Truth Unites - Why You Need Religion (with Ross Douthat)

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Gavin Ortlund interviews Ross Douthat on his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious Check out Ross's book: https://www.amazon.com/Believe-Why-Everyone-Should-Religious/dp/0310367581/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Do you see right now an overt interest in demons and sorcery? And do you feel a concern to warn people about this right now? I brought several rosaries, a blessed statue of an obscure Renaissance Pope. So I'm ready. I'm ready if need be. Well, hey, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. I'm really honored to be here with Ross Douthit, a New York Times columnist and author of many books that I was just telling him how much I love.

And I also love this book, Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious. and we're going to talk all about it. Link in the video description. Check it out. A fascinating book. And not super academic or hard to read. This is a book. A lot of different people can find accessible and interesting,

and it's a lot of fun to read, too. So check it out in the video description. I've got a lot of questions, but let me start by just saying, thanks, Ross, for doing this. How's your day going today? It's great. It's a privilege to be here.

You're very kind. That's a very, very kind words. I appreciate it. And I agree. I hope it's a book that, accessible. One of the arguments in the book is that if there is a strong case for being religious, it should be an accessible case, right? It shouldn't just be the case that you have to be an academic theologian or philosopher to discern the possibility that God exists. So I tried to write it

in that spirit. Yeah, that definitely comes through. And I'll say this, we might disappoint some of our viewers right up front because many people are watching my channel out of interest in the Catholic versus Protestant discussions. And I'm not anticipating we're going to go there in this video. I've brought several rosaries, a blessed statue of an obscure Renaissance Pope. So I'm ready. I'm ready if need be. Well, it's fine with me if it does go into that territory. But the goal is more an area where we have a lot of common ground, and that is pushing against the secularism that is in our culture. And more specifically, it seems like the kind of reader that you're trying to help in this book is the secular person wondering, maybe they're interested in religion, but they're kind of wondering

if it's intellectually credible. Is that accurate? And how would you describe kind of what you're hoping to do with this book? Yeah, I feel like I'm writing the book into a moment or for a moment when America has gone through a wave of secularization. More Americans are raised without religion than ever before in our history. It's not just that you have lots of lapsed Catholics and lapsed Baptists running around. For the first time, you have a really large population that has not had any kind of direct encounter with a church or a religious institution in their lifetime. So that's happened, but we've also, I think, reached a moment where the kind of high tide, of confident atheism and enthusiastic secularism has receded. I think a lot of people are looking at the

world in the 2020s, looking at a world where institutional religion is weaker, where organized Christianity is weaker and saying, well, this isn't the, you know, happy, scientific, you know, rationalist utopia than I was promised. Instead, the world feels more polarized, more chaotic. And there's just a lot of, I think, you know, especially among young people, sort of anxiety, depression, you know, a sort of failure to kind of make a home for yourself in the world, you could almost say. And this is, I think, inevitably prompted a certain kind of renewed interest in religion or in spiritual practices that sort of, you know, get you part of the way to religion, at least.

But I think, as you said, I think there's a lot of people who are in a moment. mode of spiritual interest or religious interest who, first of all, don't really know anything about the basics of why one might be religious in the first place, right? And in that sense, you know, when C.S. Lewis wrote mere Christianity, I think the idea that you could have this kind of baseline Christianity before you got to Protestant versus Catholic arguments was sort of novel and interesting and striking. I think in the world we live in. now you almost need a kind of mere religion to sort of persuade people or explain to people, well, why, you know, why would you join an organized religion to begin with?

What are the major religions up to, that kind of thing? So in part, I'm trying to sort of provide guidance for people in that position, but I am also trying to make a sort of more specific argument, especially in the first part of the book, that you don't have to leave, you know, sort of your reason, your belief in, you know, the modern rules of scientific evidence at the door when you take a step into religious belief, right? I think there's a lot of people, including people who have entered into religious practice, who think of themselves as sort of taking this total leap into the unknown, you know, sort of keeping, or keeping two books, right? You have sort of the book of

reason and science and you have the book of faith and, you know, they're just sort of completely separate from one another. And the argument I'm making is that no, in fact, um, There are very strong reasons to think that a religious perspective on existence, meaning a basic view that we're here for a reason, that there are higher powers out there, that the supernatural is real, that people's religious experiences correspond to something in reality itself. There's a strong case that that perspective on the world is just much more coherent, convincing, and in line with what we actually know about reality than a hard atheism or material. Yeah. Would you say there's greater spiritual openness in some respects today than even like 10 years ago?

The general spiritual environment feels different right now. Do you see that? And what do you think is behind that? Yeah, I think 10 or 15 years ago, we were at the sort of tail end of the decline of the old, big institutions of American Christianity. And I say that as a Roman Catholic, the Catholic Church is one of those big institutions. It was going through. the agony of the sex abuse crisis. But I think that extends to Protestantism as well. I think if you look at, say, the Southern Baptist Convention, Baptist growth kind of hit a peak 15 or 20 years ago, and it's been in decline ever since. So, and then obviously mainline Protestantism, the old, you know, the churches that we think of in 1950s America, the United Methodists and the congregationalists and so on, they've been in decline since the 1970s, right? So you've had this kind of long,

long, long, but slow decline of religion as a powerful institutional force that kind of reached an endpoint. And now we're in a landscape where people who are engaging with religion aren't engaging with that kind of past anymore. I mean, obviously not, this doesn't describe everyone, but people in the category that you're talking about, right, people who are sort of newly interested in spirituality, they're just not operating in a world where it was like, oh, you're going to be a Methodist or a Baptist, or if you're Irish or Italian, you're going to be a Catholic. Like, you know, the America of the religious America of 1950 or 1975 is just completely gone. And that is a reflection of religion's decline.

