The Sean McDowell Show - Religion Strikes Back: Why Everyone Should Believe in God (ft. Ross Douthat)

Episode Date: February 22, 2025

As a columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat has a new book releasing in February on why he believes it is harder NOT to believe in God than to have faith. He traces how the God-conversation has radically shifted since the early 2000s. Join us for a deep-dive on religion today and the latest case for God from order in the cosmos and consciousness. READ: Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat (https://amzn.to/3BYHYdq) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

even the divine not merely an option but an obligation despite the claim that god is dead is the supernatural rushing back into the world and is the religious perspective by far more likely to be true than the alternative according to our guest today ross doubt that new york times columnist and author of the new fascinating book believe the answer to these questions is a resounding yes. Ross, before we start, I was telling you that I really appreciate your column at the New York Times and your voice. And I heard about your book when you were doing kind of a talk about how the supernatural is coming back. And you cited the book by Rod Dreher, the book by Spencer Clavin. You cited your own book as kind of this narrative that the

supernatural is coming back into the world and the conversation about faith has changed. Now, given that I'm Protestant and you're Catholic, there's plenty of differences you and I could debate. I'm not interested in that conversation. I want to know about the book you wrote, why you wrote it, and your take on the questions that I cited. So thanks for coming on and have this conversation. It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. And I'll put away the bleeding statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I'll come back. I'll come back for those. But yeah, I mean, you saw an essay I wrote where the argument was basically that, you know, I don't think it's that the supernatural ever actually goes away. In fact, one of the arguments that I make in the book is that what people talk about as sort of disenchantment in modern life is a little bit of an illusion. People keep on having mystical and supernatural experiences, even under officially secular conditions. But I do think that societies sort of go through waves and shifts, right?

And when I was starting out as a journalist in the early 2000s, there was a big moment when atheistic arguments, the new atheists, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, they found a big audience. And there was sort of a receptiveness to critiques of religion for a whole bunch of reasons that we don't have to go into right now, but that sort of primed American society and Western society for attacks on religious belief. And I think we're in a moment now that's quite different. I think we're in a moment where people feel the absence of religion as and are sort of nostalgic for belief. I think a lot of people feel like, you know, the promises of secularism and materialism haven't been fulfilled, that people sort of feel adrift in the world. I think the Internet in particular has made people feel sort of more isolated and

adrift. And so there's both, I think, a renewed sort of sense of people sort of experimenting spiritually, sort of casting around for, you know, whether it's astrology or psychedelics or the renewed fascination with UFOs. I think all of these reflect this sort of impulse to reach up and out that's stronger now maybe than 15 years ago. And then the book itself, I think, though, is I'm sort of pitching the book to everyone. Of course, everyone should buy this book, but especially towards a kind of person who is attracted to religion, is interested in spiritual ideas, but thinks of that attraction as kind of an abandonment of their reason. The sense of like, well, it would be nice if religion was true. But in order to believe that, I have to give up on what science and rationality tell us.

And I don't think science and rationality get you all the way to our shared Christian commitments, but I think they get you somewhere to a basic religious posture, a basic sense that some kind of God probably exists. The universe is probably made with human beings in mind. And I'm trying to get people that far in this book. So I've co-written a book with my father. It's an evangelistic book, kind of unapologetically starts with the person of Jesus and makes the case that Jesus is God and somebody should be a Christian. Now, you have a different approach in this book. I'm just curious, what are you aiming to accomplish with Believe?

And why did you approach it kind of the way that you did, given our cultural moment? So yeah, I sort of, I basically end the book where it sounds like you start. So I end the book with a chapter called A Case Study, Why I Am a Christian, where I basically talk, I talk about Jesus, I talk about my own religious journey, I talk about the Gospels, I talk about why the Christian story is compelling, and why I think it fits with the argument for being religious that I've made in the prior chapters. But I think we're in a moment right now where as a culture, we have become sufficiently post, not just post-Christian, but post-religious in certain ways that there's value in a kind of table setting for specific Christian arguments that wouldn't

have been the case a hundred years ago or even, or 2000 years or 2000 years ago right you know if you go back to the world where jesus was preaching where the disciples were preaching and so on you know not just among the jews but among roman pagans and elsewhere there was a sort of shared framework that you know the cosmos was created and meaningful there was disagreement about who you know whether there was a god who the gods were disagreement about who, you know, whether there was a God, who the gods were and so on. But, you know, when St. Paul goes and preaches and talks about, you know, the unknown God, right, he's speaking to a pagan world that took religious ideas seriously, that took the supernatural seriously, that had their own religious practices.

Our world is different. It's not completely post-religious, as I said. I think there's still lots of, even among people who don't believe in God, there's lots of spiritual energy and activity out there. But there is a sense, I think, especially among the most educated Americans and Westerners and so on, people have kind of forgotten what makes religious arguments important and interesting in the first place, right? Why would you have a religious posture towards the universe? Why would you think there might be a God? Why would you consider prayer and these kind of things, right? I think a lot of people have sort of put that reality a little bit behind them while remaining sort of interested in religious possibilities.

