Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat

Clifford Cook
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Ross Douthat wrote a book called Believe - Why Everyone Should Be Religious. This podcast reviews that book, page by page, to seek whether the arguments Ross Douthat makes for Christianity hold up to skeptical scrutiny. Can a Christian apologist withstand the critical review of a reader who doesn’t begin with the author’s Christian bias?

  1. 5h ago

    Questioning Religious Authority Isn't Embarrassing, Ross Douthat

    Ross Douthat says that people, when they have religious or supernatural experiences, they are… “…embarrassed to talk about their experiences at all, since they assumed that doctors and psychologists would sneer at them. That embarrassment is itself a key feature of our times. Yes, there is some natural human eagerness to believe in the supernatural, some persistent fascination with the marvelous or eerie, but as Official Knowledge has marginalized the mystical, that eagerness coexists with the opposite sort of pressure to dismiss supernatural experiences, even one's own supernatural experiences, lest one appear deluded or disreputable.” Ross Douthat goes on to talk about how Official Knowledge just doesn't allow any space for the supernatural, or religion. Poor, poor religion just doesn't have any space, he suggests. No one has any space to talk about supernatural things and then doctors and psychologists, those science people, they just sneer at you or people. Notice what Ross Douthat actually says. He says that people are afraid that doctors and psychologists will sneer at them. Why are people afraid of that? Let's look at this rationally, which means let's look at the facts of what's going on. Is official knowledge actually shoving supernatural beliefs out? Is it so that there's no space within institutions of higher learning, for example, for ideas that are religious or in other ways supernatural and magic No. That's simply not the case. There are 482 accredited colleges and universities in the USA that have a religious studies department. If you know anything about departments of religious studies, you know that they are overwhelmingly staffed by professors who themselves believe in religion. It’s not absolutely all of them, but most of them. Most of them come out of religious backgrounds. That's why they got a degree in religious studies, because the professional pathway is to get a degree in religious studies and then go become a religious preacher. So, there are 482 accredited colleges and universities that are training people to go out and become religious, and certainly encouraging students to go encounter religious ideas and to take them seriously. There are 850 accredited American colleges and universities that are religiously affiliated, many of them controlled by religious organizations. There are many more unaccredited Bible colleges devoted to teaching Christianity. So actually, Official Knowledge is thoroughly infused with religion. Official Knowledge provides dedicated special places, protected spaces, where religion is given a voice, where the supernatural can come in as a topic so that people can talk about it and take it seriously. Let's also look out on Main Street Official Knowledge. Where are the institutions in our communities? There are over 350,000 Christian churches in the United States of America. They are staffed by people who are preachers and priests and bishops and things like that. These are people who claim to have Official Knowledge. Are those churches being shut down? No, not by outsiders. Sometimes the churches are shutting themselves down because they just can't bring in enough people anymore, but that's a separate issue. There is no one from the outside shutting those churches down. We can take a look in the government. That's another source of Official Knowledge. You know what happens around the country now? Government meetings are led by Christian prayers. That's how they're opened up. They get a local preacher in there and they give a Christian prayer as a ritual opening to government meetings. What about in government schools? K through 12, high schools, elementary schools, middle schools, in an increasing number of states, are actually teaching Christian religion. It is legally required for a public school, a government-run, institution, to have the Christian-defined Ten Commandments. (Actually, in the Pentateuch, there are lots of commandments, but there are not 10 that are designated in particular. Christians have decided that there are 10 and decided what they look like.) Government schools are required legally to post that on the wall. So, public schools are being used to spread religious knowledge. What's the equivalent for skepticism and for atheism? Let's not look at science and say that, “Well, there are also departments of biology and chemistry and physics in universities.” It's true that those science departments exist, but science is not anti-religion. Science is neutral in terms of what's real and what's not real. Science is neutral, because it has a process of separating sense from nonsense, reality from non-reality. Science uses really rigorous techniques to do that. Science is not just sneering at people and intimidating them and making them feel like they're outsiders. Of course, there are scientists who are jerks, because there are people who are not nice in every group of humanity, but the scientific process itself is not at all anti-religion actually. I think you'll find that most scientists are perfectly decent, nice people. They don't engage in a programmatic suppression of religion. Science is not anti-religion. It's neutral toward religion. It critically examines everything. Science does critically examine claims that are made by religious believers. Yes, it happens that if some faith healer comes along, and claims to have certain abilities to heal people, through touch or through magic elixirs, or holy water, or stuff like that, scientists can come along and critically examine those claims. Critical examination means to take rational processes and look at the facts related to what religious people are saying. Do you know what happens much more often than that, so much more often? Most of the time, scientists are critically examining what other scientists say. Should Ross Douthat say, “Oh, people are afraid to go into science because they're afraid that scientists are going to sneer at them, and they're going to ask difficult questions about their work. Oh, that's so terrible. That's a pressure for people not to be scientists.” Would it be reasonable for Ross Douthat to say that? No, it would not be reasonable. Critical examination does not create a pressure for people not to be scientists. Critical examination creates a pressure for people to do good work when they are scientists. It's a pressure, yes. There is a societal pressure to not babble nonsense when you're working at a university or college. Yet there is that safe space of all of those religious studies departments, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all across the country, in colleges and universities that are in their very foundation constitutionally accommodating to religion. In fact, many of them are promoting religion. Official Knowledge is religious all over the place. What about the federal government? We now have, in the White House, an official White House Office for religious affairs, the White House Faith Office. In most branches of the federal government, you have Christian prayer meetings being held by the leadership, pressuring everyone in the government to take part, ostracizing people who do not take part. There is actually pressure and forces of social embarrassment against non-believers in religion from the federal government. The U.S. military has become an organization that practices religious indoctrination. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, as he fancies himself, the civilian leader of the U.S. military has declared that the war against Iran is being done in the name of Jesus, in the name of Christianity. He has established an official Office of Religious Affairs within the Pentagon in order to assess and maintain soldiers’ spiritual readiness, their spiritual aptitude, their spiritual health. The US military is huge, and the U.S. Military is now being used to pressure soldiers to worship, and not just to worship generically, but to follow Christianity specifically, and not even just to follow Christianity in general, but to follow certain kinds of Christianity. The Pentagon has eliminated official recognition for more progressive forms of Christianity, such as Unitarian Universalism. You can't be recognized as a Unitarian Universalist, or a Unitarian or a universalist separately, by the military. The military now requires soldiers to describe themselves as a member of some other Christian denomination if they belong to Unitarian Universalist associations. Under Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon also has no official recognition of atheists or humanists. Soldiers are simply not allowed to describe themselves in those terms. They have to recategorize themselves as agnostic, which means that they're no longer really certain that there is no God, with no gods at all. Now they have to describe themselves as not being sure, like they just haven't made up their minds. All the while, the U.S. military and the U.S. government is infiltrated by huge numbers of, almost always Christian, chaplains. There are Christian chaplains teaching soldiers to be Christian in the US military. Also in the U.S. Congress, every day, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, is opened not by some kind of appointed government official who has experience and expertise in secular affairs. No, both houses of Congress are opened by a Christian chaplain. There has never been a non-Christian chaplain in those positions. The U.S. Congress can't open if there isn't a prayer and a little sermon given by a Christian preacher first. So if we want to talk about Official Knowledge in the United States of America, the facts show that Official Knowledge is thoroughly dominated by a religious perspective, a supernatural perspective in general, and by a Christian perspective specifically. So why is Ross Douthat claiming that the opposite is the case? Ross Douthat is performing a really sad kind of maneuver that is being performed to reposition non-religious people and non-relig