It's bad news, obviously, for Christians and Christianity that we've ended up in this place. But it has also, I think, created a new openness that. you know, just was not there to the same degree for people who felt like they were sort of getting rid of an inheritance they didn't want anymore. I think that's the world of the world in which, you know, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens found such a big audience was a world of people looking to finally get rid of an inheritance that they'd already sort of given up on. And the world we're in now is the next generation. It's people who say, well, I don't have any kind of religious inheritance, but I have all kinds of questions about the universe and my place in it. Maybe I'm

interested in spiritual experience. I think certainly, you know, if you're just focusing on what people are doing, the practices that they are trying out, you know, well beyond Christianity, encompassing all kinds of, you know, New Age stuff, psychedelics, astrology, these kinds of things. definitely it's a more spiritually open-minded moment than 15 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating to think the needs and the conversations right now are different even than just 10 or 15 years ago. What would you say as you watch conversations between secular and religious people in the United States right now?

If you could change one thing, what would you change? What is not going well right now? Well, it's interesting. You know, again, going back a little bit, I would have said that, you know, those conversations are sort of often stuck on culture war issues, right? That we had the sexual revolution in the United States and all around the developed world, starting the 60s and 70s. And it created these intractable arguments about same-sex marriage, divorce, premarital

sex, you know, everything, abortion, everything related to those tanks. of issues and those divided Christian churches internally and they divided religious believers from usually more liberal people who were who were secular and no longer religious right and look I you know I'm a social and cultural conservative I think those issues are very important I do think that for a long time it it was often the case that you were sort of boiling down the question of a yes or no for God or religion or Jesus Christ to where you stood on one, you know, one set of cultural debates. And that was, that was a problem, right? It was a problem for Christian witness.

And it was also a problem for secular people who were sort of closing, I think, closing their ears to a wider array of religious arguments because they were like, well, I can't side with, you know, Sarah Palin. I can't be on the same side as George W. Bush. That's still there. I feel like now the landscape is a little different. And, you know, I don't write that much about the culture war in this book. I touch a little bit on issues about sex as a stumbling block late in the book, but it's not my primary concern.

I think now there's a couple of sort of points of, I guess you could say points of difficulty. One is a version of what I've already mentioned, right? This idea that you have people who are really interested. interested in religion, but don't sort of don't feel like they can go all the way. They sort of, they want to believe in belief itself, right? Like they want to be, they want religion back in some form, but they don't want to fully commit to what seem like disreputable ideas about a personal God, you know, God entering history, these kind of things.

So that's that's there. And then I think for, especially for people who have no primary point of contact with religion. There's a sense of sort of, you know, difficulty or even impossibility in kind of parsing, parsing the religious landscape, even if you wanted to enter into it, right? It's this sense of like, you know, there are so many religions in the world, so many churches just within Christianity that even if I was persuaded that there might be a God and my life might have some cosmic purpose, how would I possibly go about, you know, assessing all of these churches? They can't all possibly have the truth. And if I choose one, I'm almost certainly getting it wrong. And this,

this ties into an argument you heard a lot of from sort of atheistic writers like Dawkins, right? This idea that, you know, well, Christians, you know, believe in their God, but their atheists, about 99.9% of all the gods humanity has ever believed in, right? So the odds are that their God is fake too, right? If, you know, if everyone agrees that 99.9% of all gods are fake, you know, then why would you put your faith in that last 0.01%. So I think that, I don't think everyone is sort of thinking about it in quite those terms, but this sense of like, how can I possibly choose? How would I, you know, how would I possibly commit to just one option?

And probably the internet has accentuated that. I mean, this is sort of a general reality of modernity. Everyone is just confronted with more religious choice than any human being ever. in history, but probably the internet has added to that a bit. And I think figuring out how, as believers, you talk in that landscape is quite important to sort of pulling some people from curiosity into actual practice and belief. Fascinating. Yeah, the biggest thing that surprised me in running my YouTube channel is how many people struggle. I've had to coin a phrase for, which I don't even like the term very much, but I call it intellectual anxiety,

where people just feel paralyzed by all the options and all the information they don't know what to do. And maybe we can come back to that in a second when we talk about divine hiddenness and, you know, one of the whole chapters of the book, which was so instructive and interesting to me just to think there's a whole chapter in your book about just the need for commitment as such. And so we'll come back to that in just a second. But maybe we can just work through some of the content of the book. It's so good. I want to hit each chapter a little bit. Chapter one is about how our universe looks designed. And you're pushing back against this narrative that with Copernicus and Darwin, God has been sort of pushed out of the picture, and you're saying,

no, 20th century scientific discoveries really seem to be pushing in the opposite direction. Maybe here's an objection I've heard that might be worth addressing. If somebody says, yeah, we don't understand something like fine-tuning yet, but look at how much else science has already explained. And surely science will one day be able to explain that also. How would you interact with someone who's kind of thinking like that? I mean, I think this is the impulse that you see where people think that because, you know, Darwin's theory of evolution came along and provided a, you know, sort of seemingly purely material explanation, you know, how true that is.

This is a separate question, but seemingly a purely material explanation for what seemsingly, seemed like, you know, the special creation of biological life that you're going to get a Darwin, you know, at every level of science, right? And so it's sort of, you know, the search for like, well, what's the equivalent of the theory of evolution to explain why the universe seems not just designed and ordered in this remarkable way, but designed and ordered in this really specific way, really, you know, hyper, one in, you know, one in a billion specific to yield, you know, stars, planets and conscious life, right? And the idea is, well, there must be some sort of equivalent of the Darwinian argument there. And this is the attraction of the idea of a multiverse, right? The

idea that, well, you know, you have one, you have one universe that's hospitable to life because you have, you know, an infinite number or, you know, millions and billions of universes out there, always branching off from one another. And of course, you know, we think this one is designed because we happen to be in it, but we only happen to be in it because, you know, no one could observe all of the other universes, right? They don't have observers to wonder, wonder at them. And I think it does come from that sense that you mentioned, that science has been effective previously at explaining things that appear to be designed without a designer and so it will be successful again. I think there's a couple of things to be said about that.

