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In one of their sketches, comedy duo Key and Peele go on a road trip. They decide to put on some music, and Jordan Peele accidentally adds some personal recordings to the playlist. “This is an audio diary of my experiments with the human condition,” he says through the car’s speakers. Despite Peele’s objections, Keegan-Michael Key insists on continuing: “I want to hear your thoughts on things!” he exclaims, and the recording gets stranger with each passing moment. “I’ve been looking at myself in the mirror, naked, for hours now,” Peele says at one point. “I’m starting to see my reptilian self.” Later, the recording consists mostly of Peele screaming. “Why?!” he screams. “Aaaaaahh …
Sometimes the people you know end up thinking stranger thoughts than you might expect. That seems to be the case with Ross Douthat, a Times columnist whose new book, “To Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” explores unexpected angles. Douthat, described by Isaac Chotiner as “liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator” in a profile for the paper, is known for his levelheadedness. He specializes in introducing progressive readers to ideas they would normally ignore, and in framing questions that typically irritate conservatives—has America become decadent? Is there a need for a new “sexual ethic”?—in ways that leftist thinkers can understand. It’s not easy for a conservative to break into liberal circles; the guards at the gate won’t let him in. But Douthat slips in through a side door, chats a bit, and leaves an interesting book on the kitchen table, highlighting a few passages.
In his Times column, Douthat often examines religion, usually through a sociological or political lens. (Earlier this year, for example, he wondered whether our decades-long “wave of secularization” had reached the point of a religious revival.) “Believe” is different: In it, Douthat is proselytizing. His intended audience is not hardened skeptics like Richard Dawkins, who find religion intellectually absurd. His main goal is to reach people who are curious about faith, or who are “spiritual” but not religious. (About a third of Americans consider themselves that way, by some polls.) If you fall into this camp, you might share a general sense of the mystical ineffability of existence, or believe that there is more to it than science can describe. You may be an agnostic or even an atheist, but still feel that the rituals, rhythms, and conventions of religion can enrich your life and connect you to others; that its practices direct our attention to what is truly important. At the same time, you may have difficulty accepting the idea that Jesus actually rose from the dead on the third day.
If that sounds like you, Douthat wants you to consider the possibility of concrete faith and formal adherence to doctrine. “This is not a book about how religious stories are psychologically useful, regardless of their true content,” he writes, “or how embracing the mystery of existence can make you happier in everyday life.” Douthat argues that you should be religious because religion, as traditionally understood, is true; in fact, it is not only true but also reasonable, despite scientific progress. His most astonishing, and perhaps foolhardy, claim is that scientific progress has actually increased the likelihood that “religious views are closer to the truth than purely secular worldviews.”
Since at least the nineteenth century, theologians have complained about the “God of the gaps”—a modern version of God who occupies only those parts of reality that remain unexplained by science. Darwin identifies one such gap: before he discovered evolution by natural selection, God was thought to have created all life on Earth in a makeshift way; today, our understanding of evolution places divine influence, if you believe in it, at some pre-Darwinian time, perhaps even before the Earth (or the Big Bang). The problem with believing in a God of the gaps is that the gaps get smaller as science advances.
One solution is to believe in a more abstract kind of God. The writer Karen Armstrong, for example, has argued that for much of history, God was conceived of as something that “transcends our thoughts and concepts.” Religion, then, was not a set of beliefs that could be proven or disproved, but a set of practices, often characterized by “silence, reserve, and reverence,” that could bring us closer to a divine that we could not truly describe. From this perspective, the God-of-the-gaps problem seems avoidable; in fact, it might be better to think of God more abstractly, as something that fits awkwardly into the physical world. In her book The Case for God, Armstrong quotes theologian Paul Tillich, who suggested that the concept of a God who could “intervene in natural events” was self-defeating: by turning God into “a natural object among others,” it relegated the divine to the earth.
Sourse: newyorker.com