  2. 1d ago

    Repaired Radios That Play Music Are Not Proof Of God, Ross Douthat

    The essence of this chapter of Ross Douthat’s book Believe is the claim that a lot of people think that there's just no evidence for religion, but in fact, there is. Douthat says there’s tons of evidence for a religious perspective. The supposed evidence provided in this chapter is that supernatural experiences, magic, appears in the form of things happen that cannot be explained rationally. That's where we get into the rub of it. “Cannot be explained rationally” means you haven't found the explanation of what happened rationally. It means that you lack information. When you say that something has not been explained rationally, that doesn't mean that it lacks a rational basis, a factual basis. It doesn't mean that it's supernatural. It just means that you haven't found an explanation yet. It's like, going back to an idea from a couple of episodes ago, kind of like thinking about a murder mystery. If someone is killed, and it's certainly a murder, and you find a murder weapon, like a knife in the chest of a person, and they're dead on the floor, but they're in a room that was locked from the inside, that’s a classic thing in murder mysteries, right? The reader is meant to ask: How could it possibly have been done? Who can explain what was going on? You can say there is no logical explanation. There is no rational explanation. That doesn't mean that ghosts did it. That doesn't mean that magic was involved. It means that you haven't found an explanation yet. Ross Douthat is falling for the mistake of failing to understand that distinction in this chapter 3. In a story that he uses to frame this chapter, I said in the last episode that I would get to this and now I am, the story has to do with an experience that was had by Michael Shermer, who has been the editor of Skeptical Enquirer and a very public prominent skeptical writer for a long time. In 2014, Shermer wrote a short article about something that happened when he got married. Earlier that year, in June, he met a woman. He fell in love with her and she agreed to marry him. Her name was Jennifer. She was from Germany, and she grew up being raised partially by her grandfather because her father was not in the picture. I don't know the details of that, but that's not really the important part. The important thing is that her grandfather was very important to her, but he died when she was sixteen yers old, and this story that Shermer relates took place many, many years after that. So, Jennifer is preparing to move in with Michael Shermer. They're going to get married, and a lot of her stuff is shipped over to his house and is damaged in the process. Let me begin to read this to you, word for word from the article Shermer wrote: “She had been raised by her mom, her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16. In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged, and several precious heirlooms lost. Including her grandfather's binoculars.” I want you to remember that part about the binoculars, and that a lot of stuff was damaged in the shipping process. Now we're going to go to the radio part. The radio part of this story is where Shermer wants to put the emphasis, and that's pretty important, that he makes that emphasis, instead of, you know, he could have emphasized something else. Anyway, Shermer continues: “His 1978 Phillips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried percussive maintenance, said to work on such devices, smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom. Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home. And in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings.” Now, I’m skipping forward a couple of lines. His new wife says, can we go talk in the back of the house, because I have something I want to say to you? “She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering absurdly if this combined printer scanner fax machine had also include a radio. Nope. At that moment, Jennifer shot me a look. I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller, the exorcist startled audiences. ‘That can't be what I think it is, can it?’ she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes.” Then Shermer’s article quotes Jennifer as saying, “My grandfather is here with us. I'm not alone,” as she cries. Here's something that I really think is pretty important in what's going on in this story: Michael Shermer made a series of efforts to repair this radio. He got new power source and he worked with the electrical connections. He also did the thing of whapping a radio, hitting it against something to try to get it to work. That detail is really important in what we're considering here because that's a common practice with electronic communication devices at this time, things like hitting a TV on the side, slapping it to get it to work again. That would often work. That tells you something about the very fragile nature of electronic communication equipment at that time. It was very arbitrary, that sometimes a radio or a television set would work. and then mysteriously, which just means you don't understand what's going on, it would stop working. That doesn't mean that there are demons or ghosts or supernatural elements causing the radio to work or not to work. It simply means that mysteriously, these things stopped working, but then, somehow, you would do something like hit them, and then, sometimes that would work, and sometimes that wouldn't work. It would get the device to work again, which certainly is pretty bizarre. It means you don't know what you're doing, but kind of you jiggle things around and stuff happens and sometimes that would actually work. A lot of the times it would work. And then a lot of times the radio or TV would just stop working again. What that should tell you, as you're reading this story, is that it's actually very common for these electronic communications devices like radios and TVs to go through periods of working and not working that you don't quite understand. It happens in odd ways. So that's the story that Michael Shermer is talking about: There was a radio, and Shermer did at least a partial, maybe a complete repair of that radio. Then, later on, the radio worked. So he fixed a radio and then it worked. The mysterious part is that the radio didn't seem to work for a long time in between, three months in between. However, Shermer had shoved the radio in the back of a desk drawer. He shoved the radio so far back that when the music was heard, Shermer and his new wife actually went to their next door neighbors to ask them, “Are you guys playing music? What's going on?” The radio was playing so softly, they had trouble hearing it. So, it's actually quite plausible that during the three months in question, that radio was playing at different times when they couldn't hear it. It’s also possible that the radio was playing, but Shermer and Jennifer would just presume that somebody else was playing something somewhere else, like the at the nextdoor neighbors’ house or in another part of their own house. It just so happens that they looked for the source of the music this time. That's actually a really rational explanation for the experience Shermer described, in which they had just been through a wedding, and Michael Shermer's new wife felt as if the radio was her grandfather talking to her from the dead. So we have, on the one hand, a pretty plausible explanation for the experience, which is that a piece of 1970s communication electronic equipment was highly unpredictable and would start working and stop working at odd times. On the other side, we have something else. Ross Douthat is willing to accept a weird idea: That the radio playing a love song, after Michael Shermer's wedding ceremony is proof that his wife's grandfather was using the radio, coming back from the dead, to try to communicate with his granddaughter. Here’s what Ross Douthat is overlooking: The weird supernatural explanation actually requires evidence. It requires evidence apart from merely not understanding how the radio could have turned on. Radios, after all, when you put batteries in them and you repair them, often work. It’s quite normal for old radios will work unpredictably. So, we have a very clear, plausible scenario, with clear lines of evidence. We know that radios work. We know that radios work better when you put batteries in them. We know that radios work better when you try to fix them, which Michael Shermer did. We also know that radios from the 1970s were unpredictable. Thus slapping it up the side of the radio to try to make it to work could be effective So we have a very clear set of evidence there for a rational materialist explanation. What do we have on the other side, for the argument that Michael Shermer's wife's grandfather, who had been dead for many years, somehow was able to come back to life, and was able to use a radio to communicate with his granddaughter? Well, first of all, we have to ask this question: Why would we think that the grandfather was using the radio to communicate with his granddaughter from beyond the dead, the grave, from the dead? Are we supposed to pres