One is just that, you know, the basic law-bound orderliness of the cosmos is not actually something that, you know, has ever had some kind of, you know, brilliant materialist explanation, right? It's sort of built into the basic. assumptions of modern science, that this is how the universe works, that it, you know, it will, if we investigated more and more, it will display, you know, consistency and mathematical beauty and all of these things, right. But it's not actually that the deeper we have gone into, you know, sort of the physics, the deep physics of the cosmos, the more discoveries we've made that have

demonstrated that there probably isn't a God, right? This is not actually. how modern science has proceeded. And in fact, to the to the contrary, I, you know, one of my, everyone has sort of a favorite argument for why God probably exists, why a religious perspective is true. My own sort of, I don't think it's necessarily the strongest. I just tend to like it is that it is, there was actually no reason to expect at the outset of the modern scientific project that we would ever get as far as we've gotten in terms of understanding the universe. obtaining almost godlike powers over the universe, splitting the atom, not just figuring out the human genome, but potentially rewriting it, all of these things. There was no reason in 1400 or 1500 to think we would get that far if there was no God and the universe wasn't in some sense made for us.

And from a kind of materialist point of view, it's not just that you have to sort of explain the fine tuning of the universe that produces planets and conscious life, you also have to explain out of all the possible worlds that could have conscious life, why we've ended up with one where that conscious life is in turn capable of reascending up the ladder of creation, figuring out not just how to manipulate tools and light fires in, you know, in primeval Africa or the Middle East, but unlocking the deep structure of reality, understanding it and manipulating it in these incredibly powerful ways. And I think that both, it both adds to the fundamental unlikeliness that you get from just sort of the fine-tuning arguments, but it also makes science a vindication of the

likelihood of God, right? Like, again, flashback in time a few hundred years and say you're having an argument with an atheist, right? Under whose premises is it more likely that human beings will advance as far scientifically as they have since then. The believers or the atheists? I think clearly the believers, right? I think very clearly in the believers cosmos, it's more likely that human beings will figure out how to split the atom and how to, you know, modify their own DNA. In the atheist cosmos, it's impossible, but it's much more likely that you're going to hit a ceiling very quickly precisely because the universe is not made for us. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but I think that is part of the argument I make is that, again,

it's not just sort of what we've learned about fine tuning. It's the fact that we've been able to learn it at all that is deeply unlikely unless you accept what I think is the basic likelihood, which is that we are actually really important players in the life of the universe. You can't prove that there aren't, you know, maybe there's also conscious beings on, you know, some other planet somewhere else, right? I don't think, you know, outside of intra-Christian arguments, I don't think you can, you know, prove that definitively one way or another. But I think at the very least, you have to say what we have been able to to achieve indicates that, you know, the biblical idea that were made in the image of God look stronger,

much stronger in 2025 than it necessarily did in terms of what we could do in 1525 or 1725. You bring up consciousness there, and this is chapter two. This is the chapter that was most interesting to me to read through because I haven't done as much work in this area. But you mentioned earlier that a non-expert should be able to track with conversations about religion and so on and so forth. For the non-expert, for the person like myself who hasn't really read a ton in this area, tell us a little bit about how consciousness fits into the argument that you're making. Why is that a surprising feature of the world? What does that have to do with religion? Yeah. So again, right, the traditional religious picture of the human person, and obviously there's differences between the major religions, but the

traditional religious perspective is that human beings have a body that is conjoined in some way to a non-material self, a soul, a spirit, you know, whatever, whatever terminology that you want to use, right? And that what we experience in our consciousness, both sort of the basic sense of selfhood, then the sort of direct experience of reality, like not, you know, not just sort of what the atoms are doing, but what it actually feels like to eat an orange or read a poem or experience a sunset and then our capacity for sort of reason and judgment, right, our ability to sort of operate in a way that is itself sort of supernatural, right? You're sort of when you exercise reason and judgment, you are inherently trying to stand a bit outside the chains of material

causation, right? So all of that from the religious perspective is itself evidence, you know, not of necessarily a particular conception of God, but evidence that mind is separate from and in some sense probably precedes matter, that mind is one of the fundamental properties of reality, and it's not just something that is sort of secondary to a world of purely material causation. Now, obviously modern science, including modern neuroscience, has tried to work in the opposite direction, right, to say, okay, we assume that the material, is primary and therefore the react we just have to figure out how you know how you get from the material to mind mind and consciousness has to be somehow downstream of a set of material material causes

right and clearly mind is affected by material causes right if I had three glasses of wine before I conducted this conversation conversation would be quite different and my conscious experience of But and yours too would be would be quite different, right? And people have always known that. It's not, you know, the mind is clearly penetrated by and interpenetrating with the material in some important way. And that's a lot of what neuroscient scientific advances have figured out, right? They've figured out, okay, well, you know, stimulation to this part of the brain has this effect on consciousness. Doing this has that effect on your conscious experience, right?

all of that is incredibly valuable and important scientific research, but it doesn't get you to an explanation of where the primary experience of selfhood comes from. And there's a philosopher of neuroscience, not a religious believer named David Chalmers, who came up with this really useful distinction in the 1990s. between what he called the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problems of consciousness and the hard problems of consciousness and the hard problem. The easy problems are not actually easy. They're just problems of the kind that neuroscience investigates that we know how to investigate through scientific testing and manipulation. Like, you know, my wife wrote a book about the science of the maternal transformation.

