I am someone who has trouble operating a toaster, so the physical world and how it works will always remain a mystery to me. So the physics argument would have been way beyond me. I appreciate your scholarly takedown of Douthat's contentions.
I've never understood why believers invest so much time and effort trying to convince others of the rightness of their views. Why don't they just practice their own beliefs in private? I suspect the answer is that they are engaging in a sort of authoritarian, fascist effort to establish control. I'm content to enjoy the daily reports from the Webb and Hubble telescopes, and marvel as our knowledge of the universe expands incrementally. And I have absolutely no desire to sway Douthat over to my posture.
Because if the claims of any given faith are true, and in the Christian faith in particular one is commanded to love your neighbor, then it would be wrong of someone not to at least try to communicate the benefits of this faith to you. A bit surprised an intelligent person can’t see the difference between reports from telescopes and this, but, okay. And that the only explanation you can think of is fascism… well, that says more about you than it says about Douthat.
I don’t know anything about proselytizing but I do know that religion practiced in community is far more powerful than doing it in private. I’d think that would be obvious, leading me to think that your answer regarding fascism and control sounds more like moving prejudices around a page than thinking. As for appreciating things to be in awe about, there’s a far grander experience in communing with it.
Hmmm. I've also become more religious of late, and later on in life, so this book appeals to me as well. Your critique actually makes me want to read this book and see what I make of it. I guess that's a win? Thanks for this
I love how you point out that their claim actually "proves" the opposite if not examined more carefully. Similarly, based on how you framed their supposed physics revelations I was left wondering why it would matter how precise or difficult it would have been for the exact conditions we live in to arise; we are talking about it from the fact that they did, so their rarity seems besides the point.
I loathe Douthat as a thinker and as a pundit, so I am impressed at your willingness to take him at all seriously, even if also mystified as to why anyone would bother.
I appreciate this review. I'm not a huge fan of Douthat, more because of how he allows his radical traditionalist Catholicism to shape his political views than any of his religious beliefs themselves, and while I know far less about physics or any of the hard sciences than I do about politics or social sciences, it sounds like what he and Stephen Barr are using to bolster their argument for a creator could just as easily be used to argue for the anthropic principle.
Does he address the anthropic principle at all as a counterargument? I'd also be curious to hear your opinions on the matter, or anybody's with a firmer understanding of the science behind it.
I've also become more agonistic as I've gotten older after several experiences I can't really explain weakened the conviction behind the atheism of my youth, but still for the most part believe that the benefits of organized religion, like the community, sense of purpose, and network effects for acts of charity, might have a hard time balancing the scales with the potential harms caused by the more dogmatic, disingenuous, or fundamentalist strains of it. Of course, I've met many believers who are genuinely good people, and come across philosophical principles I wholeheartedly agree with in religious texts, besides it isn't really my place to judge whether it's a net positive or negative in the first place and I'd never argue against anybody having the agency to make their own decisions about it.
Whatever my personal beliefs on religion, I understand that like any human institution or practice it's probably something of a mixed bag depending on (among other things) the humans involved in it and like those humans it's something that I'll probably never fully understand but can at least try to appreciate.
There is no meaning in taking Ross Douthat serious. When first I tried to read what he wrote, I suspected that the NYT put him in the paper instead of the international cartoon that they had shortly before removed from the (international) edition. But no, Ross seems to be a human being who is not worth reading. His religious bias is greater than our Milky Way. I suspect him never to read the comments, where readers point out, every single time, where he is mistaken. I don't think he is lying - he does not know anything outside the borders of his knowledge. Furthermore, I don't understand why the NYT keeps paying him for his explicit nonsensical ideas.
