| 0:37 | Intro. [Recording date: March 19, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is March 19th, 2025, and my guest is author and journalist, Ross Douthat. He is an Opinion Columnist for The New York Times. And our topic for today is his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross, welcome to EconTalk. Ross Douthat: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Russ Roberts: Before we begin, I want to mention this conversation may cover some themes inappropriate for young children. Feel free to screen this if you are a parent. |
| 1:05 | Russ Roberts: As most EconTalk listeners know, I'm a religious Jew. Some listeners when discovering that write me and say they're surprised because they've always thought I was intelligent. I sometimes respond by saying, 'Well, a lot of intelligent people in history have been believers. Isaac Newton, C.S. Lewis, Maimonides.' And, a typical response I get then is, 'Well, sure, then. Then, a smart person could be a believer; but now, I mean, those people wouldn't be religious now.' Your book is an attempt to justify belief or the exploration of belief from an intelligent perspective. Give us the thumbnail for the skeptics out there. How could a thoughtful, intelligent, rational, educated, enlightened person in 2025 actually believe in an invisible being that you and I would call God? Ross Douthat: So, the conceit of the book is that most of the reasons that made people, made it seem reasonable to be religious back then--as your correspondents would put it--still obtain today. And, that there is a sort of master narrative of modern secularism or modern atheism that says, 'Look, there were good reasons to believe before Copernicus and Galileo.' Or 'There were good reasons to believe before Charles Darwin.' Or maybe, some people would say there were good reasons to believe before neuroscience; or different sort of scientific revolutions are picked out and identified. And, I think that those revolutions did in fact call into question certain specific tenets of specific religions. And, we operate in the West inside a monotheistic Abrahamic heritage. We've had a sort of heavily Christian--Christian-dominated--culture, and there's no question that the early scientific revolutions and revelations about the shape of the cosmos and the solar system and everything else challenged medieval Catholicism's conception of the order of the planets and the sun and the stars. Which was I think not really, strictly speaking, a point of Catholic doctrine, was more an inheritance from Ptolemy; but it was something the Church was committed to, and that very famously created a particular crisis. Darwinism goes a little further and calls into question a lot of readings--Jewish and Christian I would say, but especially Christian--because of Christian ideas about original sin of the Book of Genesis and the origins of human life, right? So, it's absolutely the case that science can and has challenged particular doctrines and particular beliefs. But, the general religious picture--and this is a book that I think for various reasons tries to start by laying out a very general case for why someone would be religious, before you get to whether you should be Jewish or Muslim or Christian or Buddhist or whatever else--the general religious argument that we find ourselves in a universe that appears to be structured and designed in ways conducive to the emergence, not just of order and sort of regularity and mathematical patterns, but planet, stars, and conscious life: that's a striking thing. There are lots of other possible universes that would not contain anything quite like the world in which we find ourselves. And, the fact that there's a correspondence between that overarching structure and the mystery of our own consciousness, our own mind and its ability to penetrate into the deep mysteries of the cosmos and to understand them. And then, the fact that a persistent feature of human culture from ancient times from back then--as your correspondents would say--to the present, is religious and spiritual experience. Intimations, experiences, some of them more commonplace, some of them more outré, some of them alarming. But, experiences that persist under secular conditions, experiences that happen to people who don't believe in God, as well as people who believe in God. Experiences that seem to give strong indicators that there are invisible forces in the world, higher powers if you will, that are interested in communicating with and being in some kind of relationship with us. I think that combination--general order, yielding human life, a correspondence between our consciousness and the general order, and constant persistent enduring intimations of transcendence--is enough to make it very, very rational to be a religious believer of some kind. |
| 6:18 | Russ Roberts: And you couch it in the right way, I think--the probabilistic way that, we're not talking about absolute certainty--that's one of the other gifts of science and the modern perspective. We're not talking about 100% chance. This question is: Is there evidence that might comfort a would-be believer that is rational? I just want to add, by the way, that in your brief thumbnail--which is lovely--of how science challenged faith. The other, I think, narrative about the past, which I find amusing, is that everyone believed in God and was 100% religious until Darwin, and then nobody believed in God anymore except a few crazy people. I'm pretty confident that there has been non-believers throughout much of the ancient past, and that science did have an effect on where the balance of the evidence lay for some people. But, this idea that people were robotic--people who are comforted constantly by, say, the existence of an afterlife, is I think kind of a foolish way to look at human history. Ross Douthat: I agree, and I think at the very least you would say you have only to look at human behavior in the past to get a strong indication that whatever people formally believed, they were not living their life in some way where--they were not manifesting the kind of certainty in belief that you associate with saints, great philosophers of religion, pious peasant women, whoever else. Right? One thing in Christianity: we have a lot of debates about the doctrine of Hell. That is a big point of debate and discussion always, but especially nowadays. And, one thing you will often hear is a complaint from critics of the doctrine who say that, 'Well, the fear of Hell was this horrible punishing thing that hung over every Christian believer for the last 2,000 years and made their life a misery.' And, obviously, there are cases where that is true; there are people whose psychology has been warped by an overemphasis on eternal damnation. But, if you go back and look at, like, the history of the Middle Ages and how Christians were actually behaving at what was a--I think it's fair to say--a peak of formal belief in the doctrine of Hell, I don't get the strong sense that the average knight and chevalier in 13th century France was waking up every day thinking, 'Oh, the--Hell, it's this thing that I have to think about all the time that's preventing me from having a good time and smiting my enemies and bedding my mistress,' and anything like that. People have always been people, and have always tended to prioritize the immediate and the material even under cultural conditions, obviously, that make religious belief seem more compelling and more commonplace. |
| 9:45 | Russ Roberts: Now, I want to start with a topic--as we get into the details of the book, I want to alert listeners who are not interested in this topic that I won't let it go on for more than five or 10 minutes. I'm sure many of you out there are tired of this topic. I am ceaselessly intrigued by it, so I don't know how painful it is for you out there. But, we're going to talk about consciousness. And, in particular what the book--and you write about this quite poetically and quite beautifully--there is a belief, a very common belief among highly educated people, that there is nothing beyond the material. That the brain is a set of electrical signals. There's no such thing as the soul. That's a childish idea that we have no material evidence for. And so, as a result, a lot of the things that people say about the human experience, those are just the freakish electrical signals that the brain produces and that's just the reality we have to face. That's--you alluded to the advances in neuroscience; we've looked into the brain. There's no soul there; there's no little creature, the real us. So, what does consciousness and the brain have to do with your view of belief? Ross Douthat: I sort of think that a primary question that drives the divide between the religious person and the non-religious person is: what do we think is the primary thing in the cosmos? We have access, as people experiencing life, to two broad categories of things. One is mind, it's the direct experience of being a conscious being, whatever that may mean. Right? It's an experience I'm having, you're having right now having this conversation. And the second experience is the experience of matter and the material world, which is filtered through our conscious experience. Right? If I touch the table here or rub my laptop screen or something, I'm having an encounter with the material, but that is then being translated in some way into my conscious experience, the experience of being a self in the world. And, I think the religious argument is basically just that we have a variety of good reasons to think that mind is probably primary. And, matter, while real--the question of what matter actually is, is itself a slightly harder question to answer than some materialists tend to think. But, you said only five or 10 minutes, so we'll set that one aside, and just say there are good reasons to think that mind is something primary. And, those reasons start with the fact that it is very, very hard to give a clear account of how the experience of mind arises from--in any kind of direct, scientifically testable way--from the electrical impulses and everything else and chemical reactions in the brain. Clearly, the two are intertwined in some way. And, obviously, neuroscience has demonstrated convincingly that certain parts of the brain have certain effects on your consciousness--just that we sort of knew that already because we knew that drinking strong spirits has a strong effect on your consciousness. But we know a lot more about that now. So, there's no--I think a sort of hard Cartesianism where mind and body are completely separate in some way and they only attach at one particular point: That seems wrong. Consciousness somehow interpenetrates the material. But yeah: there's no good account on offer, I think, from any materialist or reductionist--and I've read most of those accounts--that it actually explains what consciousness is and how it works. And the best you can get to is a kind of illusionist case in a sense, which says that consciousness is sort of--it's an illusion of control. Right? We have the illusion of selfhood and the illusion of control, and this is advantageous in some way that is then hard to explain, because, presumably, if it's an illusion of control, all the processes would run the same way without this sense of being a spectator and a passenger and an actor. Right? So, it's sort of, like, you know, you think that you're making choices and making decisions, but really, you're just sort of watching a movie and thinking you're participating in it. But, wouldn't it be simpler to have a universe where the systems just ran on their own, if the conscious observer isn't actually doing anything? So, I think materialism struggles to explain consciousness, but then we also just have a number more of specific reasons recently, including the ones I alluded to before, but adding in some of the spooky stuff that goes on with quantum physics and the way that measurement and mind seems to interact and sort of collapse possibility into reality. And, there's a number of ways I think in which the case for mind as a primary thing has actually gotten stronger in the last 100 years, notwithstanding all the advances in neuroscience and everything else. |