And so I think there's value in a kind of, in effect, a kind of table setting of saying, okay, you know, and this is sort of similar to arguments that Christian intellectuals have made before in the past, right, that there are certain things about God that we can only know through faith and revelation. But there are also certain things about God that we should be able to figure out through reason. And I'm saying, you know, for a lot of people, it might be useful to start with those things you can figure out through reason before you take the next step into the quest for an actual relationship with God. Well, I love that about your book, especially as an apologist. I'm constantly inviting people to examine the evidence, consider the facts, whether

it's a natural revelation or, say, the resurrection of Jesus, and you point towards that towards the end of the book. One of the interesting things you say, Ross, is I give a talk on sometimes college campuses, and the theme is why a spiritual quest should begin with Jesus or should begin with Christianity. And I specifically say a spiritual quest rather than a religious quest, because religion in people's minds feels antiquated. They're aware of the abuse of religion. It doesn't invite a conversation. And yet you make a real interesting point, and I want you to unpack this, is that we shouldn't just defend the spiritual, but we should defend the religious. What do you mean by that, and why do you make that point?

So yeah, I think you're absolutely right about where a lot of people are right now and how what you know, when people hear the word religion, they associate it with both sort of, you know, oppression and crimes in the Western and American past. They associate it with institutions and doctrines, right, that they, you know, that don't seem relatable and so on, right? So for a lot of people, it makes sense to present religious ideas as part of a kind of personal spiritual quest. However, it's also the case that when we talk about religion, traditionally, we mean a couple of things, right? We mean sort of communal and institutional structures of support for people's spiritual quest, right?

Their sort of personal encounter with the divine. And we also mean rules that sort of establish what right belief is supposed to be, but also establish kind of guardrails around experimentation and purely individualized forms of practice. And it's really hard, I think, to have a healthy spiritual life if you never get those aspects of religion into the mix. Now, if you're just starting out, right, and I say this in the book, like, you know, if you're starting out and you're convinced I should, you know, I should be interested in God, right, I should be interested in my purpose in life, obviously, you're not going to immediately go from there to full conversion to, you know, and I mean, unless right, unless divine grace

enters in, right. But just on your own, it's not like, all right, I've decided this. And now I'm going to join this particular branch of the Presbyterian church or something. No, it's natural. It's natural to have a period of exploration. Like there's a lot of people who have never opened, you know, have never opened the Bible or any, you know, any scripture from any world religion, right? There's a lot of people who just haven't had an encounter with basic ideas and stories and arguments. And in that period of encounter, it is going to be kind of an individual thing that you're doing. But you shouldn't imagine that as your goal for your actual, for your actual spiritual life, right? You could say, okay,

I'm going to have this phase of sort of reading widely, maybe going to different churches, doing sort of personal experiments. But the goal should be to condense that opening into a particular choice. First, because you're going to need support, community, fellowship, people around you who are practicing the same faith as you, people around you strengthening you and building you up in your faith, people around you who encourage you when you hit those spiritual deserts and those dark nights of the soul, right? That's the communal side. And you can't have that without something that we call religion, as loaded as the word may be. And then also, and this is, I think, I think less true of people who are having their initial spiritual encounter with Jesus,

right? Or with someone trying to introduce them to the Jesus of the New Testament, as you would. But there's a lot of people out there who are just trying to be open to God, divine possibilities, who are doing a lot of different things right now. You know, you go into the book, go into my local Barnes and Noble, and you know, there's three shelves of Christianity and Judaica and three shelves of spiritual self-help, kind of Oprah Winfrey stuff, and three shelves of magic, tarot, astrology, witchcraft, right? So, I mean, that's a big thing. And, you know, there's a lot, I know a lot of people in my supposedly secular profession of journalism who will say, oh, you know, yeah, I had a,

you know, I went on a ayahuasca retreat, right? I did, you know, I did this thing with a shaman. It was super weird, right? So there's just a lot of stuff that people are getting up to and experimenting with. And one of the arguments in my book for those people is that if you take spiritual reality seriously, if you think in some form the supernatural exists, then like any territory in the real world, it's going to have dangers. It's going to have inhabitants who might not be perfectly friendly to human beings,

who might not necessarily have our good in mind. You know, again, you don't have to go all the way to specifically Christian conceptions of the demonic and, you know, the possibility of, you know, having your soul possessed or lost and so on. I think to persuade people that you want to have some guidance, some rules, some recommendations for what to do. And again, I think that gone on spiritual quests before and what, you know, what carries that, what transmits it? It's religious traditions. It's not just the individual. Also, my favorite points of your book is at the end, you asked the question, you know, why shouldn't people forge their own path to God? And you say, first off, you're probably not a religious genius. A lot of religions have risen and fallen,

and there's a collective wisdom of people who've gone before, and then you make the obvious but I think brilliant point, like if somebody wants to learn tennis or chess or cooking or anything else in life, you pull from those who've gone before and have some collective wisdom to pass on rather than start afresh. That makes so much sense. Now we're going to get to your unique case for Christianity, but in one of the earlier chapters of the book, you talk about kind of the classical evidence for design. Now, you and I would differ, and maybe this is a Catholic-Protestant divide over Darwinism, but I'm not interested in having

