautiful short story by that same name, A Child's Christmas in Wales. And as a result, during the rehearsal process, I had to learn no less than 20, maybe 30 19th century Christmas songs, which I loved. And I remembered one day in middle school a year or two later, our Catholic music teacher was directing the Christmas play. And she didn't have enough, didn't know enough English carols to fill out the play. And here I am the Jewish kid in the cast going, well, if it were me, I'd certainly recommend King Wenchless Loss. If you want a high-energy tune or maybe God-Resty, merry gentleman.

but personally, I'm very partial to the more solemn deep cuts like past three o'clock or in the bleak midwinter. I'm not joking when I tell you, my familiarity with 19th century English Christmas carols rivals the most devout Christian you possibly know. And maybe this is why you can understand that by the time I was in my 20s, my connection to Judaism had been quite diluted.

And the truth is, I didn't really mind. It didn't really feel like my losing, the faith amounted to losing anything. It felt in some ways like being unburdened by a set of rules that I never fully believed in. So anyway, we fast forward the story to my 30s, and for a variety of reasons, I slowly began to feel like my lack of religiosity

and my secularism, which had previously felt like the weightlessness of freedom, was starting to feel like a heavy absence. There's a thin and even cheap way to talk about, about this, which is that I am dispositionally sort of a mystical person without any particular way to channel those instincts. I mean, I'm picking a purposefully ridiculous example here, but I think it illustrates the point. When I was single in New York in my mid-20s, I believed very strongly that I had a pair of lucky socks. I believed that my sock choice was materially connected

to whether I would go out and meet somebody that I jived with. And to be a secular person, who nourishes superstitions like this is almost too ridiculous to consider in close detail. I mean, the idea that my sock choice made things happen in the world was essentially to believe that God existed and that he was waiting around in the firmament of eternity,

twiddling his thumbs, ignoring the epidemics, ignoring the wars, with his finger hovering over the good stuff happens now button if I picked out the right pair of old Navy fabric to put on my feet. But if you take this seriously for a moment, my absurd superstitions, it does speak to the fact

that even non-believers often imbue the physical world with magical properties, even people who think they don't believe in divinity, nonetheless sometimes inscribe their reality

with a sense of the divine. When I think about it really deeply, when I think about the absence of an organized belief system in my life. I think it's very connected to the fact that I lost my parents in my 20s. There are an infinitude of things that a person loses when he loses his parents.

But one thing I can clearly see now at 38 as a father is the way that being without parents can disconnect someone from a sense of backward-looking tradition. My mom died and I was 26, and my dad died three years later. and in an extraordinary and even chilling way, he died early one morning in January 2016

the very same day he was about to meet the young woman I was dating who would eventually become my wife. And I've never forgotten that detail, the fact that in a way that seemed almost too fitting for an accidental universe, I lost my family on the same day. day that I found my family. And as I got older and passed through all these familiar gates of life, get engaged, get married, have a child, I felt in the variety of ways the pain of not being able

to tell my parents about my life. I'm talking about the simplest questions. Questions as simple as here's what my life is like now. Was it like this for you? At the same time that I was feeling this hard to define absence in my life, which I occasionally associated with the absence of religion, I was becoming very interested in this question of religious non-affiliation at the level of society, of country. Why had America become so much less religious in the last 50 years? The reasons for this country's disconnection from religion seemed often understandable. You have the horrors of Catholic priest abuse, the religious right, turning off. a generation of young liberals, even the sexual revolution, replacing a set of Christian principles

about sex and marriage with modern secular principles about freedom and individualism. But surely, one truth about life is that just because something happens for good reasons doesn't guarantee it will lead to good outcomes. In fact, in a recent report from the Brookings Institution on the decline of social well-being in America, The Tulane University economist Douglas Harris said, quote, if there is one overarching theme to American life, it's that we're pulling apart economically, politically, and socially. Frederick Hess, an education expert who worked on this report,

said he thought the disconnect between America's high GDP and its low levels of happiness and life satisfaction was related to, quote, the weakening bonds of community. and the degree to which Americans feel less rooted in close-knit bonds of family and faith. Today's guest is Ross Douthit, a New York Times columnist. Ross is a Catholic conservative. So from an identity checkbox standpoint,

we are very different people. But Ross is one of my favorite writers from any point along the ideological spectrum, not only because he's very interesting, but because he takes these issues that I think about so damn seriously. His new book is called Believe, why everybody should be religious.

And it begins with this incredibly compelling and relatable description of Ross reading the feedback that he's getting at the Times and watching the letters from the editor evolve from a genre of, you stupid idiot, how could you possibly believe in a magical man in the sky,

to, I think I'm missing something in my life, a religion-sized hole at the center of my community or myself. Can you, Ross, help me find it? Today we talk about Ross's religious journey and mine, the history of religion in America, the popular misconception that science automatically rolled back religiosity, the rational scientific case for the existence of God, Why I find that case intellectually compelling but emotionally lacking.

