Rational and Religious (with Ross Douthat)

How can we explain the world's underlying order? How does consciousness emerge? And why do people from such different cultures have such similar near-death experiences? Listen as Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of the new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, argues that these and other unanswerable questions underscore his argument for the rationality of religious belief. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss Douthat's reasons for embracing faith with confidence, why science only bolsters his belief, and why he thinks that more religion would be a good thing for society.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is March 19, 2025, and my guest is author and journalist Ross Douthat. He is an opinion columnist for The New York Times, and our topic for today is his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Before we begin, I want to mention this conversation may cover some themes inappropriate for young children. Feel free to screen this if you are a parent. As most Econ Talk listeners know, I'm a religious Jew. Some listeners, when discovering that, write me and say they're surprised because they've always thought I was intelligent. I sometimes respond by saying, "Well, you know, a lot of intelligent people in history have been believers: Isaac Newton, C.S. Lewis, Maimonides." And a typical response I get then is, "Well, sure, then. Then a smart person could be a believer, but now, I mean, those people wouldn't be religious now." Your book is an attempt to justify belief, or the exploration of belief,

• 1:41Speaker 00

  from an intelligent perspective. Give us the thumbnail for the skeptics out there. How could a thoughtful, intelligent, rational, educated, enlightened person in 2025 actually believe in an invisible being that you and I would call God?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  So the conceit of the book is that most of the reasons that made people, made it seem reasonable to be religious back then, as your correspondence would put it, still obtain today. And that there is a sort of master narrative of modern secularism or modern atheism that says, "Look, you know, there were good reasons to believe before Copernicus and Galileo." Or "There were good reasons to believe before Charles Darwin." Or maybe some people would say "There were good reasons to believe before neuroscience." Or, you know, the different, different, different sort of scientific revolutions are picked

• 2:42Speaker 01

  out and identified. And I think that those revolutions did, in fact, call into question certain specific tenets of specific religions. And, you know, we operate in the West inside a monotheistic, Abrahamic heritage. You know, we've had a sort of heavily Christian, Christian-dominated culture. And there's no question that, you know, the, the early scientific revolutions and revelations about, you know, the shape of the cosmos and the solar system and everything else challenged

• 3:21Speaker 01

  medieval Catholicism's conception of, you know, the, the order, the order of the planets and the sun and the stars, which was, I think, not really, strictly speaking, a point of Catholic doctrine, was more an inheritance from Ptolemy. But, you know, but it was something the Church was committed to, and that very famously created a particular crisis. Darwinism goes a little further and calls into question a lot of readings, Jewish and Christian, I would say, but especially Christian because of Christian ideas about original sin, of the Book of Genesis and the origins of human life. Right? So it's absolutely the case that science can check, can and has challenged particular

• 4:05Speaker 01

  doctrines and particular beliefs. But the General religious picture, and this is a book that, you know, I think for various reasons, tries to start by laying out a very general case for why someone would be religious before you get to whether you should be Jewish, or Muslim, or Christian, or Buddhist, or whatever else. The general religious argument that we find ourselves in a universe that appears to be structured and designed in ways conducive to the emergence, um, not just of order and sort of regularity and mathematical patterns, but planet, stars, and conscious life, that's a striking thing.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  There are lots of other possible universes that, you know, that would not contain anything quite like the world in which we find ourselves. The fact that there's a correspondence between that overarching structure and the mystery of our own consciousness, our own mind and its ability to penetrate into the deep mysteries of the cosmos and to understand them. And then the fact that a persistent feature of human culture from ancient times, from back then, as your correspondence would say, to the present, is religious and spiritual experience, intimations, experiences, some of them more commonplace, some of them more

• 5:32Speaker 01

  outre, some of them alarming, um, but experiences that persist under secular conditions, experiences that happen to people who don't believe in God, as well as people who believe in God, um, experiences that seem to give strong indicators that there are invisible forces in the world, higher, higher powers, if you will, that are interested in communicating with and being in some kind of relationship with us. I think that combination, general order yielding human life, a correspondence between our consciousness and the general order, and constant, persistent, enduring intimations of transcendence is enough to make it very, very rational to be a religious believer of some kind.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  And you couch it in the right way, I think, the probabilistic way that we're not talking about absolute certainty. That's one of the other gifts of science and the modern perspective, we're not talking about, um, 100% chance, this question is.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Is there evidence that might comfort a would be believer that is rational? I just want to add, by the way, that in your brief thumbnail, which is lovely, of how science challenged faith, the other, I think, narrative about the past, which I find amusing, is that everyone believed in God and was 100% religious until Darwin, and then nobody believed in God anymore, except a few crazy people. I'm pretty confident there's been nonbelievers throughout much of the ancient past, and that

• 7:18Speaker 00

  science did have an effect on where the balance of the evidence lay for some people. But this idea that people were robotic, people who were comforted constantly by, say, the existence of an afterlife, is, I think, kind of a foolish way to look at human history.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I agree, and I think you, at the very least, you would say you have only to look at human behavior in the past to get a strong indication that whatever people formally believed, they were not living their life in some way where it was, you know, they were not manifesting the kind of certainty in belief that you associate with, you know, saints, great philosophers of religion, you know, pious peasant women, whoever else, right? You know, one thing, in Christianity, we have a lot of debates about the doctrine of hell, that is a, you know, a big point of debate and discussion, always, but especially

• 8:24Speaker 01

  nowadays. And one thing you'll often hear is a complaint from critics of the doctrine who say that, you know, "Well, the fear of hell was this sort of horrible, this horrible punishing thing that hung over every Christian believer for the last 2,000 years and made their life a misery." And obviously, there are cases where that is true. There are people whose psychology has been warped by an overemphasis on eternal damnation. But if you go back and look at, like, the history of the Middle Ages, at how Christians were actually behaving, at what was, I think it's fair to say, a peak of formal belief in the doctrine of hell. I don't get the strong sense that, you know, the average knight and chevalier