that debate right now. What I'm interested in is the common narrative that the Copernican revolution destroyed our confidence that Earth is unique and we have like a privileged status in the universe and that Darwin rid the world of any evidence for design. What's your response to that claim that really has influenced people now probably for centuries? Yeah, I think the main response is that both Copernicus and Darwin had a kind of unsettling effect on specific theologically infused world pictures, right? And, you know, this is clearly true of Copernicus. Almost everyone, Catholic or Protestant, agrees that, you know, the universe has turned out to be bigger than we realized or wilder and more complicated than we realized before we had telescopes and had that astronomical perspective, right? So you go from a kind of, you know, the sort of neat seeming hierarchies of the medieval conception of the cosmos to something bigger

and stranger and more complicated. And it's not surprising that in that move, it unsettles people, it instills sort of doubts about, you know, God's purpose and the place of human beings in the cosmos. At the same time, the entire scientific revolution of that, you know, of which Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler and so on were just a part, also revealed deep, consistent, and beautiful order throughout that wilder, wider cosmos that it explored, right? So at no point, as we proceeded from Copernicus to Newton and down to 19th and early 20th century physicists, was it the case that order went away, that structure went away, that sort of these, you know, that the promise that, you know, I think is connected to a belief in an order in God, the promise that the universe is rational

and fits together and can be understood by our rational minds, that promise was fulfilled again and again and again as science penetrated ever deeper into the structure and the order of the world. So throughout the scientific revolutions, that, you know, that basic reality that we live in an ordered, law-bound, structured, beautiful cosmos was sort of revealed to be even more true, I think, than anyone could have possibly known before our sense of the universe opened out. But then something else happened, especially in the 20th century, which was that first you had the Big Bang Theory and the widespread acceptance that actually the universe was not eternal, that it had a beginning, that time as well as space

were created together in a way suggested by the book of Genesis itself and argued for by early Christians against pagans who thought the universe might be eternal, right? So you have that sort of return of the idea of creation through the working of science. then i think more importantly even you have a increasing sense not just that the universe is orderly and law-bound but just how precisely calibrated that order and those laws have to be to give rise to you know not to even the basic building blocks of our world atoms and cells and so on, to say nothing of planets and stars and ultimately complex life. And it's really hard to convey to even to the human mind just how precisely fine-tuned, I mean, you're, as an apologist, you're well aware of these kind of

arguments. They've become a staple of Christian apologetics, but for a reason, right? It really is quite crazy. It's, you know, that this constant or that, you know, that value has to be in the range of the luckiest lottery ticket in the history of all lottery tickets, just in order to get planets and life and human beings off the ground. And to me, what that doesn't just suggest, I think it strongly indicates, right, is that the universe was not just constructed, but constructed with us, whatever we represent in mind. The universe was built as it was in order to give rise to life and then to human life a human to you know to beings that can under that can understand it and grasp it and so in that sense even though we don't think earth is the physical center of us you know a smallish universe in the style of the pre-copernican perspective in other ways smallish universe in the style of the pre-Copernican perspective. In other ways, Earth does look like the center of the universe, certainly more like it is,

it is the place where the central thing for which the universe came into being has actually happened and taken form. Now, maybe there's conscious life somewhere on other planets, maybe we're one center among many, right? You could make that argument, right? You don't want to be too presumptuous just based on the science alone. But I think a certain amount of belief in human exceptionalism and Earth's centrality to the drama of the cosmos has actually been given back to us by science itself. So what the Copernican Revolution seemed to take away, this sense of the earth centrality, I think has returned in the 20th and 21st centuries through what we've learned about just what went into building a universe where earth and human beings could come into existence in the first place. Ross, I teach an undergrad class at Biola where we explore a lot of the apologetic issues that are in your book. And personally, I do not think the Darwinian mechanism and others can account for the complexity and diversity of life understood as a material mechanism or process. But I'll say to my students, look, even if Darwinism happened,

at best, this explains the origin of species, how species change to another one. It doesn't explain why there's something rather than nothing. It doesn't explain fine tuning, doesn't explain the origin of life, doesn't explain beauty, doesn't explain the origin of consciousness, doesn't explain so many features of the world that even if it were true, it's not close to getting rid of the case for design. I think that's the point that you're underlying here. And I want to read just a quote from your book, right? I think you say, I like this, you say, but the 19th century, in other words, there's this enlightenment story that as science progressed, the room for God would get smaller and smaller, kind of the secular thesis. You see, the 19th century was more scientifically advanced than Hume's 18th century, but also more shot through with mysticism and revivalism.