And finally, I entreat Ross to give me his single best case that Christianity is true. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Ross Douthit, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Derek. It's great to be with you. I could tell from the first pages of this book that it was written for somebody just like me. You describe a tonal shift in the letters you were getting from New York Times readers, from essentially, L.O.L., you believe in a flying spaghetti monster, to genuine and earnest questions about how the demise of religion in modern secular society leaves painful cavities in our lives in the form of less meaning, less community, a weakened sense of backward-looking story or forward-looking purpose. And as I'm reading along to the introduction,

I'm thinking, my God, this book feels like it was written for me. You write, quote, the serious, modern person might believe that religious faith can be psychologically advantageous and necessary to human flourishing, end quote. And I'm thinking, me too. Next sentence, he might set aside the animus of the anti-God brigade, that was my dad, and embrace a more nuanced and potentially favorable view of religion's place in contemporary life. And I'm thinking, my God, me too.

next sentence, quote, he might regard faith in terms suggested recently by the Atlantic's Derek Thompson. I'm like, what the hell? Very rare to be reading a book and think, this really feels like it was talking to me. And then boom, the author's like, if the person you're reading this book happens to be a 5-8 secular Jew working at the Atlantic named Derek, I am in fact talking to you. So I very much appreciate. That was in a footnote. We had to cut that that footnote because I had too many of them. I was like, you know, 5, 7 lapsed Lutheran. you know, working at the New Yorker. Yeah, I mean, there's a, the book is, the book is written for a lot of people, but you are one of them, Derek. You are. When my lawyers saw 5-7, I know that we threatened to sue the publisher. And I think that's where the footnote was taken out. There's some behind the scenes.

There was some negotiation. So look, in the open, I talked about my religious experience, which so clearly matches up with this audience that you're trying to reach with this book. Let's start with your religious experience. Tell me the story of how you came to be, a Catholic? What was your religious experience growing up? So I grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s, and my parents were Episcopalians when I was a kid, which is, you know, one of those old mainline Protestant denominations that basically dominated large swaths of American history and went into steep decline starting in the 1960s. And so in sociological terms, I was probably set up well for a kind of future where my parents took me to church and had me baptized and we were sort of loosely attached to the church. And then I would drift away in adolescence and become, you know, a sort of elapsed, a lapsed Protestant or maybe a Christmas and Easter Protestant taking my kids to church and so on. But in reality, we ended up taking a kind of strange detour out of that path.

because my mother who had some illness issue she was dealing with got invited by a friend to attend a charismatic healing service. And my mother went to one of these things, and it was something where this woman would walk around the auditorium with a microphone and point to people and say, someone in this aisle has serious problem with their sciatic nerve. Someone in this aisle is dealing with this and that and the other thing. And people would come out and she would pray for them, and they would fall over and have, to varying degrees, a kind of ecstatic experience of the Holy Spirit. And so this happened to my mother, and it sort of, it changed our lives when I was a kid. We were living in New Haven. And then for reasons that were in a way quite different, my parents and I, my 17-year-old self, ended up converting

to Catholicism. And for my mother, especially, who was sort of the more mystical personality, there was a kind of, there was a kind of mystical continuity where, you know, she went to some, there's sort of a charismatic piece of Catholicism that provided a kind of entry point. But it also connected back to her Episcopalian childhood. The one thing to say is I didn't have these experiences personally. I was an observer of other people's religious experiences. And I both thought that they were real. Also, it often made me very uncomfortable.

especially as I became, you know, an awkward teenager. And I was very happy to enter a more sort of intellectualized and ritualized form of Christianity where, you know, the idea in Catholicism is basically that, you know, the God's grace is available to you and you don't have to have this kind of, you know, dramatic on the floor slain in the spirit experience to feel confident that God's grace is working through baptism, you know, the sacraments and so on. Well, there's two pieces at that story that I really want to hold on to as we continue discussing the subject. One, which is that while people like me often confront religion as a set of arguments,

there's many people that feel religion as a set of rituals, sometimes at the level of falling on the ground, speaking in tongues. Like, it's a very physical experience for many people, while people like me sort of think of it in an intellectualized way. That's one piece of the story that stuck with me. Another is that you mentioned you were brought up Christian. You are a Christian. I was brought up Reformed Jewish.

I am Reformed Jewish. My dad didn't really care about religion. My mom enjoyed Judaism but also was sort of Buddhist at the same time. I am also kind of reformed Jewish and a little bit interested in Buddhism. And whether religion exists at some kind of polygenic genome level, whether there are religion genes, hard to say for the moment, there does seem to be something very real about the fact that religiosity seems to travel in some way through families,

that people tend to, for the most part, have a faith that's somewhat related to the faith of their parents. What do you make of that? Is that a significant point to hold on, or is that just an obvious point? Like, yes, of course children would be more likely to have the religion of their parents. I mean, I think there's two, I think you actually collapsed together two slightly different realities of the way that religion is inherited. I think there's a way that religion is inherited that's similar to the way, you know, your political worldview is inherited, right?