What happens to women when they're pregnant and become mothers? What are the hormones that are at work? How does the, you know, how does the literal shape of the brain change throughout pregnancy in ways that change, for instance, how you react to your newborns cries or to his or her features, these kind of things, right? That's really interesting, but that's the easy problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is figuring out why you as a self experience existence the way that you actually do, right? not why, you know, is some circuit in your brain triggered by a particular frequency of your newborn's cry, but why does it feel like what it feels like to be a mother? You know, that's sort of a particularly profound example, but you can say the same thing about why does it feel like what it feels like to take a bite out of an apple? Why does the color, or why is the color orange orange?

What is the connection between that experience that you have and, you know, the way that, you know, light, light bounces off an orange and is carried, you know, is carried through your eyeball and thence into your brain, right? And Chalmers' argument was that this problem is really, really hard to solve. It's very easy to imagine a form of existence in which, you know, people don't have the kind of conscious experiences. that we have indeed sort of materialism would seem to predict something more like a kind of zombified existence right where you're responding to stimuli and you know your brain is working out figuring out what to tell your body to do in various situations um but you're not going into you know you don't have this sort of sense of of the person of the self that religion has always argued as a primary part of reality and chalmers point which i think still

holds up very well decades, decades later, is that there just aren't good materialist arguments for where the experience of consciousness comes from, that there is something almost inherently supernatural about consciousness that is not touched by any of the current arguments that we have. And you get, you know, you get this language, people who are trying to find a kind of halfway house between the supernatural and materialism talk a lot about the concept of emergence, right? the idea that, well, your consciousness can't be reduced to the material, but it emerges in some way from the material, the way like, you know, the motion of a car emerges from the material, you know, wheel and engine and pistons and so on of the car. And I want to go into too much detail, but I don't think those arguments make any sense at all. I think they, I think they end up sort of recapitulating the original problem, which is that, you know, you are dealing with something that seems, again, inherently, you know, inherently supernatural or magical in the reality of consciousness. And then a final point that's that, you know, I only touch on briefly because it's sort of a

deep and complex scientific debate, right? But the other thing, it's not just that sort of yourself has not been touched by reductionism to date. It's also that something we've learned about the deepest order of reality, the quantum realm. right quantum physics and so on what we've learned about that strongly suggests that there's some really weird interface between consciousness and the material where the material seems to exist in some kind of state of contingency until it is observed by consciousness which would seem you know the naive reading the simplest reading of that is again that mind is what sort of organizes in some bizarre way the actual form that the universe takes. And, you know, this is, that's not the conclusion that every scientist draws from it,

to put it mildly. But I think it's very easy to see the theological implications of, of that idea, right? Like, okay, the universe has been existing for, you know, billions of years without consciousness to give shape to it. So what's been giving shape to it? Maybe a more capital C form of consciousness has been part of the story all along. Fascinating. Let me ask a question. This is my best ability to articulate a question that comes into my own mind, kind of as a follow up on this issue of consciousness.

But I hope it will be coherent because I'm not confident I can state this question perfectly. So hopefully you can meet me halfway here. But it has to do with whether consciousness exists kind of on a spectrum, higher levels of consciousness, lower levels of consciousness, in the animal kingdom, for example. So if someone is looking, supposing evolution for the sake of the argument for the moment, you know, different people might make a different proposal

for where, like what's the first moment of consciousness in the process of evolution? And they might say, look, this looks like it comes about very, very gradually. And they might feel from this that kind of rubs against the intuition that consciousness is this qualitatively distinct thing. How would you interact with someone who's thinking along those lines? Because I bring this question up with other friends of mine who love the argument from consciousness. And they're saying, no, no, no, that doesn't affect the argument at all.

But I still struggle with this. Does that make sense? Well, no, I think it's a really good question. I think there is, first of all, I think clearly some form of consciousness exists in higher and lower levels across the animal kingdom. Right. Again, this would not have been sort of a novelty to pre-modern thinkers, right? The idea that, you know, there are animal souls as well as human souls is sort of part of, it's part of the discourse long before, long before Darwin came on the scene, right?

There is clearly something very particular about human consciousness. We don't know for certain, to what degree some of that particular. particularity might be shared with the very highest animals, right, with dolphins and and elephants and some, some, you know, some others. Again, just speaking in strictly, in strictly scientific terms. So, yes, I think, I think it's fair to say that whatever, you know, whatever the emergence of, whatever the emergence of consciousness is, it is correlated in some way with development in biological, in the the biological substrate, right? That, however, does not get you to a point of biological explanation for the phenomena itself. I don't think it's, I think it is understandable from an

evolutionary perspective why people looking at that progression want to say, well, you know, so this, if we think, if we think that's sort of the biological, you know, the biological, you know, the biological reality of the body and the brain developed gradually, then why can't we have an account of the evolution of consciousness? That's a natural thing to think. However, there is no such account, right? That's the, that's the, that's the downside of that argument. If it were the case that this gradual development yielded some sort of clear materialist theory of what is happening when you have a conscious experience of the world, then that would be, you know, a useful breakthrough for sort of, you know, hard, hard materialism. But it, you know, it doesn't seem to do that, right?

