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Ross Douthat continues to use the NY Times to tout his new book on why we we should be religious. But he uses the same tired old arguments.
I don’t know if it’s considered ethical to use one’s newspaper column to reproduce excerpts of a book that you’ve written—at least if you get paid for both the book and the column, which would be double-dipping. But let’s leave that aside to consider Ross Douthat’s new book, which he’s excerpted twice in The New … Continue reading Ross Douthat continues to use the NY Times to tout his new book on why we we should be religious. But he uses the same tired old arguments.
I don’t know if it’s considered ethical to use one’s newspaper column to reproduce excerpts of a book that you’ve written—at least if you get paid for both the book and the column, which would be double-dipping. But let’s leave that aside to consider Ross Douthat’s new book, which he’s excerpted twice in The New York Times. In the latest article, below, Douthat gives several arguments for the existence of God, including his favorite one, which turns out to be humans’ ability to comprehend the truths of the universe. That comprehension is supposedly evidence for a divinity, for Douthat doesn’t see how natural selection could give us abilities beyond those that evolved during most of the six million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps. Click below to see his arguments, which are also archived here. And of course I try to refute his arguments.
First, here Douthat’s book, apparently part of an intellectual/journalist push to argue that religion (despite its disappearance) is really, really, supported by evidence. Click below to go to the Amazon site. The book came out yesterday.
I’ll also leave aside my problem that it’s hard to believe in God if you’ve already rejected that form of supernaturalism. However, Douthat is trying to pull an anti-Hitchens and convince us that, yes, there are very good arguments for believing in God, In other words, he’s trying to reconvert us nonbelievers. The problem is that he recycles the same old tired arguments that have failed to convince most nonbelievers, and so offers at best a lame argument. It sure doesn’t convince me, though, as I said in Faith Versus Fact, I don’t think it’s a 100% absolute certainty that no God exists. That would be an unscientific point of view. But I’m pretty damn sure that we live in a godless universe.
Here are Douthat’s arguments, most of which should be familiar to you (his quotes are indented):
1.) The three big ones. He considers the best evidence for God to be the “convergence of multipole different lines of arguments”, though the convergence of weak arguments do not, to me, lead to a very convincing argument:
Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.
Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.
The cosmic design argument rests on the so-called “fine tuning” of the universe, which of course has alternative explanations, including the fact that we do not know how fine-tuned the universe is since we don’t know what other combinations of constants would permit life; the anthropic principle that since we’re here to observe life, the constants must have permitted life; the view that the constants may be connected in a way that we don’t understand; the idea that there are multiple universes, only some of which permit life, and we happily happen to be in one that allows it (Douthat, not a scientist, rejects the multiverse explanation); that the universe would look very different from how it does now if it really was fine-tuned, and so on. For a good summary of these arguments, see Sean Carroll’s video and my post here, as well as Carroll’s summary at The Preposterous Universe. Douthat apparently has not considered these rebuttals seriously.
As far as human consciousness is concerned, Douthat doesn’t see how it could have evolved, and therefore sees it as a product of God. But we are beginning to understand the naturalistic underpinnings of consciousness, which means that evolution—either directly for consciousness or indirectly via evolution that’s produced consciousness as a byproduct—is a plausible alternative. For some reason Douthat ignores the evidence that other species of animals are conscious (some appear to have a “theory of mind,” which implies consciousness, as well as the ability to pass the mirror test for self recognition; see also here). Since Douthat sees human exceptionalism for this trait as evidence for God, what about the consciousness of animals. Why did God make them conscious. Douthat:
[God’s] infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”
Are squirrels and ravens also made in the image of God?
Finally, there Douthat’s argument based on “the plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions”. I guess you’d have to read the book to see what “disenchanted conditions” means (presumably not when you’re in church or taking LSD), but I’m always dubious that one having an experience of God (and I have had “spiritual” experience, which I don’t consider evidence for God) proves the existence of God. After all, people have illusions and delusions and experiences all the time that do not compoart with reality. People with anorexia look in the mirror and think they are too fat even though they are skeletal. But they are not fat. I could go on, but you can think of similar delusions.
But wait! There’s more!
2.) The universe is intelligible and we can use reason to understand it. To Douthat, this is the most convincing argument of all.
Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.
This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. (There is an even more intense argument that even having our thoughts align as they do with physical reality is extremely unlikely and miraculous, but I’ll just direct you down that rabbit hole rather than explore it.)
But the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness and assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning — that the response to stimuli that enabled early Homo sapiens to recognize the patterns, say, of a predator’s behavior ended up having adaptive use beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding.
As we’ll see in #3 below, Douthat doubts the evolutionary hypothesis for other reasons, but in fact I cannot see our powers of understanding the universe as something that defies naturalistic evolution. We have evolved through natural selection to understand what we could over the first six million years of our lineage. Individuals that had correct understandings (snakes might kill you, thunder means that there may be water, cat tracks are a cause of concern) are those who survived, while those who didn’t understand such stuff would not survive. This is of course not unique to humans, for many animals show what seems to be an understanding of their world, and what various signs and signals mean. Some birds know that if another bird seems them cache an acorn, they have to go rehide the acorn. The sure looks like reasoning, but it may be the product of natural selection—or even learning. And, of course, the ability to learn evolved by natural selection as well.
