Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe

On 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious'

North Italian Painter, Two Angels, c. 1330, Fresco

All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few right-leaning columnists at the New York Times, stops short of asking everyone to join him in his Catholicism, or even in Christianity. Instead, he aims at a wider target, arguing in favor of believing in God and joining a religion.

Believe is not a treatise on why religion is good for you as a person, or good for society. Instead, Douthat writes that it is “especially important now to defend not just the spiritual but the religious — meaning not just the experience of the numinous but the attempt to think rationally about it, not just the personal pursuit of the mystical but faith’s structured and communal forms, not just ideas about how one might encounter something worthy of the name of God but ideas about what such a God might want from us.” Accordingly, the first three chapters argue for the factual truth of religious ideas like God, the soul, and spiritual experiences. The next three chapters make an argument that established, organized religion is the right response to these claims. A final, more personal chapter details Douthat’s own specifically Christian beliefs.

I’ve been nonreligious for most of my life, but nearly three years ago I had an intense spiritual experience. These days I still consider myself agnostic; I don’t fully understand what I experienced and I’m not convinced that anyone does. However, I have become religious, in that I can now regularly be found at my local Quaker meeting on Sunday mornings. So I should be well within the target audience for this book, and there are many things about Douthat’s approach that appeal to me, the emphasis on truth not least among them.

The first chapter of Believe rests much of its argumentation on theoretical physics, a subject near and dear to my heart. After completing my undergraduate degree in mathematical physics in my home country of New Zealand, I was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for a year of graduate study at the University of Cambridge. I set out hopefully, seeking the path to a career at the frontiers of our physical knowledge. When I got there, I learned that nearly every course within my main area of study was leading towards research in string theory, a speculative approach to unifying general relativity and quantum field theory that has become increasingly dominant, over several decades, without making a single testable prediction.

String theory might eventually yield results. I am not, myself, of the opinion that it is likely to. I had a choice to make: I could knowingly pursue a line of research that I didn't think was truthful, or I could give up a dream I’d been pursuing for years. Was it even feasible to change course, midstream, after I’d moved halfway around the world?

I went for a walk, started crying, realized I was partly crying because I hadn't had enough to eat, found a small cafe, and ate a small pizza. As the food entered my system, I made a list of people to talk to about shifting my intended field of study. I would change my life for the truth.

Accordingly, when Believe makes its initial appeal on the basis of scientific truth, I am honor-bound to listen. The first chapter sets out on a difficult task, arguing not just that the universe must have been designed by some sort of Mind but also that we, as humans, have some special link to that Mind “that not every created thing enjoys.” To support the claim of design, Douthat turns to what is often called the “fine tuning” argument. Drawing on the work of the religious physicist Stephen Barr, he explains that certain apparently arbitrary constants in our current best understanding of the ultimate physical laws of the universe require exquisitely precise values in order to give rise to hydrogen, to stars, and to the more complex elements that are created by stars. The fine tuning argument explains this apparently unlikely precision by saying that the universe was made, consciously, by a Creator.

The fine tuning argument requires caution. It’s not clear that we have a sensible definition of which universes are “possible,” especially since our current understanding of fundamental physical laws is certainly not fully correct. Nor do we necessarily know that hydrogen/stars/etc. are the correct conditions to require. It is hard to predict the behavior of an entire universe from first principles, and other possible universes might do equally interesting things that we would never have expected.

Still, Douthat correctly notes that these caveats have not stopped physicists from attempting to explain why this universe, in particular, should exist. Some physicists have suggested, for example, that perhaps every “possible” universe exists, and hence that beings like us would have to show up in one of them. I will freely concede that if we are going to allow the speculative notion of potentially infinite numbers of totally inaccessible universes into the discussion, then the speculative idea that a conscious Mind designed our universe ought to be allowed in, too.

Douthat wants to go beyond the fine tuning argument, however, arguing not just that there is a God, but that humans are special to God in a way that is not shared by anything else that we are aware of. Consciousness is special, he argues, because the “Copenhagen Theory [sic]” of quantum mechanics is “scientific evidence that mind somehow precedes matter.” Regrettably, Douthat’s argument here is based not on the work of any physicist, but rather on an essay in the Claremont Review of Books by Spencer Klavan, who holds a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Yale.

Approvingly quoted by Douthat, Klavan goes so far as to claim that photons, atoms and the like “cannot exist unseen,” and hence that all of our scientific theories about things that happened before humanity are “about how things would have behaved if there was someone there to watch them.” This is then used to set up an argument for God: “The most fearsome heresy of all … is that indeed there was someone there.”

Let’s think this through. If we suppose that observation by a conscious mind is enough by itself to collapse a quantum wavefunction from probability into actuality, and if God is essentially a conscious Mind, like our minds except perfect and all-knowing and much more powerful, then every wave function must already be collapsed, since God sees all. Yet we know from physical experiments that this is not the case, because this would make the entire field of quantum mechanics unnecessary! The postulates of Klavan, which Douthat encourages us to accept, thus bring us to a startling conclusion. We would appear to have scientific proof that God cannot possibly exist.

