An Open Letter to Ross Douthat
Hey Ross,
Let me just say that, though I’m neither religious nor conservative, I really appreciate your columns. I read them on the regular. Maybe it’s because I was once a Catholic, and educated by Jesuits, but I feel like I get where you’re coming from, even if I couldn’t stay there myself.
In your column of August 14, “A Guide to Finding Faith,” you attempt to show your more skeptical readers (like me) why believing in God and the supernatural might actually be more reasonable than not believing. You want to show, contra Daniel Dennett, that it is materialism, not religion, that has cast a spell on modern minds. Once we break the spell of the former, the latter becomes much easier to accept.
You cover a lot of ground in your piece, but I’ll try to summarize your arguments as succinctly as possible. It seems to me your thesis rests upon the idea that the way our minds apprehend objective reality only strengthens the theist’s claim that humans partake of the divine essence. The idea of invoking a multiverse to explain the fittedness of our own universe for life, and the claim that consciousness is really an illusion, strike you as “less parsimonious, less immediately reasonable, than a traditional religious assumption that mind precedes matter, as the mind of God precedes the universe — that the precise calibrations of physical reality and the irreducibility of personal experience are proof that consciousness came first.”
But these first two claims are straw men. You don’t need the multiverse to exist to address the seeming fittedness of the universe for life. Arguments about fine tuning get cause and effect backwards. Life adapts to the universe, not vice versa. Anyway, I know of no scientist who has yet produced an experiment that could test for the existence of the multiverse, leaving the whole concept, for the moment, outside the realm of science.
Your dismissal of Dennett’s arguments about consciousness is even more head-scratching since, as far as I can gather, it is based on nothing more than your distaste for his conclusions rather than whether those conclusions hold up to logical and empirical scrutiny. Like Descartes, you have accepted unquestioningly his argument that “I think, therefore I am.” But, as the seventeenth century philosopher — and Catholic priest — Pierre Gassendi pointed out, to move from the fact that thinking is occurring to the assumption that said thinking is being done by a particular agent, is just begging the question. Dennett’s view of consciousness as a constant revision of various “drafts” consisting of memories (which are really reconstructions and not recordings) mixed with present experience, is more true to life than the hypothesis that our identities owe their unity and stability to an unobservable, supernatural soul.
But your more interesting arguments pertain to the nature of consciousness and how the fit between reality and our mind’s apprehension of reality supports belief in the supernatural. Contrary to the claim that the progress of science makes God less and less plausible, you argue that “the God hypothesis is constantly vindicated by the comprehensibility of the universe, and the capacity of our reason to unlock its many secrets.” You quote David Bentley Hart: “We assume that the human mind can be a true mirror of objective reality because we assume that objective reality is already a mirror of mind.”
According to you, this is why, despite the disillusionment of the modern, scientific worldview, people continue to have religious experiences, even if they don’t interpret them as such. “The disenchantment of the modern world is a myth of the intelligentsia: In reality it never happened. Instead, through the whole multicentury process of secularization, the decline of religion’s political power and cultural prestige, people kept right on having near-death experiences and demonic visitations and wild divine encounters. They just lost the religious structures through which those experiences used to be interpreted.”
But here is where you go wrong. The mind is emphatically not a true mirror of objective reality. On the contrary, the mind is more like a filter, translating just so much of reality into symbols that are meaningful for our survival and reproduction, and omitting the rest. Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at UC-Irvine, likens our subjective experience of consciousness to the desktop of a computer: “Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.”
You think that the survival of religious experiences down to the present undercuts the idea that they could be merely cognitive illusions. “[I]f your claim is that religious experience is mostly just misinterpretation, it’s a substantial concession to acknowledge that it persists through ages of reason as well as ages of faith, and endures even when cultural and medical and scientific authorities discount or dismiss it.”
But is it really a concession? Look at the image of the arrows above. This is called the Muller-Lyer Illusion. Because of how our brains have evolved to judge distances and depths, we perceive one line as longer than the other, when in fact they are the same length. I know that the lines are equal, and yet I can’t help but see one as longer than the other. That’s just how my brain is wired. No amount of conscious knowledge can unwire it. It’s the same with ghosts, angels, werewolves, and every other species of supernatural agent. All are products of our brains’ evolved capacity for agency detection, combined with our penchant for blending basic ontological categories and their associated qualities to yield new categories of beings with fantastical properties. (See Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford University Press (2002))
And the thing is, unlike religious authorities, I don’t have to just trust the scientists who tell me that belief in the supernatural has a natural explanation. I can read their books and papers for myself. When confronted with two conflicting authorities, I’ll take the one that shows its work, and is willing to subject its conclusions to public scrutiny.
So no, it’s clearly not the case that “when today’s evolutionary theorists go searching for a reason people believe so readily in spiritual powers and nonhuman minds, they are also making a concession to religion’s plausibility….” That’s no more true than saying that an evolutionary explanation for why we fall for the Muller-Lyer illusion is a concession to the plausibility of the claim that, perhaps, the lines aren’t equal after all.
But here’s the thing that really gets me: why insist on the existence of something called “the supernatural” at all? If you ask me, atheists like myself who hold strong moral convictions have a great deal more faith than religious people like you, since we don’t claim our moral judgments are underwritten by an infallible, eternal agent. Faith is supposed to require doubt, but what room for doubt do you really have when you can always rest assured that God is in Heaven and the moral arc of the universe is necessarily bending to His will?
The American philosopher and humanist John Dewey saw this problem aright when he wrote: “Men have gone on to build up vast intellectual schemes, philosophies, and theologies, to prove that ideals are not real as ideals but as antecedently existing actualities. They have failed to see that in converting moral realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith. Faith that something should be in existence as far as lies in our power is changed into the intellectual belief that it is already in existence. When physical existence does not bear out the assertion, the physical is subtly changed into the metaphysical. In this way, moral faith has been inextricably tied up with intellectual beliefs about the supernatural.”
For you, belief in the supernatural is an empirical question, which is why you’re still rehearsing arguments about fine tuning and the universality of religious experiences. But faith — genuine faith — isn’t an empirical matter at all. It’s an existential one. The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich was correct to define faith as the state of being ultimately concerned. Genuine faith requires, not orthodox belief, but rather the binding of oneself to values that promise the ultimate integration and reconciliation of individual experience with what Dewey called “that imaginative totality we call the universe.” Idolatry, by contrast, tempts us with a merely apparent source of value that in fact cuts us off from the continuous reintegration of experience, by drawing a boundary around a particular, temporary integration and elevating it to the status of an eternal object of devotion.
There are many flavors of idolatry at large in the world today: nationalism, racism, capitalism, communism, scientism, and so on. And you’d be right to point to all of these as a warning of how we can be led astray when we abandon traditional forms of faith. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’d acknowledge that for most of its history, and right down to the present, religious life has often been idolatrous too. I’ve met scores of ex-Christians who left their churches because of the tribalism, doctrinal rigidity, and politicization of faith communities that has characterized much of American Christianity during my lifetime. That includes your beloved Catholic Church (which is why it has taken so long for the victims of sexual abuse to receive acknowledgment and restitution). They left religion because it was the only way to live a life of genuine faith in universal values like justice and love. So did I. Can you convince me I was wrong?