The Case for Religion Amidst AI, UFOs, and Psychedelics with Ross Douthat

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Ross Douthat

   My argument is that before you get even to the question of these really decisive choices—Jesus as the Son of God or Muhammad as Seal of the Prophets, right? A Buddhist vision of nirvana or a Christian vision of heaven—those choices are distinct. They're distinct from one another. But before you get there, you can say to yourself reasonably: look, if I can accept that there's probably some kind of God who created the universe and has some kind of plan for human beings, then I think it's okay to say probably this God is not out to get us, right? This God is not setting up this impossible thing where there is one true religion, but guess what? It's practiced by six tribesmen in eastern Siberia, and you're never going to figure it out. Sorry, sucks to be you, right? No—you can reasonably assume that religions that develop, endure, win converts, and survive amid challenges and competition and secularization and so on are in general probably closer to the truth about the universe than, let's say, a random startup cult in a basement in San Diego or something, right?

2. 01:16

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green, where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

3. 01:41

   Michael Horton

   Well, it's a pleasure to be able to have a conversation with Ross Douthat. I've been looking forward to this, especially after reading his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross is a New York Times opinion columnist, a leading intellectual today, and he's the host of the Interesting Times podcast at the New York Times—and a Roman Catholic who we're going to try to bring back into the fold. You just kind of skipped over—you went charismatic, Episcopal, Roman Catholic. We're going to try to bring you back to the center there, Ross, if possible.

4. 02:23

   Ross Douthat

   It's true. First, thank you so much for having me. And it's true that as a kid, we went on a tour of American Christianity. But we did not have a Reformed confessional Calvinist phase as far as I can remember. There's always the possibility that there was a hazy couple of months—

5. 02:47

   Michael Horton

   While you were asleep or something—

6. 02:48

   Ross Douthat

   Of hardcore Calvinism. Maybe a sojourn in Moscow, Idaho, though that wasn’t—I don’t think that was a going concern—

7. 02:55

   Michael Horton

   Please, no.

8. 02:56

   Ross Douthat

   Back then. But yes, no, I'm here to be instructed in—

9. 03:00

   Michael Horton

   Oh no, we're on the learning end here. You recently participated in the Free Press debate, "Does the West Need a Religious Revival?" And your opening statement—if I can just quote it here, it's a good chunk, but it's a good way into this, I think—“Do away with faith, the New Atheists argued, and the world will become a better place. Believe in God, that old North Korean dictator in the sky, literally poisoned everything. Religious fundamentalism stood in the way of scientific progress. Religious moralism stood in the way of personal liberation. Belief in an imaginary sky daddy was a source of pointless polarization. And we listened to them. We ran the experiment. America in 2025 is more secular than the America of 20 years ago. Religious affiliation has declined. Fewer Americans associate with religious tradition than at any point in our modern history. And how's it going? Is America happier, less polarized, more inclined to understand those with different worldviews and perspectives, more confident in scientific and academic authority, more reasonable?” Listeners, I think, might be able to answer this question for themselves, but why don't you explain a little more your reason for asking this question, because I believe it really sets up the whole purpose of your book.

10. 04:19

    Ross Douthat

    Yeah, so we've lived in the United States through a period—we can debate a term like secularization, but let's call it a period of de-churching. And it's sort of a second wave. There was a first wave of dechurching after the 1960s that took American church-going down from what had been kind of an all-time high in the 1940s and '50s, right? It was not actually the case in American history that the country started out religious and just became progressively more secular. In fact, of course, there were awakenings and revivals, ups and downs. But really, the trend in church membership and the strength of churches and religious institutions was mostly upward until the middle of the 20th century. And then you get a sharp decline in the '60s and '70s, a leveling off, and then a new decline that we've just gone through. And this decline wasn't caused by the New Atheists—the writers I was talking about in that statement—but they certainly helped hurry it along. And they did make a set of pretty concrete claims about how much better the world would be if America became less Christian, less religious, less inclined to practice and pray and believe in an invisible God. And I think we're at a point now—especially since COVID, which I think was kind of a point of cultural demarcation—where no one believes in that narrative anymore. No one thinks that a less religious America is a more enlightened and happier America. And so there's plenty of people who miss religion even if they don't believe in it. There's a large population of younger people especially who have been raised without any connection to organized religion. Not Christmas and Easter, not even a little Sunday school—just nothing. Flat nothing.