Like, you know, you grow up with liberal parents and you're a liberal. You grow up with conservative parents and you're a conservative. you grow up in the U.S. in the late part of the 20th century and you believe in liberal democracy, as you would not have if you had been growing up in 16th century, Italy, unless you were, you know, an extremely unusual character, right? So there's one sense, if you think of religion as kind of a package of ideas in which, yes, it is probably inherited in, you know, in sort of cultural ways, but that doesn't mean that you can't have useful and productive arguments about it, Right? Like it would be strange, you know, you and I both write a lot about politics. It would be strange if somebody said, well, the reality is that most liberals grew up with liberal parents and most libertarians grew up with libertarian parents. And so we can't have an argument about, you know, who's right about the minimum wage to speak right now. I mean, of course you can have that argument while recognizing that, you know, it's not going to be absolutely settled because people carry different backgrounds, backgrounds with them.

The other point, though, is like the kind of, there are different people have different sort of experiences of, I mean, like, obviously I believe in God, right? So I'm just going to call them experiences of God, right? That do themselves seem to have some temperamental and sort of genetic conditioning. There clearly are sort of people who have more pious temperaments and more skeptical temperaments. There are people who have more cerebral attitudes towards the ultimate questions and people who literally could, you know, would not be satisfied with a religious journey or anything else if it was not primarily experiential, right? You know, Reform Judaism has a particular sort of cerebral, fairly secularized and ethically driven approach to religion. And you have a, you know, a particular, you inherit that from your parents via via a shared culture. and there's some shared temperament.

I think it's interesting, though, like from my own perspective, looking at my own experience, I am not temperamentally a mystical personality in a deep, in any kind of deep and profound and profound way. I have a fundamentally cerebral attitude toward religion.

Here I am, you know, publishing a book filled with arguments to try and, you know, get, you know, lapsed reform Jews to, you know, be persuaded to believe in God. But, but having,

these weird experiences as a child being around other people who had mystical experiences had a profound effect on my cerebral view of religion, which is, you know, which is interesting. So your book, the meat of your book is a defense of commitment to religion, a defense of faith. But there's also a piece of your book that touches on history. And I want to touch briefly on history before we get to the thesis of your book. There's a sense, I think, among people like me, that the decline of religion in the West, and it's really a decline of religion in America, was the result of faith losing an argument to science.

But essentially, there were a set of questions like, why does the sunrise, that we used to answer with faith, and then we did some experiments, and we said, oh, it turns out that gravity exists, and the solar system is shaped like this, and it's heliocentric, and suddenly we had a scientific answer to a question that faith previously had to answer. But when you look at the graphs of American church attendance, up until the middle of the 20th century, something like 70, 80, 90% of Americans based on the survey you're looking at were still attending temple regularly. This is a century after Darwin, centuries after Copernicus. And it makes me wonder whether, do you think religions declined in America because religion lost an argument to science, or rather because religious

institutions like the church lost legitimacy and secular institutions gained it. I think the decline that you're talking about at the end over the last 60 years is heavily driven by sociological and technological changes that have big effects on religion, but don't start at the level of an argument about the existence of God or even the authority of a particular church, right? So, you know, why is Christianity more potent in 1957 America than in 2007 America? Right. Well, you know, before you get to any kind of argument about Darwin or evolution, it's because we invented the birth control pill and we had a sexual revolution built around, you know, that technology and

social changes associated with it that alienated a lot of Americans from the traditional sexual ethic offered by Christianity, but also, I think, in different ways, most of the major world religions, right? So in 1957, there was this kind of deep, overreaching, between what you might call like middle-class moral common sense and religious teachings that said, don't have sex before marriage, you know, don't get divorced, you know, have a bunch of kids, right? You know, if you're trying to answer the question, why are fewer people going to church? You would want to focus on that before you would focus on Darwin and so on. Similarly, you'd say the same thing, I think, about the age of the internet, right?

The age of the internet has had a dissolving effect, as you've written about many times, on all kinds of institutional loyalties and commitments from basic ones like, you know, falling in love and getting married to, you know, whether you have trust in government or civic institutions and so on, right? And so religion has been caught up in that kind of shift, too, in ways that, again, sociological and technological, not intellectual. However, I also think that there is a kind of background reality that I think especially comes in, after Darwin in the 19th century, where, but is sort of, you know, built into the larger idea that science is a, science is the most successful form of knowledge generation that we have, and it is for good reason a pursuit that sort of deliberately tries to rule out religious explanations, right?

That, I think that creates this kind of background where, what I call in the book, official knowledge is, you know, becomes secular at a certain point. At a certain point, it becomes embarrassing if you are a college professor or a journalist or an elite podcaster, you know, to be too interested in the supernatural. Not that people aren't, right? People, you know, the 1970s happened, the spiritualism craze in the late 1800s happened. There are still sort of ebbs and flows of supernatural interest. But there is this kind of elite level default, not toward hard atheism, but towards a kind of, you know, a kind of skepticism about any

kind of religious argument that is sort of a persistent part of our culture. And so then when these deeper sociological and technological forces come along and, you know, dissolve part of the foundation of religion, the elite culture sort of goes, you know, it doesn't do much to pull things back, right? It's sort of like, oh, yeah, it makes sense that fewer people are going to church because, you know, we are rational people and we know that probably, you know, religious ideas belong to this kind of, you know, this sort of antique, antiquated category of superstition. So that, there is, I think, a kind of intellectual background to the decline of religion that is important. But it's not like the reason that churchgoing collapses

