The God that failed: A review of Ross Douthat's 'Believe'

The traditional God of the theologians has failed, but the God of the poets is still viable.

Written by Bo Winegard.

Is God dead? Ross Douthat doesn’t think so. His latest book, Believe, a genial and unexpectedly ecumenical defense of faith, arrives at a propitious moment. The fervor of New Atheism has faded, its trust in science and reason having failed to eradicate superstition. Meanwhile, the decline of institutional faith—fewer men and women attending church—has not lifted the dark clouds of partisanship and irrationality. If anything, the light of charity, compromise, and reasoned discourse seems more obscured now than in the supposedly benighted days of the early 2000s when New Atheism flourished.

Perhaps religion was never the scourge its critics claimed. Perhaps man possesses a religious instinct—or instincts—that cannot be eliminated, only distorted. Perhaps religion is inevitable. If not Christianity or Islam, then fascism, communism, or some other perverted cult of personality.

This raises a real problem. New Atheism was not merely a gesture of defiance appealing to young nihilists and intellectual poseurs in the West; some of its concerns about religion were legitimate. Many religious claims do seem absurd to men and women shaped by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It is impossible for us to believe as Augustine or Aquinas did. Our universe is vaster, our world less enchanted. Earth is no longer the center of the cosmos but merely one planet among quintillions of planets. Its lands are no longer populated by prophets, magicians, and miracles but by chemicals, atoms, and indifferent chains of cause and effect.

The defender of faith faces a dilemma: either reconcile religious belief with the modern worldview or resist the implications of science and philosophy altogether. Broadly speaking, there are three possible strategies in response to these encroachments of science and Enlightenment

1. A literalist argument, maintaining that modern science and philosophy have not, in fact, vitiated traditional conceptions of God and the supernatural.

2. A poetic argument, asserting that religion is best understood as metaphor and symbol and that its doctrines should be seen not as empirical claims but as profound and enduring poetry.

3. A pragmatic argument, contending that regardless of religion’s epistemological status, its social and psychological effects are largely beneficial and should be encouraged. (And, of course, the pragmatic argument can be combined with either the literalist or poetic approach.)

Unfortunately, Douthat chose the first strategy—a serious mistake, in my view, since the doctrines of traditional religion are almost certainly false when treated as empirical assertions. Believe does nothing to dissuade me of this.

To his credit, Douthat is a cordial and commendably lucid proponent of religious faith, never haranguing atheists or skeptics and never obfuscating matters of metaphysics or morality. Yet his arguments remain utterly unpersuasive. And because his mistaken strategy still seduces some religious intellectuals who dream of defending the dogmas of religion with the tools of science, it warrants critical attention.

Bad literalist arguments must be cleared away like clutter to make room for good poetic arguments. Only by quelling the literalist impulse can a more compelling vision of religion flourish. The traditional God of the theologians has failed, his plausibility eroded by centuries of scientific progress, but a different, more poetic, more pantheistic God remains viable.

Douthat forwards three major arguments for taking the literalist God seriously: (1) the appearance of design (fine-tuning) in the universe; (2) the mystery and marvel of the conscious human mind; and (3) the persistence and ubiquity of mystical and supernatural experiences.

The fine-tuning argument

The fine-tuning argument is a refined and scientifically sophisticated version of the traditional argument from design, a commonplace in Christian apologetics. The classical argument from design contends that the universe’s exquisite order—especially the complexity of life on Earth—could not have arisen by mere chance but must be the product of an intelligent creator’s mind.

William Paley, an English philosopher and Christian apologist, forwarded perhaps the most popular version of this argument, comparing the ordered complexities of the natural world to a watch found in a field, whose existence obviously required a maker:

…for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtility, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity.

The trouble with this argument is that we now possess a powerful explanation for the natural world’s admittedly impressive—though often cruel and bloody—order: evolution by natural selection. Biologist Richard Dawkins—long one of religion’s fiercest critics, though recently describing himself as a 'cultural Christian'—illustrates this point in The Blind Watchmaker.

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Douthat, of course, is aware of Darwin and the challenge his theory poses to the argument from design. Therefore, like other scientifically informed Christian apologists, he advances an updated version of the argument:

But the law and order and complexity of that larger system still cry out for explanation; instead of a watchmaker, you need a factory builder or computer programmer to set the whole thing running. Or put another way, the complex watch that you need to explain isn’t the individual body of an ape or an armadillo; it’s the larger life-generating system of the universe itself.