11. 06:11

    Michael Horton

    They're not angry. They're not angry.

12. 06:12

    Ross Douthat

    And they're not angry. They're not alienated. They don't have a history of bad experiences with nuns wrapping their fingers with rulers or anything like that. They just don't know the first thing about what religion is. Why might someone be religious? What does that mean in practice? And so the book—yeah, the book is written for everyone. Of course, the subtitle is Why Everyone Should Be Religious, so it's a book for everyone. But in terms of who it's speaking to most directly, it's people first in the camp that thinks, well, it would be nice to be religious, but you just can't get there without setting too much reason and science aside. And then the second group of people who are like, I'm interested in religion, but tell me more about it. Why might someone take religious ideas seriously? And what might one do with one's life absent a kind of road-to-Damascus experience, right? So absent a kind of direct conversion, you're just a person trying to set out on a religious pilgrimage. What are the landmarks you're looking for? What kind of choices might you make?

13. 07:19

    Michael Horton

    And they're against the dogmatism of the New Atheists. That's an old story now, right?

14. 07:24

    Ross Douthat

    I think so. Look, it's a big and complicated country, right? And there are still plenty of people out there who have had bad experiences with religion, who have angrily rejected it or intellectually rejected it. I write a column for the New York Times. The New York Times has many secular readers—if you dig into the comment threads on some of my religious columns, you will find plenty of people who sound a lot like Richard Dawkins at his peak. But if you're talking about the trend—where is the culture going—then I think absolutely it's going to a place of spiritual and religious interest that doesn't carry with it any sense of the historic Christian or Abrahamic or anything past—

15. 08:09

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

16. 08:09

    Ross Douthat

    Really. And that's, for Christians, right—Protestants and Catholics, Reformed and Roman alike—that’s a zone of opportunity. But it's also—and this, I think, goes to some of your own writing and interest—a zone of peril, right? Because there are a lot of people setting out into the spiritual landscape without a map, without any guidance, opening themselves up to all different kinds of spiritual experience, some of it positive, some of it dangerous. And there's definitely, I think, an impulse toward looking for what you might call small-g gods in this environment. So not Yahweh or Jehovah, and not even Allah or the Brahman—not even some ultimate divine principle from a non-Christian religion—but more like, what is an intermediate power that can help me in my life. And you see that in neopaganism. You see it in the vogue for psychedelic religious experiences. You see it, I think, in the UFO fascination. And you see it a bit—this is more scientific than religious—but a bit in what people are looking for from AI. So—

17. 09:23

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

18. 09:23

    Ross Douthat

    In that sense, the traditional religions and Christianity above all are sort of in competition with more individualistic, personalized forms of religious faith that, from a Christian perspective, are in danger of, let's just say, directing worship in the wrong direction.

19. 09:44

    Michael Horton

    Autonomous individualism sounds like it's at the heart of this, right? You make a great argument that you can't play soccer alone. You really emphasize that you need to get in the water, get in the game. Don't sit on the sidelines saying that any effort to sort of get in a game—that might strike people at first. As I was reading it, I was thinking, is he advocating some kind of religious syncretism? And as you read on, it's like, no, it's concentric circles. You're starting where people are. You're trying to invite people into the game of religion. You know, C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. You are kind of mere religion.

20. 10:28

    Ross Douthat

    Mere—yeah, it's one. Well, Lewis is—look, context matters, right? Lewis is writing in an environment—this is 60 or 70 years ago, but maybe more than that now; we're all getting older—but he's writing in an environment where secularization has taken hold. People have left religion behind, but the religion they have left behind is clearly Christianity, right? And the viable—

21. 10:54

    Michael Horton

    Disaffected Anglicans.