• 9:09Speaker 01

  in 13th century France was waking up every day thinking, you know, oh, to hell, it's this thing that I have to think about all the time that's gonna, you know, that's preventing me from having a good time and, you know, smiting my enemies and bedding my mistress and anything, anything like that. People, people have always been people and have always tended to prioritize the immediate and the material, even under cultural conditions, obviously, that, that make religious belief seem more compelling and more commonplace.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  I want to start with the topic as we get into the details of the book. I want to alert listeners who are not interested in this topic that I won't let it go on for more than five or 10 minutes. I'm sure many of you out there are tired of this topic. I am ceaselessly intrigued by it, so I don't know how painful it is for you out there. But we're going to talk about consciousness. And in particular, what the book, and you write about this quite poetically and quite beautifully, there is a belief, very common belief among highly educated people, that there is nothing beyond the material, that the brain is a set of electrical signals. There's no such thing as the soul.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  It's a, that's a childish idea that we have no material evidence for. And so as a result, a lot of the things that people say about the human experience, those are just the freakish electric signals that the brain produces. And that's just the reality we have to face. That's, you alluded to the advances in neuroscience. We've looked into the brain. There's no soul there. There's no little creature, the real us. So what does consciousness and the brain have to do with your view of belief?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  I sort of think that a primary question that drives the divide between the religious person and the non-religious person is what do we think is the primary thing in the cosmos? We have access as people experiencing life to two broad categories of things. One is mind. It's the direct experience of being a conscious being, whatever that may mean, right? It's an experience I'm having, you're having right now, having this conversation. And the second experience is the experience of matter and the material world, which is

• 11:56Speaker 01

  filtered through our conscious experience, right? If I touch the table here or, you know, rub my laptop screen or something, I'm having an encounter with the material, but that is then being translated in some way into into my conscious experience, the experience of being a self in the world. And I think the religious argument is basically just that we have a variety of good reasons to think that mind is probably primary and matter while real. The question of what matter actually is, is itself a slightly harder question to answer than some materialists tend to think, but you said only five or 10 minutes, so we'll

• 12:39Speaker 01

  set that one aside and just say, there are good reasons to think that mind is something primary. And those reasons start with the fact that it is very, very hard to give a clear account of how the experience of mind arises from, in any kind of direct scientifically testable way, from the electrical impulses and everything else and chemical reactions in the brain. Clearly, the two are intertwined in some way and, you know, obviously, you know, neuroscience has demonstrated convincingly that certain parts of the brain have certain effects on your consciousness, just that we sort of knew that already.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Because we knew that drinking strong spirits had a strong effect on your consciousness. But we know a lot more about that now. So there's no, I think, a sort of hard Cartesianism where, you know, mind and body are completely separate in some, in some, some way, and they only attach at one particular point. That seems wrong. Consciousness somehow interpenetrates the material. But yeah, there's just no, there's no good account on offer from, I think, from any materialist or reductionist. And I've read most of those accounts that it actually explains what consciousness is and how it works. And the best you can get to is a kind of illusionist case, in a sense, which says

• 14:04Speaker 01

  that, you know, consciousness is sort of, it's, it's an illusion of control, right? We have the illusion of selfhood and the illusion of control, and this is advantageous in some way that is then hard to explain because presumably if it's an illusion of control, all the processes would run the same way without this sense of being a spectator and a passenger and an actor, right? So it's sort of like, you know, you think that you're making choices and making decisions, but really you're just sort of watching a movie and thinking you're participating in it. But wouldn't it be simpler to have a universe where there wasn't, you know, where the systems just ran on their own if the conscious observer isn't actually doing anything?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So I think it's, I think materialism struggles to explain consciousness, but then we also just have a number of sort of more of specific reasons recently, including the ones I alluded to before, but adding in some of the spooky stuff that goes on with quantum physics and the way that measurement and mind seems to interact and sort of collapse possibility into reality. There's a number of ways, I think, in which the case for mind as a primary thing has actually gotten stronger in the last hundred years, notwithstanding all the advances in neuroscience and everything else.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  What I think about it is our command of the material world as human beings has expanded unimaginably over the last century. It's part of a much longer process, obviously. We understand extraordinary things about the universe, about the cosmos, about the microcosmos. It's a weird thing that one of the few mysteries the brain has failed to fathom is the brain. It's like, well, it's only one way to look at it. It's only one thing. We've done an extraordinary job everywhere else, so this is just one little corner we're struggling with. It's kind of an important corner. It's the corner with which we access the universe.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  And our experience could just be, it's a matter of time. Some people believe that. Some people believe it will always be veiled from us. Using a brain to understand the brain may be beyond our capabilities. Alan Lightman on this program, we'll link to that episode, interviewed him a few times, but on one of our conversations, his view is that, and I think this is a common view among scientists, is that the brain's capability is just a bonus. Some of the more aspects of the brain, which we might talk about, yearning, I would talk about a sense of justice, regret, embarrassment, many of the human emotions that we experience

• 16:53Speaker 00

  intensely inside this little thing we carry around with that's called our head, those are just things that, they're just sometimes negative bonuses, sometimes positive bonuses. They're just things that came along for the ride. And you're arguing essentially that that's not a very appealing argument. It's not an appealing argument, for sure. It could be true, but it's not appealing.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think that the weakness, and I've read a bunch of Lightman, actually, and... The problem is still the explanation of whether they're a bonus or not, right? Whether are they essential to the functioning of the brain or not, right? Could you have human beings without consciousness? Could you have P-zombies, right? As the idea zombies, basically, human beings who do everything that conscious beings do, but are in fact not conscious, right? Could that exist? Those are really interesting questions, but you, there is still also just the primary question of how do you get consciousness? Like, how do you get it?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  How do you actually generate this kind of particular experience, which has different layers, right? Like, it's, there's sort of a primary experience just of the mystery of like yourself in the world, you're having the experience of this conversation. Like, how do you experience the redness of a rose, right? The quailia, to use the lingo of neuroscientists, the qualities of existence that are not explained just by doing, deconstructing the chemical composition of the rose. Then you have above that, like, reason and judgment, right? Like, what is, what is it to reason? Human beings reason abstractly. What does that, what does that mean in the context of a material cosmos?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  How does a strictly material cosmos generate abstract reasoning that works? That's sort of the further question, right? You said, you mentioned, we've unraveled all these mysteries, figured out all these things, developed, you know, an abstract language of mathematics that just happens to correlate really well with how objects work in the real world. How does any of that work? Enlightenment, as I recall, spends a certain amount of time talking about emergence, right? Which is the sort of catch-all term that... Would be, well, they wouldn't say they're reductionists. The people, they would say, we're not reductionists because we think consciousness is real. We just think it's emergent. It's an emergent property. And I'm not sure if I'm getting the Lightman one right, but I think he talks about like