The late 20th century decline of institutional religion in America has had no effect on the share of Americans who report supernatural experiences. By some measures, these reports have notably increased. So you're flipping the story that's often told and trying to make the case that this really is what's happening. Now, if I may, I want to press one point. I was wishing you unpacked this more in your book. On page 32, when you start talking about a fashioned universe, you say that the beginning of the universe points to reality being something of a story. Now, I want you to explain why you think it points towards a story, because either atheists are going to say that we have no explanation for the origin of the universe, or it's always been here or it had a beginning and you can have a beginning that's uncaused.

Maybe something came from nothing. You're saying not only is there a beginning, but that suggests some kind of author and story that we're a part of. Explain. Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that a beginning alone is actually a pretty big deal. I very explicitly tried to write the book not as sort of a deep probing of the philosophical arguments around the existence of God. One of my claims in the book is that if God exists, if religion is reasonable and obligatory, you should be able to figure that out without going deep into Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and high philosophical stuff. But to just tiptoe in that direction, I do think that the argument that you need some sort of uncaused cause to ground reality itself, which is the uncaused cause it still has to rest on something that is necessary.

You can't be contingency all the way down. So even if the universe had always existed, that if it isn't, if the universe is eternal, then by definition, any point in time in an eternal universe is pretty much, you know, everything is equidistant from everything else. Right. So it becomes hard to talk about sort of the specialness or distinctiveness of a particular moment, a particular zone or place in the timeline, right? Whereas if the universe has a beginning and an end, which is both of which are quite important to Christian belief, then you're dealing with something where there is, you know, there is more drama, right? There is a sense of a narrative in which things happen in order to go from a certain place to another place to achieve a certain thing and reach ultimately whatever the resolution of the story is meant to be. And so I think the realization that the universe does have a beginning is, again, not

something that's necessary to believe in God, but is something that is very important for Christian belief in particular, because Christianity is, like Judaism, a religion of narrative, where God's will and purposes are working themselves out through chronological history, through events and personalities that are, yeah, in the end, you know, a story that God is writing. There's a line that I'm going to paraphrase it, but from, you know, the Protestant, I should say, novelist, Marianne Williamson, Marilynne Robinson, sorry, not Marianne Williamson, very different figures. Marilynne Robinson has some line in her novel, Gilead, where someone says, you know, I like to think that in heaven, that the story of our world will be like the epic that is told the story, you know, the song that is sung in the street, like the Iliad of heaven. And, you know, whether that's perfectly orthodox or not, I don't know. But I've always liked that idea, right, that there is a story God is telling that we are part of.

Each of our own lives participates in some way, has a role to play in the story. And the fullness of the story is something that we will be able to appreciate from an eternal vantage point once that story is complete. And science science cannot prove that, but it can give indicators of of that. And even, you know, not to get too deep into into Darwinian questions, but even I think the drama of evolution, you know, the the origin of species, whatever the sort of, you know, whatever the force that immediately drives their origination may be, even there, this idea of sort of development, increasing complexity, even in ever more dazzling complexity in the fossil record, the idea that, you know, that life does, in effect, ascend, right? Like the hardcore evolutionist has to say, well, you know, life, you know, life is life is life, you know, if it lives, it's, you know, and so there's no, you know, there's no difference ultimately between a bacteria and, you know, a dolphin and a human being. They're all just sort of fitness maximizing machines, right? But we can all see that that's

not true, that there is, you know, again, with whatever cause, development in life, hierarchies in life, forms of life that are higher and lower, that develop over time, right, in a way that, again, is, I think, consonant with the Christian idea of the universe as a story. I think that the issues that Darwinism raises for Christianity are actually much more specific to questions about the fall, how sin and death entered the world. I didn't want to get into those in this book. I think you could write another whole book about them. But I think Darwinism raises more theological issues about a few specific Christian claims, then it raises issues about

whether the universe is designed and whether there's a God. I don't think Darwinism poses really any challenge to the broad argument from design for the reasons that you just offered in the beginning of your question. Fair enough. Now, one of the things that I enjoy about your book and appreciate is you ask a lot of questions. Sometimes you answer them. Sometimes you just let them sit for the reader to ponder. And I think that's wise. That's a good way to get people to think. I do that on Twitter all the time. I asked a question just recently. I said, what's worse, if anything, than death? And I just wanted people to think about it. I was curious what they would say. Well, one question you ask and then you answer. In fact, when I was reading

this last night, I paused and I read it to my wife. I thought this insight was so interesting is why don't more scientists believe? If there is this case for design, origin of the universe, fine-tuning, consciousness, et cetera, Why don't more scientists believe? Your take. So I think in part, it is something that's a little bit specific to Western culture and certain conflicts between traditional religious authorities, maybe more of them Catholic than Protestant, and intellectual life in the sciences, right? And, you know, I think the Galileo affair, power and scientists and intellectuals who were skeptical of aspects of the religious consensus. And, you know, sometimes sometimes we're right to be skeptical, right, about, you know, the some some of the visions of how the universe worked that they had in the late Middle Ages weren't true. And I think that in part just has built up sort of this kind of cultural tension where it's like to be a scientist is to be against religious institutions. That's sort of part of the self identity, the identity of scientists. And I do think that you can see that that actually goes away a little bit when you get outside the Western context. I cite this