| 15:26 | Russ Roberts: The way I think about it is: our command of the material world as human beings has expanded unimaginably over the last century. It's part of a much longer process, obviously. We understand extraordinary things about the universe, about the cosmos, about the microcosmos. It's a weird thing that one of the few mysteries the brain has failed to fathom is the brain. It's kind of--'Well, one way to look at it is: It's only one thing. We've done an extraordinary job everywhere else, so this is just one little corner we're struggling with.' It's kind of an important corner. It's the corner with which we access the universe and our experience. Could just be it's a matter of time; some people believe that. Some people believe it will always be veiled from us. Using a brain to understand the brain may be beyond our capabilities. Alan Lightman on this program--we'll link to that episode; I've interviewed him a few times--but on one of our conversations, his view is that--and I think this is a common view among scientists--is that the brain's capability is just a bonus. Some of the more aspects of the brain, like which we might talk about--yearning; I would talk about a sense of justice, regret, embarrassment. Many of the human emotions that we experienced intensely inside this little thing that we carry around with us called our head, those are just things that, they're just sometimes negative bonuses, sometimes positive bonuses. They're just things that came along for the ride. And, you're arguing essentially that that's not a very appealing argument. It's not an appealing argument, for sure. It could be true, but it's not appealing. Ross Douthat: Well, I think that the weakness--and I've read a bunch of Lightman, actually. And the problem is still the explanation of--whether they're a bonus or not, right? Whether are they essential to the functioning of the brain or not, right? Could you have human beings without consciousness? Could you have P-zombies, right? The idea--zombies, basically human beings who do everything that conscious beings do, but are in fact not conscious? Could that exist? And those are really interesting questions. But there is still also just the primary question of: How do you get consciousness? Like, how do you get it? How do you actually generate this kind of particular experience? Which has different layers, right? There's sort of a primary experience just of the mystery of, like, yourself in the world. You're having the experience of this conversation. Like, how do you experience the redness of a rose, right? The qualia--to use the lingo of neuroscientists--the qualities of existence that are not explained just by doing, deconstructing the chemical composition of the rose. Then you have above that, like, reason and judgment, right? Like, what is it to reason? Human beings reason abstractly. What does that mean in the context of a material cosmos? How does a strictly material cosmos generate abstract reasoning that works? That sort of--the further question--right?--you mention: we've unraveled all these mysteries, figured out all these things, developed an abstract language of mathematics that just happens to correlate really well with how objects work in the real world. How does any of that work? And Lightman, as I recall, spends a certain amount of time talking about emergence--right?--which is the sort of catch-all term that would be, well, they wouldn't say they're reductionists. They would say, 'We're not reductionists because we think consciousness is real. We just think it's emergent. It's an emergent property.' And, I'm not sure if I'm getting the Lightman one right, but I think he talks about the motion of a car. Right? Like, it emerges from the wheel and the axle and everything else, right? So, you can't define it to one material thing, but you know it when you see it. But, consciousness is just not like the motion of a car. You can observe the motion of a car and draw a strict material correlation between the movement of all the parts and the larger motion. There's no such connection with consciousness. When people talk about emergence to me, they're still talking about magic. |
| 19:57 | Russ Roberts: And, of course, this is--we're now about to move on to a new topic--but we're going to stop at one that I think I'm also more interested than my average listener, which is AI [Artificial Intelligence] and whether it will become conscious. What most--many--AI researchers believe is that just as the brain--the electrical signals of the chemicals and the flesh, the physical entity of the brain--yields consciousness in a way that we don't fully understand, that any one piece is not decisive but all them together allows consciousness to emerge. They believe that AI will have the same experience: That, although we don't understand exactly how artificial intelligence currently works in responding to our queries on chatbots, using LLMs [Large Language Models]--just, it's a better time. It will just coalesce and emerge the way consciousness emerged out of the human physical things. And then, the AIs will be conscious and will have many of the experiences that humans have--of agency, of longing, of regret. You know, my example--listeners are probably tired of--but that a Roomba, that a vacuum cleaner might wish it had become a driverless car and yearn for that. That that could someday happen. I'm a skeptic, but the truth is, I have trouble explaining my skepticism because I don't understand how humans have yearnings to be other things and to regret what they've chosen in the past they've staked out. So, since I don't understand that, I can't really rule out a machine being able to reach that place. But I'm skeptical. So, in your-- Ross Douthat: I think that's the right posture for the person like you and I, who thinks that this is a seeming hard limit on materialism. You should be skeptical that just by sort of building a machine without having any conception of how to make it conscious, but just building something that seems to produce outputs that are like the human mind, you'll get the inner experience. But, you shouldn't rule it out precisely because we don't have a materialist account of how consciousness emerges. Right? So, if it turned out that at some level of complexity, AI suddenly manifests consciousness--and again, it would be hard to prove exactly; the proof question would be a tricky one--I certainly think people will think AIs are conscious before they are. I think that is almost certain. But if it did emerge, that would not actually prove anything about materialism, because materialism still wouldn't have an account of how it had actually happened. Right? And I mean, to put on my spooky, spooky weird religious-stuff hat for a minute too, there is an element in the AI project of a kind of--I mean, well, in Jewish terms it's the Golem legend, right? But, it's a summoning, right? There isn't in some way an actual sense in which the AI project is saying, 'We are building agents that can do human things,' and at some level we sort of expect to call up out of the vasty deep a spirit that will inhabit them, which is part of the strangeness of our own time. I think there's sort of a general strangeness that is one reason I wrote this book now, is that I think we're in a stranger moment than we were 10 or 15 years ago, in terms of sort of the spiritual and the material. Russ Roberts: I think that's right. |
| 23:58 | Russ Roberts: Let's turn to a--as I promised--a different topic. And, as a believer, there are certain arguments people make for faith that give me the willies. I'm sure you find that as well. One of those is relying on coincidences to prove the hand of God. Usually for me, that just shows a lack of understanding of probability, or--I'll just say it that way. Another area that I'm troubled by, but you are not, is what we would call near-death experiences. There, you write about that, you write about mystical experiences, so-called spiritual experiences. I think many people have, and Alan Lightman writes about it in quite eloquent terms, an experience of transcendence or awe. Hard to understand where that would come from in a material world, but we have it. But near-death is, and what people experience in near-death experiences is--it's just never spoken to me. But, I want you to make the case; and you've studied it much more than I have, so take a shot. Ross Douthat: Sure. Well, so first, I agree with you that there are certain forms of religious experience that you would expect to happen or expect some version of them to show up, even were religion not true, God didn't exist, and so on. Right? And, coincidence--the person who has a dream that turns out to come true. Right? People have a lot of dreams, you live a long time. Eventually one of them is going to stand out and look prophetic just through the law of large numbers. Right? So, I think there are ways--now that doesn't mean I'm ruling out that you could actually have a prophetic dream. I'm just saying certain things that people experience are expected to some degree within a cosmos that is not created by God. Russ Roberts: Before you go on and get to near-death, you should make a reference because it is kind of extraordinary as a case of this kind, the Michael Shermer experience. It's a little bit off the charts: it did kind of--it was interesting. Ross Douthat: Yeah, so that's more--I think, the supernatural or mystical experiences that are more persuasive are the ones that don't seem like just law of large numbers things, that have some sort of concrete reality, in terms of either the intensity of the personal experience, the correlates like physical