• 19:27Speaker 01

  the motion of a car, right? Like it emerges from the wheel and the axle and everything else, right? You have, so it's not, you know, you can't define it to one material thing, but you know it when you see it. But, but consciousness is just not like the motion of a car. You can observe the motion of a car and draw a strict material correlation between the movement of all the parts and the larger motion. There's no such connection with consciousness. When people talk about emergence, to me, they're still talking about magic.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  And of course, the, you know, and this is, we're now about to move on to a new topic, but we're going to stop at one that I think I'm also more interested than my average listener, which is AI and whether it will become conscious. What most, many AI researchers believe is that just as the brain, the electrical signals of the chemicals and the flesh, the physical entity of the brain yields consciousness in a way that we don't fully understand that any one piece is not decisive, but all them together allows consciousness to emerge.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  They believe that AI will have the same experience that although we don't understand exactly how artificial intelligence currently works in responding to our queries on chatbots using LLMs, just, it's a better time. It'll just coalesce and emerge the way consciousness emerged out of the human physical things. And then the AIs will be conscious. And we'll have many of the experiences that humans have of agency, of longing, of regret. You know, my example, which I was probably tired of, but you know, that a Roomba, that a

• 21:22Speaker 00

  vacuum cleaner might wish it had become a driverless car and yearn for that, that that could someday happen.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  I'm a skeptic, but the truth is, I have trouble explaining my skepticism because I don't understand how humans have yearnings to be other things and to regret what they've chosen in the past, they've staked out. So I don't, since I don't understand that, I can't really rule out a machine being able to reach that place, but I'm skeptical. So in your-

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's the right, I think that's the right posture for the person like you and I, who thinks that this is a seeming hard limit on materialism. You should be skeptical that just by sort of building a machine without having any conception of how to make it conscious, but just building something that seems to do, you know, produce outputs that are like the human mind, you'll get the inner, the inner experience. But you shouldn't rule it out precisely because we don't have a materialist account of how consciousness emerges, right? So it is, you know, it would, if it turned out that at

• 22:39Speaker 01

  some level of complexity, AI suddenly manifests consciousness in, you know, and again, it'd be hard to prove exactly, the proof question would, would be a tricky one. I certainly think people will think AIs are conscious before they are.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  I think that, that is almost certain. But, but if it did emerge, that would not actually prove anything about materialism, because materialism still wouldn't have an account of how it had actually happened, right? And I mean, to put on my like spooky, spooky weird religious stuff hat for a minute too, there is an element in the AI project of a kind of, I mean, well, in Jewish terms, it's the Golem legend, right?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  But there's, but it's a summoning, right? There is in some way, an actual sense in which the AI project is saying- We are building agents that can do human things. And at some level, we sort of expect to call up, out of the vasty deep, a spirit that will inhabit them, which is part of the strangeness of our own time. I think there's sort of a general strangeness that is... One reason I wrote this book now is that I think we're in a stranger moment than we were 10 or 15 years ago in terms of sort of the spiritual and the material.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  And I think that's right. Let's turn to, as I promised, a different topic. And, you know, as a believer, there are certain arguments people make for faith that give me the willies. I'm sure you find that as well. One of those is relying on coincidences to prove the hand of God. Usually for me, that just shows a lack of understanding of probability, or I'll just say it that way. Another area that I'm troubled by, but you are not, is near what we would call near-death experiences. There are... You write about that.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  You write about mystical experiences, so-called spiritual experiences. I think many people have, and Allen Lightman writes about it in quite eloquent terms, the an experience of transcendence or awe. Hard to understand where that would come from in a material world, but we have it. But near-death is, and what people experience in near-death experiences is, it's never been, it's never spoken to me, but I want you to make the case, and you've studied it much more than I have. So, take a shot.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, so, I mean, so first, I agree with you that there are certain forms of religious experience that you would expect to happen.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Or expect some version of them to show up even were religion not true, God didn't exist and so on, right? And coincidence, you know, the person who has a dream that turns out to come true, right? Like, people have a lot of dreams, you live a long time, eventually one of them is going to stand out and look prophetic just through the law of large numbers, right? So I think the, I think there are ways, and now that, that doesn't mean I'm ruling out that you could actually have a prophetic dream, I'm just saying, like, certain things that people experience are expected to some degree within a cosmos that is not created by God.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Before you, before you go on and get to near death, you should make a reference, because it is kind of extraordinary as a case of this kind, the Michael Shermer experience. It's, um, it's a little bit off the charts. It did kind of, it was interesting.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's, so that's, that's more, um, I, I think the, the supernatural or mystical experiences that are more persuasive are the ones that don't seem like just law of large numbers things, that have some sort of concrete reality in terms of either the intensity of the personal experience, the correlates, like physical healing, near-death experiences, which I'll get to in a minute, or the example that I, I used, which is from the professional skeptic, Michael Shermer, a really smart guy who spent most of his career debunking bad paranormal and supernatural claims. Um, and at one point, he, in his

• 27:05Speaker 01

  life, he was getting married and his wife, um, had a radio that had been given to her, I think by her great uncle, but someone who had passed away, who meant a lot to her, who she wished could be at the wedding. And the radio had never worked. It was an old radio, it was broken, Shermer himself had tried to fix it repeatedly, could never get it to, could never get it to work. Um, and on their wedding day, uh, they, you know, went back into their house after the ceremony, they were, you know, and they heard music coming from the back of the house. And they went in, I'm not sure if they found it in the drawer, I can't remember the details, but it was the radio, and it was playing a love song, kind you would dance to at a wedding. And it did this, um, during, during

• 27:49Speaker 01

  the wedding, and then it shifted over to some kind of like, appropriate, again, appropriate, like classical music or something in the evening, and then it stopped, and it never worked again. And Shermer, Shermer was clearly, clearly really struck by this. And to his credit, he has, you know, he has, he has written about it several times and tried to come up with different theories, you know, maybe there's a multiverse and her great uncle is still alive in another branch of the multiverse and they have a way of communicating across the multiverse, right? I mean, you know, you can, you can come up with theories, but it, it clearly, it's a good case study of the kind of thing, and I've known many people who have had things like this happen to them, the kind of thing that happens in the world

• 28:31Speaker 01

  that you need some explanation besides just, um, you know, just coincidence and, and the law of large numbers to explain. And I do feel like people underestimate because we live in a regime of official secularism. Plenty of people are religious, but, uh, you know, if, if you go over to Yale Law School or, you know, write a Wikipedia entry or something, you're expected to sort of rule out supernatural ideas. People underestimate just how commonplace these kind of like weird experiences are. Not in the sense that most people are having them all the time, but lots and lots of people have a couple of things that happened in their life that seem like, you know, sort of like a finger pushing, pushing in a little bit.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Near death experiences then, sorry, did you want to?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was, I was, um, I was just gonna say, there's a natural, I think there's, those who are listening and haven't heard that story, and I had not heard it before I read it in your book, the radio story, I think the world's divided into two groups of people. The people who love the idea that that could be true, and not just that it happened, or that Michael Shermer tells the story, but rather that the world could work that in that mysterious, mystical and beautiful way. A lot of movies exploit that human longing. And then there's the other group of people are people who, who just assume Michael Shermer was on drugs that night, or he was, went through, he did something, somebody tampered