  3. 3d ago

    The Foreskin of Jesus Is Not Magic, Ross Douthat

    Lies do not become more truthful simply because they are repeated. They typically become less credible. That is the case with the lies that form the basis of Roman Catholic claims of miracles, such as the appearance of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, as well of the miracles performed by the head of St. John the Baptist, and the foreskin of Jesus, which is miraculously supposed to be held as a holy relic by 31 different Christian churches. These miracles aren’t hard to explain. They’re blatant lies told for the sake of crass economic benefit. Welcome to Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that is devoted to an examination of a single book. That book is Believe: why everyone should be religious. The author of that book is Ross Douthat, a right wing Christian pundit. We are now on page 71. We have entered into chapter 3 and chapter 3 begins with a pretty wild story, and it ends with that story. So we'll get back to that because it's kind of a frame for this entire chapter here. I want to remind you that Ross Douthat is claiming that, um, he is going to establish a reasonable grounds for belief in religion that doesn't require faith. He says that you just should be able to think with your logical mind and be rational about it, and it'll be obvious to everybody that religion is true. And so, this this chapter is about miracles. Now, miracles are by definition exceptions to the rule. They are moments when the ordinary rules are the standard ways of reality working are broken and anything can happen at all. So this is a really odd kind of thing because Ross Douthat has claimed that the existence of laws in the universe proves that there's a divine Lawgiver, but now he's arguing that the universe is actually lawless that, you know, anything can happen at any time. You can have miracles occur. Ross Douthat refers to one miracle in particular on page 71: The Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, Portugal in 1918. The official Catholic Church storyline of this is that there were these three children who started telling the adults around them that they had been talking to the Virgin Mary. The adults were like, “Really? You've been talking to the Virgin Mary, prove it.”The children said, “Well, the Virgin Mary told us that there's going to be something really funky happening up in the sky.” Okay, they didn't use a word “funky.” They used a Portuguese word which means, you know, something really fancy. It's going to happen up in the sky, and so thousands and thousands of Catholic believers, actually tens of thousands came to see if that would be true. Then, according to Ross Douthat, “The sun appeared to dance before tens of thousands of witnesses.” All of those witnesses were Catholic believers. You gotta wonder, why did tens of thousands of Catholic believers show up at a single location, simply because three kids said that they had been talking to the Virgin Mary. I mean, kids say a lot of things. Kids say, “I’m a superhero.” Kids say, “I’ve got an imaginary friend.” Kids say stuff like that. This is where the miracle begins to be suspicious. It begins to look like something of a setup, because, you know, I think most adults understand very well that when children say outlandish things, you need to take it with more than a grain of salt. So why did those tens of thousands of Catholic believers show up? Well, we'll get to that. The way that Ross Douthat describes this supposed miracle is kind of suspect on its own. He describes them merely as witnesses, but these were not disinterested witnesses, these were people who already were true believers in Roman Catholicism, members of the church, devout people who had been organized. To show up in this place. Let's get to the miracle part. The sun appeared to dance in the sky. According to Ross Douthat, that's really what happened. Actually, if you look at descriptions of the event that were gathered, That's not really what happened? Now, some of them may have used the word dance, but others got more specific. They said that the sun was going in great big circles and spirals in the sky. Yet other observers said that they saw the sun go in great big zigzags back and forth in the sky, and yet more, thousands of people who had gone there, as Roman Catholic, loyal witnesses to a predicted event that everyone was expecting to happen, said that nothing happened at all. The sun didn't move in the sky. So what was really going on? Ross Douthat says, well, this is clear evidence that God is is truly real, and that the Roman Catholic church is real, and that the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus who was an incarnation of God, actually, is around all the time and talking to people, and it's a miracle. Yay, it's magic! It's Christian magic! Therefore, you should be a Christian. Case closed, right? Yeah, not really case closed, actually. You see, the thing is, Ross Douthat seems to discount quite a bit of things. For