healing, near-death experiences, which I'll get to in a minute. Or, the example that I used, which is from the professional skeptic, Michael Shermer, a really smart guy who spent most of his career debunking bad paranormal and supernatural claims. And, at one point in his life, he was getting married and his wife had a radio that had been given to her, I think by her great-uncle, but someone who had passed away who meant a lot to her, who she wished could be at the wedding. And, the radio had never worked. It was an old radio; it was broken. Shermer himself had tried to fix it repeatedly, could never get it to work. And, on their wedding day, they went back into their house after the ceremony, and they heard music coming from the back of the house. And, they went in--I'm not sure if they found it in a drawer, I can't remember the details--but it was the radio; and it was playing a love song, a kind you would dance to at a wedding. And, it did this during the wedding, and then it shifted over to some kind of, again, appropriate classical music or something in the evening. And then, it stopped and it never worked again. And, Shermer was clearly really struck by this. Russ Roberts: Understandably. Ross Douthat: And, to his credit--he has written about it several times and tried to come up with different theories. Maybe there's a multiverse and her great-uncle is still alive in another branch of the multiverse, and they have a way of communicating across the multiverse. Right? I mean, you can come up with theories. But it clearly--it's a good case study of the kind of thing--and, I've known many people who have had things like this happen to them--the kind of thing that happens in the world that you need some explanation besides just coincidence and the law of large numbers to explain. And, I do feel like people underestimate because we live in a regime of official secularism. Plenty of people are religious, but if you go over to you Yale Law School or write a Wikipedia entry or something, you're expected to sort of rule out supernatural ideas. People underestimate just how commonplace these kind of weird experiences are. Not in the sense that most people are having them all the time, but lots and lots of people have, couple things that happen in their life that seem like a finger pushing in a little bit. Near-death experiences, then--sorry, did you want to--? |
| 29:19 | Russ Roberts: Yeah, I was just going to say, there's a natural--I think those who are listening and haven't heard that story, and I had not heard it before I read it in your book, the radio story--I think the world is divided into two groups of people: the people who love the idea that that could be true, and not just that it happened or that Michael Shermer tells the story, but rather that the world could work in that mysterious, mystical, and beautiful way. A lot of movies exploit that human longing. And then there's the other group of people who are people who just assume Michael Shermer was on drugs that night, or he did something--somebody tampered with his manuscript when he was setting it up for publication. They can't bear the idea that such a thing could be true, rather than the other group that longs for it. So, I just wanted to mention, I think that's just an interesting part of the human experience. But, you can react to that if you want, and then you can talk about near-death. Ross Douthat: Yeah, no; I think that's right. I think there are certainly people for whom the default assumption--and this sort of goes back to David Hume, right?--is that if there's a miracle, by definition it's so unlikely that you should look for any other explanation. And, even though you think Michael Shermer seems like a trustworthy guy and he has put this story in enough books that if he had really been on drugs at the time, probably someone would have mentioned it and said, 'Ask Shermer. He was pretty out there at that wedding.' Nonetheless, yeah, the default should be that he and his spouse were deceived in some way, where, had someone else been there, they would not have seen the same thing or had the same experience, right? Near-death experiences: I don't want to over--push this too hard. I have a strong interest in these stories. I don't think you can say things that are completely definitive about them. But basically, some meaningful percentage of people who experience something close to death--I'm not going to say it's death because there's endless debates about when brain activity ceases and when you're really dead--but, people who come to the threshold of death and then come back, have a strikingly consistent kind of experience that involves the clichés that you hear about in pop culture, that you encounter dead relatives and ancestors. Sometimes you have a feeling of a kind of life review under moral judgment, right? Or, and there's some--it's not always under strong moral judgment, sometimes it's just a review of your life. There's the tunnel, there's the white light, there's feelings of love and peace and so on. And, this exists across cultures. It takes different forms. You'll get some Buddhist features in near-death experiences in China and some Hindu features, and there's clearly some sort of impact of cultural expectations or religious expectations on what you see, which is itself an interesting point. But there's also--but these experiences are, they're quite different as far as I can tell from reading the literature, and from talking to some people who've had them: from hallucinatory experiences or dreams, which are the two things they're most often analogized to. They have a intensity and clarity of experience. They're perceived as more real than real. They are life-changing. People who come back from them change their metaphysical perspectives, change their moral perspectives. Sometimes in ways that don't go well, like you'll have people who are, like, 'I'm committed to a higher power and I'm leaving my family,' or something. It's not like a simple, everyone just becomes good because of this; but it's life-changing, right? And--did you want to jump in? Sorry. And, out of--I think what you can say about them, at the very least--this is sort of my minimalist case for taking them seriously--is that it's really easy--there have been plenty of near-death experiences in the human past, but we really just have not brought nearly as many people back from the brink of death in most of human history as we have done in the last 50 or 100 years. Right? And, it's just really easy to imagine a timeline where we start resuscitating lots more people under modern medicine and we get a consistent pattern of near-death experiences where they're always just a complete chaotic jumble--what you'd expect from a brain misfiring, going terminal, or they're dreamlike and it's like they partake of the subconscious in some way, but it's dream logic, things don't make sense. You can't remember them after they're over. That is what I think the materialist or the anti-supernaturalist who thinks there's absolutely no life after death would predict that you would get from bringing lots more people back, as we've done. And, that's not what we've gotten. We've gotten these, again, sort of persistent cross-cultural patterns of experiences that have certain things in common that seem kind of religious, kind of like God is out there. There are hellish ones and purgatorial ones too, right? It's not the case that everyone who has a near-death--people have ones where the judgment, sense of isolation--like, there's darker things. So, it's also not just as simple as near-death experiences prove that everyone goes to heaven or anything like that. But, yeah: I think that the fact that you get something like this persistently in a situation where you're bringing lots of people back from the dead, you have to count it as a point in religion's favor. Don't have to believe it all, but you have to say--if we didn't have them, anti-supernaturalists would be saying, reasonably, like, 'Look, you say there's life after death. Why doesn't anyone who ever comes back from the brink of death say anything about this?' But, in this world, it's an interesting indicator. Russ Roberts: Yeah, my skepticism on that, I mean, I'm agnostic about it. It doesn't move me either way particularly, but there could be lots of people who have jumbly, awful experiences; they just don't get talked about as much. I would worry about that selection bias. And of course, the other worry now is that you're supposed to see a light at the end of a tunnel, and I think that's seeded, and you're supposed to review your life, and there's supposed to be dead people welcoming you as into the next world. And, I just wonder how much of that's just an hallucination from having heard about it in the past. The problem with the-- Ross Douthat: Well, but I mean, there you--so one thing that's interesting is that the people who start studying this in the 1960s find that Raymond Moody is the first person to really write about this. People don't want to tell the stories in many cases; they're sort of embarrassed to tell them. They feel like this is this a sort of profound thing that happened to me but I can't really explain it, and I know that my doctors won't believe it, so I don't talk about it. Like, there was sort of a taboo around it for a while. Also, there isn't any kind of clear correlation where religious believers have these experiences, and atheists and skeptics do not. You get--to the extent that people have tried to do statistical analysis, it seems like you're perfectly likely to have a near-death experience without being a practicing member of a faith who has sort of a set of expectations. And then, finally, I mean, I think the wish fulfillment thing: So, there's what you might call near near-death experiences that people have. So, there's a lot of literature on this from hospices and places where people are sort of steered toward death in their final days. There's a lot of literature on people when they get within a few days often of dying, and hospice workers can tell--like, okay? this person's a few days off from dying. They start to see people, like dead people. This is quite commonplace--spouse, parent, sibling, etc. That, I think the skeptic can just say, 'Look, this is sort of a--the brain has evolved this capacity to hallucinate in these ways at the brink of death because it smooths the passage and so on.' It's a little harder to make that case with things that you wouldn't actually come back--under the normal run of evolutionary experience, people were not coming back from the dead, right? You get killed by a rampaging leopard, wherever in a million B.C.-- Russ Roberts: Saber-toothed tiger-- Ross Douthat: Something, saber-toothed tiger, right? You get killed. What's the evolutionary adaptation in: as you're bleeding out on the ground, seeing a white light that you're never going to tell Grok, your fellow tribesman, about? Right? Again, can you come up with some evolutionary Just-So story for why it would be beneficial? Maybe. But, I think it's more of a leap and less of what you would expect. I think the skeptic is on firmer ground saying, 'This is what I'd expect with things that happen to people while they're still alive and fully conscious, than things that we've only found out about by virtue of resuscitating lots of people who in a prior dispensation would have just died.' |