I also love physics, from a pop science viewpoint. I also love religion and the idea, however amorphous and undefinable, of a creator. The idea of a god in control of everything, and many other crazy interpretations, I find absurd and parochial. What I’m drawn to is a deep and intuitive way is the idea from the 11th chapter of St. Augustine’s confessions, that God exists outside of time, and we exist within it. Our consciousness exists between these two states, allowing us to be both in the observable present and the recent past, creating the idea of time we’ve created that, when examined in physical terms, exists entirely within the past.
Not a great review. The critic here obsesses over one small part of the book that’s meant to frame the argument, not stake a central claim.
And it’s not so much a takedown as a disagreement and quibbling about semantics. Klavan’s conclusion about quantum mechanics is that we reach a point in science where objectivity becomes impossible and theory is all we have. Therefore, if we hope science can explain itself, we’ll be disappointed. My guess is that Douthat probably feels this way too. Newtonian physics and Darwinian assumptions are long since outdated. It’s time to think differently about our world.
But I guess they’re not scientists so they’re automatically wrong about this. Argument from authority, but whatever. This is what science is these days.
I would’ve liked to know what the rest of the book was about. I guess there’s some personal testimony and biblical lessons at the end? Ah well, whatever, the critic here has made up her mind not to believe and goes back to the Copenhagen interpretation (it’s not a theory ackshually!) thinking this justifies the reluctance to believe in a mind.
I’ll just read the book while she goes and cries about String Theory and multiverses.
My main argument is not from authority at all. Klavan made a specific suggestion about the relationship between quantum mechanics and God that would, if taken to be true, prove that God does not exist. If he were a physicist making that claim, it would not cease to prove the opposite of what he wants it to. But if he were a physicist, he would probably not have made that mistake to begin with. Douthat should have known better than to use his argument without running it past someone familiar with the underlying subject.
Since you haven’t read the book, you are in no position to contradict me on what it claims or how central that first chapter is to the later arguments. If you want to leave science behind, go ahead. This book, however, is very deliberately and explicitly arguing from science, not around or against it.
One paragraph in and I'm brought up short by "one of the few right-leaning columnists" This is probably my usual quibble with the editors' fixed beliefs that would allow this to slide but there are 8-9 "right-leaning" columnists out of 17 so identified on the masthead: Brooks, Douthat, Dowd (sorry, some people will claim she is centrist or something but no she is working for the clampdown), French, Friedman, Paul, Stephens, with Polgreen and Gessen being ambiguous due to the fact that their queerness makes some of their writing consistent with supposedly liberal or left beliefs but otherwise not obviously fitting a sharp binary. Jane Coaston, another libertarian, was for a while featured heavily too, although she isn't technically a columnist. That isn't "one of a few." Particularly given how Krugman is all over Substack talking about how he left because the editorial slant grew less friendly to him, it is just very lazy to pretend that the NYT or the mainstream media is "liberal" or "left-wing." Nothing to do with the actual book, but a real quibble with this critical background.
Of course you would think so. She is still on their dropdown of columnists, but you are correct that mercifully she is departed; I had forgotten in the midst of other things to think about. The NYT is not a left-leaning publication, and Ross Douthat is not one of "a few right-leaning authors." That quoted passage is simply not correct as a matter of fact.
Only if you've never read it, and grew up listening to right wing media refer to it that way. The NYT has always been an establishment paper that largely tacks center-right, as my breakdown of its Op-ed columnists was getting at. Its reporting is similarly middle-of-the road, and can be very -- VERY -- establishment friendly. Judith Miller helped Dubya persuade people war was a good idea by laundering lies through the Times' front page, for christ's sake! If you think it's a left wing paper you are comparing it to right wing tabloid garbage like the NY Post or Fox which announce their viewpoint from the first sentence. Even the Wall St. Journal before Murdoch was famous for its reporting being unbiased rather than far right like its editorial page. The Times is only "left-leaning" to the extent that, as Stephen Colbert quipped, "reality has a liberal bias." If you want an actual left-of-center paper to compare to, try the Guardian (UK) -- there isn't a left-leaning paper in America that is part of the mainstream media operation.