Douthat, though, says that we understand far more than we could have evolved to understand: our powers or reasoning far exceed what was “needed” by natural selection. Ergo Jesus and the last point:
3.) We understand far more about the universes than would be expected if our powers of reasoning evolved by natural selection. We can play chess, we can make music, we can send people to the Moon. How on earth did we evolve the capabilities to do those things? Douthat:
Even then, it seems likely that in many, many potential universes those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, that there would have been either inherent limits on our ape-minds or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration, as the practical gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any obvious evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap.
“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?
This to me seems a really misguided argument, for it neglects two things that have developed through culture, which, of course, though not unique in humans, are most highly developed in our species (advanced reasoning and complex culture). I could add writing, which allows us to pass on knowledge to a distant futurity. Once we have a big brain and an ability to reason, and on top of that culture and communication through writing or syntactical language, the sky is the limit. Playing chess or going to the moon is not a result of evolution, but a byproduct of an evolutionary process that eventually led to the development of culture and communication (both of which, by the way, would also be favored by natural selection, since we are social animals). Further, it’s not just us who have abilities that could not have evolved. Lyrebirds can imitate car doors closing or chainsaws; parrots can imitate human speech and song. While some imitation may have been favored by natural selection, surely the imitation of human speech has piggybacked on other abilities. Dogs and horses can be trained to do things that are completely unnatural to them, and would never have appeared in nature, but they get a reward for successful training. It’s not hard to see that these abilities are simply byproducts of these animals’ evolution. Now horses and parrots have neither the culture, language, or manual abilities to build spaceships, and so they haven’t done so, but one can see in many species potential abilities that could not have been the direct product of evolution.
And if we can see in other species these “piggyback” abilities, then it’s not so hard to see them in our own species. That, after all, is the line of argument that Darwin made in his books, showing that humans could have evolved because there’s a continuum between the features and behavior of other species and of our own species.
And with that I will conclude my argument on this Darwin Day. Douthat, I fear, is simply appropriating old arguments and cobbling them together to argue for God. But of course the best argument for God, which can’t be made because it hasn’t worked, is direct signs of God’s existence, like him spelling out “I am that I am” in the stars (that one is due to Carl Sagan). In Faith Versus Fact I list other arguments that would tentatively convince me, an atheist, of the existence of not just God, but of a Christian God. But no such evidence has appeared, so Douthat relies on The Argument from Lived Spiritual and Religious Experience. The words of the late Victor Stenger come to mind: he said something like, “The absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence—if that evidence should be there.” It isn’t.
Finally, there are arguments against God, especially Douthat’s Christian variety. One was made by Stephen Fry: Why does God let innocent children die of cancer, or kill millions through earthquakes and tsunamis? Presumably an omnipotent and loving God would have the ability to prevent needless suffering. I’m sure Douthat deals with that in his book, but I’ve heard all the justifications for that (“God gave us free will,” “God gave us a planet with tectonic plates,” “We don’t understand God’s ways,” and so on), and find none convincing.
Douthat is merely buttressing a faith that he probably learned as a child (he’s not a Hindu or Muslim, after all), and I’m betting that his book will be an extended exercise in confirmation bias. We shall see.
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Douthat has also touted his book on a podcast with Catholic believer Andrew Sullivan. I’ve listened to about half of their 1½-hour conversation (link below), but you can listen to it by clicking on the screenshot below, and you can see Sullivan’s notes here. An excerpt:
Ross is a writer and a dear old colleague, back when we were both bloggers at The Atlantic. Since then he’s been a columnist at the New York Times — and, in my mind, he’s the best columnist in the country. The author of many books, including Grand New Party and The Decadent Society, his new one is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (which you can pre-order now). So in this podcast, I play — literally — Devil’s advocate. Forgive me for getting stuck on the meaning of the universe in the first 20 minutes or so. It picks up after that.
For two clips of our convo — on the difference between proselytizing and evangelizing, and the “hallucinations of the sane” — see our YouTube page.
Other topics: Creation; the improbable parameters of the Big Bang; the “fine-tuning” argument I cannot understand; extraterrestrial life; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Hitch; the atheist/materialist view; the multiverse; quantum physics; consciousness; John von Neumann; Isaac Newton; human evolution; tribal survival; the exponential unity of global knowledge; Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; the substack Bentham’s Bulldog; why humans wonder; miracles; Sebastian Junger and near-death experiences; the scientific method; William James; religious individualists; cults; Vatican II; Pope Francis; the sex-abuse crisis in the Church; suffering and theodicy; Lyme Disease; the AIDS crisis; Jesus and the Resurrection; Peter J Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels?; and the natural selection of religions.
There are also shorter YouTube clips of the discussion here and here. The longer discussion is pretty much a precis of the article above, at least the bit I listened to. Sullivan says he pushes back just to be the devil’s advocate, but I haven’t yet gotten to that part.
h/t: Paulo
