I do believe, help my unbelief!
—Mark 9:24
This plaintive cry from a desperate father seeking relief for his son possessed by a terrible demon in Mark’s gospel has resonated deeply with believers (like me) down through the centuries, even if (like me) they have never had experience of the demonic. The first time I preached about doubt—my own experience of it personally, my experience of it pastorally—was in the very first year of my priesthood, and it was eye-opening for me. I vividly recall hearing from my parishioners in Portland, Oregon, that day and in the weeks to follow how grateful they were to learn that a priest had had doubts, that doubt was not sinful in itself nor a failure of character. Somehow, despite the fact that the Book of Job was written at least three centuries before the birth of Christ, and is a well-known if mysterious and challenging book of the Hebrew Scriptures, regular, church-going Catholics in my experience harbor guilt over the moments when they feel like that desperate father: believers who want help with unbelief.
Far from being sinful, however, the possibility, indeed the reality of doubt, is an inescapable aspect of human existence. As Joseph Ratzinger wrote in the introduction to his Introduction to Christianity in 1968, “No one can lay God and his Kingdom on the table before another man; even the believer cannot do it for himself. . . . Neither can quite escape doubt or belief; for one, faith is present against doubt, for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt.” The image presents itself of the contemporary believer sitting across from the unbeliever, each thinking “perhaps she is right!” Ratzinger describes this as the “unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief.” What Ratzinger identified as the state of belief in 1968 seems only more intensely true today, at least from my vantage point as a priest perched at a Catholic university who has also since ordination attended a secular law school, practiced in a large law firm, and spent a year as a scholar in residence at that same secular law school. One encounters far more uncertainty and caution among self-identified believers, agnostics, and even atheists than pugnacious self-confidence, at least if my experience is a guide.
Seemingly keenly aware of precisely the dynamic that then-Fr. Ratzinger identified, Ross Douthat has given the universe of believers, doubters, and atheists a wonderful gift in his newest book, Believe. Douthat’s book has the hallmarks of his columns and other writings: a fearless willingness to challenge the broader culture, coupled with a humble acknowledgement of his own limitations. Douthat tends to be generous in sharing moments of his own faith journey when it can be helpful without oversharing or getting in the way. And while his prose and his arguments reflect a Harvard education and a keen intellect besides, he has written an approachable encouragement to belief accessible to a wide range of readers, and not aiming to settle the subtlest disputes of academic theologians and philosophers. “I have personally never read Eriugena on subjectivity, I defer to others on the proper interpretation of Duns Scotus, and we won’t be reckoning with the ontological proof of God’s existence or seeking a resolution to the debates over divine simplicity.” Rather, he aims to make his appeal on the basis of “ordinary intelligence and common sense.” One suspects that the latter approach is both more urgently needed and much likelier to help Douthat feed the family.
Douthat’s game plan in his book is neither too tentative nor too confident: he believes the case for religion is a case in reason and his arena is argumentation, but he does not take himself to have made an irrefutable case in reason for belief—just a very good one. This seems appropriate: if one cannot “lay God and his Kingdom” on the table for one’s readers, perhaps one can at least help them to see that for a reasonable and reasonably educated person there is room on the table for both, and maybe more reasons to believe than deny them. And while Douthat offers the gentle encouragement to those raised (at whatever level of intensity) in a faith different from his own, that they may be better off starting there, at least, and being believing Jews or Hindus or Muslims, he also concludes with his own reasons for believing that the Catholic faith is indeed true. One might say that this relatively short book is less an effort to replace doubt with certainty than to carve out the intellectual space for a certain kind of doubter to lean into life as a believer without resorting to fideism or mere emotionalism.
Douthat’s argument unfolds primarily over the first four chapters, which lay out a positive case for belief. The first chapter amounts to what one might call an inversion of the “God of the gaps” objection to theism, and a new look at arguments from design as supportive of theism. Next, Douthat considers the uniqueness of the human mind—the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness and why it is a problem for skepticism. In what may be the most surprising and challenging chapter for science-minded skeptics, he then turns to consideration of the persistence of the paranormal, and one is reminded of when Douthat made a public case in The Atlantic that we should ponder whether the use of pornography is tantamount to adultery—this is Douthat at his most Douthatian in his willingness to say, “hey, you may think this is weird but so is the world and let’s not be so dismissive of something because we find it weird or hard.” The last part of the positive case, as I read it, is his chapter on “The Case for Commitment,” which is at once a move to consider the practical implications for the preceding chapters (which, if he has persuaded a reader, should lead to some sort of assent) and suggest they lead not just to endorsing certain propositions but embracing some formal religious tradition. So we have a turn from the basic intellectual case to a rational consideration of the positive goods in store for one who does not just add God to the list of things one believes in (like gravity or evolution) but takes the further step of responding to God by practice of some faith tradition or other.