example, people are really fond of telling lies, and when other people are telling a lie, they are awfully fond of joining in. We have a well-known story that describes this principle of human behavior. It's called the Emperor's New Clothes. When everyone in town, you know how it goes, everyone in town says to the emperor, he's got great new clothes. In fact, he's naked, but no one wants to say, hey, the emperor's not wearing clothes. I think that's what we've got going on here. Let me tell you why I believe that. When it comes to the Roman Catholic Church, Well, there's no nice way to put this. Roman Catholic Church has a long, long history of lying about miracles, absolutely lying about miracles. I will give you a very specific example. It has to do with holy relics that are supposed to have uh, magical powers, okay? The head of St. John the Baptist, for example. The head of St. John the Baptist has been claimed as a relic by multiple Roman Catholic churches. I mean, not just the church, but we're talking about specific cathedrals, specific churches. For example, uh, the head of St. John the Baptist is said by the Church of San Silvestro, in Rome, to be there, and they've got it right there in the church, and pilgrims come, and they pay homage to it, and they, um, expect that the, The head of St. John the Baptist is going to perform miracles for them. The problem is that the cathedral in Amiens, this is in France, also claims to have the head of St. John the Baptist, as does the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. All of these places are saying, “Hey, we've all got the head of St. John the Baptist.” Now, I don't think that even Roman Catholics believe that there has been a miracle where this head of St. John the Baptist has split into three copies of itself so that there can be three magical objects so that pilgrims. Will come to a church and pray at that church and leave financial donations at that church. You see, these holy relics are at shrines, and one of the things that happens at a Roman Catholic shrine is that people leave financial donations in exchange for the miracles that they believe they are going to benefit from the magic Roman Catholic spells that they are going to be the beneficiaries of while at these shrines. Do you know what those three little kids said that the Virgin Mary said to them, when she appeared to them, but nobody else could see her, they said that the Virgin Mary said that everybody had to build a shrine there to the Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal. Guess what? That shrine is still active today. And there are hordes of people who go to that shrine every year. It's a major destination, and the town surrounding the shrine has all of these shops that sell religious relics, and people give money to the church, at the shrine, and people are making a killing, a killing for these relics. Let me give you another example of the kind of relics that are out there in the world. There is, um, the foreskin of Jesus. The foreskin of Jesus. You know where the foreskin is, right? It's the little bit of the penis that is cut off from the body of a little boy when he's just a baby in Judaism, but also in most parts of Christianity. This is ritualized genital mutilation. The Roman Catholic church has claimed that the foreskin of Jesus is a magical object that can perform miracles. Specifically, it can help women to give birth to babies, to get pregnant. It can help men to become fertile when they have been infertile. It has magical powers, the foreskin of Jesus. There's just a little bit of a problem here. The foreskin of Jesus has been claimed to be kept as an object by 31 different churches. 31 different churches in Europe have claimed that they have the holy foreskin of Jesus in France alone. We have a church in Paris, one in Toulouse, one in shark, one in Metz, one in Conch, one in Lang, one in Besancon. You get the idea. There's one in Le Puy en Velet. I'm not pronouncing that exactly right. There's one in the abbey of Sharu, and we go up to Belgium and the Notre Dame Cathedral, not the famous one in France, but this one's in Belgium, just across the border. Oh, but back down in France. The church of Cologne, also has that foreskin of Jesus. The foreskin of Jesus. There was this problem in the Roman Catholic Church that so many churches said, we have it. We have it. We have it. We got it while we were on a Crusade, and we brought it back, and now we've got the foreskin of Jesus. It began to look pretty ridiculous, and then, you know, people started telling jokes about it. It got really out of control. So back in the 1600s, there was a Roman Catholic scholar and Vatican librarian named Leo Alatius. He said that what actually happened to the foreskin of Jesus was that when Jesus ascended to heaven, his foreskin ascended separately. It rose through the sky into the heavens into outer space, and the foreskin of Jesus is what became the rings of the planet Saturn. I'm not making this up. This is from a Catholic schola

