Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
By Ross Douthat.
Zondervan, 2025.
Hardcover, 240 pages, $29.99.
Reviewed by Luca Frumento.
In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg explaining how Europe came to forget Christianity’s deep roots in ancient Greek philosophy. Logos to the Greeks meant “word,” “speech,” “reason,” or “principle,” indicating a rational order underlying the nature of things. In John’s Gospel, we learn that God animates, indeed is, that order: “In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Christians believe human beings participate in divine logos, however dimly, through contemplation.
Thus Christians claim that God cannot act contrary to reason. To the Christian, reason is not an external constraint imposed on God; rather, God cannot act contrary to reason because God cannot contradict or cease to be himself.
To Benedict, this profound rapprochement between Greek philosophy and Christianity is fundamental to understanding reason and revelation. Benedict laments that modern Europe has lost this understanding of faith and reason—a loss he calls the “dehellenization of Christianity” that unfolded in three historical stages. First, sixteenth-century Protestant reformers opposed the medieval devotion to Greek metaphysics in favor of “returning” complete authority to the written gospel. Second, eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers generally favored inductive, empirical reasoning based on historical and scientific “facts” over deductive metaphysical “speculation.” Third, the logical conclusion of the second stage occurred in the twentieth century when man finally stripped reason of all its power to understand anything beyond the material, thus bringing about an age of moral relativism.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in his recent book titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, confronts us—Benedict’s “third-stagers”—head-on. He challenges the reigning orthodoxy of our time—not religious belief, but the claim that all religious belief is irrational. Douthat invites readers to question their preconceived notions of faith and reason with three arguments: first, reason observes an order to nature, and intelligent design is its most plausible cause; second, the human mind seems uniquely shaped to discover truths about that order; third, (perhaps in tension with his previous two claims), the supernatural realm continues to suspend and penetrate that order, and us. To Douthat, to deny order, consciousness, and enchantment would be to deny the truth as it comes to sight.
Benedict’s “dehellenization of Christianity” describes the secularization of the West. Interestingly, according to Benedict, secularization did not occur due to an increased confidence in reason as opposed to revelation, but rather due to a diminished confidence in reason’s capacities. Today reason is relegated to merely applying the scientific method to discover efficient causes. The scientific method is external to the human mind, and therefore immune to its unscientific prejudices.
If you have doubts about this, if you suspect that human beings can reason beyond mere methodology, if you are open to the possibility that we can think rationally about enduring moral, not merely material, questions, then Douthat’s book is for you.
Employ reason to observe reality, Douthat argues, and one finds that reality is not reducible to random matter in motion. Rather, reality shows signs of intelligent design oriented to the good of human beings. Even more, the mind is uniquely capable of discovering that intelligent design. And miracles and supernatural experiences continue to occur in the modern world, even under the microscope of modern science.
Douthat attempts to demonstrate his three claims by addressing the purported scientific evidence against belief. Like all good authors, he meets us where we are. But Douthat begins his book in a different, stranger manner—with a thought experiment. He asks the reader to close his eyes and imagine a world before materialism became the reigning orthodoxy. He asks us to imagine either a more enchanted past, or for those raised in a religious household, to simply remember their childhood when they took religious belief for granted. Douthat thus nudges the reader to expand his epistemic horizons beyond the material by asking him to reason from what this imaginary, naïve self sees in plain sight, without an education—or indoctrination—in materialism.
Yet in doing so, Douthat frames his entire book in light of the reader’s nostalgia, his desire to recover the tranquility of the past or of childhood. We thus raise the following question: Is our longing for happiness an obstacle to rational inquiry? Douthat seems to suggest that we cannot separate reason, even purely empirical rationality, from the human longing for happiness. Are we thus doomed to prejudice, bias, and falsehood? Or can understanding the human longing for happiness somehow unlock the deepest truths about man, nature, and the cosmos?
Returning to a naïve observation of the world, we find “regular-seeming, complex, and predictable systems: the progress of the seasons, the stars in their courses, the everyday workings of the human body.” Not only do these systems “manifest a crude rationality,” but they also “seem beautiful, graceful, and sublime.” The heart of Douthat’s argument is “that nothing so vast and complex and beautiful could exist by simple accident.” Not only that, but “something extra seems added to the human race, enabling us to understand more of the world…and also to invent and create within it.”
Hasn’t modern natural science disabused us of these biases? Haven’t we proven that the laws of nature are fixed and indifferent to human beings, and that we evolved by a series of random events from apes to humans? Why keep antiquated hopes alive?