one survey in my book, right, that like in East Asia and the Islamic world, the gap between whether scientists believe in God versus the general public is smaller than it is in the United States and Europe. And it even, I think, reverses in some East Asian countries where they're scientists, maybe sometimes more likely. So that, that suggests to me, some of it is kind of historically contingent, but some of it clearly is just that a lot of the work of science, the good work of science depends on deliberately ruling out in advance sort of miraculous intervention as an explanation

for what's happening, right? Science is all about finding the consistencies and regularities of the material world in ways that are predictable, that can be reproduced in the laboratory, and crucially, don't involve agents, minds getting in and, you know, monkeying with the results in any way, right? And this is a good, generally a good rule for how you do science. If you want to figure out, you know, the orbit of a planet, it doesn't do to say, well, an angel is carrying it around and so we can never predict it, right? You're not going to get very far with that mentality. So that I think makes sense to explain a certain kind of practical atheism that is part of, or a practical, let's call it a practical anti-supernaturalism. Now that I think in turn has sort of hardened into this kind of orthodoxy where scientists are like, well,

to protect the practical anti-supernaturalism of our everyday work, we have to become total anti-supernaturalists and rule out, you know, even the possibility of a divine creator, because otherwise we're not scientists anymore, right? I think that is a, it's a big mistake. It's sort of novel in the last 150 years, right? Like, you know, Isaac Newton was a bit of a Christian heretic, let's say, but he was certainly, he was certainly a devout religious believer. You know, many, many of the figures associated with the progress of science believed in some form of God. Some of them had quite, quite quirky supernatural ideas. But there has been a shift in the last century and a half towards this, this exclusion. I think the natural resting place for a lot of scientists who have

this, this perspective should be the forms of religion that are themselves a bit anti-supernaturalist, right? So, you know, deism, right, the belief in a God who sort of sets the universe in motion and then leaves it alone. I think that if more scientists were sort of consistent in their perspectives, you would get more deists and some pantheists. But maybe the fact that you don't maybe suggest that those are in the end somewhat unstable religious identities and people either go towards a personal relationship with god or go toward atheism and it's it's hard to maintain this sort of purely philosophical belief in a god of the

physicists i guess um but those would be sort of yeah you, you're right, I don't provide a definite answer. But I think it is, it's something worth reckoning with and thinking about. And it is also a reasonable kind of comeback to people like me, citing, you know, the science, right, to say, well, if this is what the science shows, why don't the scientists agree with you. As a believer, you do have to have some explanation for why not every scientist sees the evidence of fine tuning and design pointing in a particular way. But you also get, just to ramble a tiny bit more, you also get, like one thing we haven't mentioned is the idea of the multiverse, which will be familiar to anyone watching your show who's ever watched a Marvel movie, right? It's sort of entered into pop culture. Or DC now, too. Or DC now, right? Like, everybody's got a multiverse. Everybody's got multiple universes, everything, everywhere, all at once, one best picture for a portrait of the multiverse, right? And the multiverse is, in a way, an attempt to escape what fine-tuning suggests. It's saying like, look, yeah, this universe looks fine tuned,

but actually there's infinite universes. And it's just, you know, we just happen to be in the one that produced conscious life that can, can observe it. Right. I don't think that argument actually works. I think it still raises all these questions about, well, why do you have this machine for producing universe? It's pretty, pretty odd that, right. But about, well, why do you have this machine for producing universes? It's pretty, pretty odd that, right? But I do think clearly the part of the appeal of the multiverse is this attempt to escape

from where otherwise the evidence is pointing. I do think that there is among some scientists and philosophers a desire of like, it's like anything but God, right? Like there has to be, if the evidence points towards God, there has to be, we need something. We'd rather postulate five gazillion universes that we can never access or see or touch than consider that maybe the Christians might've been right all along. You know, as far as why more scientists don't believe, I love you point out specifically in Taiwan and Hong Kong, scientists are actually slightly more likely to be religious than the general public, which suggests there's something

cultural or sociological going on. I think a piece of it is that in a lot of Christian circles, at least Protestant, we discourage people from going into the sciences. You lose your faith, it's secular, don't go into that. And it invites more secular people into it than those who are religious. And so I think that's a piece of it. But on the multiverse, do you agree with that? Yeah, no, no. I think the religion...

Yeah, I think... No, and this, again, it does go back to to Galileo. Unfortunately, there it's not that like religion is innocent of, you know, religious institutions are totally innocent. And no religious religious institutions and religious people have made all kinds of intellectual mistakes and and are partially responsible for whatever alienation between science and religion exists. I appreciate your taking the multiverse because really, if there is a multiverse, it doesn't explain the first question. Why is there something rather than nothing? And it doesn't get rid of design. It just bumps it up a level. I think that's the heart of it.

Now, another chapter in your book, which I found fascinating, I had a conversation with an atheist, young, brilliant thinker named Coleman Hughes. You might recognize his name. I know his work. Yep. I asked him, I said, as an atheist, is there anything that gives you pause about the universe that suggests there might be a God? He said two things, and one of them was consciousness.