• 30:00Speaker 00

  with his manuscript when he was setting it up for publication. They can't bear the idea that such a thing could be true, rather than the other group that longs for it. So I just wanted to mention, I think that's just an interesting part of the human experience, but you can react to that if you want, then you can talk about near death.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, no, I think, I think that's right. I think there are people, there are certainly people for whom the default assumption, and this is sort of goes back to David Hume, right, is that If there's a miracle, by definition, it's so unlikely that you should look for any other explanation. And, you know, even though you think Michael Shermer seems like a trustworthy guy, and he's put this story in enough books, and if he had really been on drugs at the time, probably someone would have, would have mentioned it and said, "Ash Shermer, he was pretty, you know, he's pretty out there at that wedding." Nonetheless, the, yeah, the default should be that he and his, he and his spouse were deceived in some, you know, some, some way where had someone else been there, they would not have seen

• 31:01Speaker 01

  the same thing or had the same experience, right? Near-death experiences, I, I don't want to over, you know, sort of push, push this too hard. I have a strong interest in these stories. I don't think you can say things that are completely definitive about them, but basically, some meaningful percentage of people who experience something close to death, I'm not going to say it's death, because there's endless debates about when brain activity ceases and when you're really dead, but people who come to the threshold of death and then come back, have a strikingly consistent kind of experience of, you know, that involves the cliches that, you know, you hear about in pop culture, that, you

• 31:44Speaker 01

  know, you encounter, encounter dead relatives and ancestors. Sometimes you have a feeling of a kind of life review under moral judgment, right? Or, you know, there's some, it's not always under strong moral judgment, sometimes it's just a review of, of your life. There's the tunnel, there's the white light, there's feelings of love and peace and so on. And then, and, and this, this exists across cultures. It takes different forms. There are sort of, you know, you'll get some Buddhist features in near-death experiences in China and some Hindu features. And, you know, there's, there's clearly some sort of impact of cultural expectations or religious expectations on what, what you see, which is itself an interesting

• 32:29Speaker 01

  point. But there's also, but these experiences are

• 32:34Speaker 01

  They're quite different, as far as I can tell from reading the literature and from talking to some people who've had them, from hallucinatory experiences or dreams, which are the two things they're most often analogized to. They have a intensity and clarity of experience. They're perceived as more real than real. They are life-changing. People who come back from them change their metaphysical perspectives, change their moral perspectives, sometimes in ways that don't go well. Like, you'll have people who are like, "I'm, you know, I'm committed to a higher power and I'm leaving my family," or something. Like, it's not like a simple, "Everyone becomes, you know, everyone just becomes good because

• 33:18Speaker 01

  of this," but it's life-changing, right? And, did you want to jump in? Sorry. And, and, out of, I think what you can say about them, at the very least, this is sort of my minimalist case for taking them seriously, is that it's really easy, like, we had, there have been plenty of near-death experiences in the human past, but we really just have not brought nearly as many people back from the brink of death in most of human history as we've done in the last 50 or 100 years, right? And it's just really easy to imagine a timeline where we start resuscitating lots more people under modern medicine, and we

• 34:01Speaker 01

  get a consistent pattern of near-death experiences where they're always just a complete chaotic jumble, what you'd expect from, you know, a brain misfiring, going into, you know, going terminal, or they're dreamlike and it's like, you know, they partake of the subconscious in some way, but it's dream logic, things don't make sense, you can't remember them after they're over. You know, that is what I think the materialist or the anti-supernaturalist who thinks there's absolutely no life after death would predict that you would get from bringing lots more people back, as we've done. And that's not what we've gotten. We've gotten these, again, sort of persistent cross-cultural patterns

• 34:41Speaker 01

  of experiences that have certain things in common, that seem kind of religious, kind of like gods out there. There are hellish ones and purgatorial ones, too, right? It's not the case that everyone who has a near-death, like, people have, people have ones where the judgment, sense of isolation, like, there's darker things. So it's also not just as simple as... Near death experiences prove that everyone goes to heaven or anything like that. Um, but yeah, I, I think that the, the fact that, the fact that this is, that you get something like this persistently in, in a situation where you're bringing lots of people back

• 35:23Speaker 01

  from the dead, dead, you have to count it as a point in religion's favor. Don't have to believe it all, but you have to say, ha, ha, if we didn't have them, anti-supernaturalists would be saying reasonably, like, look, you know, you say there's life after death. Why doesn't anyone who ever comes back from the brink of death say anything about this? Um, but in this world, you know, it's an interesting indicator.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, my, my skepticism on that, I mean, I'm, I'm agnostic about it. I know, it doesn't move me either way particularly, but, um, there could be lots of people who have jumbly awful experiences. They just don't get talked about as much. I would worry about that selection bias. Um, and of course the other worry now is that you're supposed to see a light at the end of a tunnel and, you know, I think that's seated and you're supposed to review your life and there's supposed to be dead people welcoming you as into the next world. And I just wonder how much of that's just an hallucination from having heard about it in the past. It, the problem with that-

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Well, but, I mean, there, there you, so one, one thing that's interesting is that, um, the people who start studying this in the 1960s find that, uh, Raymond Moody is the first person to really, to really write about this. People are embarrassed, like, people don't want to tell the stories in many cases. They're sort of embarrassed, embarrassed to tell them, like, they feel like, you know, this is this sort of profound thing that happened to me, but I can't really explain it. And I know that my doctors won't believe it, so I don't talk about it. Like, there was sort of a taboo around it for a while. Also, you know, there isn't any kind of clear correlation where religious believers

• 37:08Speaker 01

  have these experiences and atheists and skeptics do not. You get, you know, you're, to the extent that people have tried to do statistical analysis, it seems like you're perfectly likely to have a near-death experience without being a practicing member of a faith who has sort of a set of, a set of expectations. And then finally, I mean, I think the sort of wish fulfillment thing, like, so there are, there's near, what you might call near, near-death experiences that people have. So when, there's a lot of literature on this from, from sort of hospices and places where people are sort of steered in, toward death in their final days. There's a lot of literature on people when they get, you know, within a few days often