Douthat astutely argues that modern natural science has not refuted the fundamentals of belief. The Copernican and Darwinian revolutions indeed challenged the conventional dogmas of geo-centrism and creationism. They called into question the notion that God placed man at the literal center of the universe, that God “sculpted each species in its finished form,” and that God instituted a “moral structure” to the natural world. Yet for Douthat, Copernicus and Darwin, while threatening certain conventional dogmas, did not explain away the persistence of “what ancient Hinduism called rta, the fundamental ordering principle of the world.” Discovering certain natural necessities may refute certain religious notions, but such discoveries do not explain away one fundamental truth claim: there is an infinitely complex—and seemingly divinely ordered—system in which those necessities occur.
And if we simply “trust the science,” the probability of the universe, let alone human beings, coming to exist is nearly impossible. Additionally, the Big Bang Theory buttresses religious claims about nature being created ex nihilo rather than nature being eternal. Here, Douthat prudently remains in the epistemic territory of Benedict’s third-stagers, modern natural science. On scientific terms, religious belief has not been refuted and may even seem plausible. Douthat initially investigates scientific claims in order to subtly encourage his reader to climb up the epistemic ladder from the standard of irrefutable material proof to plausibility. Douthat forces us to acknowledge that religious explanations are more plausible than previously imagined. Plausibility is the crack in the door into which Douthat wiggles his foot.
Can Douthat bust the door wide open? Is Douthat’s logical move to plausibility, a jump made from the vantage point of the reader’s narrow empirical grounds, enough to recover the full breadth and depth of reason as Benedict understood it? Douthat shows that we still find signs of divinity when we narrow our rational inquiry to merely efficient causality.
Douthat’s second and third claims address but reach far beyond any purported scientific evidence. In addressing the problem of consciousness and the persistence of miracles, Douthat invites the reader to consider the possibility that mind precedes matter, and that reality cannot be reduced to its material parts. For Douthat, the mind is not an “easy problem,” like measuring neural pathways or neurotransmitters. Rather, it is a “hard problem,” given the challenge of explaining how certain patterns of neural activity give rise to subjective experience. Neuroscience can indicate the activity of the brain associated with pain or pleasure, but it cannot explain what makes orange…well…orange, or the reason Beethoven’s 9th symphony moves us to tears, or the joy of holding a baby. These are not epiphenomena of matter; rather, they are the “data” of consciousness—a problem modern natural science may never be able to explain by material causality alone.
Similarly, Douthat argues that miracles persist even in our allegedly disenchanted age. Accounts of divine intervention occur to believers and non-believers alike at the same frequency as our more enchanted past (to David Hume’s shame). For Douthat, to remain studiously blind to these signs is less a mark of rationality than of an a priori commitment to materialism. And so, he asks: if we are truly open-minded, why should we not be open to the supernatural wonders? One question remains: does openness to the supernatural guarantee an experience of miracles, and if not, how is one to think about the reasonableness of specific religious traditions without specific revelatory experiences?
Douthat acknowledges the tension between miracles and natural necessities, but he refuses to treat this tension as fatal to either faith or reason. Instead, he indicates that miracles do not refute the existence of nature so much as they reveal a higher order. Many questions about this indication, however, remain unanswered. After walking through the three arguments for the plausibility of belief, Douthat leaps from plausibility to commitment, urging the reader to commit to a traditional religion.
One wonders if Douthat’s leap from plausibility to commitment is too sudden. After constructing a scaffolding of epistemic plausibility, Douthat’s suggestion to embrace a traditional faith feels abrupt. Douthat successfully challenges dogmatic materialism, but his skeptical readers likely require something more than the general plausibility of immaterial claims rooted in the refutation of materialism. Is this general plausibility, and the recognition of uncanny mystery latent in man, nature, and the cosmos, enough to dive into traditional religion? Thankfully, Douthat begins to venture beyond this general plausibility in his last chapter, where he provides an account of his conversion to Catholicism. Here, we begin to understand the strong case for Christianity, opening the door for the return to Benedict’s conception of logos.
What I see as the deeper lesson of Believe is that plausibility opens the door for our eros by challenging reigning materialist orthodoxy, thereby thrusting us into a world of deeper, more interesting accounts of the universe.
As Benedict understood, the human being is a creature not only of logos, but of eros; he is characterized by the desire to fulfill an inexplicable lack in his soul through the love of the Beautiful. That longing may cloud our reason, but it also may clarify it. Douthat’s book, contrary to the tone of its title, advises against dogmatism. Douthat encourages us to embrace the rational truth that dogmatic materialism is just as deceptive as unthinking faith, and in doing so gives our nostalgic longings—the longings he tapped into with his initial thought experiment—more credibility than our cynical selves were once willing to give. In Believe, Douthat begins to stamp out the dogmas of our age, thus giving our erotic longings a little room to breathe.
I sense that Douthat hopes his readers begin to consider the possibility that their hunger for truth and beauty is not a cruel joke played by a silent universe, but a signpost pointing home. Douthat’s great achievement in Believe is demonstrating that this much-desired possibility may not be so unfounded after all.
Luca Frumento is a doctoral student in Political Theory at Baylor University.
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