You have a chapter on what's called the hard problem versus the soft problem. Explain the difference and why you think consciousness points towards the supernatural. Right. So this is an area where there has, again, from the beginning of the scientific revolution in the Western world, there has always been an understanding that the self, you know, you and I, our sense of conscious experience, willpower, agency, judgment, and rationality are really hard to explain in terms of material interactions, right? So science sets out to explain how matter in motion explains what happens in the world. It's really hard to do that with the actual

experience of being a human being. And again, for a long time, most scientists sort of acknowledged that, right? And sort of said, okay, yeah, there is, you know, I mean, you go back to Descartes, right? You know, he's sort of a mind-body dualist. He thinks that there's some kind of ghost in the machine, which is not actually the traditional Christian view, but is, you know, is a view that sort of allows for an independent consciousness operating in material reality. Then at a certain point, neuroscience advances, we start mapping the brain, we start figuring out different ways that you can manipulate consciousness with drugs and alterations, the body and so on. And science starts to get confident that eventually they're going to explain consciousness, that it's just going to turn out to be part of material reality in the same way that, you know, your circulatory system is. And this is a commonplace view. And it has to be the view.

If you're a true materialist, if there's just, you know, if this is all there is, the mind has to be reducible to matter. The problem, the hard problem, which is this phrase that a non-religious philosopher used, is that nobody knows how to get from material causation to conscious experience. That's right. They just don't. And this extends through all the work of neuroscience. It extends through everything that's going on with AI. And I even note that it's interesting some of the people working on artificial intelligence have gotten excited when AI turns into a black box, right? Where it's doing, its computations are so complicated that we can't even understand

what it's doing. And they say, great, this is, this must be the point at which consciousness emerges, right? With the implication being, we have no idea how consciousness emerges. So if we just get, we, you know, throw a little mystery into the AI system, maybe that's how the robots start to become selves and become ensouled. But, but that and sold. But that is the basic, and it's sort of, in a way, it's a kind of, I think Hughes is, I don't know how deeply he's read in these issues, but he's intuiting what I think is obvious to most people if they stop to think about it, which is that there is something irreducible to the self, selfhood, both your immediate experience of your interactions with the world and also your reason,

your judgment, your ability to stand apart from the world and analyze and pass judgment on it, that whatever it is, is clearly distinct from physical causality, as we understand it, right? And in that sense, and here I'm stealing an idea from the philosopher David Bentley Hart, when people talk about the supernatural, right? And they're like, well, you know, there's ordinary life, and then there's the supernatural of angels and ghosts and so on. What they sometimes are missing is that actually you and I are having a supernatural experience right now. Like we are communicating with one another, mind to mind, consciousness to consciousness, maybe imperfectly, maybe it's not a perfect

communion, right? But we're having this kind of communication that cannot be reduced to the sound waves rolling off your microphone, the pixels coming off your screen, and so on. There is something else happening. There's something happening. You're having a supernatural experience. If you open up Lord of the Rings, you are communing with J.R.R. Tolkien, who is dead, through a physical medium that, again, is linked to something linked to a story, but the story cannot be reduced to the physical medium. And that's, I think that is it's, again, that doesn't get you all the way to specific belief in a creator God. But I think what it tells you is that mind is something that is distinct from matter, that probably precedes matter in

some way. I think this is what some of the weirdness of quantum physics suggests. And also, and this is the last point that I try and emphasize, the fact that our minds can understand that matter, right, that we can make all of this progress in figuring out the deep realities of the universe. You know, if the multiverse is real, including the multiverse, right? Like it's quite, if there were a multiverse, it would be quite strange if a bunch of random ape creatures from an obscure planet had, we figured it out and just using, you know, this evolutionary toolkit that evolved to dodge panthers or something. No, there is clearly some link between our consciousness and the structure of the universe that allows us to understand it. And that link probably, I think, probably

connects us to the capital M mind that is responsible for all of it in the first place. I want to read another section from your book just so people get a feel for it. You're talking about artificial consciousness. And you say, the hope seems to be that if we make the output generation process more and more complicated so that the path from input to response increasingly escapes our understanding, at some point there'll be a shift we can't see or measure, a mysterious synthesis that we can't understand, and some I will just emerge. In other words, it's as if you get this consciousness and self-consciousness at a level of complexity. Now, I would consider that a kind of magic. Obviously,

you don't believe in that, but it's completely getting something from nothing. I made this point. You cite Michael Shermer a few times, the skeptic. We had a two-hour debate about four or six weeks ago on morality and on consciousness. And I pressed him for an explanation and he said, well, emergence explains it. And my point was, I said, well, I think he gave the example of like inflation. It emerges in some economic system. And I said, there's a difference between inflation, whether it objectively exists or not. And that's just a term we use to describe some

phenomena and something with top down causal powers that is conscious and self-conscious. Inflation doesn't get you close to explaining that. Right. And inflation is just itself a concept that is dependent on the existence of conscious minds to understand it, right? I mean, it seems to me that in, yeah, I've read a lot of the arguments about so-called emergence, and they tend to do one of two things. Either they say, you know, well, you know, the consciousness emerges the way like motion emerges from all the parts of the automobile, like motion isn't in one single part of the automobile, but put a car together, turn it on and you get motion. Okay. but in that case, there is a direct connection

between the materials and movement. The wheels turn, movement happens, A to B, really easy, straightforward to explain. That's not what happens with consciousness. You can't look at the neurons firing in the brain and say, oh, I understand what someone is thinking. You can't look at the neurons firing in the brain and say, oh, I understand what someone is thinking. You can't at all. There's a huge gap, an ontological gap between those experiences.