22. 10:55

    Ross Douthat

    Right, exactly. The viable religious options in C.S. Lewis's England were Christian options. In some of his books he does get into a bit of interreligious ideas—he talks about the Dao. I think that's in The Abolition of Man—the sort of universal principles of morality that show up in different religions. So he does a bit of that, but basically, as a writer, he can take for granted that if he can talk someone into believing in God, their only live option is Christianity. And that's not true in 21st-century America. And so you are starting out at a more basic level—mere religion. And you also have to take for granted that there are people who are going to become interested in religion and are going to convert to Christianity straight away, and then there are people who are going to go on more complicated and tangled journeys. And I think Christians—there is obviously a sort of openness in my book to the presence of God in other religions, and that is, in its own way, a kind of liberal idea coming from a conservative Catholic, but I do take that seriously. And I think Christians have to take seriously that they're going to be speaking to people who are confronted with a really wide array of religious options, and who, if they come to Christianity, are sometimes going to come to it through several different way stations along the way.

23. 12:36

    Michael Horton

    That's what really impressed me—that you really take the reader through those way stations. It's not like you leave them there and just, you know, do argue that Christianity is the truest destination, but you don't say that up front. You're kind of drawing people into it. You talk about the big religions, which I found interesting—if you're going to start somewhere, one, do it with a community that's been around for a long time. Join it, check it out. Just stew in it for a while. Why the big religions?

24. 13:15

    Ross Douthat

    Well, this is an answer to a really commonplace complaint that I hear a lot from people who are not religious—you know, not hardcore atheists, open to religion, right—but their view, because we live in this pluralist society where, just through the internet alone, you have access to basically every religion extant in the world today. And so they say, look, how can you possibly imagine that out of, you know, 1,217 religious possibilities, you have the truth? And how can you possibly hope to find the truth setting out into a world where there are so many different competing religious possibilities? And my argument is that before you get even to the question of these really decisive choices—Jesus as the Son of God or Muhammad as Seal of the Prophets, right, a Buddhist vision of nirvana or a Christian vision of heaven; those choices are distinct, they're distinct from one another—but before you get there, you can say to yourself reasonably: look, if I can accept that there's probably some kind of God who created the universe and has some kind of plan for human beings—and the first part of my book is trying to walk people through the scientific, philosophical, and historical reasons to take that basic idea seriously, right—so if I've persuaded them to take that basic idea seriously, then I think it's okay to say probably this God is not out to get us, right? This God is not setting up this impossible thing where there is one true religion, but guess what—it's practiced by six tribesmen in eastern Siberia, and you're never going to figure it out. Sorry, sucks to be you, right? No—you have to assume—well, you don't have to assume—but I think you can reasonably assume that religions that develop, endure, win converts, and survive amid challenges and competition and secularization and so on are in general probably closer to the truth about the universe than, let's say, a random startup cult in a basement in San Diego or something. In the end, you have to make a choice between Christianity and Islam. Absolutely. But Christianity and Islam together are both a lot more likely to be true than a random faith that went extinct in the 16th century somewhere. If God is real, and if human beings have some actual role to play in God's plan, I think it is okay to narrow your religious options in a substantial way. And then it's also okay to say, okay, I don't have to figure out the answer to every single theological controversy to start out on a journey, right? So people will say, well, okay, Christianity or Islam—but there are so many kinds of Christianity. There's the endless jokes about, you're this kind of Baptist, but you're that kind of Baptist, right? And obviously there are lots of different kinds of Islam too. But it's like if you're starting out thinking about politics, right—for instance there are many different kinds of conservatism and many different kinds of liberalism. But it's still okay to start out and say, I'm probably a conservative or I'm probably a liberal, before you obsess over the specific differences between the 16 kinds of Baptists. Again, not to say those distinctions are unimportant, but you shouldn't imprison yourself—there are a lot of people who just get stuck in a kind of indecisive—

25. 16:58

    Michael Horton

    Paralyzed.

26. 16:58

    Ross Douthat

    Agnosticism because they're like, well, there are 17 Methodist—you know, 17 churches in the town green, how am I going to pick one? And well, you—

27. 17:05

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

28. 17:05

    Ross Douthat

    You can make it easier on yourself to begin with, and trust that providence is going to be helpful to you once you begin a quest that providence obviously wants you to begin.

29. 17:21

    Michael Horton

    The first part of your book clears away the brush, first of all, on the whole question of Christianity or religion and science. So science has debunked Christianity—that's why I can't join it. How do you respond?