Now, I think I didn't, you know, I didn't get into this in the book exactly, but I do think there are ways in which the origin of human beings, right, the sort of natural origin of human beings, the debates about, you know, evolution, the Garden of Eden, the fall, original sin, and so on. There are clearly some unresolved questions in that territory for Christianity in particular, maybe more than for some other world religions because of the specific narrative of the fall and death entering the world with the fall that Christians have. And, you know, I think that's sort of a separate a separate book, right? But saying that, you know, there are strong arguments for religious belief, strong arguments to think that the soul is real, strong reasons to think

that God exists, that doesn't exhaust the questions that science raises for religion. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't suggest that it does, right? But I think there's a tendency of people to, you know, to sort of reject for secondary reasons what should still. be affirmed for primary reasons. Like, people will say, well, there's this particular Christian teaching that I find hard to square with, you know, my understanding of modern science and therefore I won't be a Christian, right? But, well, okay. But if the broader evidence of modern science strongly suggests that, you know, God exists and created human beings and so on, you, you know, your doubt about a particular Christian teaching still leaves you in a position.

where you should probably be very interested in who this God is and what he wants of you, right? Like there's sort of a kind of, you know, yeah, there's a sense of like people, not that they're doing this consciously, but people sort of looking for a very specific problem as a reason to take on a larger worldview, a materialist worldview that has many, many more problems of its own. Yeah, let's, that's fact. fascinating. Let's talk about spiritual experiences. This is a big part of the argument of the book as well in chapter three. I was kind of struck by how forceful this was as well. Yeah, no, I'm I'm all in on the, I mean, this is, you know, Catholics, Catholics and the supernatural man. You know, we're just, we're always ready, you know, Virgin Mary's appearing, statues are bleeding. We're all in. Well, it's fascinating because you're talking about experiences from all different kinds of religions. And one of the points you're making is that,

Even in very educated contexts where they're not necessarily being propagated by religious authorities, spiritual experiences keep on happening. And this is a point of fascination for me about the darker forms of spirituality where there's an interest in that right now. One of my burdens is I want to warn people that not all spirituality is good. And this is something you talk about. So let me, in fact, for our viewers, I'll put up this quote on the screen and I want to read this from page 105 of the book. You say, don't mess around with demons might see. like too basic a message to require the structure of an entire religion to convey and reinforce. But in fact, what happens in horror films, the people who go into that room or open that book

or hold that seance with predictably disastrous consequences also happens in real life. And you also talk about, you know, the fascination with aliens right now and just how there's this broad interest. So I guess I have a couple questions about this. One of them is just, how would you respond to the concern? Someone might say, defending religion as such is simply too broad of a phenomenon to defend because you're dealing with so many vastly diverse kinds of experiences. Some of them are good and some of them are very, very evil.

So therefore, you really shouldn't defend religion as such. You should make a more targeted focus. How would you interact with a concern like that? I mean, I think that's, in a way, a very reasonable concern, right? But I think that part of what I'm doing in the book is defending religion against the kind of spiritual but not religious mentality that's really powerful in our society. The idea that you can just sort of go out and seek out and have spiritual experiences without any kind of structure of practice and belief around you. Because I think that's that's sort of the zone of maximal danger. But I also think that, you know, the range of religious and spiritual experience that people have, while on the one hand, it does vary in certain ways across cultures, right? People are more likely to have a vision of Krishna if they are raised Hindu in India and more likely to have a vision of Jesus if they're raised evangelical in Indiana, right? There are, you know, clearly, clearly some role, some sort of important cultural role in

the ways that experiences manifest themselves. However, there are also commonalities and forms of consistency across religious experience, across cultures, right? And just, and this ranges from kind of what I describe in the book as kind of baseline, basic forms of spiritual experience. These are the sort of feelings of sort of oneness with the universe and divine love that people have, this sort of, you know, sudden awareness of their own almost immortality. These kind of experiences to more specific experiences, like what feels like direct encounters with God or some kind of supernatural person to specific miraculous healings to, you know, demonic possession, right?

Like or brushes with the demonic. Now, Buddhism and Hinduism have quite different theologies of the demonic than do the Abrahamic religions. However, you know, if you read, you know, Buddhist accounts of, you know, hungry ghosts and, you know, demons and other things like that, I don't think it's at all crazy to say, well, you know, they're talking about, they're talking about the same territory that a Catholic exorcist would be talking about. They have a different, different theories of what it is and where it comes from, to some extent, obviously what you do about it. But there does seem to be this sort of shared. these sort of shared religious experiences. And the same might be said of something like dear death experiences, right, which is an example of a form of spiritual experience that has seemingly just become a lot more common under modern conditions, precisely because we've gotten a lot better at bringing people back from the brink of death, right? So near death experiences, again, there's cultural differences.

People see somewhat different things depending on their religious background. But there's also a lot of commonalities between someone who has a near-death experience as, you know, a Buddhist in China, a Hindu in India, or a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim in the West. Or as a non-believer. I mean, one of the important realities is that spiritual experiences happen to non-believers all the time. There's no reason to think that only religious people, only people with like preexisting beliefs have spiritual experiences. The beliefs help condition how they're in the experiences. are interpreted. But anyway, all of which is to say that on the one hand, yes, in the end, you can't just believe in religion, qua religion, right? Absolutely. And in the book, I urge people to actually embrace a specific religious tradition and a specific practice. And the book ends, you know, with an argument for my own Christianity. But I do think that there are intermediate steps that are useful to think about where, you know, the spiritual landscape is potentially dangerous and you want to go from a kind of, you know, you don't want to end up

stuck in a pure experimenter mode. And the best way to get out of that mode is to look for institutions that have evolved theories about what these different spiritual experiences are, interpretations of them that share some commonalities and methods for how to approach them. It's, you know, I don't know how much you've read about psychedelic experience, which is a big, a big feature of the kind of spiritual exploration landscape now. A lot of people take psychedelics and have really positive experiences. A lot of people take them honestly and come away, converted from materialism to some sort of supernatural belief. That's a sort of fascinating feature of some of these things. But people have, you know, some pretty dark and scary experiences of.