• 37:52Speaker 01

  of dying, and hospice workers, you know, can tell, like, okay, this person's a few days off from dying, they start, they start to see people, like dead, dead people. This is quite, quite commonplace, you know, spouse, parent, sibling, et cetera. That, I think, the skeptic can just say, look, you know, this is, this is sort of a, the brain has evolved this capacity to hallucinate in these ways at the brink of death because it, you know, smooths the passage and so on. It's a little harder to make that case with things that you wouldn't actually come back, like, under the normal run of evolutionary experience, people were not coming back from the dead, right?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  You know, you, you, you get, you get killed by a, by a rampaging leopard, wherever, you know, in a million B.C.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Sabre-toothed tiger.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Something. Sabre-toothed tiger, right? You get killed, like, what's, what's the evolutionary adaptation in, you know, as you're bleeding out on the ground, seeing a white light that you're never going to tell Grok, your fellow tribesman, about, right? Again, you, can you come up with some evolutionary jesso story for why it would be beneficial, maybe? But I think it's, I think it's, it's more of a leap and less of what you would expect. I, I think the skeptic is on firmer ground, saying, this is what I'd expect with things that happen to people while they're still alive and fully conscious, than things that we've only found out about by virtue of resuscitating lots of people who, in a prior dispensation, would have just died.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  This program is called Econ Talk. People get mad when I consider changing the name to something like our tagline, Conversations for the Curious. But there is an Econ Talk piece to this conversation, which I don't think has ever been raised on this program before, which is, you're making the case for religion. You're encouraging people to go on a journey, a quest, to explore it. Should church membership be tax deductible, say, in the United States? And the question I'm asking is, is it a benefit to the United States that people will join communities of faith, besides for themselves?

• 40:14Speaker 00

  As a classical liberal, when I lived in the United States, I just felt uneasy about the subsidies to religious life. I've challenged people about that. They don't have a good answer. They don't... I like to think that having people of faith who come together in religious communities is good for the body public, but you can make the opposite case easily. We'll talk maybe about that later. But what's your view on that? Do you think it's good for a country to have religious people in it?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, I think...

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Sorry. Just to make it sharper, should other people pay for that practice on the grounds that it's good for them, not just the practitioner? That's the better way to sharpen it.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, this is the terrain, honestly, where a lot of people are actually more comfortable, in my experience, having debates about religion. The sort of, you know, is it... There's a lot of people who shy away from the kind of conversation we were just having, but who are more comfortable once you get into a zone of whether or not religion's true, is it, you know, is it good for society in ways that then would have policy implications? I think the answer broadly is that it is. You know, this is sort of the... I think in ways that extend, though, beyond religious communities alone. I think religion...

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Genuinely, generally, not in every case, you can have toxic forms of religion that don't do this, but religion in the Western world, in the US, historically, has been a powerful source of sort of non-governmental social capital, sort of civic engagement, in ways that doesn't sort of fully substitute for, but does substitute for some of the operations of the state, especially in a society that has a welfare state, right? So, you know, if you're the strictest libertarian and you want to abolish the welfare state, maybe this argument doesn't have as much purchase, or maybe it has more purchase, right? Maybe there's more case for making...

• 42:28Speaker 01

  But I think in general, sort of tax favoritism towards sort of tokevillian enterprises is a good thing, and religion falls under that category in the same way that, you know, the tax deduction for charitable giving, which applies not only to the religious but to the nonreligious, right? Like, I think it's good to have some kind of tax favoritism for sort of social engagement with positive externalities, might be the economisty way of putting it.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  And in the US, religion historically has really clearly fallen into that category. Now, is there any limit on that? Like, you know, for instance, I am currently, you know, totally open to the idea of taxing university endowments at a certain level, right? I think tax exemptions for educational enterprises are good, but when you have a, you know, an enterprise that's essentially running a giant hedge fund and is having, in my view, a terrible effect on American life, like, having some taxation is okay. And then I've made that argument, I've had people associated with universities come back to me and say, "Well, what about, you know, the Catholic Church owning all this property in Manhattan that's worth millions and millions of dollars?"

• 43:51Speaker 01

  And I, you know, in principle... I wouldn't have a, you know, I, I wouldn't have a problem saying there's some level of accumulated wealth at which maybe a tax could kick in, right? Like if it turns out that, you know, the Mormon church has $300 trillion because they've been so good at preparing for the apocalypse or something. And somebody said, look, the US has a huge budget deficit. We need to have a tax on religious endowments that kicks in at one, you know, at some high level. I, I don't, I don't have like a hard principled objection where you can never tax a religious enterprise. But I think in the, certainly under current American cultural conditions where most religious

• 44:33Speaker 01

  institutions are not rich, they're poor, they're hand to mouth. Uh, most, you know, most Catholic parishes are not rolling, rolling in USAID money, you know, no matter, no matter what the Trump administration might sometimes suggest. Um, yeah, I, I think, I think tax exempt status is generally a good thing.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I actually, similar issues arise here in Israel with the subsidies to the so-called ultra orthodox. Uh, I would actually take a different view, uh, at least as a first take. My first take would be that subsidizing, forcing irreligious or explicitly atheist uh, citizens to finance what they see as a, an illusion on the part of their fellow citizens is not good for religious practice. I think it discourages people from joining the religious spray. It embitters them and correctly, in my view. So my preference, whether there's a case

• 45:40Speaker 00

  or not, I would prefer that the government not subsidize religion, understanding religious organizations, understanding that that will probably mean there are fewer and there will be smaller. But at the same time, um, it will not have a backlash on the part of people having to pay for something they literally do not believe in.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I think the American, the American situation is a little distinctive in this way where, you know, we, we have never had an established church, right? So we've always sort of had, not always, like there's been variations, but sort of Treating religion as a sort of general good that's part of sort of the goods of civil society, I think, has historically felt different to people than like the particular subsidy that you get for an established church in, even now, in many, many parts of Europe, right? So like in Germany, German Catholics pay the Kirke tax or whatever, right, that funds German Catholicism.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  German Catholicism is therefore extremely wealthy, even though very few German Catholics go to church, and you have to like literally, you know, renounce Catholicism in order to stop paying that tax. I think that's obviously a bad system. And Israel seems to me to be kind of in this middle zone between the American model and sort of, you know, formal, old-school European establishment, where it, you know, it has a kind of soft establishment of religion that's related to its sort of, you know, its existence and identity as a Jewish state, that then takes on a sort of sharper edge in the subsidies you're describing.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  I think it's, yeah, I think it's, I think the resentment of that is entirely understandable, but is, again, somewhat different from a situation where you have seven different Protestant churches in a town, and, you know, they all get a tax exemption, but they're all like running a soup kitchen, and, you know, it sort of comes out a bit in the wash.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Now, the first part of the book covers what we've been talking about, which is, it makes the case for there being something that's not material, something that's above and beyond our understanding, really nicely done. And then you're faced with a more difficult challenge, which, which is, I mean, I have to pick an actual religion, I can't just think, "Well, maybe there's more to this world than is found in my philosophy, maybe there's something that's not material." But then you have to actually embrace, you make the case for embracing a doctrine of a particular religion.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  And I want to ask about that in a different way than you talk about in the book, I'm going to ask the question in a different, different framing.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  It's one thing to believe that the world may have been set in motion in some sense by something purposeful that we call God. It's another thing to think that that force still is around, cares about me, and asks things of me. And to me, that's the the real crux of choosing a faith, a particular faith. It's not very... It's interesting intellectually to embrace the idea of the possibility that there is a force in the universe behind its existence, but