It might be that existential anxiety drives people to buy into the notion of god. The big cosmic questions are challenging (How can anything exist in the first place? What happens when we die? etc.) So one way to erase doubt and fear is to just posit that the existence of a divine creator explains everything. But that creates a new problem-- if indeed we find god, we then need to ask where he/she came from. So we end up in an endless riddle, like a cat chasing its tail. I'd rather just confess that I don't have the answer and am content to just muddle thru life and maybe at some point some clarity will emerge. I think that hunger for certainty is what defines people like Douthat.
Thanks for this thoughtful review. It never fails to amaze and disappoint me that we (Western) humans are so convinced of our unique superior consciousness that we believe the rest of creation isn’t also woven into Mind or God or Great Spirit — whatever your name for it. In many oral, place-based cultures, humans are the little brothers and sisters of Creation. We came along last and only survived through their aid. There’s no basis for our story that it’s all here for us. Thomas Berry writes well about this.
William James made a nice, pragmatic argument not for a particular religion or god, but for religious feeling. He admitted he couldn't prove anything about it, but he thought that the feeling of religion was good for people. I tend to agree. I think Douthat misses the point by bringing in physics.
I wish we would talk about how people can get their religious feeling. Whether it's meditation, psychedelics, congregation, contemplation. The question of whether god exists is irrelevant to me.
Thank you for taking me through the physics. What I’m really interested in, though, is your inexplicable experience. I had one in my twenties and I haven’t been able to shake the idea (actually more of a certainty) that we are connected in one consciousness.
I am someone who has trouble operating a toaster, so the physical world and how it works will always remain a mystery to me. So the physics argument would have been way beyond me. I appreciate your scholarly takedown of Douthat's contentions.
Same. Physics is but one system to explore and maybe understand better. To center it as THE way is hubris.
I've never understood why believers invest so much time and effort trying to convince others of the rightness of their views. Why don't they just practice their own beliefs in private? I suspect the answer is that they are engaging in a sort of authoritarian, fascist effort to establish control. I'm content to enjoy the daily reports from the Webb and Hubble telescopes, and marvel as our knowledge of the universe expands incrementally. And I have absolutely no desire to sway Douthat over to my posture.
Because if the claims of any given faith are true, and in the Christian faith in particular one is commanded to love your neighbor, then it would be wrong of someone not to at least try to communicate the benefits of this faith to you. A bit surprised an intelligent person can’t see the difference between reports from telescopes and this, but, okay. And that the only explanation you can think of is fascism… well, that says more about you than it says about Douthat.
I don’t know anything about proselytizing but I do know that religion practiced in community is far more powerful than doing it in private. I’d think that would be obvious, leading me to think that your answer regarding fascism and control sounds more like moving prejudices around a page than thinking. As for appreciating things to be in awe about, there’s a far grander experience in communing with it.
“Some of Douthat’s subsequent writing emerges unscathed from this disaster.” This is one of my favorite lines of criticism ever.
i loved it too!
Hmmm. I've also become more religious of late, and later on in life, so this book appeals to me as well. Your critique actually makes me want to read this book and see what I make of it. I guess that's a win? Thanks for this
I love how you point out that their claim actually "proves" the opposite if not examined more carefully. Similarly, based on how you framed their supposed physics revelations I was left wondering why it would matter how precise or difficult it would have been for the exact conditions we live in to arise; we are talking about it from the fact that they did, so their rarity seems besides the point.
I loathe Douthat as a thinker and as a pundit, so I am impressed at your willingness to take him at all seriously, even if also mystified as to why anyone would bother.
I appreciate this review. I'm not a huge fan of Douthat, more because of how he allows his radical traditionalist Catholicism to shape his political views than any of his religious beliefs themselves, and while I know far less about physics or any of the hard sciences than I do about politics or social sciences, it sounds like what he and Stephen Barr are using to bolster their argument for a creator could just as easily be used to argue for the anthropic principle.