Yes, we now have a satisfying explanation for the appearance of design in nature, but we still need an explanation for the 'design' or 'fine-tuning' of the universe that gave rise to life and to the evolutionary processes that eventually led to conscious creatures like us. This need is especially pressing because the fine-tuning of the universe is remarkably precise, as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga wrote:

Recently a number of thinkers have proposed a new version of the argument from design, the so-called "Fine-Tuning Argument." Starting in the late Sixties and early Seventies, astrophysicists and others noted that several of the basic physical constants must fall within very narrow limits if there is to be the development of intelligent life—at any rate in a way anything like the way in which we think it actually happened. For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life of the sort we have, could probably not have developed.

Four counterarguments: (1) the fine-tuning argument is a version of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy; (2) the universe does not actually appear to be fine-tuned for human life; (3) the argument seems to require a fine-tuner to fine-tune the fine-tuner of the universe ad infinitum; and (4) even if one accepted the argument, the fine-tuner might be a malignant demon or an incompetent demiurge.

Texas sharpshooter fallacy. A cowboy fires a shotgun at the side of a barn, leaving two hundred scattered pellet holes. Afterward, he draws circles around the clusters and proclaims, “What are the odds of hitting exactly this pattern? I must be an incredible marksman!” This, in essence, is what the fine-tuning argument does with the parameters of the universe’s physical laws. It examines these parameters only after they have been set (or manifested) and declares, “What are the odds that the universe would have precisely these conditions—conditions that allow for life? Surely, it must have been designed.”

But just as any arrangement of pellet holes is as likely (or unlikely) as any other, so too is any particular set of physical laws—assuming, for the sake of argument, that such laws can vary. Declaring our universe’s specific configuration of forces and constants to be uniquely significant simply because it ultimately (after billions of years) allowed for life is question begging. It assumes, without justification, that life is inherently special and that a universe containing it is more remarkable than one without.

Embracing the fine-tuning argument, Douthat writes:

Our expanding horizon of knowledge has also consistently revealed a system that’s precisely balanced, exquisitely poised, in the alignments necessary to generate our specific kind of biological life.

And what this superintellect seems to have been careful to allow for, on the evidence of all the fine-tuning’s special relationship to our own conditions, are planets like Earth, living creatures in Earth’s menagerie, and conscious beings like, well, us.

But even if we accept that life is somehow cosmically significant, this is a strange argument.

Life is rare and the universe is enormous. What would we expect, a priori, from a “superintellect” intent on fine-tuning a universe for life, especially conscious life? Without indulging in excessive speculation, we might reasonably anticipate lush, verdant planets teeming with life, interconnected by navigable water bridges swarming with turtles, fish, and flocks of waterfowl. And on each of these planets, we would expect conscious beings—perpetually healthy and beautiful—wandering through thick, ripe foliage abundant with delicious fruit.

In other words, we would expect life to be as widespread as the colors on an Impressionist painting, not a mere accidental splotch on a vast canvas of black. Is this in fact what we see?

No.

The universe is so vast it defies comprehension, and most of it is inhospitable to life—a dreadful, deadly expanse of radiation and drifting dust. Even seven of the eight planets in our own solar system—itself a mere speck in the cosmos—are uninhabitable without extraordinary technological ingenuity. The rise of life appears not so much intended as an improbable struggle—a fleeting anomaly in a vast and hostile universe.

If the creator’s goal was to fine-tune a universe for life—especially for conscious life—he chose a bizarre way to do so. Even on Earth alone, the emergence of humans required billions of years of evolution by natural selection, a process driven by relentless struggle and mass extinction. Conscious creatures are a fragile oddity, their precarious existence made possible only because trillions of animals perished before them.

Asserting that the universe was fine-tuned for life simply because life exists on one tiny planet in our immense cosmos is like claiming that a spot of mold in a Gothic mansion proves the house was built for the mold.

The fine-tuner needs a fine-tuner. The fine-tuning argument undermines itself with its own logic. It begins by claiming that anything as precisely ordered as the universe must have an intentional designer. Then it posits a designer—and stops there, without further analysis.

But if this designer is sophisticated enough to fine-tune an enormous universe, then it must also be intelligent and highly organized. Who, then, fine-tuned the tuner?

A defender of the fine-tuning argument might counter that the fine-tuner is a metaphysically necessary being—perfect, simple, and more akin to a mathematical truth than to a complex, contingent entity like a tree or a toad. But this is mere assertion and fails to address the more parsimonious alternative: why posit a transcendent god when one could just as easily assert that the universe itself is self-organizing? No God necessary. No fine-tuner required. Just the unfolding processes of the universe.