| 39:28 | Russ Roberts: This program is called EconTalk. People get mad when I consider changing the name to something like our tagline, Conversations for the Curious. But, there is an econ talk piece to this conversation, which I don't think it's ever been raised on this program before, which is: You're making the case for religion. You're encouraging people to go on a journey, a quest to explore it. Should church membership be tax-deductible, say, in the United States? And, the question I'm asking is: is it a benefit to the United States that people will join communities of faith--besides for themselves? As a classical liberal, when I lived in the United States, I just felt uneasy about the subsidies to religious life. I've challenged people about that. They don't have a good answer. I like to think that having people of faith who come together in religious communities is good for the body public, but you can make the opposite case easily. We'll talk maybe about that later. But, what's your view on that? Do you think it's good for a country to have religious people in it? Ross Douthat: Yes, and I think-- Russ Roberts: I'm sorry--sorry. Just to make it sharper: Should other people pay for that practice on the grounds that it's good for them, not just the practitioner? That's the better way to sharpen it. Ross Douthat: Yeah. I mean, this is the terrain, honestly, where a lot of people are actually more comfortable, in my experience, having debates about religion. There's a lot of people who shy away from the kind of conversation we were just having, but who are more comfortable once you get into a zone of: Whether or not religion is true, is it good for society in ways that then would have policy implications? I think the answer broadly is that it is. This is sort of the--I think in ways that extend though beyond religious communities alone. I think religion genuinely, generally--not in every case, you can have toxic forms of religion that don't do this--but religion in the Western World, in the United States, historically has been a powerful source of sort of non-governmental social capital, sort of civic engagement, in ways that doesn't sort of fully substitute for, but does substitute for some of the operations of the state, especially in a society that has a welfare state. Right? So, if you are the strictest libertarian and you want to abolish the welfare state, maybe this argument doesn't have as much purchase. Or maybe it has more purchase, right? Maybe there's more case for making--but I think in general, tax favoritism towards sort of Tocquevillian enterprises is a good thing, and religion falls under that category--in the same way that the tax deduction for charitable giving, which applies not only to the religious but to the non-religious. I think it's good to have some kind of tax favoritism for sort of social engagement with positive externalities, might be the economist-y way of putting it. And, in the United States religion historically has really clearly fallen into that category. Now, is there any limit on that? For instance, I am currently totally open to the idea of taxing university endowments at a certain level. I think tax exemptions for educational enterprises are good, but when you have an enterprise that's essentially running a giant hedge fund and is having, in my view, a terrible effect on American life, having some taxation is okay. And then, I've made that argument; I've had people associated with universities come back to me and say, 'Well, what about the Catholic Church owning all this property in Manhattan that's worth millions and millions of dollars?' In principle, I wouldn't have a problem saying there's some level of accumulated wealth at which maybe a tax could kick in, right? Like, if it turns out that the Mormon Church has $300 trillion dollars because they've been so good at preparing for the apocalypse or something, and somebody said, 'Look, the United States has a huge budget deficit. We need to have a tax on religious endowments that kicks in at some high level.' I don't have a hard principled objection where you can never tax a religious enterprise. But, I think certainly under current American cultural conditions where most religious institutions are not rich, they're poor, they're hand to mouth--most Catholic parishes are not rolling in USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] money, no matter what the Trump Administration might sometimes suggest--yeah, I think tax-exempt status is generally a good thing. Russ Roberts: Yeah, actually, similar issues arise here in Israel with the subsidies to the so-called ultra-Orthodox. |
| 45:03 | Russ Roberts: I would actually take a different view, at least as a first take. My first take would be that subsidizing--forcing irreligious or explicitly atheist citizens to finance what they see as an illusion on the part of their fellow citizens--is not good for religious practice. I think it discourages people from joining the religious fray. It embitters them--and correctly, in my view. So, my preference--whether there's a case or not, I would prefer that the government not subsidize religion. Understanding, religious organizations--understanding that that will probably mean there are fewer and they will be smaller--but at the same time, it will not have a backlash on the part of people having to pay for something they literally do not believe in. Ross Douthat: Yeah. I mean, I think the American situation is a little distinctive in this way, where we have never had an established church, right? So, we've always had--not always; there's been variations--but sort of treating religion as a sort of general good that's part of sort of the goods of civil society, I think has historically felt different to people than the particular subsidy that you get for an established church, even now in many parts of Europe. Right? So, in Germany, German Catholics pay the Kirche tax--or whatever--that funds German Catholicism. German Catholicism is therefore extremely wealthy, even though very few German Catholics go to church. And, you have to, like, literally renounce Catholicism in order to stop paying that tax. I think that's obviously a bad system. And, Israel, it seems to me to be kind of in this middle zone between the American model and sort of formal, old-school European establishment, where it has a kind of soft establishment of religion that's related to its existence and identity as a Jewish state, that then takes on a sort of sharper edge in the subsidies you're describing. Yeah, I think the resentment of that is entirely understandable, but is again, somewhat different from a situation where you have seven different Protestant churches in a town and they all get a tax exemption, but they're all running a soup kitchen, and it sort of comes out a bit in the wash. |
| 47:47 | Russ Roberts: Now, the first part of the book covers what we've been talking about, which is, it makes the case for there being something that's not material, something that's above and beyond our understanding. Really nicely done. And then, you were faced with a more difficult challenge, which is: Well, I've got to pick--I have to pick an actual religion. I can't just think, 'Well, maybe there's more to this world than is found in my philosophy. Maybe there's something that's not material.' But then, you have to actually embrace--you make the case for embracing a doctrine of a particular religion. And, I want to ask about that in a different way than you talk about in the book. I'm going to ask the question in a different framing. It's one thing to believe that the world may have been set in motion in some sense by something purposeful that we call God. It's another thing to think that that force still is around, cares about me, and asks things of me. And, to me, that's the real crux of choosing a faith, a particular faith. It's interesting intellectually to embrace the idea of the possibility that there is force in the universe behind its existence, but to go to the next step, which is that there's one that cares about me and asks things of me, is for many people, I think a bridge too far. What's your reaction? Ross Douthat: Yeah. Well, and this is where I think the idea of converging lines of evidence is important. Right? I think someone could be persuaded by some form of the arguments from design, supplemented by the evidence for sort of fine-tuning in the physical laws of the cosmos. They could look at all of that and be talked into something like you just suggested: that something set this in motion, there's some kind of kind of original intent, right? Some kind of deist maker. But, yeah, it seems like a bit much to go from there to: The author of all of this vastness actually cares about me. I think, though, once you get into the next two converging lines of argument that we talked about already, right? Start with the nature of consciousness. Okay? So our consciousness seems to have connection to that larger cosmic order. It's capable of understanding it and sort of penetrating it. As far as we can tell, there aren't a lot of species in this vast universe. It gets into debates about aliens, we can--but at the very least, we seem to be pretty distinctive in having this capacity. And then, as you mentioned, this capacity has along with it a moral sense, a desire for justice, a interest in what is a good life, like an interest in--all of these impulses that aren't just towards understanding. They are there: understanding is part of it, but impulses towards-- Russ Roberts: For survival, they don't seem to be-- Ross Douthat: Or survive, right-- Russ Roberts: solely related to propagating the species. Ross Douthat: Right. And I didn't get into that in the book because there's all--I tried to sort of steer away from strictly Darwinian and evolutionary territory, because that's so fraught and culture-war-y. But, yeah, I think it is at the very least, strongly indicated that we have moral impulses that transcend mere survival: the mere impulse towards the survival of our genes. So, you have those facets of consciousness. And, then, yeah: I mean, if you find all of that persuasive but find all evidence for religious experience or mystical experience to be just total woo-woo nonsense, then maybe you still don't quite get to the point of being convinced to join a religion. But, I think if you approach the evidence for religious experience with an open mind and combine it with the fact that our consciousness has these moral impulses, this desire to figure out what the good is--that when you combine all of those things, then you do have a pretty strong case, that if there is an author of the universe, if there's a higher power, they might be interested in some kind of relationship with us. And, there might be some way in which we should be trying to have a relationship and bring our lives into some kind of accordance with what they want. Especially if there's life after death, right? Not only, but especially. And, I think out of that: that is the case for religion. The big religions present themselves as systems--technologies, if you will--for helping people figure out, how should we be in relationship with whatever powers put us here? And, what does it mean to be a good person in that context? And, can you do that on your own? Maybe. Is it smart to do it on your own, never submit or join or participate? I think it's not usually smart, and I think you can see that from just looking at other areas of human life. Can you play a sport on your own? You can, but you're never going to be that good at it. Can you do politics if you never join any political organization? I guess you can tweet a lot, but joining and participating is in most areas of human life is how you actually get somewhere with whatever you're doing that you think is important. And, I think there's no reason to think religion would be any different. |