  4. 4d ago

    Humans Learn From Experience, Not God, Ross Douthat

    In this episode, Ross Douthat tells a weird story about science being like a secret book written by God in a coded language that little kids invented to avoid being listened to by their parents. That is the unhinged fantastical kind of thinking that Ross Douthat claims is “rational” in his book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Science is a systematized way of building confidence in knowledge. It’s a way of establishing a rigorously complex culture. In this sense, science is not something that began during the Enlightenment. Present day science is not an odd departure from ordinary human behavior. It’s a progressively well-developed form of an inherently human way of being. Of course, religion is also an expression of an inherently human form of behavior. In every culture we know of, there have been bizarre, irrational systems of belief and behavior. Often, these systems promote downright self-destructive behavior, as is the case with Christian practices of flagellation. Humans are weird. Our weirdness seems to be a side effect of our capability for symbolic thinking. Ross Douthat seems not to have considered that the ideas and practices of his religion could be merely symbolic. Instead, whenever Douthat comes across a bizarre story of spirits, monsters, or gods from Christianity, Douthat’s first reaction is to assume that it is literally true. It’s as if human culture has told a joke, but no matter how many times it is told, Ross Douthat just doesn’t get it. Of course, Douthat does not assume the same literalist assumption for other people’s religions. He’s so lost within the supernatural stories he grew up in that he is unable to recognize his religion’s obvious fantasies. Instead, he reinterprets literal physical reality as just a magic trick played by a cosmic wizard he knows by the name “God”. Ross Douthat’s argument completely misunderstands how language is works. Language is not just a tool of communication. It is a tool of thinking that is developed in relationship to the world. So, any language that people invent and use, relates to the world. It isn’t just an abstract code. Language is a continually reinvented system of thought and communication that gets used only because it relates to the world. Science emerged as a very precise form of language. Science is not just a book of knowledge. Science certainly isn’t a transcendent book of esoteric knowledge written by a spirit and then hidden in an attic somewhere to be discovered by humans when they become mystically mature. Full Transcript: Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This podcast is a reading of a book by Ross Douthat., who is a right wing Christian pundit on 60 Minutes. His book is Believe: Why everyone should be religious. Everyone. Everyone should be religious, no one should not be religious, is what he's saying. Anyway, we are on page 60 now. In the second chapter, which is all about consciousness, and you could kind of sum up this chapter as a Christian version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember that old movie? It was a book before that old science fiction book, a not very science-y science fiction book, I have to say, by Arthur C. Clarke. In that movie, in that book, the whole thing is like, wow, gosh, human consciousness is so amazing, it couldn't have possibly evolved naturally, so there must have been aliens, in the case of 2001. But here this is a Christian version of that. Ross Douthat. is saying it had to have been a god that created souls, magical souls, and we are all magical beings that are just trapped in these biological bodies because, you know, evolution couldn't have done this. I mean, what are the chances? What are the chances that you develop a mind like this? Ross Douthat loves that kind of framing: What are the chances? Gosh, it's so unlikely. He is Ignoring the fact that the history of life on earth is over billions of years. Not millions, not thousands. Billions of years. That’s a lot of dice rolls when you have little living things breeding over and over again, sometimes with a very short life cycle of just a matter of days, when it comes to microbes, maybe not even a day, it. The reproductive period is certainly longer when it comes to human beings, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon, the longer lifespan and longer breeding period of human beings as well. Anyway, Ross Douthat is quoting this guy on page 60, Thomas Nagel,who asks, “Is it credible that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Ross Douthat. that is quoting a question there from Thomas Nagel. I wonder, to what extent, does Ross Douthat ever refers to the answers that Thomas Nagel might have explored. In his book, Ross Douthat is saying, it just isn’t possible for people to have biologically evolved minds that can think about theoretical physics. He asks, how could you have a human mind that is capable of doing computer programming and, you know, sending people to the moon and doing all of this elaborate stuff, making music? How could that mind have evolved from what our ancestors were doing? How could we have people doing complex mathematics and logical arguments? He focuses on physics, because he loves to think about the metaphor of the universe as a machine. He likes to think that way because that means the machine had to have been made by somebody. But anyway, the question Ross Douthat is asking is how can human beings be capable of complex thoughts, when they evolved, as, you know, apes out on the savannah, hunting and throwing rocks? Well, on its face, it's kind of obvious. You have a mind that is capable of making precise calculations of the arc of an object as it travels through space to hit an intended target. I mean, come on. That's a pretty complex kind of thought and people are really good at throwing and catching. That is pretty clearly an adaptive trait. Everyone can see that connection. Ross Douthat kind of ignores it. He's also ignoring a larger evolutionary principle, an idea that really isn't that difficult, which is that you repurpose things. An example is dinosaurs, including birds. We have the fossils showing that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers, you know, but a lot of dinosaurs did not fly. Birds are kinds of dinosaurs that evolved to fly. So what are those other dinosaurs doing with feathers, and how do you get the feathers there in the first place? Well, the feathers are not just good for flying. They're not just good for flapping your wings and creating an enormous lift. They're also good at conserving heat, holding the heat and they're like a blanket that you grow around yourself. They have some of that same function as hair. So you have feathers, which perhaps evolved first, to insulate, to keep the heat in, and then were repurposed. What happened with feathers was not a conscious decision, but they were available as these interesting outgrowths that then, with a long, long period of mutations, could be repurposed into devices to move air on wings so that you can glide through the air and then fly through the air and steer yourself through the air. They're also great sexual displays. I mean, why do we have birds that are so colorful? Feathers are displays as well. Single things have multiple purposes, and something that initially was developed for one purpose can be repurposed. What if we think about consciousness like that? Ross Douthat doesn't want to look at consciousness like that, but let’s do it. Look at consciousness as a tool. We all know one of the basic things that consciousness is good for. Consciousness is a focusing tool. You keep something in mind. You keep information in mind, but also purpose. Think about this in terms of the way that it fails us sometimes, because maintaining focused consciousness is hard. Have you had the experience when you walk into a room and you forgot why you wanted to go there because you're thinking about other things? You walk into the kitchen and you realize that you don't know what it was that you were coming to get. What was it? Food? Eas it coffee? Then you have the thing of reheating coffee in the microwave multiple times because you keep on thinking, “I’m going to remember that,” and you hear the beep and you're like, “Oh, just one minute. I'm doing this other thing. I'm doing this other thing. I’ll get to that coffee in a minute.” Then you realize you forgot it again, so you reheat the coffee again. That's a failure of conscious attention. Take a look at what's happening in our world. We have a world in which multitasking has become really essential, and yet we're coming up to the limits of some of our conscious ability because we're discovering that too much multitasking actually degrades the quality of our work. People are being asked to take care of many things at a time. In fact, you could say that's what human beings are specialized in. We are specialized in keeping multiple tracks of ideas going in our minds at one time. We take care of family, we take care of our work. We take care of social responsibilities out in the community, we take care of ourselves. All of those things at the same time. Now we've got this virtual world that we have developed, we have built. It's like a tool for us to keep information and ideas like a very elaborate notebook. The online world is not consciousness itself because it hasn't developed the ability to have this self-awareness, this thing that we talked about in the last episode, which is the phenomenological sense of eye and that sense of being a thing. Nonetheless, it is an adaptive trait to be able to hold all that information in a virtual space. We can think of our human ancestors as primitive, but they were actually engaging in remarkably complex pieces of behavior. They were making art. They were maintaining social connections that

