Does God Want You to Listen to This Conversation?

I am honored to have New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the podcast to talk about his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious.

I’ve always seen atheism as my first intellectual position. Upon learning that many Christian doctrines declare that non-believers go to hell and are tortured for all eternity, I decided I needed to look into whether their claims were true and came to the conclusion that they most certainly weren’t.

Yet I don’t completely dismiss the idea that something beyond the natural world might be out there. Bentham’s Bulldog writes pieces on theism and makes arguments that I’m unsure how to think about but don’t strike me as obvious nonsense. A 2020 survey showed that 19% of philosophers leaned towards theism, so it’s not like the position is akin to anti-vaxx or young earth creationism, where none of the trained experts take the claims involved seriously. The fact that people just as smart as me have thought longer and harder about the subject and arrived at the position that God exists is enough to give me perhaps a bit of doubt about my atheism.

Debates around theism strike me as similar to those about AI doom. I can develop strong opinions on topics when there is empirical data we can bring to a question. So I have confident views on the best economic system, the role of heredity in determining cognitive and personality outcomes, what causes some voters to support Donald Trump, and whether humans have seen a major increase in living standards over the course of history. When it comes to speculation, trying to follow chains of reasoning, and arguments derived from analogies and thought experiments – which I think is most of what we have in debates over theism and AI doom – I don’t trust myself or other people to be able to do any of this well.

Douthat is someone whose political and cultural writings I’ve always found interesting, so I decided to give his new book a try. Believe focuses mostly on attempting to convince the reader that there is something out there beyond material reality, with only the last chapter making the case for Christianity. I found myself dividing the arguments into a few baskets. The best arguments for theism I think rest on fine-tuning and the mystery of consciousness. I found the supposed evidence for the existence of the supernatural – miracles, demons, the power of prayer, near-death experiences, etc. – less compelling. This was much of the focus of his conversation with Tyler, who also sounded very skeptical.

I ask Ross to assign probabilities on the supernatural being real, Christianity being true, and Catholicism being true. I then explain my main moral problem with traditional Christian dogma, which is that some portion of humanity will be sentenced to everlasting torture. We tend to think that any punishment should fit the crime one is guilty of. Few would say that an individual who has committed a dastardly act should be held down and tortured for decades, which leads to the question of why an all-knowing, all-loving God would do something similar on a much longer timescale.

We talk a good bit about the role of providence in human affairs, which I found quite fun. The conversation swerves into how Ross thinks about someone like Trump playing a preordained role in history. On the surface, this might seem like a somewhat silly part of our discussion, but it actually raises intriguing questions regarding how the mechanics of God intervening in human affairs would actually work.

Near the end, we get to the part of Ross’s book I’m most skeptical of, which is the alleged evidence for supernatural experience. If prayer is real, why not conduct a double-blind randomized study? I also bring up the Randi Prize challenge, which offered $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate supernatural abilities but never had to pay out. I have to confess however that I do find the story told by professional skeptic Michael Shermer about how his wife’s old radio started working on their wedding day to be very weird.

I do sort of love the idea that God is like a writer for a prestige TV drama, and history has all these A and B list characters that He shuffles around in order to move the plot along. The Roman Empire is maybe its own season. World War II was the finale of the one that began as the Industrial Revolution was taking off. Now we’re in the middle of Season 8, and AI, which started out as a minor character in the background, is about to become the main protagonist. The series finale is of course Judgment Day.

People like Trump and Putin are the main characters, the Starks and the Lannisters, while we lesser mortals are akin to the slaughtered hordes left on the numerous battlefields of the War of the Five Kings. The Hanania subplot is a pretty cool one. Five years ago I was nobody, now I at least have a (very bad) Wikipedia page, and can reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people on a daily basis, leading my fans closer to God or everlasting damnation. I start out as a rightoid, move towards rightist-tinged rationalism, become an influential figure among Elite Human Capital as I disparage the existence of the supernatural. Razib uses the tools of modern science to show I am related to Jesus and his neighbors in ancient Palestine, as the Lord starts speaking to me about how God is actually real, hoping to use (knowing he will use?) my biography and background to bring others into His flock. Ross Douthat convinces me to believe in God, I return to the faith of my ancestors, actually my childhood, and they run a big feature in the New York Times about what happened. All thinking people read it and become convinced God is real, helping us shake free of our cultural decadence and existential anxiety as humanity moves towards a new Golden Age. All thanks to me and this podcast. Oh and you get to live in a state of bliss for all eternity.

Very seductive! I can see the appeal of this. But as I tell Ross, short of the Lord or one of his angels appearing directly next to me, I have no way of understanding how one would distinguish Him sending me a sign from my own wishful thinking and intoxication with a very cool narrative that gives me an important role to play in a great cosmic story.

I did not become a Christian while talking to Ross, but I enjoyed his book, and perhaps some other souls will be saved among the listeners of this conversation. I think I will take him up on his suggestion to read They Flew and hope to also look into the question of the historical Jesus before long.

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