| 53:48 | Russ Roberts: Sometimes I worry about my own religious observance and faith because I think that perhaps religion is indeed the opiate of the masses. Maybe this is just comforting to me in various ways. It's pleasant much of the time. Not always, obviously, but it's often pleasant on its own terms. But then, on the flip side, opium is the opiate of the masses. So, if you're religious, you have this thing that could be described as a crutch, but if you're not religious, one of the appeals of that is you don't have to have any responsibilities. We just had Jeff Sebo on the program. It hasn't aired yet; Ross, you haven't heard it; but listeners to this podcast episode will have heard the Sebo episode if they wish. And, he cares a lot about non-humans. It's a beautiful thing. He cares about dogs and octopi and ants and maybe in other things, and perhaps AI. And, I challenged him, and just as I shouldn't[?] have challenged Peter Singer: Why bother? Why would you care about those things, when you--shouldn't you just have fun? And, if you're not a believer--well, all I'm trying to say is: religious belief comes with a benefit; and so does disbelief. And they're both for me kind of symmetric, and I think we sometimes forget that. Ross Douthat: Yeah, and I think the religious belief is--I don't think it's an opiate. I do think it's a crutch, and in ways that don't tell you necessarily anything about whether it's true or not, right? The last book I wrote before this one was about having chronic Lyme disease and being really sick, what that's like. And, that was one of most--not one of--it was the most harrowing experience of my life, and I can't imagine how I would have gotten through it if I didn't believe in a God who had allowed this to happen for what I thought had to be some reason, and I had to just sort of deal with it and get through it. And so, religion was a crutch for me, absolutely, throughout that experience--in ways that don't prove that God exists, right? It could have just been, like, I needed this psychological crutch to get through the experience. But, I completely agree, that for--in other contexts, clearly, the absence of belief holds deep attractions to people. Like, there's a reason people like the John Lennon song so much--the worst song in the world from a religious perspective--"Imagine." Right? 'Imagine there's no heaven.' Some of it is, like: Oh, you don't have to worry about hell anymore. But, most of it is, like: Imagine that the stakes aren't that high. Stakes just aren't that high, it's not a big deal. You screw up, do terrible things, do mediocre things, and it's all going to be over. Everyone ends up in the same place. Relax. I think people obviously under some circumstances find that tremendously appealing and find religion unattractive because it seems to sort of break that spell a little bit and say, maybe it counts after all. Maybe you should wake up. Russ Roberts: Yeah, I think sometimes about one of my favorite groups--music groups--is Great Big Sea. They have a song called "Consequence Free." And, the refrain is: 'I want to be consequence free/ I want to be where nothing needs to matter.' But, it's a human longing: it's a real thing. It's unpleasant to be told you have responsibilities. And, just as an aside, my view on the crutch is: yeah, it's a crutch. Don't you need one? Aren't we all broken? Aren't we all struggling to get by in this world? And, why wouldn't you, if someone said, 'Here, this will help you walk, this will help you on your journey, you'll be able to make your way,' I take it. |
| 58:13 | Russ Roberts: The next topic I want to talk about is--we could spend the next, I don't know, five or 10, 20 episodes of EconTalk on any one of them. So, I'm going to ask you, Ross, if possible to be relatively brief. But, you talk about the three big challenges to your claims, and I think they the exact--you did a beautiful job in both deciding what those are, and your answers are thoughtful. One of those is--it's one I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about--which is, it goes under the name of theodicy--the suffering that exists in the world of 'God is good, God is just.' Why is there so much suffering? The second is: organized religion doesn't have the best track record in human affairs. You and I might talk about our personal improvement from being a religious person. I feel that I think it makes me a better person, but certainly you could debate whether religion writ large has been a net benefit for the world. Interesting question. And the third, which I thought was very, very thoughtful, was sex. The obsession, it seems, of religions with sexual constraints, sexual restraints, sexual restrictions, rules, interpretations--it's kind of a bummer. And it's more than that. It's like, doesn't that sound a little bit unhealthy? Isn't there a better thing to focus on? So, talk briefly if you can--sorry to say 'briefly,' because these are large things[?]. Ross Douthat: No, no; I'll try and be very quick and settle all these problems in one minute or less. Russ Roberts: Yeah, exactly. Ross Douthat: I think the last one is, on the one hand, a very culturally powerful idea right now: that religious strictures on sex are just misogynist or cruel or unnecessary or puritanical. But, also, it's the one that I think is actually the weakest argument. Not in every particular case. Not in the sense of, like, 'Oh, obviously traditional religions are right about condemning divorce,' or something like that. You can argue the specifics of any particular sexual point. But, in general, sex is really important. Religions care about sex so much because sex is bound up in--it's taproot of all human relations and community and family. All human social organization, all sort of psychological formation is connected to love, to romance, to relationships, but to sex. And, I think you can see in the world that we have made with less religion over the last 50 or 60 years, ways in which sex without strictures can on the one hand become extremely destructive. I think we've gone through phases since the Sexual Revolution where there have been deep and bitter social consequences for sort of making sex too casual: making promiscuity, making divorce, sort of casual things. I think the history of America in the 1970s is sort of a long testament to the problems with that approach. But then, also what you see now I think in the world is something different, that, like, sex also needs encouragement. Right? One thing religions do: they put strictures on sex, but they also encourage you to have it. Not if you're a Catholic priest; not in every case. But, the Bible starts with: 'Be fruitful and multiply.' There's wedding imagery throughout both the Old and New Testaments. This is a--even in the Christian emphasis on celibacy, there's a lot of wedding stuff going on. And, the interesting thing about the world today, is that people aren't getting married. They aren't having kids. They aren't having sex at all. They're substituting sort of virtual forms of sex. And, I just think that trajectory should make people take seriously the extent to which religion took sex seriously. And, if there's an author of the universe--if you can get to the point of believing that the author of the universe cares about you--which as we said earlier, maybe you can't. But if you can, then He, They, whatever, probably cares about who you have sex with for the same reasons that you care about it. So, that's sex. Institutional religion has done tons of terrible things, but I don't think there's any great evidence that religious societies are morally worse than secular societies--that worse things have been done in the name of religion than in the name of anything else. I think the evidence tends to run the other way. If we had an hour instead of two minutes, I would happily make a strong case that the monotheistic tradition in general is associated with a lot of things that we all consider moral improvement over the last few thousand years. Not that in every case, my own Catholic Church or the Jewish Rabbinate or anything else is making all the right choices. Clearly, they're not. But, if you're looking arc-of-history, religions played a pretty important role in moral improvement and societies that have cast off religion have not immediately become radically morally improved. I think the best case in that frame against religion is: Religion should be better. Right? It shouldn't just be okay. It should be better, right? And, the truth is that, again, like, Old and New Testament alike, they are accounts of, would-be chosen peoples who are always screwing up. Right? The advertisement of both the Jewish people and Jesus's disciples is: 'Here's a story; it's a really important story; it's about how God chose us, and how we just kept messing it up.' So, at the very least, you can't say there's false advertising in Judaism and Christianity. Russ Roberts: Shocking, actually. It's shocking. Ross Douthat: And then, the problem-- Russ Roberts: For a marketing document, the Christian and Jewish Bibles are both surprisingly rich. Ross Douthat: I mean, this is a separate thing; but I do think one of the small arguments for taking the truth-claims of Abrahamic religion seriously is that neither the Old nor the New Testament reads like you would expect religious propaganda to read--at all. Which is interesting. Finally, the problem of evil I think is a real and serious problem that has no sort of podcast-ready solution. I think it's a big mistake to treat it as a reason not to be religious. I think if you accept--again, if you don't believe in God, fine--but if you accept sort of what I think is the good evidence for some kind of religious framework for the world, and then you're confronted with the problem of evil, you should say, 'Well, either I need a theology that makes sense of this,' and there are theologies that aren't classical theism, that are sort of pantheism, dualism, process theology. Like, there's a bunch of different theologies that says, 'Well, maybe God isn't omnipotent and omniscient in the way that Aquinas and Maimonides would have said--and that explains the problem of evil.' I don't think those are the right call, but I think that's more sensible than becoming an atheist. But, I also think within monotheism, you just have this sense that, like, this is actually something that if God exists, He us to wrestle with. And that's why, again, it's not a propaganda document. Right? It's why Abraham is there arguing with God outside Sodom. It's why the entire Book of Job exists. It's why the Garden of Gethsemane exists, right? That: there is some kind of mystery here that is sometimes a reason to be angry at God and sometimes an understandable reason to lose, for a time, a sense of faith. But it's a argument that you're better off having inside the framework of belief than it is an argument for leaving that framework behind. |