  5. 5d ago

    What Ross Douthat Gets Right And Wrong About Consciousness

    Full Transcript: Welcome to Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that goes through a book that was written by a man named Ross Douthat. The title of the book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It claims to be an argument, a proof that religious belief is the most rational thing you can do, that it’s perfectly reasonable, even logical. So far, there hasn't really been any logic in this book. Logic is a very precise and formulaic thing, and Ross Douthat is not writing in that way. He's attempting to write persuasively, asking us to take a rational approach while not really engaging in a rational approach himself. Chapter two, which is where we're going now, in the pages 40s through 50s, is a perfect example of that. Ross Douthat is essentially engaging in a kind of whataboutism when it comes to belief in the soul. In this chapter, called the Mind and the Cosmos, he's writing about consciousness. He is proposing that consciousness is a supernatural thing. He claims that consciousness is not material, even though it's connected to the material, obviously, though somehow there's something more to it. I want to start out this podcast episode by talking about a couple things that Ross Douthat actually gets right in this chapter. The first has to do with acknowledging that consciousness is mysterious and remains mysterious. What does that word “mysterious” mean? It means that there's a mystery. It doesn't mean that you've solved the mystery. You don't have an explanation with a mystery. Think about it as like a murder mystery, the first two chapters of a murder mystery. In the first one, the murder happens, and in the second one, a bumbling police sergeant comes in and says, whoa, clearly, it was this person over here who did it. Then we find out that actually the facts do not support that perspective, or that this accusation doesn't seem to be adequate. There's not complete evidence for that. In this case, there might be two bumbling police detectives, so we might have a third chapter. Let me explain what I mean. First of all, there's the acknowledgement of the mystery. This is where Ross Douthat gets it right, when he writes that consciousness is mysterious, and you can't say that we understand everything about it. It is weird. Consciousness is not something that we can directly see in somebody else out there, whether it's a human being or another kind of animal. Consciousness is more than the mere observation of wakefulness. Consciousness is not just the sense that we clearly see that that person or animal has roused itself from sleep and are awake in that sense Consciousness is the experience from the inside of being, within a frame state of mind. It is subjectivity. It is what we call Qualia. “Qualia“ is a great word that Ross Douthat uses. It refers to subjective experience on its own terms, what it feels like to be something with consciousness. These descriptions are awkward. It's challenging to describe consciousness because consciousness is not itself a physical object, and Ross Stouthet is right in pointing that out. You can't pick up a cube of consciousness. It is something that happens that emerges from of our physical bodies, but as a mental awareness, not a substance. By the way, it’s not just the brain, but the entire rest of the body with the nervous system and hormones that support consciousness. Consciousness has a foundation in the physical sensations that you have throughout your body. To reduce it to something that happens only in the brain is simplistic. The whole idea that consciousness could exist only as a brain in a jar is missing quite a bit about what consciousness really is. Of course, it could be that if you could put a brain in a jar and keep it alive, there might be some kind of consciousness going on in there. We really don't know because nobody has ever been able to do that, so let's put that off to the side because that's outside of the realm of anything that we can really examine. It's a thought experiment, but highly speculative. The point is that people experience consciousness directly. Nonetheless, there is a barrier to fully communicating about consciousness, or understanding it directly in other ways. Much of the grist for romantic comedy and drama arises out of that gap. You can't know another person's consciousness. You can't even know your dog's consciousness. We see signs of it. We see other people acting as if they have consciousness, but we can't know it directly. We can't do a mind meld like in Star Trek with Mr. Spock the Vulcan. That's science fiction. It's not real. There is no evidence of actual psychic powers. In fact, scientific experiments have routinely found that any kind of results that indicate psychic powers cannot be replicated. There is evidence that psychic powers do not exist. The inability to reach out and share consciousness directly makes it really difficult to talk about to understand what consciousness is. That’s why people have struggled with discussions of consciousness for many thousands of years, going back to ancient philosophy. There are people who seek to dismiss consciousness as an important question, saying that it's just an illusion, but in fact, consciousness is maybe the most important question of all. Of course there are other important questions. I'm not going to get into an argument about what the  most ultimate question really is. That's an argument for somewhere else with somebody else. Consciousness is a very important topic to consider. One of the reasons for that is death. Death is coming, and in the meantime, pain and suffering is a considerable portion of conscious experience. What’s important about that is that pain is embodied. Pain can happen in a mental sense too, of course. There can be emotional suffering, purely within the consciousness, but more directly, we experience pain when things happen to our physical bodies. There is a connection between the physical body and our consciousness. It is the most urgent thing in our consciousness to avoid suffering, to escape hunger, escape sleeplessness, escape torture, physically, because it affects our body and affects our consciousness. So, we have the first chapter in our murder mystery. In this first chapter, the mystery is identified: What the heck is going on with consciousness? Now, in the second chapter of this murder mystery, religion shows up and says, “There is a soul, and the soul exists completely separately from the body, and it’s created separately. It can float outside of the body, and it can you know, exist as a ghost after you die.”That's the first bumbling police sergeant coming in to the story. Upon any kind of examination of what that religious police sergeant is saying, however, we have to respond with the recognition that there isn't any evidence of a soul that is separate from the body, distinct from it, something that can survive death. We have no physical or other reliable forms of evidence, no substantiation for that. The soul as a seat of consciousness is a baseless assertion, a claim without corroboration. There is a second bumbling police sergeant that shows up at this point in the mystery, however. This second character claims that consciousness is present within anything that replicates what humans do. It makes the confident statement that anything that seems to do the kinds of things that humans do must be conscious. This argument is currently being made when about generative artificial intelligence, what we really should call large language models. Large language models are a little bit more than just stochastic parrots now. The latest iterations of LLMs have things like calculators added into them, along with a few other bits of software that mimic human language or coding in computers. They simulate online behavior. They imitate us, but the thing is, we know that these are just kind of mathematical models. They generate output that is plausible, that seems right. However, an imitation is often not the same thing as what it imitates. For example, if you take a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper, and you make a drawing that looks like a person, that doesn't make the drawing a person itself. It certainly doesn’t make the drawing conscious. There is no indication that there is anything at all conscious about artificial intelligence. Ross Douthat kind of discusses this issue in this second chapter, of his book. Some of what he has to say is on target. It really is ridiculous when people claim that ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude are conscious. We have no evidence that generative AI is in any sense conscious. In fact, all of the reasonable understandings what these systems do and what they are indicates that they are merely very fancy, very sophisticated pieces of software. They imitate other things, just as a drawing can imitate the three dimensional world without itself having three dimensions. Now we come to the equivalent of a fourth chapter in the murder mystery… metaphorically. In this fourth chapter of the murder mystery, the first police sergeant comes back and says, “Aha! You see, artificial intelligence, isn’t conscious! And you know what's more? I've got more things to talk about! I've got more evidence that the soul is, in fact, the explanation for consciousness.” The police sergeant continues: “Did you know that biologists and neurologists have not ever been able to fully explain all of the ways in which consciousness originates in the human brain? Therefore, consciousness must be a soul!” This outrageous leap of faith is like what Ross Douthat writes in the second chapter of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. He is claiming because scientists have not fully explained consciousness and its relationship to the physical body, the idea that consciousness arises in a soul must be true. The fact is that we have a huge amount of science that shows the relationship be