I hasten to reassure my readers that greater familiarity with quantum mechanics makes this conclusion easy to avoid. What Klavan has done, with Douthat eagerly following, is conflate the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics with a somewhat different notion about how objects might not exist unless they are observed by somebody. The “measurement” that collapses a wavefunction from probability to actuality in the Copenhagen interpretation is one of the aspects that is hardest to make sense of, but it need not be associated with a conscious mind. It is consistent with quantum theory to suppose that a photographic plate can “measure” a photon before somebody looks at it. Moreover, even if we do insist on involving human consciousness in the explanation of wavefunction collapse, we could certainly suppose that perception by God is not the same as the human observation of a physical measurement, and accordingly does not collapse wavefunctions.

In their eagerness for scientific signs of God’s existence, Klavan and Douthat shoot past these alternate, reasonable interpretations, and even imply that those who would opt for them have an ulterior motive of rejecting the “heresy” of religious explanations, instead of accepting what Douthat calls the “simplicity” of returning to “the fundamentals of the religious perspective on the world.” Within their suggested framework, Klavan and Douthat have got what they asked for: a scientific verdict on the existence of God. The poetic justice is readily apparent.

Some of Douthat’s subsequent writing emerges unscathed from this disaster. To his credit, Douthat does not pretend that choosing one religion out of many is a simple matter. Rather than immediately try to herd people towards his own beliefs, he argues more generally in favor of making the search, and of affirmatively choosing a tradition to engage with; his own Catholic beliefs are reserved for a more personal final chapter. This approach is a welcome departure from apologetic works in which religious diversity is unacknowledged or dismissed. Treading a path between maintaining orthodox beliefs and acknowledging the different beliefs of others requires diplomacy and careful wording, and Douthat, with his long experience as one of the more conservative opinion writers at the New York Times, has the right skills for this aspect of the book.

Other parts of the book fare less well. Discussing the mystery of how our conscious minds can understand the world, Douthat claims that “The simplest answer is still the religious one: that the ‘I AM’ of consciousness doesn't just coexist with matter but precedes and shapes and organizes it.” This “simplest answer” about consciousness inevitably serves as a reminder of how Douthat’s supposed “simplest explanation” for quantum mechanics went astray.

Relatedly, Douthat’s claim that we are “the readers that the book of nature was awaiting all along” seems to ignore the ways in which quantum mechanics presents us with a physics that does not appear designed for easy human comprehension. Douthat noted, back in that first chapter, that “quantum theory is, from one perspective, the place where the scientific project’s expectations of perfect order and law-bound predictability have finally been disappointed, its questions answered by paradox and riddles.” This awareness disappears when he later claims that our scientific successes prove that our minds were intended to comprehend the world. Perhaps he thinks that simply accepting the “Copenhagen Theory” would render the subject clear. It would not.

At every turn, this book wants to present us with a world that is fundamentally comprehensible. “When I invoke reason here,” Douthat reassures us in his introduction, “I don’t mean some incredibly complex or multilayered argument of the sort that only a great philosopher could understand.” Indeed, “one of this book’s recurrent themes is that if the religious perspective is correct, its merits — and with them the obligation to take religion seriously — should be readily apparent to a normal person.” As he later puts it, “the universe isn’t out to cheat you.” Conveniently, if you are overwhelmed by the variety of religious teachings out there, “you can assume that the wisdom of the human past and the workings of Providence have elevated a smaller set of figures and texts [the more famous ones] for a reason.”

This is Panglossian epistemology. Rather than engage with the true wild and confusing complexity of the world, Douthat simply asserts that God would not allow it to be so. But the universe is not a cozy sandbox in which the important objects are conveniently highlighted under your cursor. It’s maddening and multifaceted, full of wonders beyond our comprehension and details whose importance is not lessened by the profusion thereof. An honest look at the world does not allow us to rest on this sort of overconfidence in our understanding. As this book demonstrates all too well, such hubris can lead to dramatic failure.

Towards the end of Believe, Douthat retells the Parable of the Talents, from the book of Matthew. In the parable, three servants are given different amounts of money. Unlike the two with more, the one who was given the smallest amount is afraid of losing it if he tries to increase it by trade, so he buries his money in the ground. For this, he is punished. “[Y]ou will not be penalized for failing to reach the same exact destination as your neighbor,” Douthat explains. “The punishment is reserved for refusing to choose or act.”

I, too, am fond of the Parable of the Talents as an exhortation to set out upon our explorations with whatever gifts we have, even if they seem small or inadequate. Indeed, we should not need a guarantee that the task is within our capacity. The risk of going astray is very real, but the attempt does not need to be safe to be worthwhile.

Gemma Mason lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where she works as an environmental data scientist. You can read more of her writing at

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