| 1:06:18 | Russ Roberts: I did an episode with Susan Cain on her book, Bitterwweet. And for me, theodicy--especially the Jewish perspective on it, which there are a zillion pages of Jewish grappling with this fact that there is suffering in the world, and how can that be? But for me, it's a bittersweet thing. There's a lot of bitterness. The cruelty of human beings to each other is unfathomable and heartbreaking and maybe damages your faith in God or your ability to search for God. But, the ability of human beings to rise above their own sense of self, and help other people--make sacrifices, love, strive, do extraordinary things, make ourselves laugh. The human carnival is just so rich. And you could debate for whether the glass is half full or half empty. There's an extraordinary story by the Yiddish writer, I.L. Peretz--it's called "The Three Gifts"--which, maybe we'll be able to find a link to it. I'm not sure it's online. It's a masterpiece on this question of whether the world is slightly better than it is worse, or slightly worse than it is better; and it's our job to push it into the good realm. But, that's the way I like to think about it. I don't know why there's evil in the world. As one rabbi once told me long ago, 'Stop trying to figure out what's in God's briefcase.' So, when people say, 'How did the Holocaust happen in a world with God?' There's a lot of answers. None of them are satisfying, really. There's nothing that brings comfort in that area. But, what does bring comfort is the incredible kindnesses that people did for each other in death camps that non-Jews struggled but managed sometimes--even once, but more than once--to save Jews. And finally that: Okay? Maybe it's true--maybe the world is an awful place. I don't know why; but my job here is to try to make it a little bit better. I think that's a lovely way to look at the purpose and nature of human existence, and it's consistent with there being a God, even if I don't fully understand how that God runs the world, clearly beyond me-- Ross Douthat: Yeah. Yeah. I think if there's a problem of evil--and there is--there's also a problem of good. Right? From the perspective of the pure skeptic. The skeptic has to explain two things: both why there is this sort of surplus of moral aspiration in human beings that coexists with all the dark stuff? And, they also have to explain just why everyday life has so many things in it that are extra-good, right? Again, you could imagine a world where we ate food and we did it from compulsion, but we didn't enjoy it the way we do. Same with sex. Same with any aspect of human life. There's a lot of excessive good added in that gives me confidence that, at bottom, there is a goodness that is worth associating ourselves with. Even if we don't understand why, if it's so powerful, it allows evil to persist as well. Russ Roberts: I want to just mention a metaphor you use. You talk about an open door. I think it's a really beautiful metaphor. When you think about the world of religion or the world of the transcendent, you can pass by an open door and not notice it. You can pass by and glance over toward it as you walk by. You can stop at the door and peer in, or you can enter the room and see what it looks and feels like to be there. And, I think your book is an invitation to enter the room. Ross Douthat: Hopefully. Hopefully, it's a, at least, somewhat appealing one. Yes. |
| 1:10:44 | Russ Roberts: What kind of reaction have you gotten from friends and colleagues? In a way, this is a brave book to write. You've sided with the irrational unwashed: Shame on you. Ross Douthat: I mean, people--my friends and colleagues--already knew that I had a lot of weird ideas, honestly, Russ. I think the most interesting thing about doing promotion for the book and having conversations like this one is just seeing the diversity of human relationships to religion. I think--I haven't had a lot of conversations with hard militant atheists. Hopefully I will, I should, right? But, I've had a lot of conversations with people sort of in the borderlands between belief and disbelief. And everyone has sort of a different reaction. That's part of what's interesting. There are people for whom the arguments for design and fine-tuning seem really powerful, but they can never imagine themselves believing in the supernatural. And then, there are people for whom it's the reverse. I did a conversation with Andrew Sullivan, my fellow Catholic, who--he was just, like, 'Look, I don't believe in the fine-tuning stuff. The universe just seems too big. Earth is too small. Honestly, it doesn't seem like we're here for a reason.' It's only when you get to the personal and mystical that faith becomes compelling to him. And then there are just a lot of people for whom, like, calling something God is too much. Right? People for whom it's, like: 'I agree with you, materialism is a flawed paradigm. I agree with you, there's more to all this than meets the eye.' But, saying it's a God, it feels presumptuous, or it has too much cultural baggage, and so on. So, I don't know. It's just been--I mean, knew this, obviously--I know people have different reactions. But, since I'm doing this argument where it's, like, converging lines--right?--it's just really interesting to see which lines different people want to follow and which ones they're, like, 'No, that can't be right.' Anyway, it's been very fun. |
| 1:12:51 | Russ Roberts: I want to close with the hardcore atheist, who you mention in the book, which is Christopher Hitchens. You tell the story of encountering him in the kitchen of a party and he asked you a question. I think it's a profound question. Give us the answer that speaks to you these days. Tell us what happened there. Ross Douthat: So he said--I had debated him once. I was actually filling in for Andrew Sullivan. I was very young and he was in his prime, and the debate didn't go well for God. So, but he liked talking to believers, as everyone knew. And so he cornered me at the Christmas party and started in on this whole thing about, 'Let's say we could prove it'--right?--'that Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead. What would that actually prove?' And, it was late at the party, and I wasn't expecting that and I don't remember exactly what I said, but it probably wasn't the thing I needed to say to save Christopher Hitchens' soul. But, I think that was a profound question, generally, because I think there are a lot of people for whom the possibility of weird things happening or mystical things happening and so on, coexists with a sense of, like: What can we do? What can we do about it? You've got to live your life. Russ Roberts: Who cares? Yeah. Ross Douthat: Not even, 'Who cares?' No, I think he would say, 'I care. This is very interesting. But, like, am I really going to organize my life around it?' And so, part of the point of this book is to say, like: There's enough stuff out there that it should. You don't have to embrace, in that case, the particular doctrine of Jesus as Messiah and divine person to say, 'That should make you interested in religion. That should make you take religion seriously.' And, religion: there's a lot of different ways to be religious. Right? I have known monks and I have known Christmas- and Easter-Catholics; and the monks are hopefully closer to God, but it's still better to be a Christmas- and Easter-Catholic than to have no connection to this possible reality at all. You should be trying to connect yourself to the possible reality, because it's very important. That's one thing. And then, because I am a Christian, I do think the story of the resurrection of Jesus is not just a story about a weird thing that randomly happened, like Michael Shermer's radio that we were talking about before. It's a thing that happened that was connected to the life that Jesus lived, the teaching that he offered, the way in which he died. He didn't just, like, die of cancer and then get resurrected. He died in a particular public way, tortured by political and religious authorities, all the rest of it. Right? That, the Christian argument is that this is a drama that is connected to the drama of the Jewish people and is connected to a larger story of God's intervention in history, in a way that if you buy into it, helps make a larger sense out of what humans are and what they're doing. So, the miracle alone is not the only signifier here. It is the story in which the miracle happens. And, I think a lot of what the religious quest is, is: Human life is a story. We're living out--we have our own story that's embedded in a larger story of the human race. And, it's good to try and find the place where you think your story fits into the larger story. It doesn't mean you're absolutely right, but that is a very worthwhile endeavor, I think. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Ross Douthat. Ross, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Ross Douthat: You're very welcome. Thank you for having me, Russ. |
How can we explain the world's underlying order? How does consciousness emerge? And why do people from such different cultures have such similar near-death experiences? Listen as Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of the new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, argues that these and other unanswerable questions underscore his argument for the rationality of religious belief. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss Douthat's reasons for embracing faith with confidence, why science only bolsters his belief, and why he thinks that more religion would be a good thing for society.