in a particular moment in time, usually. Ross, tell me how this sits with you. I'm hearing you say the scientific revolution, Darwin, Copernicus, these forces acted a bit like termites in the wall of religiosity. They weakened the structure, but they didn't bring the walls down. In America, the wrecking ball came in the form of political and social changes, right? You mentioned birth control. I'll mention the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, which tied Christianity to the Republican party alienated a lot of young progressives in the 2000s. And you see this in the data with secularism or religious non-affiliation rising much faster among liberals than conservatives. Is this a fair way to describe how you generally see the decline of faith in America, like termites versus wrecking balls? I mean, I completely agree what, you know, what you said about politics and political polarization playing a big role. I think that. there's a longer list of factors. But yeah, I think that's generally fair. I do think, though,

it is sort of, there's two things. One is it's termites in the walls for the intelligentsia. I think most profoundly, right? It's like you generate out of the kind of post-Darwin moment, a elite class in America that slowly sheds its Protestantism. And that that happens. you know, there's a sociologist named Christian Smith who's written about this, but that there is a kind of secularization of the Protestant elite that happens pretty steadily from the middle of the 19th century down to the middle of the 20th century. And that is really important, yeah, for sort of creating the context in which then everything from the birth control pill to the automobile, to the internet, to polarization, to the Catholic sex abuse crisis, all, you know, all these things

then give you rapid mass secularization. But I think it is a very, it's sort of particular to the development and sort of deep Protestantization of the American elite, right? But like you go from, you know, all of the elite, all of the elite schools in America were founded as Protestant schools, right? And they remained sort of tacitly Protestant for a long time. And but that sort of, that had dissolved before the larger secularization took hold. I wanted to begin with history rather than psychology because in a way, the historical lesson

anticipates the psychological lesson. Civilization can believe in science and also have deep faith. And so can people. And what's interesting about your book is how seriously you take the idea that science itself isn't just compatible with faith. Science, you say, arguably bolsters the case for belief. This was such an interesting argument. I want to quote from your chapters and then throw things back to you. Quote, the cosmological constant, which governs the speed at which the universe expands,

sits in a range that is roughly a one in ten to the 120th power chance of occurring randomly. That range is essential to prevent both a flying apart and a swift collapse of the universe, both of which would have doomed the development of anything like life. Were the nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons inside atoms, just fractionally stronger, it would have eliminated all the hydrogen atoms in the very earliest phase of the universe. No hydrogen, no water, no us. And quote, Ross, we do appear to live in a kind of jackpot universe.

why do you consider this to be Exhibit A in the case for scientific secular folks like me to be more open to the idea of a divine creator? I mean, I think my personal inclination is to make the argument that it's not just that science itself should be open to this idea. It is that the coherence of science is much stronger and the ambitions of science much. more plausible once you accept that we probably almost certainly live in a universe made with us in mind. I think it's the case that basically the entire modern scientific project has always sort of depended on tacitly religious expectations and understandings about the universe. The modern scientific, and it does in fact begin with, you know, deeply religious scientists. The, you know, the scientific revolution doesn't begin with a bunch of eight,

Aethyst throwing off the chains of science, all of, you know, from Copernicus down to Isaac Newton, who was kind of a religious cuck in his own way. It was completely normal for scientists to say, look, we are, you know, we are investigating and expounding upon the order that some kind of God has created, right? And that makes sense because the scientific project assumes order, right? It assumes regularity, predictability, mathematical beauty. It assumes all of these things as sort of givens of its project, right? So that's, that, that pattern has always been there. And you have divisions, obviously, where science challenges particular religious doctrines or, or, you know, and you get that with Galileo in certain ways, you get that with Darwin in certain ways. And there

obviously are ways in which specific scientific discoveries can unsettle particular interpretations of scripture, particular theological world pictures. That's clear. But that's different from saying, you know, because it's different from saying that because science has proceeded from discovery to discovery at every stage finding the universe yielding to our, you know, our investigative efforts, therefore there's no God and it's all a random accident. That's an odd position to take when you sort of separated a little bit from debates about, you know, evolution or, you know, or heliocentrism and just say, wait, what are we actually saying here? We're saying we have this incredibly successful project to understand the cosmos, but we're claiming that the very success

of this project proves that the cosmos has no fundamental underlying design behind it. That's, that's a peculiar place to be in, even before you get to the stuff that, you know, you quoted from the book, which is the basic, the revelation of science, of late 20th century science, basically, which is that there are many, many, many, like, gazillion-level many possible orderings for a possible universe, and ours sits in this incredibly unlikely range necessary to produce not just sort of basic order, but planets, water, life, us, etc. supposedly John von Newman, you know, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, said, there probably is a god.

Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't. And that's basically where I think we are just with the kind of physical, cosmological evidence, plus the fact that we, you know, sort of jumped up apes from an obscure planet in a, you know, the western spiral arm of the Milky Way. The fact that we can understand all of this is also quite peculiar. if, you know, we aren't part of the reason why it's here. I love this line of thinking. I love this idea that seeing science,

which means seeing reality clearly, is to see the hand of creation. I mean, you know, to spin this up a bit, like the idea that from a stew of hydrogen atoms and quantum mechanics emerges my seamless experience of consciousness is miraculous. Like the idea that out of the world of rocks and gases we get love, we get beauty, we taste wine and chocolate, we feel awe, we make art.

This is miraculous even if it's not a divine miracle. And yet when I think about all this, when I hear these words coming out of my mouth, I'm not sure it brings me any closer to belief in any religious faith specifically. And it makes me wonder whether faith can be accessed by logic alone. maybe this is just the wrong door to knock on to enter the temple of belief, so to speak, and religion has to be felt first, experienced first, and then intellectualized second. Do you agree with that? Do you think it's possible to logic oneself toward the leap of faith? I think that the goal, I mean, there's some Jewish Christian difference here, but allowing for that, right,

The goal of serious religious practice, the goal of being part of a religious community, in the end, is a relationship with, you know, the consciousness, the mind, the being that is at the origin of the universe and that is responsible for all of those things that you just express gratitude for. And since it is about relationship and sort of seeking and encounter and all of those things, yes, clearly there is a zone where we're not talking about logical argument anymore. And I'm not suggesting in this book that, you know, you can think your way to sainthood or you can think your way into heaven or you can think your way into enlightenment. I'm saying that you can think your way to the point. where you can say, okay, there probably is some kind of higher power, and I probably should be seeking that kind of relationship. I do think you can think your way, logic your way, to that initial point. It obviously, like we started the conversation talking about, you know, temperamental differences and so on, everybody's different, right? Everybody's going to have a different kind of experience. I do, though, think that there is a kind of cultural conditioning here that a lot of secular educated people,

my friends and neighbors, people I work with and love have, right? Where, you know, it's like you just said, they'll be like, well, you know,

there might be some higher purpose to the universe. We might be here for a reason, love, beauty, all these things, but that's not religion, right? Like, I don't know.

That's, I feel like that is, it's not religion, but it is part of the reason to be, to be religious. Yes, it is. It absolutely is.

This sets me up perfectly for what might be the biggest question I have to ask you. And it touches on the psychology of belief, the emotional psychology belief. Imagine that, you don't know me that well, but imagine that I'm someone who's diligent. We've played softball together. Sorry, excuse me. Many years ago, we know each other as well as any together. So, trust that I'm diligent and loving. trust that I read philosophy and want to feel gratitude, and I want to think deeply about life,

that I have an appreciation for the mystery of the world, that fundamentally, whether or not I believe in God, I basically adhere to the values of the Old and New Testament, consider the Sermon on the Mount to be a beautiful guide to life. And throughout all of this, don't accept Jesus as my Savior and don't accept the existence of God or pray. to him. What am I missing? I mean, we can, you're missing a lot, right? I think. And I think you, I think there's sort of different, different layers, right? I think there are things that you yourself feel yourself to be missing that are, that you've written about, right? That we, you were talking about at the outset that are the kind of immediate goods of religious practice, which

include sort of basic, obvious things. Like, you know, there's obviously lots of different ways to have a community, but the religious model of community has been an effective and successful one for a long time, right? You know, it delivers, it delivers sort of ritual, it delivers ways to usher your child or children into adulthood. It delivers support in tough times. You know, it delivers communal experiences of joy that you can recreate, by being a sports fan, but there is something substantially different about them in a religious

context. So there's sort of a range of practical, this worldly benefits of religious practice that are hard to reproduce, not that it's impossible, but hard to reproduce as a kind of high-minded sermon on the Mount admiring secular humanist, right? So that's level one. I think a lot of not, you know, plenty of secular people wouldn't accept that argument, but I think there are quite a few, right, quite a few do. And I think the age of the internet has made more people accept it because it has so many different, community is harder now, clearly, in various ways, right? And religion can feel almost like a hack, right? But then the, the secondary thing, and what I would, you know, what I would insist on, right, is that, you know, you're also missing the,

quite strong possibility that God is real, right, and that the reason that religion delivers a lot of these ancillary benefits and the reason it makes it easier for you to cultivate those good things that you as a secular person find in religion is that in fact, right, the basic claims of religion are correct. And it's not just that there's a God. It's not just that you have an immortal soul. It's that you're going to die. and meet God and, you know, be accountable for the decisions that you made in this life. And all of that reality bleeds back into the every day in ways that shape the every day. But that reality is also itself out there. And so if you say to yourself, well, you know, I can have some of these immediate

goods of religion without belief. It's harder, but you probably can. But there are also ultimate goods that I think the realities of the universe push you toward that you should want as well. And these are the old boring, you know, there's a boring argument for religion, right? It's like, hey, Derek, you're going to die. Right? You're going to die. But in fact, you are going to die,

and I'm going to die. We're all going to die. And maybe there's no God, and we just sort of, you know, evaporate, like, all we are is dust on the wind. But I think that the order and structure and nature of the cosmos give a pretty strong indicator that that's not actually the end of the story. And if it's not the end of the story, you know, you've got a strong

interest in, you know, preparing yourself for that ultimate translation encounter, whatever, you know, whatever sort of ecumenical word you want to use for. So, entrenched in what you just said, I think, two very different ideas, both quite important. One implication of what you just said is that what matters is believe. because inherent in belief is this set of experiences and communal ties and meaning-making that makes life better. The second implication of what you just said is that what matters is belief in Jesus because eternity is at stake, not just a better life, but eternity. and I want to make sure that I give you a chance to talk about Jesus because this is the end of your book, the case for Christianity.