entities while taking these substances and you will see in the literature on psychedelic experiences all of these debates about what do you do you know how do you handle a negative entity right what do you know what do you do when when you have you know is this like the manifestation of your own repressed desires and you need to embrace the shadow in order to you know in order to be whole or you know do you know when I get possessed by a demon right and I feel like institutional religion has something important to offer people who right now are just sort of groping in a landscape that, you know, God is there. I obviously believe that, but other things are there as well. Do you see right now an overt interest in demons and sorcery? And do you feel a

concern to warn people about this right now? I think that there is a, I mean, Yes, but I think there's a fascination with what you might call intermediate powers where you have a lot of people who struggle to believe in the God of the Bible or the god of classical theism, the sort of philosophical conception that most most sort of Christian theologians would have embraced. They struggle for different reasons to believe that there's like one divine architect. But they find it easier, like, you know, some people in the pre-Christian past to believe that there are powers, spiritual powers in the world that you can reach out to and commune with and gain things from and so on. You know, and you mentioned like the question of consciousness, right? And, you know, there's lower forms of consciousness and higher forms of consciousness. I don't think it's that difficult for people to believe that, you know, there are higher forms of consciousness that are not God, but that are, let's say, small G, gods. So I don't think, I think there's a lot of people who do not think of themselves as like, I'm going to go commune with a demon, right?

I mean, of course, there are actual Satanists, but that's not the way this usually works. It's much more people saying, you know, I'm really interested in extraterrestrials. There's obviously a kind of strong spiritual component to a lot of E.T. style belief. And it's like, okay, these are people from other worlds who come down and have contact with human beings and might, you know, be trying to usher us into enlightenment. You know, so that's a category. There's the people taking ayahuasca and saying, well, I found my spirit guide on ayahuasca and it was a radiant being of light. It's kind of a secular version of this with AI. Obviously, some of the arguments about, you know, the AI becoming a kind of machine god

have, you know, reflects some version of this. But I think, and then there are people who are like, you know, they're interested in Aphrodite again. They're interested in ISIS, right? And I think, you know, Christians have an interpretation of who you're actually talking to. if you're trying to talk to Babylonian or Greek gods again. But that's not, there's a lot of people for whom it's just a kind of, you know, it's a kind of experimentation with a lot of play acting, right? That's the other thing.

There's a lot of people for whom this is sort of a zone of, you know, irony and ambiguity about what they really believe, right? It's like, well, to become Christian, you would have to commit to like, I believe in the Nicene Creed, right? I believe in the Trinity, these kind of things. But if I'm dabbling in astrology or playing around with neo-paganism, I can sort of tell myself it's a game. You know, I'm not like some crazy, you know, crazy theist or something.

I'm just, you know, I'm just dabbling. And I think that's part of the story, too. There's people who want to kind of denyability about their own spiritual beliefs, right? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Well, I know that you and I both want to contribute to the real.

re-Christianization of our culture. So thinking of the United States here is I look at, if I look at a map of the U.S., and I look at different areas where there's a special need for sort of sowing seeds of Christianity, I see different kinds of challenges. Like when I think of the Northeast versus the Northwest, you know, a city like Boston or a city like Portland, both of these are places where there's less Christianity right now, but it feels different, you know, the different kind of challenges. And I know you've written this book you've also written the book bad religion and i'm curious to ask you what do you see is the the more urgent threat to christianity in the united states a kind of hardcore secularism on the one hand or kind of bad forms of amorphous spirituality on the other yeah i i would say um i completely agree with you

basically that it just completely varies depending depending on your context right i think that there are you know, I live in New Haven, Connecticut, I sometimes teach at Yale, I'm sort of inside the American intelligentsia. And, you know, in the most important parts of the American intelligentsia, the core obstacle to belief is this sense that it's irrational, that you can't be a rational modern person and really, really believe in God, right? And that's one reason I wrote this book is that when I wrote bad religion, which was more about sort of contemporary forms of heresy, I was focusing more on people who believe in something, but, you know, are sort of, well, I was arguing believe in the wrong things, but let's just say believe in something sort of amorphous and uncertain, right? But, you know,

this book is maybe targeted a little more to people for whom hard secularism is a big obstacle to belief. But generally, yeah, I'd say there's three categories, really. There's a kind of default atheism in the intelligentsia. There is a kind of post-Christian spiritual perspective that maybe would be more common in the Pacific Northwest, California. I mean, it's everywhere, but these kind of things, which is sort of searching for religious experience and meaning, but sees Christianity as bad. or antiquated or perverse and would rather, you know, go for Aphrodite, right? Or, I mean, or whatever the equivalent is. So that's, and then the third, the third category, which, you know, blurs into the other two,

is maybe what you would see in, you know, like sort of post-industrial parts of the Midwest or, you know, some of the places hardest hit by the opioid epidemic and so on, which is just a kind of failure of institutions where it's people still identify as Christian. they aren't atheists and they aren't neo-pagans, but their communities have fallen apart. They don't go to church. They don't have the sort of structure that organized institutional religion delivers.