30. 17:37

    Ross Douthat

    I think the things that people treat as the debunkings—in particular Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin, right—are absolutely moments when there was conflict between particular scientific arguments and particular Christian teachings. And I think the conflict was sharper with Darwinism, which is why it remains a conflict. I don't talk a lot about evolution in the book, in part because I don't think we've come to the end of Christians arguing about evolution and its implications. I think it does raise some knotty theological—K-N-O-T-T-Y, not—but some theological issues about Genesis and the fall. Not insoluble issues, but real issues. So it is absolutely the case that science can raise issues for particular theological doctrines—I would never say that's not the case. The claim, though, that science has disproven the broad Christian perspective on the world—that there is a creator God outside time and space who made the heavens and the earth, who ordered all things with human beings in mind, who intervenes in human history in decisive ways. One, none of that has been debunked by any scientific investigation. Two, portions of that perspective—the initial part about God as a creator and orderer of the universe—have been confirmed and strengthened, I think, in a variety of different ways by the progress of modern science. Not just the basic structure and design of the universe, but the incredible fine-tuning of the universe's laws to allow for the emergence of planets and stars and human life. All of that is something we know more about now than we ever have before. And it's actually pushed atheism and materialism into this weird cul-de-sac where the strict materialist is now required to believe in an infinity of invisible universes—the so-called multiverse—in order to avoid believing in a single invisible God. Then also, I think what you have with consciousness—not just the resilient mystery of consciousness, but the fact that consciousness is capable of penetrating the larger mysteries, understanding the cosmos, its laws and its ordering, and so on—that seems to me like confirmation of the basic Christian idea of human beings made in the image of God: that God is the designer of the superstructure, and we participate in the divine nature insofar as we can understand those structures, split the atom, and potentially, for better or worse, rewrite our own genetic code, all of this stuff. Finally—this is less a scientific point than a sociological and historical point—I think people in these arguments don't give enough weight to the resilience of religious and spiritual experience. Probably this is the consequence of what I mentioned before, my own sojourn in Pentecostalism as a kid. But really, from an atheist materialist perspective, it is quite surprising how completely and thoroughly religious and mystical experience has persisted under more secularized conditions, where you don't have churches telling everyone what to believe or making people read Bible stories about miracles, and so on. And in fact, there are endless case studies of people who have no religious beliefs whatsoever, including militant atheists, having strange, fascinating, bizarre supernatural experiences. I think there's just a plethora of basic evidence that if there is a higher power, the higher power is interested in us—even before you get to a specific big question like, did the incarnation and the resurrection happen? Just as a general matter, right? And this is all sort of, when St. Paul is preaching to the pagans, he says something to the effect of, “I'm here to tell you about God's revelation—the most important thing”—but there was already enough evidence out there for you to have some kind of belief. And the first part of my book is basically trying to set out what that evidence is: What is Saint Paul talking about in the context of our 21st-century knowledge?

31. 21:51

    Michael Horton

    Especially in such a brief space.

32. 21:55

    Ross Douthat

    It is. It's not a—

33. 21:56

    Michael Horton

    Concisely summarize those arguments.

34. 22:00

    Ross Douthat

    Hopefully.

35. 22:00

    Michael Horton

    Very, very helpfully.

36. 22:07

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37. 23:04

    Michael Horton

    One of the things that strikes me, Ross, is how many scientists today are not represented at all by Dawkins. They are—even hardcore materialists are trying to argue for materialism in a spiritual kind of way—they're trying to spiritualize matter. Panpsychism—you refer to panpsychism, and I've been reading on panpsychism and the folks working on AI and transhumanism and so forth. It's almost like shifting from organized religion, which we don't like, to science-fiction spiritualism—retrieving a kind of Neoplatonic mysticism, of an Aristotelian kind of panpsychism, that we thought was over, that even Orthodox Christians shy away from.