• 49:19Speaker 00

  to go to the next step, which is that there's one that cares about me and asks things of me, is for many people, I think, a bridge too far. What's your reaction?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Well, and this is where I think the idea of converging lines of evidence is important, right? I think someone could be persuaded by, you know, some form of the arguments from design, supplemented by the evidence for sort of fine tuning in the physical laws of the cosmos. They could look at all of that and be talked into something like you just suggested, that something set this in motion. There's some kind of some kind of original intent, right? Some kind of deist maker. But yeah, it seems like a bit much to go from there to the author of all of this vastness actually cares about me.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  I think, though, once you get into the next two converging lines of argument that we talked about already, right? Start with the nature of consciousness. Okay, so consciousness seems to have... Our consciousness seems to have some connection to that larger cosmic order. It's capable of understanding it and sort of penetrating it. As far as we can tell, there aren't a lot of species in this vast universe. It gets into debates about aliens. But, you know, at the very least, we seem to be pretty distinctive in having this capacity. And then, as you mentioned, this capacity has along with it...

• 50:52Speaker 01

  A moral sense, you know, a desire for for justice, a interest in what is a good life, like an interest in, you know, all of these impulses that aren't just towards understanding. They are there, like, understanding is part of it, but impulses towards-

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Or survival. They don't seem to be solely related to propagating the species.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Right. And there's, you know, I didn't get into that in the book because there's all, I tried to sort of steer away from strictly Darwinian and evolutionary territory because that's so fraught and culture worry. But yeah, I think it's pretty, I think it is at the very least strongly indicated that we have moral impulses that transcend mere survival, you know, the mere impulse towards the survival of our of our genes. So you have you have that, those facets of consciousness. And then, yeah, I mean, if you if you find all of that persuasive, but find all evidence for religious experience

• 51:55Speaker 01

  or mystical experience to be just total woo woo nonsense, then maybe you still don't quite get to the point of being convinced to join a religion. But I think if you approach the evidence for religious experience with an open mind and combine it with the fact that our consciousness has these moral impulses, this desire to figure out what the good is, that when you combine all of those things, then you do have a pretty strong case that, you know, if there is an author of the universe, if there's a higher power, they might be interested in some kind of relationship with us. And there might be some way in which

• 52:35Speaker 01

  we should be trying to have a relationship and bring our lives into some kind of accordance with with what they want. Especially if there's life after death, right? Not only, but especially. And I think out of that, that is, that is the case for religion. Religion, the big religions present themselves as systems, technologies, if you will, for helping people figure out how- How should we be in relationship with whatever powers put us here? And what does it mean to be a good person in that in that context? And you can you do that on your own? Maybe? Is it smart to do it on your own? Not, you know, never, never submit or join or participate?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  I think it's not usually smart. And I think you can see that from just looking at other areas of human life. Can you play a sport on your own? You can, but you're never going to be that good at it. Can you do politics if you never, you know, join any political organization? I guess you can tweet a lot, right? But like, joining and participating is in most areas of human life is how you actually get somewhere with whatever you're doing that you think is important. And I think there's no reason to think religion would be any different.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Sometimes I worry about my own religious observance and faith because I think that perhaps religion is indeed the opiate of the masses. Maybe this is just comforting to me.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  In various ways, it's pleasant much of the time, not always, obviously, but it's often pleasant on its own terms. Then on the flip side, opium is the opiate of the masses. So, you know, if you're religious, you are, you have this thing that could be described as a crutch. But if you're not religious, one of the appeals of that is you don't have to have any responsibilities. And we just had Jeff Sebo on the program. It hasn't aired yet, Ross, you haven't heard it, but listeners to this podcast episode will have heard the Sebo episode if they wish. And he cares a lot about non-humans. It's a beautiful thing.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  He cares about dogs and octopi and ants and maybe in other things and perhaps AI. And I challenged him and just as I should, I challenged Peter Singer. Why bother? Why would you care about those things? You shouldn't just have fun. And if you're not a belief, one of the, all I'm trying to say is religious belief comes with a benefit and so does disbelief. And they're both kind of, for me, kind of symmetric. And I think we sometimes forget that.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think the religious belief is, I don't think it's an opiate. I do think it's a crutch. And in ways that don't tell you necessarily anything about whether it's true or not, right? The last book I wrote before this one was about having chronic Lyme disease and being really sick. What that's like. And that was, you know, one of the most, not one of, it was the most harrowing experience of my life. And I can't imagine how I would have gotten through it if I didn't believe in a God who, you know, had allowed this to happen for what, you know, I thought was some, had to be some reason. And I had to just sort of deal with it and get through it.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  And so religion was a crutch for me, absolutely, throughout that experience. In ways that don't prove that God exists, right? It could have just been like, I needed, I needed this psychological crutch to get through, to get through the experience. But I completely agree that for, in other contexts, clearly, the absence of belief holds deep attractions to people. Like, there's a reason people like the John Lennon song so much. The worst song in the world, right? From a religious perspective, imagine, right? Imagine there's no heaven, you know, some of it is like, oh, you don't have to worry about hell anymore. But most of it is like, imagine that the stakes aren't that high. You know, stakes just aren't that high. It's not a big deal. You screw up, you know?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Do terrible things, do mediocre things, and it's all gonna be over. Everyone ends up in the same place, relax. I think people, obviously, under some circumstances, find that tremendously appealing and find religion unattractive because it seems to break, you know, sort of break that spell a little bit and say, maybe it, maybe it counts after all. Maybe you should wake up.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think sometimes about...