You are a Christian. I want to make sure that we talk about Jesus. But first, I am really interested in what I suppose, you know, you could call like the phenomenology of belief, like the phenomenology of experience. I've never really believed in God. And I don't know what it's like to believe in God. What I imagine it's like, like the way I intellectualize it, is a little bit like the concept of, do you know,

um, Veltz in biology? This idea that different organisms have like a different sensory interface, right? Like bats have echolocation and animals, some animals seen infrared, and homing pigeons have this like built in GPS system. You know, dogs have their smell. And it's not that I think, obviously, the people that believe in God are like a different species with like, you know, access to echolocation.

But I do think that faith is a way of seeing the world. It is another pair of eyes. And it seems to me like belief in God seems to offer people, like a layer of experience that I don't have, or at least I think I don't have. And I wonder if you found a way in your conversations with non-believers or more secular people or just, you know, believing Jews, people who aren't Christian, a way of explaining like the phenomenology of your belief, what you think it offers you

in terms of your experience of reality? Yeah, I don't think I have a perfect expression. I mean, to me, and again, this is, you know, a difference that I go back and forth on whether it is sort of inherent or culturally conditioned, right? But to me, the hard part of religion

is what I was, the relational side, right? the idea that you are trying to be connected in a sort of intimate and personal way, since I'm a Christian to Jesus, but this applies generally to people who believe in, you know, who believe in a higher power, right? You're trying, you are trying to get into a place where you, a mortal, finite, time-bound creature, have a real relationship with a higher level of reality. and a being that exists at a higher level of reality,

that is similar or supposed to be deeper and more profound than the kind of relationships that you have with your wife or your kids or your parents or your friends, right? That to me is what religion, like, as a technology, right, is ultimately trying to do. It's trying to create rituals and structures and actions and prayers and so on that enable you to have that kind of relationship. And that's really hard.

And I don't have any illusions that I have achieved it in a profound way. That's why I'm not, that's why I haven't written a book that's called, like, you know, how to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, because I do believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the second person of the Trinity and so on. But I don't have, like, a deep profound sort of saint level confidence in that relationship. What I do have that I am trying to convey in this book is a sense that just believing, that God exists is not as hard as you might think it is, right? That like, what, what are you thinking when you think that God exists? You're thinking a set of a set of things, again, I would say

that you already think 60, 70, 80 percent of these things. You think the universe is ordered. You think that human life is miraculous. You think that consciousness, you know, has this special role in understanding and, you know, literally shaping the universe as we go through it, right? And what belief in God does is sort of say, okay, and all of those realities have their point of origin in a kind of structuring and ordering mind, you know, higher power of which we are made, we are made in its image, right? It is like us, except, you know, perfect, perfected and above, right? And I, on the one hand, I can see why people can find that hard to believe. At the same time, I have always found it quite persuasive that like, look,

you know, this is, we find ourselves in an orderly universe in which, you know, our minds have some integral relationship to the order in which, you know, people have, since time immemorial, had experiences and encounters, mystical experiences and encounters with what seems to be the higher order. Why doesn't it make sense to just say that higher being and consciousness probably exists? That doesn't resolve any of the secondary questions, right? It's like you've still got the problem of evil, you know, you've still got the question of, you know, what has got up to, what's actually going on? It's quite, you know, it can be quite mysterious, right? It doesn't tell you exactly how to have a relationship

with God, but I don't think, I think you can, I don't think you should leap ahead and say, well, in order to believe in God, I have to have some clear sense of how I have a relationship with him. I think it's okay as an initial step to say, okay, there's probably a God. I'm not sure how to have a relationship with it. Maybe I can't. Maybe, you know, maybe it's impossible, right? Like, who knows? But that initial move, I don't think, is some vast step away from the world as you already.

I mean, like, people experience their lives as stories, right? I mean, not everyone, right, but many people, perhaps you experience your life as a story that you're living. You're living inside a story, the story of Derek Thompson. To believe in God is just to believe that that story has an author, right? I don't know. Is that an impossible move? I'm not sure. You are, again, I think, retracing these two related, but ultimately, importantly, distinct ideas, which is, number one, that what we're talking about, what matters is belief, and number two, that what matters is belief in a specific organized religion with a specific

scripture and set of rituals that goes back thousands of years. And again, I think these are related questions, but they are very different, right? To be overwhelmed by, as I sometimes am, the awe of experience and not just experience in the big picture, like, oh my God, how sick is it to be alive? But the awe of specific experience. Like, wow, like my daughter did something so adorable, Like this moment feels like it has like a shimmer of sacredness to it, right? Like there's those uncanny moments that everyone must feel, whether it's love or awe hiking a mountain, extraordinary celebration, your favorite team won the championship. Like those heightened moments exist.