And whatever they believe, they're just, they're sort of spiritually and culturally adrift. So those are three, and I agree, quite different categories and that require sort of different kinds of, you know, sort of mission work in a way. I think, you know, a Christian who's interested in renewing Christianity in, you know, in Ohio or Illinois or Wisconsin, maybe is going to be focused much more on, you know, the kind of community building work that a congregation,

a successful congregation, can do, right? Someone who's trying to rebuild Christianity in the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast may be more focused on, you know, intellectual arguments or a kind of like, you know, almost like spiritual contention, right? Like, you know, okay, you're interested in the supernatural. I'm interested in the supernatural too. Whose supernaturalism is, you know, I mean, that's Elijah and the prophets of Val, right? You don't want to go all the way, but there is something there. So those are, yeah, those are just going to be different, different models depending on, on where you

are and what kind of post-Christianity you're engaging with. Yeah. Chapter 4 of the book talks about commitment. It makes a case for the idea of commitment. And this resonated with me in my efforts to help people who struggle with the problem of divine hiddenness, where I'll have a lot of people who are saying, you know, basically, like they're open, they're, they kind of see it, but they just can't sort of turn a lever inside their mind and make themselves go all the way. So they're kind of stuck in within shades of probability and indecision and uncertainty it's a very human kind of struggle how would you suppose someone reads chapters one through three of your book and they're saying okay that's all plausible how would you actually move them and and what what considerations would you

appeal to to really move them into a decisive commitment to religion i mean i think here sort of some of the old arguments are are still good ones right which is that you know you get one life as far as we know, you know, allowing, allowing for possibilities of reincarnation in an ecumenical spirit, as far as we know, you get one life, you're going to die. All of human civilization exists in the shadow of mortality and perishability. If you think that there is any chance at all, that death is not the end, that human civilization has a eternal as well as immediate purpose. You know, this is, this is obviously sort of a version of Pascal's wager, right?

Like it's not a novel argument at all. But it's still basically correct, I think. If you can get your, if you can get a certain distance where you're open to the possibility of God, you're open to religious possibilities, then given the situation we find ourselves in, I think there's a strong obligation to go further, right? Like, why wouldn't you take a step further and a step beyond that and see and see what happens, right? You're not, you know, and this is where some of those questions we were talking about before of like the plethora of religious choices and the sense of paralysis comes in, right? I think there are people who sort of sincerely accept that initial logic.

They're like, okay, I get one life. I should make a choice. But how, you know, how can I possibly make a choice, right? And there I think it's sort of helpful to narrow, you know, to sort of simplify things a little bit for people to say, okay, yes, there are 16,000 different shades of Pentecostalism, you know, in Brazil or something. But, you know, to start at the beginning, there really are, you know, if there is a God, then, and he's not trying to trick you. This is an important point that I make in the book, right? that you know the universe if god is real the universe should not be a trick right the universe is not a trick then you should be able to say okay yes there's endless religions but there are basically like

you know three or four big choices on offer right you know there's the abrahamic traditions Buddhism and hinduism like it's okay to start there and then similarly it's probably okay to start with the religion that providence you know has placed in front of you right like if you you have a strong connection to a particular church or tradition, you don't have to assume that it's the one true church to say, all right, I'm, you know, let's let's start there and see what happens, right? And here that links up to the last thing I'll say on this, right, which is, you know, in the New Testament, Jesus talks a lot, not a lot, it talks a certain amount about like the perils of lukewarmness, right? You know, the famous, you know, you should be hot or cold. You shouldn't be

lukewarm, right? And but also just the idea of, you know, there's a lot of kind of financial language in the Gospels, right? The idea that you're given something by God. You're given talents, right? You know, literal talents, but also talents as money. And, you know, the servants who invest those talents who do something with them are praised. And the servant who sort of freaks out and, you know, buries the talent, right? I think that's sort of a useful analog. for the person who might believe in God but feel sort of paralyzed by indecision, they bury the talent, they don't do anything with it, they don't try anything. And, you know, God's pretty displeased with that. And I think that's, I think that's a useful place to start, right? That, like, before you get to,

you know, questions of theological certainty or anything like that, like, starting by giving God something to work with, you know, taking a step. I think that there's a lot of, there's a lot of wisdom in that. One of the dangers you warn against in the book is people just picking and choosing lots of little bits from different religions. Maybe you could just say a word about this and why is that, why, you know, earlier actually you mentioned kind of being in the spiritual danger zone when you're just out on your own. Say a little more about this of why, what's the problem with this approach? Yeah, sorry, there's sunlight coming in. So as you can see, I'm gradually developing a divine halo, the more, the longer this conversation goes on.

Yeah. So I think, again, initially, right, let's say you're interested in religion. You know, you don't, you've had no experience with it before. Obviously, you're not going to immediately, you know, walk out tomorrow and sign conversion papers and, you know, sort of commit fully. you absolutely make sense at the outset to do some kind of experimentation, right? Go to some different churches. Read the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita, right? These kind of things, right?

There's sort of an initial step where a kind of, you know, spiritual buffet makes sense. But once you're trying to actually practice, right, the idea that you are just going to constantly mix and match and never sort of submit yourself. to an existing system runs into a couple of difficulties. The first is just like, you know, you yourself are probably not the religious genius for the ages, right? I mean, you could be as possible. We don't want to rule it out, right? But the likelihood that you are uniquely well positioned to start your own religion relative to every other human being who ever lived is pretty slim, right?

And religion is not entirely different from other forms of human practice and knowledge, right? it's you know if you're interested in sports you could make up your your own Calvin ball game and try and get everyone to join it or just play it yourself in your backyard you could but probably you're going to be a better athlete and have more fun and get more out of it if you just you know join a baseball team or a soccer team and follow the rules of soccer or baseball religion is obviously different from that but it's not completely different right there is a kind of and then obviously there are all the attendant benefits in religious practice of having a community, having a disciplining effect from being with other people who expect you to live up to your obligations, the inspirational

effect of being surrounded by people who are on the same kind of journey as you, the form of solidarity that friendship or marriage to someone who believes as you do provides. Like all of that is just, again, if you're not completely self-sufficient in your spiritual quest, you're going to go a lot farther and do a lot of lot more if you're doing it in communion with other with other people. And then, you know, the final point, right, is that like, you know, even if you're a total relativist, right, total religious relativist who believes, you know, there's one God, but there's many paths to the same truth, right? And, you know, every religion provides a different map. And it's, you know, each map is equal and so on. Let's say that's true. It still isn't a good idea to take

the bottom corner of one map, the top corner of another map, tape them together. You know, even in a world where you're following different maps to the same destination, you still want to follow an actual map and not assume that you can just sort of put together your preferred pieces, in part because, you know, religions are built around, obviously, like, you know, the challenges of human life, right? And the need to sort of go through dark valleys, right? The Pilgrim's Progress is, you know, a sort of narrative in Christianity for a reason. And so it's like saying, well, you know, I want to go from New York City to Florida.