• 57:24Speaker 00

  One of my favorite groups, music groups is Great Big C. They have a song called "Consequence Free." And the refrain is, "I want to be consequence free. I want to be where nothing needs to matter." It's a human longing. It's a real thing. It's unpleasant to be told you have responsibilities. And, you know, my, just as an aside, my view on the crush is, yeah, it's a crush. Don't you need one? Aren't we all broken? Aren't we all struggling to get by in this world? And why wouldn't you, if someone said, "Here, this will help you walk. This will help you on your journey.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  You'll be able to make your way." I take it. The next topic I want to talk about is, we could spend the next, I don't know, five or 10, 20 episodes of Beacon, talk on any one of them. So I'm going to ask you, Ross, if possible, to be, this is relatively brief, but you talk about the three big challenges to your claims. And I think they are the exact, you did a beautiful job in both deciding what those are, and your answers are thoughtful. One of those is one I spend a lot, I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about, which is, goes under the name of theodicy, the suffering that exists in the world.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  If God is good, God is just, why is there so much suffering? The second is organized religion doesn't have the best track record in human affairs. You and I might talk about our personal improvement from being a religious person. I feel that. I think it makes me a better person. But certainly you could debate whether religion writ large has been a net benefit for the world. Interesting question. And the third, which I thought was very, very thoughtful, was sex. The obsession, it seems, of religions with sexual constraints, sexual restraints, sexual...

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Restrictions, rules, interpretations. It's kind of a bummer. And it's kind of, more than that, it's like, it's, doesn't that seem a little bit unhealthy? Isn't there a better thing to focus on? So, talk briefly if you can, sorry to say briefly, because these are large.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  No, no, it's, it's, it's, I'll, I'll be, I'll try and be very quick. Settle all these problems in one manner or less. I think the last one is, on the one hand, a very culturally powerful idea right now, that like, you know, religious strictures on sex are just misogynist, or cruel, or unnecessary, or puritanical. But also, it's the one that I think is actually the weakest, the weakest argument. Not in every particular case, not in the sense of like, you know, oh, obviously, traditional religions are right about, you know, condemning divorce, or something like that. Like, you can, you can argue the specifics of any particular sexual point. But, in general, sex is really important.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Religions care about sex so much, because sex is bound up in, it's the taproot of all human relations, and community, and family, all human social organization, all sort of psychological formation, is connected to, to love, right, to romance, to relationships, but to sex. And, and I think you can see, in the world that we have made with less religion over the last fifty or sixty years, ways in which sex without strictures can, on the one hand, become extremely destructive. I think we've gone through phases since the sexual revolution,

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  where there have been deep and bitter social consequences for, sort of, making sex too casual, making promiscuity, making divorce, sort of, casual things. I think the history of America in the nineteen seventies is sort of a long testament to the problems with that approach. But then also, what you see now, I think, in the world, is something different, that like, sort of, sex also kind of needs encouragement, right? One thing religions do, they put strictures on sex, but they also encourage you to have it. Not if you're a Catholic priest. Right, not in every case. But the Bible starts with be fruitful and multiply. There's wedding imagery throughout both the Old and New Testaments.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Even in the Christian emphasis on celibacy, there's a lot of wedding stuff going on. And the interesting thing about the world today is that people aren't getting married. They aren't having kids. They aren't having sex at all. They're substituting sort of virtual forms of sex. And I just think that that trajectory should make people take seriously the extent to which religion took sex seriously. And if there's an author of the universe, if you can get to the point of believing that the author of the universe cares about you, which, as we said earlier, maybe you can't. But if you can, then he, they, whatever, probably cares about who you have sex with for the same reasons that you care about him.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  So that's sex. Institutional religion has done tons of terrible things, but I don't think there's any great evidence that religious societies are morally worse than secular societies, that worse things have been done in the name of religion than in the name of anything else. I think the evidence tends to run the other way. If we had an hour instead of two minutes, I would happily make a strong case that the monotheistic tradition in general is associated with a lot of things that we all consider moral improvement over the last few thousand years. Not that in every case my own Catholic Church or the Jewish rabinate or anything else is making all the right choices. Clearly, they're not.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  But if you're looking arc of history, religion's played a pretty important role in moral improvement. And societies that have cast off religion have not immediately become radically morally improved. I think the best case in that frame against religion is religion should be better. Right? It shouldn't just be okay. It should be better. And the truth is that, again, like Old and New Testament alike... You know, they are accounts of would be chosen peoples who are always screwing up, right? The advertisement, the advertisement of both, you know, the Jewish people and Jesus's disciples is here's a story, it's a really important story, it's about how God chose us and how we just kept,

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  we just kept messing it up, right? So at the very least, you can't say there's false advertising in Judaism and Christianity.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Shocking, actually.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  And then the problem for a marketing document, the Christian Jewish Bibles are both surprisingly rich. I mean, this is, this is a separate, a separate thing, but I do think one of the small arguments for taking the truth claims of Abrahamic religion seriously is that neither the Old nor the New Testament reads like you would expect religious propaganda to read at all, which is interesting. Finally, the problem of evil, I think, is a real and serious problem that has no sort of podcast-ready solution. I think it's a big mistake to treat it as a reason not to be religious. I think if you accept, again, if you don't believe

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  in God, fine, but if you accept sort of what I think is the good evidence for some kind of religious framework for the world, and then you're confronted with the problem of evil, you should say, well, you know, either I need a theology that makes sense of this, and there are theologies that aren't, you know, classical theism, that aren't, you know, that are, you know, sort of pantheism, dualism, you know, that process theology, like there's a, there's a bunch of different theologies that says, well, maybe God isn't omnipotent and omniscient in the way that Aquinas and Maimonides would have said, and that explains the problem of evil. I don't think those are the right call, but I think that's more sensible than becoming an atheist. But I also think within, you know, within monotheism,

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  you just, you just have this sense that like, this is actually something that if God exists, he wants us to wrestle with. That's why, you know, again, it's not a propaganda document, right? It's why Abraham is there arguing with God outside Sodom. It's why the entire book of Job exists. It's why the Garden of Gethsemane exists, right? That there is some kind of mystery here that is sometimes a reason to be angry at God and sometimes an understandable reason to lose for a time a sense of faith. But it's an argument that you're better off having inside the framework of belief than...