The final chapters of the book may be seen as answering what are likely to be the natural lingering questions from what I have called the positive case. In the straightforwardly titled “Three Stumbling Blocks,” he considers the classic Problem of Evil (why would a good and powerful god allow innocent suffering?), the history of wicked behavior by religious institutions, and the arguably odd preoccupation with sexual morality in many traditional religions. A very brief seventh chapter urges readers open to belief to consider returning, at least as a start, to the faith tradition they were raised in, or converting to one that has for whatever reason been intriguing, without worrying about whether one has exhaustively sorted through every alternative. For a certain kind of orthodox Catholic this may seem surprisingly loosey-goosey for the often straight-laced Douthat, but he seems to embrace fully the teaching of Lumen Gentium that “those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience” (§16).
Douthat concludes this gentle progression from suggesting that faith is rational on the preponderance of the evidence, then to the claim that religious practice is a salutary movement for those so convinced, through the superiority of religion to irreligion almost irrespective of which faith, by sharing his own story of conversion to Catholicism. One might say that while he has not delivered a heavy-handed sermon to revive “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” neither is he reluctant to explain that he really does believe that his Catholic faith is the truth. In a moment I will turn to some more detailed consideration of several of these themes, but for now it is worth noting that as Douthat presents his case it unfolds with nuance, gentleness, and the “common sense” that he lays out as his aspiration in the introduction. He has a few barbs for what he sees as bad arguments along the way, but generally seems to have tried very hard to have before him at all times in writing, as it were, an open-minded, faith-curious skeptic worthy of respectful engagement. If the New Atheists made a splash in part by their sometimes breathtaking hostility and often entertaining mockery of believers, Douthat is looking rather to make inroads more by respecting his reader than vanquishing a foe across the room. Here I will reflect a bit on Douthat’s main case for belief and why I think it is worth readers’ time.
A God of No Gaps?
For a long time, scientists and philosophers of science have pushed against the religious world view by claiming that it was rooted primarily in our inability to explain the phenomena of nature adequately. Carl Sagan famously formulated it:
As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It’s a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm.
The idea is that for primitive people religion was defensible because it sort of was science, but then we got real science and it has crowded out religion from the domain of the intellectually respectable in the way that Elijah crowded out Baal as a plausible alternative to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though now the fire was at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his chapter “The Fashioned Universe,” Douthat works a kind of jujitsu on this argument and notes that the more we learn about how strange and implausible the universe is, and how strange and implausible is our place in it, the more room science opens up for a belief in God. The scientific revolution, he avers, “has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order than what was available to either the senses or the reasoning faculties in the premodern world.” So while the Copernican revolution displaced a simplistic notion of a universe with Earth and humanity as its physical center, the scientific revolution has “consistently revealed a system that’s precisely balanced, exquisitely poised, in the alignments necessary to generate our specific kind of biological life.” This is often referred to as an argument from “fine tuning”—the universe seems to contain many features in its laws and constants that if they were tweaked ever so slightly would make lives and minds like ours impossible—so isn’t it very unlikely hospitality to us to suggest that it was indeed built for us after all? Doesn’t the lack of gaps, as it were, invite God back in?
There are rejoinders to the fine-tuning argument, of course. A leading contemporary physicist and professor of natural philosophy, Sean Carrol, calls it a “terrible argument.” Among other things, he argues that fine tuning is a kind of insult to God’s power—could a god worthy of the name not have made life an any number of ways? Why would God be constrained by what we understand to be the necessary building blocks of organic life? I suppose either side of this debate might fairly wonder whether the other was not begging the question by pretending to be kind to the other side’s biggest assumption: The theist says, “OK, I grant evolution, and quantum physics, and I say—wow, it’s amazing we got here and that awe leads me to infer a plan and a planner.” The skeptic in turn says, “Let’s imagine for a minute there’s a powerful planner like your god—couldn’t he or she or it have made life in any of a number of ways? Why would they need ‘fine tuning?’” I am inclined to think that both Douthat and Carroll make good points. Douthat is not wrong to suggest that the wonders of modern science may well inspire a reasonable person to join the Psalmist in stating “the heavens declare the glory of God.” And Carroll is likewise correct that such “fine tuning” as we arguably perceive does not entail a creator as a matter of basic logic. The picture that emerges from physics and biology may instead be more like the classic optical illusion that makes a viewer switch between seeing two vases or two faces—neither is exactly right or wrong.
As my friend and colleague, the Notre Dame philosopher John O’Callaghan, has long reminded me, “proofs” for the existence of God were not intended as “demonstrations” in the way that middle school geometry proves that parallel lines so not intersect. Rather, they honor our rational instincts to make more rather than less sense of underdetermined data. So if we think of Douthat not as trying to prove that God is unavoidable for a smart and educated person but that God is available and maybe even more attractive than the alternative to a smart and rational person, we can allow that Carroll is not a fool but neither is the believer.
The Left-Over Self
Until recent years, I read only “fundamental” books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as War and Peace, the novel of novels; A Study of History, the solution of the problem of time; Schroedinger’s What is Life?, Einstein’s The Universe as I See It, and such. During those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere and read fundamental books and only for diversion took walks around the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie. Certainly it did not matter to me where I was when I read such a book as The Expanding Universe. The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie called It Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over.