Does he address the anthropic principle at all as a counterargument? I'd also be curious to hear your opinions on the matter, or anybody's with a firmer understanding of the science behind it.
I've also become more agonistic as I've gotten older after several experiences I can't really explain weakened the conviction behind the atheism of my youth, but still for the most part believe that the benefits of organized religion, like the community, sense of purpose, and network effects for acts of charity, might have a hard time balancing the scales with the potential harms caused by the more dogmatic, disingenuous, or fundamentalist strains of it. Of course, I've met many believers who are genuinely good people, and come across philosophical principles I wholeheartedly agree with in religious texts, besides it isn't really my place to judge whether it's a net positive or negative in the first place and I'd never argue against anybody having the agency to make their own decisions about it.
Whatever my personal beliefs on religion, I understand that like any human institution or practice it's probably something of a mixed bag depending on (among other things) the humans involved in it and like those humans it's something that I'll probably never fully understand but can at least try to appreciate.
There is no meaning in taking Ross Douthat serious. When first I tried to read what he wrote, I suspected that the NYT put him in the paper instead of the international cartoon that they had shortly before removed from the (international) edition. But no, Ross seems to be a human being who is not worth reading. His religious bias is greater than our Milky Way. I suspect him never to read the comments, where readers point out, every single time, where he is mistaken. I don't think he is lying - he does not know anything outside the borders of his knowledge. Furthermore, I don't understand why the NYT keeps paying him for his explicit nonsensical ideas.
I also love physics, from a pop science viewpoint. I also love religion and the idea, however amorphous and undefinable, of a creator. The idea of a god in control of everything, and many other crazy interpretations, I find absurd and parochial. What I’m drawn to is a deep and intuitive way is the idea from the 11th chapter of St. Augustine’s confessions, that God exists outside of time, and we exist within it. Our consciousness exists between these two states, allowing us to be both in the observable present and the recent past, creating the idea of time we’ve created that, when examined in physical terms, exists entirely within the past.
Not a great review. The critic here obsesses over one small part of the book that’s meant to frame the argument, not stake a central claim.
And it’s not so much a takedown as a disagreement and quibbling about semantics. Klavan’s conclusion about quantum mechanics is that we reach a point in science where objectivity becomes impossible and theory is all we have. Therefore, if we hope science can explain itself, we’ll be disappointed. My guess is that Douthat probably feels this way too. Newtonian physics and Darwinian assumptions are long since outdated. It’s time to think differently about our world.
But I guess they’re not scientists so they’re automatically wrong about this. Argument from authority, but whatever. This is what science is these days.
I would’ve liked to know what the rest of the book was about. I guess there’s some personal testimony and biblical lessons at the end? Ah well, whatever, the critic here has made up her mind not to believe and goes back to the Copenhagen interpretation (it’s not a theory ackshually!) thinking this justifies the reluctance to believe in a mind.
I’ll just read the book while she goes and cries about String Theory and multiverses.
My main argument is not from authority at all. Klavan made a specific suggestion about the relationship between quantum mechanics and God that would, if taken to be true, prove that God does not exist. If he were a physicist making that claim, it would not cease to prove the opposite of what he wants it to. But if he were a physicist, he would probably not have made that mistake to begin with. Douthat should have known better than to use his argument without running it past someone familiar with the underlying subject.
Since you haven’t read the book, you are in no position to contradict me on what it claims or how central that first chapter is to the later arguments. If you want to leave science behind, go ahead. This book, however, is very deliberately and explicitly arguing from science, not around or against it.