38. 24:07

    Ross Douthat

    My sense is that that's truer of, I guess you could say, atheist philosophers right now than it is of practicing scientists. I think a lot of practicing scientists—again, not Richard Dawkins-esque scourges of religion—but are sort of deep enough in their disciplines that they're content with a conventional materialist paradigm because it's what guides their scientific work, right? So it's the people who are lifting up a bit—philosophers of science, sometimes neuroscientists, but often philosophers of neuroscience—who are lifting up and looking at the big picture and saying, wait a minute, materialism doesn't make sense of any of this. You have these concepts like emergence, right? It's like consciousness is an emergent property—well, no one knows what emergence means, this is just sort of mysticism, right? And so you have people like Philip Goff, who's written about panpsychism, and Thomas Nagel, the famous philosopher, who again are not conventionally religious, but are sort of trying to come up with a theory that accepts the resilience of mind as a kind of irreducible fact about existence without going all the way to a capital-M Mind. I think that's a pretty unstable position to be in. And in fact, Goff, maybe the most prominent panpsychist, keeps flirting with heterodox or heretical forms of Christianity—Nagel, maybe not so much. But yeah, I think there's certainly a sense among a lot of smart people that materialism is insufficient to get to mind and consciousness—something needs to be added to the theory. And you get people flirting with like, well, maybe quantum physics can help us in some way, there's some quantum level of reality that generates consciousness or something. I'm pretty underwhelmed by some of those speculations.

39. 26:0

    Michael Horton

    Almost sounds like a God-of-the-gaps theory, doesn't it? Not our God of the gaps, but—

40. 26:14

    Ross Douthat

    Yes, some of those theories are clearly like, we are awaiting a breakthrough in science that will explain it. Yeah, it's an atheism of the gaps in that sense. I think the panpsychists—it's more like they are accepting something that I, as a Christian, also believe to be true; they're just not perhaps drawing the correct inference from it. At the very least, I feel like once you're a panpsychist, you should become a pantheist pretty quickly. You don't have to become a classical theist. You might still have skepticism that mind can exist outside time and space, but at the very least, once you've stipulated that mind is in everything and all over everything, there’s probably then higher forms of mind than just ours. Right. And yeah, I think if I were a panpsychist, I would be a pantheist.

41. 27:09

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, makes the most sense. You write: "Everywhere mysticism is on the march, spiritual experimentation is coming back. My unhappily agnostic correspondents are on the hunt for gnosis, the divine experience, the hidden architecture, the secret truth." This is almost entirely what I'm seeing also in academic histories on the spiritual-but-not-religious phenomenon. And you say this hunt for divine gnosis and experience is why religion needs defending. I'm curious then—even though New Atheism’s dying, do you think religion has more or less a chance against the enchantment of New Agey therapeutic spirituality? Or was the idea of disenchantment-enchantment developed precisely as an alternative to Judeo-Christian monotheism?

42. 28:09

    Ross Douthat

    That's an interesting idea, and I suspect you're more familiar with that particular history. I do think there are ways in which Christians are sort of obliged to be skeptical of a disenchantment-enchantment frame, right? My own view is that, to the extent enchantment describes something real about the universe, it's a reality that persists notwithstanding official secular conditions, right. I guess I'd say two things. First, I think in general, what gives religion an advantage over individualized spirituality—apart from questions of truth, which are obviously quite important too, if God is on the side of religion, that makes a difference. But setting that aside, I think, you know, one of the things we're seeing in our society now is that certain forms of hyperindividualism lead to extinction very quickly. You see this in collapsing birth rates all over the world. You see this, I think, in the ways various forms of human culture under digital conditions just disappear and vanish, right? And so, as much as the sort of spiritual-but-not-religious mentality clearly has a certain appeal to people who don't want to submit to traditional religious authority, I think it also struggles to reproduce itself—it needs actual stronger communities to generate the people who it can then convert. And that can work for a while. But under the conditions of the next 50 years, where I am really worried about—not human extinction exactly, but whole nations almost disappearing—I think the cultural and demographic advantages of religion can become really important, right? So you'd certainly bet on that the Amish are going to have a really good 21st century. Whereas people who are building their religion on a purely personalized level—how many kids are those people having? What kind of—

43. 30:25

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

44. 30:25

    Ross Douthat

    Community are those people building?