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Then it is an argument for leaving that framework behind.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  I did that. I did an episode with Susan Cain on her book Bittersweet. And for me, the Odyssey, especially the Jewish perspective on it, which

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  there are a zillion pages of Jewish grappling with this fact that there is suffering in the world and how could that be? But for me, it's a bittersweet thing. There's a lot of bitterness. The cruelty of human beings to each other is unfathomable and heartbreaking and maybe damages your faith in God or your ability to search for God. But the ability of human beings to rise above their own sense of self and help other people, make sacrifices, love,

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  strive, do extraordinary things, make ourselves laugh. The human carnival is just so rich. And you know, you could debate for whether the glass is half full or half empty. There's an extraordinary story by the Yiddish writer Ilperitz called The Three Gifts, which maybe we'll be able to find a link to it. I'm not sure it's online. It's a masterpiece on this question of whether the world is slightly better than it is worse, or slightly worse than it is better. And it's our job to push it into the good realm. But that's the way I like to think about it. I don't know why there's evil in the world.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  As one rabbi once told me, "I want to go stop trying to figure out what's in God's briefcase." So when people say, "How did the Holocaust happen in a world with God?" There's a lot of answers. None of them are satisfying, really. There's nothing that brings comfort in that area. But what does bring comfort is the incredible kindnesses that people did for each other in death camps that non-Jews struggled but managed sometimes, even once, but more than once, to save Jews.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  And finally, that, okay, maybe it's true. Maybe the world is an awful place. I don't know why, but... My job here is to try to make it a little bit better. I think that's a lovely way to look at the purpose and nature of human existence. And it's consistent with there being a God, even if I don't fully understand how that God runs the world, clearly beyond me.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think, I think if there's a problem of evil, and there is, there's also a problem of good, right? From, from the perspective of the, of the, of the pure skeptic. The skeptic has to explain two things, both why there is this sort of surplus of, you know, sort of moral aspiration in human beings that coexists with all the dark stuff. And they also have to explain just why everyday life has so many things in it that are extra good. Right? Again, like you could imagine a world where we ate food and we did it from compulsion. And, but we didn't enjoy it the way we do. Same with sex, same with any, any aspect of, of human life.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Like, there's a lot of excessive good added in that gives me confidence that, you know, at, at bottom, there, there is a goodness that is worth associating ourselves with, even if we don't understand why, if it's so powerful, it allows evil to persist as well.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  I want to just mention a metaphor you use. You talk about an open door. I think it's a really beautiful metaphor. When you think about the world of, of religion or the world of the transcendent, you know, you can pass by an open door and not notice it. You can pass by and glance over toward it as you walk by. You can stop at the door, peer in, or you can enter the room and see what it looks and feels like to be there. And I think your book is a, is an invitation to enter the room.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Hopefully, hopefully, at least somewhat appealing one, yes.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  What kind of reaction have you gotten from friends and colleagues? In a way, this is a brave book to write. You've sided with the irrational unwashed. Shame on you.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  I mean, people, my friends and colleagues already knew that I had a lot of weird ideas, honestly, Russ. So it's not, I think the most interesting thing about doing promotion for the book and having conversations like this one is just seeing, sort of, seeing the diversity of human relationships to religion. I think, you know, I haven't had a lot of conversations with hard militant atheists. Hopefully, I will, I should, right? But I've had a lot of conversations with people, sort of, in the borderlands between belief and disbelief. And everyone has, everyone has sort of a different reaction. That's part of what's interesting. There are people for whom, you know, the arguments for design and fine tuning seem

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  really powerful, but they can never imagine themselves believing in the supernatural. And then there are people for whom it's the reverse. I did a conversation with Andrew Sullivan, my fellow Catholic, who just, he was just like, "Look, I don't, I don't respond, I don't, I don't believe in the, you know, the fine tuning stuff. The universe just seems too big. Earth is too small. It doesn't seem like we're here for a reason. It's only when you get to the personal and mystical that faith becomes compelling to him." And then there are just a lot of people for whom, like, calling something God is too much, right? People for whom it's like, "I, I agree with you. Materialism is a flawed paradigm. I agree with you, there's more to all this than meets the eye.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  But saying it's God, it feels like presumptuous, or it has too much cultural baggage, and so on." So, I don't know, it's just been, I mean, I knew this, obviously. You know, people have different reactions. But since I'm doing this argument where it's like converging lines, right? It's just really interesting to see which lines different people want to follow and which ones, they're like, "No, that's, that can't be right." Right? Anyway, it's been very, it's been very fun.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  I want to close with a hardcore atheist who you mentioned in the book, which is Christopher Hitchens. You tell the story of encountering him in the kitchen of a party. And he asks you a question. I think it's a profound question. Give us the answer that speaks to you these days. Tell us what happened there.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  So he said, I had debated him once. I was actually filling in for Andrew Sullivan. I was very young and he was in his prime. And it didn't, the debate didn't go well for God. So, you know, but he liked talking to believers, as everyone, everyone knew. And so he cornered me at a Christmas party and started in on this whole thing about how, you know, what? If, you know, let's say, let's say we could prove it, right? That Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead, right? What would that actually prove? And I didn't, it was late at the party and I wasn't expecting that. And I, I don't remember exactly what I said, but it probably, probably wasn't the thing I needed to say to, you know,

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  save, save Christopher Hitchens' soul. But I think that was a profound question generally, because I think there are a lot of people for whom, you know, the possibility of weird things happening or mystical things happening and so on coexists with a sense of like, we can't, what, what can we do? What can we do about it, right? You gotta live your life.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Who cares?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Not, not even who cares. No, I think he would, Hitchens would say, I care. This is very interesting, but like, am I really gonna organize my life around it? And so part of, part of the point of this book is to say, like, there's enough stuff out there that it should, you know, you, doesn't, you don't have to embrace the particular, in that case, you know, the particular doctrine of, you know, Jesus as Messiah and divine person to say,

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  That should make you interested in religion, right? That should make you take religion seriously. And, you know, religion, there's a lot of different ways to be religious, right? Like, I, you know, I have known, you know, I have known monks, and I have known Christmas and Easter Catholics, and the monks are hopefully closer to God, but it's still better to be a Christmas and Easter Catholic than to have no connection to this possible reality at all. You should be trying to connect yourself to the possible reality, because it's very, because it's very important. That's, that's one thing. And then, because I am a Christian, like, you know, I, I do think that it's not just

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  the story of the resurrection of Jesus is not just a story about a thing that, a weird thing that randomly happened, like Michael Shermer's radio that we were talking about before. It's a thing that happened that was connected to the life that Jesus lived, the teaching that he offered, the way in which he died. He didn't just, like, die of cancer and then get resurrected. He died in a particular public way, tortured by political and religious authorities, all the rest of it, right? That the Christian argument is that this is a drama that is connected to the drama of the Jewish people, and is connected to a larger story of God's intervention in history in a way that, if you buy into it, helps make a larger sense out of what humans are

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  and, and what they're doing. So it's not, the miracle alone is not the only signifier here. It is the story in which the miracle happens. And I think a lot of what the religious quest is, is, you know, human life is a story. We're living out, we're, we have our own story that's embedded in a larger story of the human race, and it's good to try and find the place where you think your story fits into the larger story. It doesn't mean you're absolutely right, but that is a, that is a very worthwhile endeavor, I think.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Ross Douthat. Ross, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  You're very welcome. Thank you for having me, Russ.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.