One paragraph in and I'm brought up short by "one of the few right-leaning columnists" This is probably my usual quibble with the editors' fixed beliefs that would allow this to slide but there are 8-9 "right-leaning" columnists out of 17 so identified on the masthead: Brooks, Douthat, Dowd (sorry, some people will claim she is centrist or something but no she is working for the clampdown), French, Friedman, Paul, Stephens, with Polgreen and Gessen being ambiguous due to the fact that their queerness makes some of their writing consistent with supposedly liberal or left beliefs but otherwise not obviously fitting a sharp binary. Jane Coaston, another libertarian, was for a while featured heavily too, although she isn't technically a columnist. That isn't "one of a few." Particularly given how Krugman is all over Substack talking about how he left because the editorial slant grew less friendly to him, it is just very lazy to pretend that the NYT or the mainstream media is "liberal" or "left-wing." Nothing to do with the actual book, but a real quibble with this critical background.
You are pretty off base with this one. And Pamela Paul is gone.
Of course you would think so. She is still on their dropdown of columnists, but you are correct that mercifully she is departed; I had forgotten in the midst of other things to think about. The NYT is not a left-leaning publication, and Ross Douthat is not one of "a few right-leaning authors." That quoted passage is simply not correct as a matter of fact.
“The New York Times is not a left-leaning publication.” That’s an astonishing claim to make, one that I’d guess its own reporters would not make.
Only if you've never read it, and grew up listening to right wing media refer to it that way. The NYT has always been an establishment paper that largely tacks center-right, as my breakdown of its Op-ed columnists was getting at. Its reporting is similarly middle-of-the road, and can be very -- VERY -- establishment friendly. Judith Miller helped Dubya persuade people war was a good idea by laundering lies through the Times' front page, for christ's sake! If you think it's a left wing paper you are comparing it to right wing tabloid garbage like the NY Post or Fox which announce their viewpoint from the first sentence. Even the Wall St. Journal before Murdoch was famous for its reporting being unbiased rather than far right like its editorial page. The Times is only "left-leaning" to the extent that, as Stephen Colbert quipped, "reality has a liberal bias." If you want an actual left-of-center paper to compare to, try the Guardian (UK) -- there isn't a left-leaning paper in America that is part of the mainstream media operation.
It might be that existential anxiety drives people to buy into the notion of god. The big cosmic questions are challenging (How can anything exist in the first place? What happens when we die? etc.) So one way to erase doubt and fear is to just posit that the existence of a divine creator explains everything. But that creates a new problem-- if indeed we find god, we then need to ask where he/she came from. So we end up in an endless riddle, like a cat chasing its tail. I'd rather just confess that I don't have the answer and am content to just muddle thru life and maybe at some point some clarity will emerge. I think that hunger for certainty is what defines people like Douthat.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
-- Walt Whitman
Sometimes the proof is simple.
Thanks for this thoughtful review. It never fails to amaze and disappoint me that we (Western) humans are so convinced of our unique superior consciousness that we believe the rest of creation isn’t also woven into Mind or God or Great Spirit — whatever your name for it. In many oral, place-based cultures, humans are the little brothers and sisters of Creation. We came along last and only survived through their aid. There’s no basis for our story that it’s all here for us. Thomas Berry writes well about this.
What a brilliant and delightful review. I do believe I’ll remain an atheist.
William James made a nice, pragmatic argument not for a particular religion or god, but for religious feeling. He admitted he couldn't prove anything about it, but he thought that the feeling of religion was good for people. I tend to agree. I think Douthat misses the point by bringing in physics.
I wish we would talk about how people can get their religious feeling. Whether it's meditation, psychedelics, congregation, contemplation. The question of whether god exists is irrelevant to me.
Thank you for taking me through the physics. What I’m really interested in, though, is your inexplicable experience. I had one in my twenties and I haven’t been able to shake the idea (actually more of a certainty) that we are connected in one consciousness.
I’ve written a little bit about that spiritual experience towards the end of this piece: https://foldedpapers.substack.com/p/pure-motives-and-the-dark
I should apologise in advance, though, for the fact that there is a lot about it that I just can’t put into words—as you might perhaps appreciate.
Oh yes. I certainly can’t.