45. 30:27

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

46. 30:27

    Ross Douthat

    Now, with this, though, a further question—to get really weird. We went through a period like this in certain ways in the 1970s. There was a similar vogue for personal individualized religion, a similar vogue for astrology, magic, psychic powers, all of these kinds of things, right. And that burned itself out, and institutional religion made a comeback, I would say, in the '80s and '90s, so that by the time I was growing up—my parents knew their astrological signs, but I didn't know any teenager in the 1990s who knew they were a Sagittarius, right? That was passé. And crystals and all that stuff had vanished into the New Age bookstores. So you could tell a story where there are just these cycles, and we've been in a kind of spiritual-but-not-religious cycle. But for the reasons I've just suggested, institutional religion will make a bigger comeback in the future. Unless the magical forms of religion or spirituality—the people doing outreach to small-g gods—start to get answers, public manifestations of small-d divine power, these kinds of things. If suddenly magic seemed to work, if the AI oracle did seem godlike, if a UFO really descended, then you're in different territory. This is very speculative, but I don't think Christians who believe in the supernatural should fully discount the possibility that there might at some point be something really weird that happens that scrambles things. I think.

47. 32:15

    Michael Horton

    Having taken people on this great journey from the broader to the narrower—the case for commitment—you conclude the book with your arguments as to why you think Christianity stands out. Why should a person who is on this religious journey, they're kind of in the library of world religions, as you call it, take Christianity off the shelf and treat it differently?

48. 32:43

    Ross Douthat

    I think because the story of the Gospels, before you get to the whole of the religion—just the Gospels themselves—stand out in a really profound way among religious texts and religious stories. In the book, I basically say something like: the same assumption that should lead you to think that probably God is more present in the big religions than in the random ones you've never heard of should also put you on the lookout for cases within the big religions that themselves seem to stand out and command attention. I don't think Christianity has the only case study here, but I think the Gospels really are sui generis among religious texts and stories, in terms of their combination of historicity—their groundedness in the realities of a period we actually know a lot about. It's not a mythological period, a historical period—in terms of their credibility as memoir and eyewitness testimony, in terms of distinctiveness. This is not unfamiliar from Christian apologetics, but it remains true. The character of Jesus is distinctive. And the narrative of betrayal, crucifixion, resurrection stands out—the resurrection itself stands out. To read the Gospels naively, which I think more people will be doing in this context, right, is to connect again with just how much this feels like something that really happened, right. You're reading the Gospels, and you're not reading some polished account written 500 years later by the priests of a well-developed religion who are smoothing out all the rough patches and making it all fit together theologically. No, you're reading something written by people in the midst of something, who don't fully understand what's happening, who are just beginning to try to grapple with it theologically—they're hundreds of years away from the Nicene Creed being formulated, right. And it just feels like reality. And I think here the difficulty that Christians had for a long time—the intellectual difficulty—was that once Christian cultural hegemony began cracking up, Christianity was associated with institutions and teachings that, for obvious reasons, emphasized the infallibility, the indefectibility, the idea of not just Christian doctrines but the New Testament itself as the perfect word of God. And in that climate, any sort of difficulty—well, there are two different genealogies here, what's going on with that? Or John has the clearing of the temple at this point in the chronology, and the Synoptics have it somewhere else, and so on—any point of seeming tension or contradiction in the Gospels, in a culture where these institutions were making such strong claims, could become a place where the acid of skepticism could enter in. But in our context, where, again, lots of people are just coming to the Gospels fresh, I think if you come to them fresh, what's striking is—yeah, there are some tensions and issues here, some questions about whether Matthew got this right or Luke got this right—but they read like eyewitness accounts, right? That's the inescapable reality.

49. 36:31

    Michael Horton

    So they're kind of coming like the first Christians.

50. 36:34

    Ross Douthat

    Well, ideally, ideally.

51. 36:36

    Michael Horton

    Ideally, neither as critics nor believers, but we will hear more about this later, as they told Paul in Athens.

52. 36:45

    Ross Douthat

    Yes, hopefully.

53. 36:47

    Michael Horton

    And as they're reading—you're saying, as they're reading, they're going to be reading texts that, precisely because of discrepancies and different angles, and it's not all smoothed out, and so forth—precisely because of that, as well as other issues, just have this ring of truth that can bring people along before they get to either believing or criticizing.