And I only want to see tourist attractions. So I'm just going to like not do parts of the map that seem unpleasant. Okay, you're never going to get to Florida. And I think, yeah. even in the maximally relativist world, which I don't believe in personally, but even in that world, it still makes sense to try and work within the contours of an existing tradition rather than being entirely on your own. Your book has some similarities to C.S. Lewis's mere Christianity.

But one thing I thought that was interesting is he starts mere Christianity with the moral argument. And if I gathered correctly, you're a little more cautious about the moral argument, perhaps, arguing for God from morality. Do you have reservations about that argument? Do you think that argument can be used to good effect? I think it can be used to good effect, and I think it fits together with the other arguments that I'm making. One of the things I try and say is that religion and a religious perspective

makes sense of a lot of converging lines of evidence, right? It fits together the seeming fine-tuned. designedness of the cosmos with the mystery of our consciousness, with the persistence of supernatural experience in a disenchanted age, right? So, you know, the non-believer has to come up with theories for all three. The religious believer has a theory that unites them. And yeah, I think absolutely the same is true for human beings' moral sense and are sort of unique, as far as we know, unique set of moral impulses and instincts, our sense of guilt and shame, our sense of moral idealism. I didn't emphasize that in part because Lewis obviously starts his rather more

famous book that way, also because it takes you in part into arguments about the theory of evolution and in sort of, you know, the evolution of altruism and animals and sort of the rationality of altruism. And I was trying to write this book without sort of essentially bracketing some of the arguments about evolutionary biology, which I think are important and interesting. But I don't, yeah, I don't think a resolution to some of those is decisive. And then also because I'm a little wary of anything that seems like a utilitarian argument for belief, right? The idea that we, and I think, the moral, this is not what Lewis does, but I think the moral argument can sometimes become,

you want to be moral, you want to think that murder is wrong and the Holocaust is terrible and all the rest. Religion lets you do it in an internally consistent way. Therefore, you should be religious. And I don't think that is a, I don't think that's the most persuasive argument. I want to push people beyond sort of utilitarian reasons for being religious. a little bit. And I think the reason that, you know, yeah, the argument, if there is no God, then all is permitted, right, can be answered by saying, well, then all is permitted. And I think it's better to run the other way and say, if there is no God, all is permitted.

But it turns out there's very probably a God. And so the fact that you don't want everything to be permitted, good news, that makes sense in the cosmos that we find ourselves in, but not putting, not putting the desire for moral order first, because I think that's, it's, there, there are stronger non-religious arguments around that argument, especially if you're for people who are willing to abandon sort of, you know, liberal ideas about equality, which there are more of nowadays, right? Like, there is actually a kind of Nietzschean contingent on the internet, right, in a way that wasn't, the case 15 or 20 years ago. And for those people, you know, there's no pull in those arguments,

right? It's like, okay, yeah, you know, we, you know, we don't want to be niggling little Christian moralists and so on. Great. We'll leave it all behind. So, yeah, that's why I put some of my focus elsewhere. Let me ask you one last question. The purpose of my YouTube channel is to share the gospel and promote people knowing and walking with Jesus. And the last chapter of your book was a case study on why I am a Christian. So maybe I'll just give you a chance to speak to someone out there watching this video who may be thinking, well, I'm open to religion and I'm even open to Christianity. What would be the appeal you'd make for Christianity specifically?

Why should someone be a Christian? I think in the context of my book, it's a little bit similar to some of the general arguments I make about religion. which is that there is sort of an assumption in our culture that various forms of sort of scholarship and advanced research and so on have made the New Testament much less credible than it ever would have been to people in the 18th century or, you know, the 7th century or whenever else. I don't think that's true at all. I think that if you both encounter the Gospels afresh as someone who hasn't sort of

had a deep encounter with Christianity yet, but also if you actually wade into the different scholarly debates about them, I think that the basic credibility of the Gospels is remarkably untouched and in some cases even elevated by what we actually know, not just what sort of secular academics have hypothesized, but what we actually know about them, their composition, how they stand out among other religious texts, how unusual they are. in both sort of the mixture of the radicalism of what they're claiming and the groundedness of their existence as sort of effectively eyewitness testimony and personal memoir and so on. So I think, you know, in the context of my wider argument, I'm saying the world is not a trick. God is not out to trick you.

If, you know, religion is true, there should be evidence pointing you that way. I think there is evidence pointing you that way. I think the same goes for Christianity. I think out of the major religions of the world, it's its origin, it's the gospels themselves, the life of Jesus, the resurrection narratives, the passion narratives. I think they just stand out in a singular way as if here is the moment when, you know, God is reaching in, grabbing you by the lapels and asking you to pay attention. And I think that's a place for, someone who isn't a Christian for their interest in Christianity to start with with those stories, with the, you know, with the encounter with Jesus himself. And I think for myself, it's the foundation. It's the thing that I come back to, right, where, you know, when I'm tempted to, you know, sort of, you know, I obviously can tell from this conversation, I'm interested in a wide range of religions and religious experiences. I do think that God is present in other religions. But fundamentally, if you're asking me to make a bet on where he wants our attention to be focused,

I think it's on the cross. Wonderful. Ross, thanks for the great conversation. Thanks for writing the book. Everybody, thanks for watching the video. Check it out in the video description. And we'll see you in the next video. Thank you.