  6. 6d ago

    There Is No Magic in Quantum Physics, Ross Douthat

    Welcome to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that examines the book, line by line, page by page, written by Ross Douthat, a right wing Christian nationalist commentator, a pundit. He wrote a book called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross Douthat claimed that it’s a reasonable, logical book explaining how everyone has to be religious. He claimed that he's going to be able to prove that to you using the force of logic, of rationality. On page 30 and 31 now, we’re going to examine a new argument, and based on physics. In the last episode, Ross Douthat was claiming that the universe's physical properties, its basic structure, was determined, was chosen consciously by a God in order to create the planet Earth so that human beings could live on it, to worship that God. We talked about that idea in the last episode. Go back and look at that if you want to deal with that issue. Today we're dealing with another issue in physics. On pages 30 and 31, Ross Douthat is claiming that consciousness can impact physical reality. Of course, human consciousness does impact physical reality, in a sense. I mean, you choose with your consciousness to move your body and you can do things like picking up a rock and throwing it. That impacts physical reality. Ross Douthat, however, is talking about something else. He's talking about shifting reality, not through the body, but through the force of mind itself, consciousness itself.  Physicists, he says, have observed how simply being observed by a conscious mind changes what that little subatomic particle does. That’s a really fun idea, and there is something about that in quantum physics, something like that, but not exactly that. This is a case in which Ross Douthat has gone slip sliding over a slope by taking a presumption and amplifying it, misunderstanding quantum physics when it suits him. There is an idea that there are particles that are so small, subatomic particles, that the way that they move is not like the way that we watch large objects move. This has absolutely been demonstrated in experimental quantum physics. You see that little subatomic particles can sometimes act like waves, sometimes like particles, and they can be entangled, in a sense, to move in a certain way, in coordination with each other over a distance. It's weird. There is no doubt that quantum mechanics is weird. However, what Ross Douthat is claiming is that by having a human consciousness specifically look at a subatomic particle, that changes its behavior. He's going to use that to say that consciousness is the building block of physical reality. Therefore, physical reality itself is consciousness, and that's God, see, so it all makes rational sense. It's all scientifically proven. He's also going to use his claim about quantum mechanics later on, by the way, to justify all kinds of supernatural belief in things like psychic powers, ESP, premonitions, and ghosts, and in essence, religion and supernatural powers of all different kinds and beastly creatures and monsters. Once you start down that path, you open it up to all sorts of things, and soon you're talking about demons and ghosts and fairies, but for right now on pages 30 to 31, he’s not bringing that in yet. What Ross Douthat is saying is that consciousness affects subatomic particles, that when you look at a subatomic particle, it changes it from one condition to another. Here’s the thing: There has been something very close to that in the Copenhagen Theory, which Ross Douthat does accurately name, but he sort of doesn't represent fairly what the Copenhagen theory actually supposes that when there is a concrete determination, which is sometimes “the observer,” When there is that concrete determination of where a subatomic particle is, it changes the nature of that subatomic particle. Ross Douthat writes that the human mind seems to play some decisive role in making physical reality take shape with that. “The conscious observer places a mysterious but essential role in collapsing quantum possibility into physical reality.” This is kind of about making a kind of wave of quantum potential get condensed down into a physical particle. Ross Douthat says that requires human consciousness. Ross Douthat cites two physicists, in particular, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg as he makes that claim, but here's the trick. Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr both explicitly and publicly refuted the misinterpretation that Ross Douthat makes of of this experimental observation. I'm going to start by citing Werner Heisenberg, famously of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. “Of course the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e. processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being.” You don't have to have human consciousness for this impact to take place. You can have a physical device registering that something happened at the subatomic level, the quantum level. Now let's go on to Niels Bohr. Niels Bohr says this: “Unambiguous information concerning atomic objects is derived from the permanent marks such as a spot on a photographic plate caused by the impact of an electron left on the bodies which define the experimental conditions. Far from involving any special intricacy, the irreversible amplification effects on which the recording of the presence of atomic objects rests, rather remind us of the essential irreversibility, inherent in the very concept of observation. The description of atomic phenomena has in these respects a perfectly objective character, in the sense that no explicit reference is made any individual observer.” Again, you don't have to have a conscious mind for this to take place, a physical photographic plate can register a specific impact. What we're talking about is the distinction between potential and actuality in the quantum realm, and that's weird enough, but human consciousness, it turns out, has nothing to do with this. Another physicist, Richard Feynman said this: “Nature does not know what you are looking at, and she behaves the way that she is going to behave, whether you bother to take down the data or not.” Once again, Ross Douthat fails to understand the science that he attempts to describe, that he attempts to pull in to use to justify his faith. Ross Douthat has faith in the truth of his religion. He has faith that it's true, and he goes around looking for excuses to justify it. For people who are not already, in that faith, it just doesn't make sense, and it certainly isn't rational. That's why not everyone believes Ross Douthat.

  7. Oct 12

    Cosmological Constants Don't Fit With Ancient God Stories, Ross Douthat

    Ross Douthat’s argument boils down to the idea that because science is groovy, and the Christian God is the King Of Groovy, the Christian God must be the original inventor of scientific principles. In the next part of chapter 1 of Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, the author claims that evolution through natural selection proves that an ancient religion is true, even though that ancient religion never had anything to say about evolution through natural selection. Douthat also says that the cosmological constant proves that his favorite supernatural spirit specifically chose the mathematical principles that underlie the universe. Ross Douthat argues that his Christian god couldn’t have made the universe any other way. Perceptive readers will notice that this argument underlies the religious faith that the Christian god is all-powerful. If the Douthat’s god can do anything he wants, he could make any cosmological constant work. Alas, the fine tuning pretzel cracks and falls apart into moldy crumbs to be pecked apart by pigeons. Douthat is beginning to rely heavily on the unstated premise that if science has failed to explain everything, religion must be the superior choice, because religion claims to explain everything. So, whenever scientists encounter a natural obstacle to knowledge, Douthat jumps in and shouts, “Aha! You see? God must be real!” He might as well argue that because we have yet to unearth all of Egypt’s artifacts, ancient Egyptian civilization must have been created by supernatural kangaroos.