54. 37:13

    Ross Douthat

    Yes. And to me—I don't want to get too deep into the biblical inerrancy debates—but to me, as a would-be naive reader, you try, even as a convinced Christian, to read the Gospels naively. If one Gospel writer and another had slight discrepancies of memory that produced different accounts, that is in fact what you would expect—

55. 37:40

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

56. 37:40

    Ross Douthat

    From eyewitness accounts. Whereas a set of Gospels that presented themselves to you completely smoothed out—oh, guess what, there's no possible tension between these four completely different books by different authors—I mean, yes, in a way you could say, well, that would be better proof of divine inspiration. But if you're analyzing their historical credibility—

57. 38:00

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

58. 38:00

    Ross Douthat

    In fact I find the discrepancies to be part of the credibility anyway.

59. 38:04

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, yeah. They didn't get together at the Marriott over a weekend and—

60. 38:10

    Ross Douthat

    Right. No, they absolutely did not. They were writing them the way you would write something in a context where you were trying to put down, based on your own memories and other people's memories, what you had experienced. That's plainly what happened.

61. 38:27

    Michael Horton

    We'll finish with this. A lot of spiritually curious people, like Joe Rogan for example, are interested in consciousness around the mystical edges, but they don't seem too interested in historical claims like the resurrection, and the implications of those historical claims. In the book, you recount a conversation with the late atheist critic Christopher Hitchens, in the kitchen at a party. He asks you, “if Jesus rose from the dead, so what?” A lot of people I meet—if you give them evidence, arguments for the resurrection of Jesus—a lot of times they say, so what? Do you believe in UFOs?

62. 39:12

    Ross Douthat

    So Hitchens didn't say "so what," though—I want to be clear. He said—

63. 39:15

    Michael Horton

    Oh, okay.

64. 39:16

    Ross Douthat

    He said, “what would it prove?”

65. 39:19

    Michael Horton

    Oh, okay, yeah.

66. 39:19

    Ross Douthat

    Which is a bit different. I think there are two slightly distinct attitudes that are both worth wrestling with. One is the one you described, right—where it's like there are people who are just never going to be convinced by any amount of evidence, or who seem like they're never going to be convinced. There's always the possibility of divine grace entering in. But people who are just so fully resistant to the idea of the supernatural that it's like, well, you know, if I believed in that, I'd have to believe in anything, and so I have to rule it out. With Hitchens, I had the sense that it was more a kind of sense of like, even if there were weird things in the world—and maybe I'm interpreting this wrongly, it was late and we had both had too many drinks—but even if there are weird things in the world, what does it all add up to? And that I encounter a lot, including in the conversations I've had around this book. There's a certain kind of person who's like, I read your stuff about the design of the universe, and I kind of agree, I think materialism is insufficient, right—but the concept of God just seems too loaded, and the idea that a religion could be true seems too much. And I think that's a very potent sense—there are people you could persuade that a miracle had happened, and they would still say, okay, but like it's still just totally mysterious to me what's going on in the world. And it's not going to be the resurrection of Jesus for them, right? It's going to be something more personal—maybe they're going to have a weird mystical experience, which lots of people have and don't know what to do with, or maybe they're going to read an argument, maybe mine, maybe someone else's, about religion, and say, hey, that kind of makes a little sense. I'm saying to them, that's an invitation. You don't have to treat it as this thing that you just set aside. And here's—this is just the very conventional part of the book's argument—I'm like, you're a mortal creature, your life is finite, it's time-bound, we're all going to die, right? If there is some kind of mystery to the universe, some kind of creator of the universe, you're going to encounter them, probably. And you should take that seriously and do something about it. That doesn't mean you have to move to Tibet and take up residence on a mountain or something. It can just mean going to church on Sunday, right? It can just mean taking a step toward religion and seeing what happens. But overcoming that sense of paralysis, I think, is really important to any kind of religious restoration.

67. 41:56

    Michael Horton

    To anyone who thinks, from this interview, that you just trail off into a fog of big religions—"let's not go to Christianity"—that's not the case at all. Here is, in fact, how the book ends: Mark 13:35–36. “‘Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.’ If you are this sleeper, I beg of you, awake." Ross Douthat, it has been a real pleasure to talk to you, and thank you for giving us your valuable time to engage with this intriguing book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

68. 42:45

    Ross Douthat

    It's been a pleasure, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.

69. 42:51

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