The Moviegoer’s Binx Bolling provides us the perfect transition to Douthat’s crucial second chapter, “The Mind and the Cosmos.” Here Douthat ponders how far the wonders of ChatGPT and Claude are from the wonder of the human person, considering what the philosopher David Chalmers has called the “hard problem” of consciousness—often described as the fact that there is “something it’s like” to be a human being in a way we do not believe there is “something it’s like” to be a calculator, even if the latter is much better at doing math. Likewise, for Douthat, while it is true that science is getting better and better at telling us which neurons are firing when a person tells a joke or comprehends an argument, it is a different task entirely “to explain how those impulses create all the subjectivities of human experience—the cogito of Descartes, the experience of agency and reasoning and judgment, the irreducible this-ness of sensory experience, which philosophers try to capture with the awkward term qualia, but that normal people know as the taste of wine, the scent of roses, the orangeness of the color orange.”
It is this subjectivity, this experiencing self, the one whom Percy so often noted can even manage to be bored and who can figure out all the mysteries of physics but still has to wonder how to get through a Wednesday afternoon, that is “left over” when the science runs out. And it is this person—me for me, you for you!—that gets all the rest of our wondering off the ground. Even more marvelously, Douthat asks us to note, that very self is just the sort of self that manages to discover just how her neurons work and just how fine-tuned the universe seems to have been for her to arrive and wonder about these things, and discover them, and worry about Wednesday afternoons. He has a guess:
The simplest answer is still the religious one. That the “I AM” of consciousness doesn’t just coexist with matter but precedes and shapes and organizes it, and human minds are unusually good at understanding the universe because we are further up the hierarchy than the animal minds with which we share the world, closer to the higher Mind or minds that preside and shape and supervise.
Once again, some skeptical lifeguard may insist that someday we will have a clear explanation with no self left over and we should avoid the dangerous waters of religion. Douthat convincingly shows the long odds against consciousness “explain[ing] itself away” and beckons us that the water is warm. Oxytocin may be the neuropeptide associated with feelings of affection, but I suspect we will always rightly want to ask for a hand in marriage by saying “I love you,” not by citing how much of the hormone is on hand.
Ghost Story
Though I am not sure what to make of it myself (an unavoidable fact, one supposes), I do hope that Douthat’s third chapter, “The Myth of Disenchantment,” gets the attention and perhaps even controversy it deserves. For here he fearlessly confronts the stubborn persistence of the downright weird and inexplicable—the paranormal, we might properly say. He opens with a gripping anecdote of mysterious and inexplicable music filling a house on a wedding day. The details have to be read to be believed and even then belief will not come easily for many. I will not spoil them here, but will note that the eerie events in question are attested not by a believer but by a famous public skeptic, Michael Shermer, with whose work I had been roughly familiar but of whose encounter with the beyond (even by his own atheistic reckoning of events the term fits) I had not previously heard.
The chapter includes multiple well-documented anecdotes of the strange and inexplicable, indeed mystical, each of which seems to pass the “Hume test,” that is, they are not offered by the credulous or religiously motivated but by skeptics and well-educated ones. If atheistic materialism is true then the “resilience of spiritual experience under secular conditions” is very difficult to imagine or explain. But the resilience seems well attested.
For a third time and a third chapter, it is worth noting that Douthat is not saying “now that you’ve heard these stories, you should sign up for baptism at the Easter Vigil.” Rather, more modestly, and therefore more persuasively, he claims “that faith has won a provisional point from atheism, that on this front the reasons to take religion seriously have multiplied rather than diminished,” when Hume certainly must have imagined that the advance of science would bring the opposite about.
Is Three a Crowd?
As noted earlier, the rest of Douthat’s book takes what this reviewer found to be a natural progression through steps that common sense might dictate: what is next, what about these questions. If you have found yourself intrigued by and open to Douthat’s case in chief I think you will find that his replies there are similarly reasonable and provocative. The book is not a demonstration but an encouragement—not the last word but an exhortation to pursue the Word. And it is throughout a generous sharing of Douthat’s own supple mind and generous spirit.
He can be pugnacious when he runs across an irresistible bit of foolishness (as in one physicist’s preposterous claim to have solved the problem of why there is something rather than nothing) but he is not spoiling for a fight. Much more often he is saying, with greater sophistication and greater stakes, what one might say to a friend afraid to try an exotic new food: “try it, you’ll like it.”
At one point in his chapter on fine tuning, Douthat quotes a review by the biologist Richard Lewontin of Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World, that scientists cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. I have always been fond of another line in that review that seems to me to undermine Lewontin’s confidence, though he is making a different point than I: “What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity ‘in deep trouble.’ Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.” Douthat will not convince anyone of the truth of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Believe, and he is not trying to. He might just get some of us to re-examine our prejudices—those that plague believers and motivate skeptics. He helped my unbelief, in any event.