There's one layer here which is attaching those moments to the sense of a being, an author, a creator. And then there is a second question of whether to become a Jew, whether to become a Christian. I want to close on that with you. The way that I have the question written down in my notes is a little bit churlish, but actually it really is the way I want to ask it. What's so great about Christianity? To be a devout Catholic is to not only believe in God, it's to believe that the infinitude of religious scriptures outside the New Testament are wrong,

or meaningfully lacking. Meaningfully. Well, first, meaningfully lacking, I think. is important, right? Because there is this idea, popularized by Richard Dawkins, but it goes back to Hume and others, right? That, like, if one religion is true,

it means all the others are fake and made up. And that does seem quite implausible, right? If you believe in one God, every other God that people have worshipped is just a figment of the imagination. I don't think that's true, and I don't think Christians are obliged to believe it's true. I think that it is itself sort of a fruit of secularism,

I think Christians are allowed and obliged to believe in a somewhat enchanted cosmos of many different powers, some of them friendly, some of them not so friendly, right? And it's not at all crazy that people have intimations and experiences of higher orders of reality and all kinds of religions in all kinds of ways. So that's one thing to say at the outset. In terms of Christianity itself, just to go back to where you were, right, like you're trying to go from, okay, I've accepted that there might be a God. now am I really going to join a particular religion, right? And one idea that I feel very strongly about that people can, you know, disagree with and so on, is that if the universe was made and fashioned and all of these intimations of wonder and so on are important, then, you know, God clearly is hidden from us in some way,

but he's not part in my language just trying to fuck with us, right? Like the universe, I don't believe in a God who is tricking us by hiding the one true religion like under a rock, right? You're going to go up to Antarctica and there's a sacred scripture buried, you know, six layers down that no one has ever read. And that contains the truth. I don't think that that's the right way to think about it, right? I think the right way to think about it is to say, okay, if there is a God and he wants to be in some kind of relationship with us, then you probably want to look at human history. and see, like, you know, what are the big religions? What are the big ideas that lots of people over a long period of time have thought and believed

and practiced in order to seek a relationship with a higher power, right? And that makes me biased towards the big religions. It makes me biased. I would say, you know, if someone was joining a religion, better to be a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim than to join some startup rationalist cult in Northern California. No offense to rationalist cults except the murderous ones, right? But then within those big religions, you know, I think you should pick one, right? And so you pick one. One way to do it is to look at the origins of those religions, the figures, the stories, the narratives, right, and say, okay, the universe is not a trick. What seems like the strongest signal here? You know, it's the signal in the noise, right? What's the strongest signal? What is all religious origins are unusual? Which one is the most unusual, right? And again, as we said at the outset, I was raised Christian, I carry certain biases

towards Christianity no matter what. But I think Christianity does quite well at that test. I think, you know, your reaction to the sermon on the Mount is part of it. I think that, you know, the, it's a strong case for the ethical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, certainly. But then I also think that the narrative of his crucifixion and death and resurrection stands out a much. religious stories, both for its unusual historical credibility, not obviously that, you know, you have to believe that he literally rose from the dead just because a bunch of people felt they saw it and wrote it down. But it is the degree of attestation to the miracle is quite unusual. And, you know, there's sort of rabbit holes we can go down about that, but stipulate that

some version of that is true. And then the story itself is just, you know, it's, like the universe itself, it's sort of fascinating and strange and makes a certain kind of intuitive sense that, you know, is not not the same thing as a logical proof, right? But it's like, yeah, you know, God himself was incarnated and, you know, was persecuted and suffered and died and shared our suffering. It has something to say to the problem of evil, right? And then, and then, you know, was raised again in a way that points towards the defeat of death. and the transcendence of flesh and mortality. It, like, redeems the physical world, but also transcends it. Anyway, I mean, I could go on, but that's sort of where, that's sort of the starting point, right?

And I completely respect someone who does the same thing and says, no, I have this, I have the reaction you have to the New Testament, but I have it to the Quran or to, you know, or to the story of the Jewish people. I was doing an event with a rabbi in New York who was saying, well, no, this is, it's the story of the Jewish people that is the central revelation of God, right? Like, you know, reasonable people can disagree about this. But I think that's what you're looking for as a religious searcher among religions. You're like, okay, what, which one, what's the signal here? What's the standout religious event? And to me, the gospel stand out. Would you acknowledge or agree that your case for large, old, organized religions, is a kind of Darwinian case for religion? You're essentially

saying in a way that the religions that survived are proof of the fact that they're the best fit for our minds. Well, yes. No, I think that the, I think that the, you know, the default inside of Darwinism, right, is that, is that, you know, adaptation confers advantage when it's fitted to reality, right? And I think that it's, this is not, again, this is not the only reason to, you know, to sort of be inclined towards big old religions. But I think the, the evolved character of world religions, yes, is part of the reason to prefer them to sort of, again, a religion that you make up yourself or that has total novelty. Now, you know, you could say, well, I mean, that can't be the only claim because obviously, you know,