READER COMMENTS
J Mann
Apr 14 2025 at 9:58am
Ross and Russ discussed tax treatment of religion.
As I understand it, under US law, churches are treated the same for tax purposes as other charitable nonprofits. The compliance burdens are lower – because of first amendment concerns, churches don’t have to apply for tax exempt status and don’t have to file the same forms.
I guess you could argue that US religious institutions should have to feel the same regulatory pain as other nonprofits, but unless you’re willing to remove the charitable nonprofits tax exemption altogether, I don’t think you would raise much more money if any.
Luke J
Apr 21 2025 at 4:57pm
This is the line of thinking I go down as well. If we’re going to remove tax-exempt status from religious organizations, then the same should apply to non-religious non-profit organizations.
Mark
Apr 22 2025 at 11:12am
I think the bargain in giving churches tax exempt status is to keep their political influence at a minimum. Not only is direct church involvement bad for politics, politics is bad for churches. Now, I think there’s an ongoing and important debate about defining where/whether too much crossover happens. Look historically and you’ll see bleed-through going back decades at least, including in movements such as women’s suffrage, abolition, Jim Crow, and temperance. Where should we draw the line between a church preaching morals that the people go on to implement in their lives, and a church actively interfering in the political process itself? It’s unclear where you could draw that line to end up with MLK, but exclude the temperance movement. I don’t think this question has ever been adequately “solved”, but it’s good to keep it as an ongoing debate such that there’s some sense of a boundary there. Without tax exempt status, those lines will blur.
This is why I think the trade-off is worth it. But for tax exempt status, you’d have preachers openly advocating specific candidates; which means those candidates would make the rounds to mega churches and other influential leaders – including the Pope or other world religious leaders whose interests lie outside the USA – in order to earn an endorsement and win votes. Religion would become a political battle, meaning some churches would pick sides. Let’s NOT go there … any more than we already have.
Grant Castillou
Apr 14 2025 at 1:14pm
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
Eric
Apr 14 2025 at 3:48pm
11:09 Ross Douthat: I sort of think that a primary question that drives the divide between the religious person and the non-religious person is: what do we think is the primary thing in the cosmos?
On the question of whether mind or matter is plausibly primary (and the other derivative), it’s not even close.
Every materialist story that mind is derivative requires that intelligent material life derives from material life, which derives from matter. But this cannot work because biological life itself requires the prior existence of an intentional mind.
All biological life depends on harnessing energy to do the work of living and reproducing. In all reproducing life, the diverse material structures required to harness energy to perform each of the many functions must be constructed from more basic material building blocks according to biological information. Without that guiding and orchestrating information, life could not be constructed, could not function, could not exist.
All biological life requires an operating system. That operating system cannot be derived in some future generation because without a reproducible system of information, there could not be a next generation. Without this, the simplest cell would not know what it needs to build, as well as how, when, and where to build it in order to live and reproduce. Since all biological life requires a functional system of coded, reproducible, meaningful information, life requires a preexisting intentional mind to design the information system that makes biological life possible. Since any material designer would still require biological life that depends on an information system, then by implication, there must ultimately be a preexisting intentional mind that does not depend on material biology. The rational science of biology points us back to what theistic religion has claimed all along.
This is just one of multiple ways in which the advance of our understanding through rational scientific study of the observable is pointing us toward inferring a preexisting, intentional, immaterial, creative and designing Mind. Some kinds of observable effects have properties that imply an intelligent cause.
Regarding near-death experiences (starting around 23:58), I was disappointed that the discussion relied merely on the fact that accounts can be “similar” and didn’t examine how people also report verifiable observations about the material world that their physical bodies could not possibly have observed. They see and describe objects or conversations in other locations, or describe details of people and of events that their eyes could not have seen. This has happened even despite having a verified flat electroencephalography (EEG) that indicates a non-responsive brain. These were details they had no material access to, but which have been documented and verified. Studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals. J. Steve Miller has written multiple books on the topic, including Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven. In this March 2025 interview with him (which also discusses the Pam Reynolds case), he also refers to the investigation by the originally skeptical Dr. Michael Sabom, who later authored Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences.
DG
Apr 17 2025 at 10:44am
From Eric –
I think there’s a false premise at the heart of your argument—the bolded section is where the issue lies. You’re assuming that “reproducible, meaningful” information can only arise through the actions of an intelligent mind. But in fact, there are many, many examples where complex, structured information emerges without any designer.
The major focus of this podcast, for instance, is economic markets, which generate meaningful information without any central intelligence or creator. In the natural world, crystal growth is a simple example. The structure and order of a crystal emerge from the properties of the matter itself. And Chaos Theory is a whole field of mathematics that explores how complex, ordered systems can arise from simple, deterministic rules.
It’s fair to point out that science doesn’t yet have a complete mechanistic explanation for the origin of life—and we may never have one. But that doesn’t mean the only possible explanation is intelligent design.
Eric
Apr 20 2025 at 9:20pm
Sorry, but each of your suggestions fails as a counter-example and actually supports my argument.
All economic activity is the activity of intentional minds. Thus, this a supporting example, not a counter-example. (There has never been any claim that complex specified information can only come from a single “central intelligence”.)
Natural laws (such as produce crystals) do produce regular order. Natural chance (such as produces irregularities in granite) can produce random complexity. Chemist and origin of life researcher Leslie Orgel coined the phrase “specified complexity” (italics in his original) to indicate that the feature that distinguished living organisms from natural products such as crystals or granite. His own definition explicitly excluded the idea that crystals are ever an example of the biological information found in living organisms.
In all of our observations without exception , every structure that originates “from the properties of the matter itself” has failed and must fail as an expression of complex specified information precisely because an informed sequence must be free to vary meaningfully to express the information and must not be constrained by “the properties of the matter” that expresses the information. You couldn’t write a reply if the sequence of letters was determined by the properties of the letters themselves. Genomes could not vary or even hold any information at all if the sequence was controlled by the properties of DNA. Ditto for all of biological information.
You are missing the target. No one doubts that nature can produce “order” or “random complexity”. As Orgel was pointing out, the biological information that distinguishes living organisms is neither of these things. That is why he needed a different term for a distinct kind of arrangement.
Nature works by combinations of necessity (e.g. chemical and physical properties) and chance. That is why we never find “specified complexity” in any naturally produced structure. Citing examples of deterministic natural order or chance randomness are like climbing a ladder is leaning against the wrong house.
Life’s operating systems work according to adopted conventions (e.g. genetic codes) that are neither arbitrary sequences (which would produce random complexity) nor required by properties (which would just produce order). Minds are the only cause we have ever found that can create complex specified information.
DG
Apr 21 2025 at 2:18pm
So, is this a Dembski-style take on intelligent design? The argument seems to follow this basic structure:
(Premise 1) Life exhibits specified complexity.