  8. Oct 9

    The Chaos of God Does Not Support Science, Ross Douthat

    Welcome to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that is examining a book that was written by Ross Dowthett. The book is called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Everyone. Imagine a world in which there isn't a single person left who criticizes, who doubts, who says no, I don't believe religion. Think about the consequences of that socially. Oh, but that's not the topic of today's episode. For today's episode, we are on page 22. Page 22 is one of those places in this book where Ross Douthat thinks that he's being really, really clever. The whole idea of this book is to try to get people to stay in religion, Even though there's tons of nonsense going on, nonsense in the form of corruption and abuse, power plays, nasty politics, but also nonsense in the sense of irrationality, the idea that there are miracles in religion and that anything can happen at any time. On page 22, is one of those places where Ross Douthat is trying to have it both ways, and he thinks he's really done a very clever logical maneuver here in saying that, gosh, the orderliness of the universe is just more proof that it was created to be orderly. Now, this is kind of his agenda in this first chapter, which is titled The Fashioned Universe. It's the whole idea that the universe was crafted just so that people could live in it, and that it's just impossible for the world to exist unless there is a Christian God, and he really goes on into Christianity over and over again. He's not really giving anything but a little token nod to any non-Christian religions. Let me go ahead and read to you what Ross Douthat has to say here and then we'll discuss. It is on page 22. “The progress of science has been guided throughout by assumptions initially instilled by the religious perspective, which few of the Copernican revolutionaries doubted, that the world at every level should be governed by predictable systems, that its ordering should be consistent across different regions, and at different levels, up and down.” So first of all, that's not from Christianity, those ideas. They are pre-Christian ideas that were, you know, being discussed in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient India, ancient China, in different forms, probably in other places we just don't have written records of them. This is not a religious idea. Let me explain what I mean by that, by relating it back to the previous episode, the one that came out yesterday, which was about page 18, where Ross Douthat was talking about how he believes that demons and angels and fairies and magic spells with witchcraft and gods are all real, that the supernatural is real, that ghosts are real. Wait a minute. If supernatural creatures and magic are the religious idea, how is it also the religious idea that the world at every level should be governed by predictable systems, that its ordering should be consistent across different regions and at levels up and down? How is it a predictable organized system in which you have people coming back from the dead as transparent floaty things that go boo in the night? That's not consistent. It's not orderly. It's not at all predictable. How is it orderly, up and down all the way to have genies who come out as clouds when you rub a lamp, and then they give you three wishes, and it can be anything at all. Anything, like magic spells. How is that predictable? What about the psychic powers? Ross Douthat talked about that on page 18 too: Psychic powers, premonitions, seeing into the future, reading minds, ESP. Ross Douthat is really trying to tell you that the world is an orderly place while also trying to tell you that magic is real. The ultimate magic is the magic of God. I mean, Ross Douthat is talking about predictable orderly systems at different levels up and down. Well, what about at the top? If you have a god who can do anything who is all powerful, and that is the Christian doctrine, that is the doctrine that uh, Ross doubt that is defending, can do anything, anytime, he can make your skin purple. Bang, just like that. He can turn you inside out. He can make you fly. He could make ten earths, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, just like that. Anything at all can make, oh, water into wine and, you know, fish and loaves and all that, you know, walking on water, raising the dead. That is not predictable. That is not orderly. What happened in the Enlightenment in the Renaissance was that people got a hold of some ancient documents that were pre-Christian. They read in those documents were these lovely ideas about order and different ways of looking at the universe that came from outside of Christian Europe. This whole idea that Ross Douthat has in this chapter that really it was just Christian European civilization that enabled these things in the first place, and that's where science comes from. He's trying to be clever and trying to say that really, a universe ordered by God with God's laws, well, that's that's clearly predictable, and that that should be very scientific, but it's not. It's completely arbitrary. According to Christian religion, the Christian God could decide that tomorrow, there's no more gravity, or that you need to breathe bubble gum instead of air. It's all arbitrary. The most arbitrary thing of all is saying that there is a god. And saying that that's all that you need to know, because like, whoa, no, wait a minute, if this is predictable and orderly, where did that god come from? Where did this God come from? Who designed the Designer? What it all comes down to is this: It is outrageous for Ross Douthat to claim that Christianity can be given the credit for orderly thought, predictable science. Order and predictability is actually totally alien to the religious perspective. The religious perspective that he himself has claimed is there with ghosts and witchcraft and things that are unproven and unprovable. Religion is not a source of order. It is a source of chaos. When you have a universe that is owned like a toy, by a Creator God who can just change the rules at any time and perform miracles for reasons that nobody understands and nobody knows, and you have a religious document like the Bible that is not even consistent with itself. This is not a source of the guiding principles of science, of logic and reason. You can have no order in a system that can be turned upside down, shaken around and have its fundamental principles changed at any moment. Ross Douthat himself is saying that this happens all the time with magical spells and magical creatures that defy the orderly model of the universe, defy physics and chemistry and biology, and all of the principles that we have actually discovered that we can observe. The truth is that all of the magic and all of the supernatural hocus pocus, all of the gods, none of them, have ever once been substantiated, by orderly, principled, independent investigations. It's all just a bunch of stories. A bunch of stories that don't hold water to science, and no, science is not everything that we need in our human lives. But if we abandon reality to fantasy stories, that we would love to believe are true, then we can fall for anything. Not everyone believes Ross Douthat, because people want more than just empty belief. People are tired of just being told stories, and then being asked to make real sacrifices for your imaginary creatures.

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Ross Douthat wrote a book called Believe - Why Everyone Should Be Religious. This podcast reviews that book, page by page, to seek whether the arguments Ross Douthat makes for Christianity hold up to skeptical scrutiny. Can a Christian apologist withstand the critical review of a reader who doesn’t begin with the author’s Christian bias?

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