you could say, well, in the age of the internet, they aren't evolved anymore. And so we need to found a new one, right? Like, no, there has to be something more to them than just their evolvedness. But their evolvedness is, I think, at the very least, a point in their favor. And I mean, And this is, you know, with Darwinism, one thing that's interesting, too, is you get, there's all this energy expended by sort of atheist theoreticians of religion who are trying to explain just the evolution of religion itself. Forget Islam and Christianity, right? But just like why did human beings evolve to be religious and to build these systems and so on, right? And, you know, one of the amusing things is that, of course, in most much of Darwinism depends. much of Darwinian theory depends on the idea that, like, you know, things evolve because they fit reality, right? Like, if your mechanism of deceiving a predator doesn't actually fit the reality of the predator, it's not going to work. And, I mean, I think, obviously, the simplest reason why you would assume that human beings had evolved to be religious is that, in fact,

there is something out there that we can get in touch with through religion that confers some kind of some kind of advantage. I will say this. For whatever reason in the last two years, I've read a lot of Christian philosophy, especially really enjoy sort of existential Christian philosophy. And I do think there's something really beautiful about aspects of the New Testament that's wonderfully subversive. I mean, here you have, in the Sermon on the Mount in particular, this extraordinary inversion of the aristocratic code. And you glossed this in your book, the idea that suffering is nobler than strength, that the meek shall inherit the earth, it harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass to the eye of a needle.

These are not ideas that seem to me to come naturally from Roman history or Levant history. They do seem genuinely radical for their time and age and geography, and the fact that these ideas, you know, conquered the West is an extraordinary thing. So, I mean, I'll just, I'll just pick up there because I think that for whatever reason, this, you know, moment in our history where, you know, people have sort of moved beyond religion to some degree, perhaps, you know, found that they miss it, are looking at it anew, without some of the burdens imposed by the very real failures of institutional churches and so on. This moment yields a sort of, it yields a sensibility that goes along as far as you've gone and then hesitates. Right. And I mean, this is the argument that, you know, talking about, you know, is an argument that, for instance, the historian Tom Holland has made. He wrote, you know, wrote a long book about sort of the Christian

revolution, but, you know, how in it, how it still shapes secular morality and liberal morality all around the world. And Holland is someone who himself sort of writes about religion, talks about religion a lot, and is always sort of hovering on the threshold, right? And, you know, he even had a kind of apparent healing happen when he was diagnosed with cancer and went and prayed in, you know, a chapel of the Virgin Mary in England, and his cancer went into remission, right? And so it's like, but he's still, you know, he's still, I've seen events with him where, you know, it's like, well, do you believe in an afterlife? He's like, well, no, you know, no, I can't, I can't quite believe in that, right? And again, I've been, you know, I've been sort of pitching you, pitching you hard Derek on this. So I won't, you know, I won't, I won't, I won't end with the strongest possible pitch. I will just say, you know, it's, it's okay. It's okay to take one more step. Just, you know, just one more step. Because I think, you know, in the end,

if there is a God, an ultimate purpose to the universe, and so on, like, then there probably is something outstretched towards you, maybe just a little bit beyond your sight. So how's that for a... It's a beautiful... Poetic evangelization or something. Anyway.

It's a beautifully pitched pitch, not too strong, not too late. The last thing you make me think of before I let you go is, you know, there's this famous concept of Pascal's Wager of, you might as well believe in God because if you're right, you get eternity, and if you're wrong, what do you give enough? Just about nothing. There's a kind of modern version of Pascal's Wager that I've seen becoming a little bit mainstreamed, which is that if you're right, then you get eternity. And if you're wrong, then you get a set of material benefits here and now in the real world

because life without belief or life without congregation or life without religious community is a thinner life than the thickness and fullness that you get with religion. I think there, yeah, I think there is a version of it out there. And I think it, you know, and again, I think it partially does reflect

just the weakness, one of the reasons that people didn't want to make that wager for a long time, to be fair, right? Was this sense of institutional religion as a source of sort of imprisonment or oppression or these kind of things, right? And so in a way, we've reached a point, it's precisely because institutional religion seems so weak that it's hard to imagine being oppressed by it, that you can sort of get down to the fundamentals and say, okay, well, what is, you know, what is actually going on

here and what is the right way, the right way to think about this, right? Like, that's sort of a peculiar feature of our times that this moment of sort of reconsideration of religion is not manifest in sort of, you know, it's not like, you know, the Catholic Church is suddenly becoming more powerful in various ways, right? Like, no, institutions are still as weak as ever. It's just in the weakness of institutions, you've sort of removed oddly, first you removed reasons to believe, but now maybe you're removing impediments to belief. And people can sort of say, okay, I have less to lose by making this wager. And, yes, an eternity potentially to gain. Ross Dath. Thank you very much. You're very welcome, Derek. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.