Or the inflation example is like, yeah, you have these sort of concepts or identities that emerge from a constellation of the you know, the movement of physical goods in the marketplace, right? You know, you close a bunch of ports and things get more expensive and that's inflation. Okay. But what is inflation in that case? Inflation is an increase in the, you know, the abstract value of pieces of paper in your wallet, which is to say it exists in you, you need consciousness to explain that emergence. You haven't explained consciousness. You've just explained something that exists within the thing you are trying to explain. And it is magic, these arguments.

I mean, this is, I quote Thomas Nagel, who's a philosopher, who's not a Christian, but a critic of materialism, a skeptic of materialism. He says, look, in every version, in the end, the emergence argument, it's like A happens, then B happens, then C happens, and then there's some magic, and you get Ross Douthat. It's like, well, okay. But I mean, and this is, I mean, one of the weird things, you see this a little bit with AI stuff, right? There's a writer named Tara Isabella Burton Burton who wrote a really interesting piece about sort of magical thinking in Silicon Valley, right? And there are basically places in the world of artificial intelligence where people are getting into magic and mystery and these kinds of things, new age stuff and so on. And I don't think that's a

coincidence. I think at a certain level, what you're trying to do with AI, it's like the Jewish legend of the golem, right? You are trying to bring something into conscious life without having a mechanical process to do it. You're trying to summon. I think at the highest level, some of the AI people may know that. So the sun has broken through onto your forehead. If that's not evidence of the divine, I don't know what is. I should move the towel. We're good. No sweat. So I'm going to ask you to do a rapid round of responses, which is completely unfair to these questions because you go into depth in the back of your book. But maybe tell us one or two things you would say, and you ask these three questions. Why does God allow so many

wicked things to happen? What's one or two points you might make in response to that? Well, I don't know why God allows the particular number of wicked things that happen to happen. I think the basic Christian argument that some degree of what we call evil is basically built into human freedom is correct. I do think that's true. And that if you want to have a world of agents who have their, you know, who are independent and are not just automatons sort of acting out, acting out sort of, you know, divine commands, then yeah, you do have the possibility for sin or evil in that world. I think that argument works. I think, though, it has limits, right? And if you say, okay, there has to be evil in the world, but does there have to be Auschwitz? You know, do children have to die? Like, I think it's understandable that people presence of evil and difficulty in the world is a really bad reason not to believe in God. It's a good reason to wrestle with God. It might be a good reason to sometimes be angry at God. for religious believers to, you know, to basically ask these questions, right? Like the Bible itself does not supply a singular answer to the question. Instead, it presents different stories

from Abraham through Job to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane of people and, you know, and the second person of the Trinity wrestling with these questions. But to go from that wrestling to saying, okay, I've weighed it all up and I've figured out, you know, God, I'm right. And God is wrong. And, you know, the level of suffering in the universe is just too high. And so God, you know, God can't exist. That is a bizarrely presumptuous move. And it assumes a kind of God-like human perspective on the fullness of eternity. We can't know what human suffering looks like in the light of eternity. We inherently cannot know that. And if you say, I can know that, and I know that it leaves God looking like a wicked demiurge or something, then you've essentially asserted that you have a God-like perspective on the world,

which is a very strange thing for an atheist to do. And then the final point is that, sorry, I know these were quick answers. No, go ahead. Well, the final point is that like, in practice, people, cultures that, and people who say, you know, I can't believe in God because there's too much suffering in the world, are more likely to be themselves wealthy and prosperous and advanced societies that have done away with a lot of suffering that are not, you know, haven't done away with it completely, but are much more comfortable than societies in the past. Whereas both cultures that deal with more suffering and in many cases, people who deal with more suffering don't seem to be impelled towards atheism, right? There are people who suffer and become atheists. But if you go back and forth between a world of people who are, let's say, struggling with chronic illness, and people who are comfortable and successful, the people struggling with chronic

illness are more likely to believe in God and find, you know, the argument compelling. So I think that that's a reason to be a little bit skeptical of the idea that people, you know, who claim to find this case against God so persuasive are really persuaded on the merits, as opposed to be looking for an excuse for their own comfortable unbelief. So I've got two last questions for you. You can answer them in the depth that you want to. I'll be fast. Oh, no, you're good.