(Premise 2) All specified complexity requires intelligent design.
(Conclusion) Therefore, life requires intelligent design.
But the word “specified” is doing all the heavy lifting here—and it’s a slippery term. It’s easy to toggle between a general and a narrow definition, which makes the argument hard to pin down. To lay this out more clearly:
If you use a broad, everyday definition of “specified,” then Premise 1 seems true—but Premise 2 is highly questionable. It’s worth noting that Orgel, whom you cite for Premise 1, used this broader sense and explicitly rejected Premise 2.
On the other hand, if you use a narrow definition of “specified” where intelligent design is implied, then Premise 2 is definitionally true—but Premise 1 is equivalent to assuming the conclusion.
In either case, I don’t think the argument doesn’t hold up.
Eric
Apr 24 2025 at 8:17pm
The key is whether one is willing to follow reason based on scientific evidence about mindless matter or else hold firmly in faith to the doctrine of materialism despite evidence to the contrary.
For example, no matter how much more we learn about ink and paper, no one expects unguided ink to ever even try to write out a symbolic recipe for a functional protein.
Considering a different kind of mindless matter makes no difference. All mindless matter lacks the knowledge to express as information, cannot imagine an immaterial coding convention to express it in, cannot design the matching encoding and decoding material mechanisms to faithfully implement the convention it cannot imagine and express the information it does not know, and has no purpose or intention to achieve any of this. These are all functions of minds, which mindless matter does not have.
For mindless matter to “do” anything toward processing information requires not only energy, but also the complex specified material structures that will harness and convert that energy into the particular work that needs to be done. Thus, every attempt to try to imagine mindless matter working on the problem of specified complexity in unguided nature falls into circular thinking by presupposing the prior existence of the specified complexity one needs to explain. It is guaranteed to be a vain hope, a wild goose chase, like looking for a perpetual motion machine.
Orgel’s own simple, original definition is quite sufficient. It implicitly concedes the fact that science has never found any specified complexity that was created by natural processes of non-living, mindless matter. That is why living organisms are distinguished by specified complexity. Given what we already know from science, that is exactly the result we should expect when we use reason to follow the scientific evidence where it leads. Holding on to faith in materialism (as Orgel did) is a blind leap of faith in the sense that it is contrary to the seen evidence.
John Wolfe
Apr 14 2025 at 5:28pm
Although I am an atheist, I have no quarrel with those who find comfort and meaning in any belief system, and for the purpose of this comment and Ross’ interview, Abrahamic religion.
However, I expect those who believe to enjoy their religion without imposing any, that is any, if their beliefs on others.
It seems to me that the New Apostolic Reformation and current US Catholic church as trying to impose their belief system on others through public policy. Those efforts need to lead to revocation of the tax exempt status for the organization and the deductions that their members take.
As far as consciousness, the soul, near death, afterlife, etc. go, I am fine with you believing in those to find meaning. I just do not see why we need more than one life lived well and the thought of eternal life – really? How does one keep from getting bored in say, the ten-thousandth year?
Kyle
Apr 15 2025 at 12:21pm
I’m about a third in, and I feel the same way about this podcast as I do about most attempts to apply a scientific approach to “proving” the existence of higher powers. Ross offers no particular insights on questions of consciousness: people have been making these arguments, and others making the counterarguments (e.g., just because we don’t understand it currently doesn’t mean we *can’t* understand it; or that it should be *expected* that we come to understand among the most complex objects in the universe—our brains—last and with great difficulty), for decades.
This doesn’t mean people should not be religious or spiritual, or reject the idea that there could be a higher power. I am (pun intended) agnostic on that question. But the positivist approach to proving religion right is entirely unconvincing, and frankly laughable when you abandon even the pretense of proving a *particular* set of beliefs because you’ve already reluctantly come to accept that there’s no particular reason to believe there is one true faith and a lot of false ones. If you believe in God, don’t let me or any other atheist stop you; but just recognize that such belief is based on something like faith or hope or longing, not on evidence. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s just not a position many of us are ever going to adopt.
Shalom freedman
Apr 16 2025 at 9:12am
If not the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob then of what meaning to us the god of the philosophers?
[edited to remove repeated material at end of comment–Econlib Ed.]
DG
Apr 16 2025 at 1:28pm
I agree with Kyle above—I was also confused by the seemingly inconsistent standards of evidence Ross applied. As a scientist and an atheist, I agree with Ross that science does not currently, and probably will never, offer a complete mechanistic explanation for consciousness. But acknowledging that gap doesn’t undermine materialism. I’m not sure why that should be seen as surprising or somehow a point in favor of religious belief—especially since Ross doesn’t seem to offer a religious account that addresses the problem of consciousness in any meaningful way either.
Ross’s main arguments for religion seem to be:
It’s too much of a coincidence that the universe is set up in such a way that we exist.
That there are cross-cultural reports of paranormal experiences, which he believes are more consistent with a religious (or at least supernatural) worldview than a materialist one.
On point (1), Russ and Ross don’t spend much time unpacking it, but it strikes me as sloppy logic. It’s a version of the fine-tuning argument that’s been critiqued thoroughly by smarter minds than mine. To me, Ross’s reasoning is exactly as strong as Calvin’s in the classic Calvin and Hobbes strip:
Calvin: I’m the end result of history.Hobbes: You?Calvin: Think of it! Thousands of generations lived and died to produce my exact, specific parents, whose reason for being, obviously, was to produce ME. All history up to this point has been spent preparing the world for my presence.Hobbes: Hmm, 4.5 billion years probably wasn’t long enough.Calvin: Now I’m here, and history is vindicated.
On point (2), I think it’s an interesting observation. And I’m open to the idea that science should be less reflexively dismissive of paradigm-challenging data, even if it comes from unconventional sources. Scientists, like anyone else, are biased—and certainly biased against paranormal claims. (After all, Columbia did fire the great parapsychologist Dr. Peter Venkman under dubious circumstances.)
But the type of evidence Ross cites is similar to the evidence used by cryptozoologists and similar people. The following is probably a somewhat unfair example, but I still think it’s illustrative. My 5-year-old recently ran into my room convinced there was something under his bed. My other kids have had similar experiences. So did I when I was young. So have many others across cultures. I’d explain it as a mix of evolutionary fear of being along in that dark, shared stories about monsters, and the emotionally and narratively shaped nature of our perception—especially in kids. A cryptozoologist might see this as evidence of under-bed monsters, which is, admittedly a simpler explanation in some ways. Ross seems to see it as evidence for God. Even if I admit that my materialist explanation is at least in part a just-so rationalization, I’m not sure why Ross thinks he has a better one.
Early on Ross says:
I would frame it differently: there have always been good reasons to believe in God, but they’ve never been about holding an objectively true view of the universe. Objective truth is one thing we aim for in our beliefs, but it’s hardly the only thing. Religion is part of our cultural software. A “good” religion helps individuals and societies flourish. I think that’s essentially the Humean view, and when Russ and Ross touch on these non-epistemic, practical reasons for belief near the end, I find that part of the conversation much more compelling than the earlier arguments.
Dean
Apr 20 2025 at 2:08pm
The argument that “that we find ourselves in a universe that appears to be structured and designed in ways conducive to the emergence, not just of order and sort of regularity and mathematical patterns” just doesn’t resonate with me. Humans are pattern recognizing machines, and examples for disorder seem to outnumber what most rational people take for a well designed system. An easy example is if the universe were designed Pi would be equal to 3.00000…., not 3.1415926535…., right?
Also, I think the churches should be taxed. There should be some economic repercussions for years of resistance to moral and scientific progress. I often wonder what society would be like had we lost the shackles of religion and magical thinking eons ago. One does not need religion to live a moral life.
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Luke J
Apr 21 2025 at 5:11pm
I’ve never been persuaded that churches were and are substantially resistant to moral and scientific progress. Rather, I see religions as façades worn by State/National interests.
But to the point of taxing churches, in what portion of their economic activities (e.g. hiring staff, leasing buildings, feeding homeless) should grubby Uncle Sam have his fingers?