One quick point I just want to make and we move on. Last night, my wife's a math teacher and I said, honey, I got a question for you. Here's the intersection of apologetics and math is from the Encyclopedia of Wars, an analysis of 1,763 wars spanning human history, 121 fall under the category of religious wars. That's 7% according to that metric. And so you're wrestling with the question why religious institutions do so many wicked things, and you challenge the premise of it. I'm reading that because I want people to see some of the insights that you make. I think that's really helpful. Last two questions. Number one is you ask this question, you say, why are traditional religions so hung up on sex?

Yeah, so that's an example of one of what I think of as the stumbling blocks, right? The people who say, I can get to design an order in the universe. I can even get to the possibility of God, but I can't join a traditional religion because, you know, yeah, they seem to be, well, in the first example, a source of religious wars and conflicts, or in the second example, because they seem hung up on sex. And, you know, the sex one, I think, is pretty easy to answer. It's not easy in all the particulars, right? Like there are people who fall away from Christian faith because, you know, of issues related to homosexuality or divorce and so on, sort of very specific issues that need specific arguments. But the general point, why would religions care about sex? If you care about

anything, you should care about sex, right? It would be weird indeed if God or some divine purpose created the universe, created human beings for a reason, cared about what we do with our money, cared about our politics, cared about all these things we do, and didn't care about the way that we form our most intense relationships, bring new life into the world, create family networks or destroy them, right, across generations, something that is a source of some of the highest pleasures and the most serious addictions and sufferings. I don't know. I think it's weird to imagine sex as this unimportant thing that God wouldn't care about, unless you're willing to say that God doesn't care about anything, in which case, okay, fair enough. Love a good response. And in some ways, your earlier chapter is about if there's a God who made us and a designer built into the world, then we're only free when we understand that God's design and orient our lives around it. Now, last question,

you say at the end, you say, Jesus is not the kind of figure you would have invented for religion. Why not? Well, so as you can probably tell from this conversation, the book I've written is very friendly to the sincere seeker, right? And it's trying to be, you know, I'm considered a conservative Catholic, certainly to the readers of the New York Times. I'm thought of as a very conservative Catholic. of suggesting that it's really important to make a religious effort, to reach out, to try and figure out what your, you know, who God is and what your relationship should be to him. And people are going to end up in different places and go on different journeys. And I tend to think that I'm not a universalist. I don't think that, you know, hell is empty, but I do tend to think that God is forgiving and loving and encompasses people who end up in a lot of

different places, right? That is my impulse and my instinct. And there's, I think, some reasons to believe that in the New Testament, but the Jesus of the New Testament is a more, he is more urgent and stringent and absolutist in his demands than, and more sort of, you know, he's more inclined to emphasize the eternal stakes of each and every choice you make right now than I am instinctively, right? And that's, so to me, that is actually one reason to believe in him in the sense that he looks less like a God, a God who I made up for myself would be less likely to offer, you know, the parable of the foolish virgins, right? You know, or to, you know, to talk about the camel and the needle's eye and the narrow gate, right? I would be more inclined to say the gate is moderately narrow and the way that leads to destruction is out there and should be avoided. But, you know, that, that sharp contrast, right. That he, that he's always drawing and that urgency of, you know, act now before it's too late, um, is yeah, it goes, it goes further than my,

my sort of more latitudinarian nature would, would go, which is, which is why I try to, you know, as a Christian, I try to end the, you know, the, the book is again, sort of a very encouraging book to seekers of all kinds, but I try to end it on a note of urgency of, you know, as in the parable, be awake, don't be asleep. Well, you definitely don't know. Yeah. Yeah. You definitely don't. You don't know when the master is coming. Exactly. You end with that sense of urgency for sure. And the inclusivism, particularism is another debate we could have. I think the New Testament points towards a particularism of salvation, but we're running

out of time. Again, that maybe we'll follow up and have a conversation about some of those differences. But I do appreciate that you say, Jesus is not the kind of figurative event. Pick up your cross and follow me. Hate your mother and your father. What does he mean by that? Even looking at a woman is lustful. Wait a minute, not the kind of God you would invent. Now, if you're right in your case, I agree with that there's evidence for the resurrection, evidence that the scriptures are true. If we're on a spiritual quest, we've got to take seriously this person, Jesus. Ross, appreciate you taking the time. Thanks so much for coming on. I thoroughly enjoyed your book. It was was fascinating even though there's a

number of areas again we didn't get into i would see differently i was just so intrigued by the way you're writing a book for spiritual seekers given your experience at the new york time your catholic background it just fascinated me how you're trying to make a bridge to the person of jesus given where our spiritually sensitive and and you know spiritually open generation is so i enjoyed it i want to commend the book believe for people uh to check out and maybe we'll have that follow-up conversation you said you would have at the beginning of the show i'll bring yeah i'll bring the icons and the statues and and we can we can have a good 16th century style throwdown in the future.

But thank you so much for having me. This was great. I really appreciate it. My privilege. And before people click away, make sure you hit subscribe. And we'd love to have you come study apologetics in some depth with me at Biola. We have a distance program. Information is below. Thanks, Ross. We'll do it again. All right. Take care.