The fine-tuner might be malignant or incompetent. Arthur Schopenhauer, the brilliant and notoriously irascible German philosopher, summed up the balance of pleasure and pain in the universe with characteristic panache: 'For the world is Hell, and the men are on the one hand the tormented souls and the other the devils in it.'

Even if one rejects his gaudy pessimism, it is difficult to deny that our planet is plagued by suffering. Disease, famine, war, and deadly natural disasters remain pervasive, while our daily lives are fraught with aches, pains, and minor disappointments. What is more, much of this suffering is inescapable—woven, as it were, into the very fabric of the universe. Aging, disease, and death, for example. Given this relentless suffering, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the so-called fine-tuner, if one exists, must be either malevolent or inept.

Stendhal (supposedly) put it more bluntly: 'God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist.'

Rhetoric aside, the point is this: even if the fine-tuner argument were valid, it tells us nothing about the fine-tuner’s nature. For that, we must judge by his creation itself. And anybody who looks with open eyes at the state of the world would struggle to conclude that the fine-tuner is worthy of worship. (More on this later.)

The marvel and mystery of the conscious mind

Consciousness is undoubtedly puzzling—it has baffled philosophers for centuries. That a material object, a squishy bundle of cells and connective tissue, could give rise to subjective experience—to the piquant taste of dark coffee or the pleasant warmth of the morning sun—is astonishing and, at present, inexplicable. For Ross Douthat, it is also evidence for God, for he sees it as pointing to the plausibility of the supernatural:

In the end, the idea that we have available some clearly more rational or more scientific alternative to a ‘naively’ supernatural understanding of the mind is itself fundamentally naïve.

The motivation here is understandable. Subjectivity seems to make a mockery of materialism. No matter how thoroughly or diligently we study the brain, we fail to uncover an explanation for the “hard problem” of consciousness: How does the firing of brain cells produce the experience of the red of a sunset or the pitter-patter of rain? More abstractly, how does mere matter give rise to qualia?

Sure, neuroscientists can point to patterns of brain activity and intricate webs of neurons, and philosophers can introduce sophisticated terms like “emergent property” or “epiphenomenalism,” but the mystery of mind seems stubbornly out of reach:

In the end, the emperor is always naked: Redescribe as you will, reduce as you may, nobody has any idea how or why the physical inputs that go into conscious experience, the stimuli from particular chemicals or light waves or exchanges between neurons, yield the actual experiences themselves.

Yet even if the impulse to posit something supernatural about consciousness is understandable, it remains fallacious. Substituting the riddle of the supernatural for the riddle of the mind, it merely compounds the enigma.
“Supernatural” becomes a placeholder for “don’t know,” serving as an illusory verbal explanation similar to the Baccalaureate Holder’s tautological claim in Molière’s play The Imaginary Invalid that opium causes sleep because of its “dormitive virtue.”

The most parsimonious reason for the persistence of the mystery of consciousness is that we are constrained creatures—evolved animals—incapable of fully understanding the world. Just as the quantum leaps of electrons defy ordinary intuition, so too does consciousness elude our understanding. Subjectivity may very well present our conceptual systems with an intractable challenge. But that does not mean something supernatural is involved. Rather, it means that the ordinary natural world is strange enough to confound our limited minds.

Douthat should be amenable to this argument about human limitations since he notes that our understanding of the universe, though limited, is nearly miraculous and apparently points toward the supernatural:

…why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and avoid predators also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to split the atom, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?

I will provide at least a partial answer to this question, but it is worth noting that such bewilderment at the accomplishments of modern science enhances my explanation of the apparent insuperability of the problem of consciousness. We are not omniscient angels. We are sophisticated apes with symbolic minds, shaped by evolution to solve recurrent environmental and social problems, to communicate with conspecifics, and to absorb and bequeath culture. Our minds did not evolve to comprehend the nature of consciousness or its relationship to the material world.

But if we’re just elevated (and arrogant!) apes who evolved like any other animal, how do we know so much about the universe? My glib answer: we really don’t. Of course, our scientific and technological achievements are impressive and rightly inspire marvel, but despite them, we still cannot precisely predict the exact formation or dissipation of a whirlpool, the long-term trajectory of a hurricane, or the movement of three gravitational bodies over extended periods. Much of our solar system—let alone our galaxy or the wider universe—remains a mystery.

My less glib answer: we leverage our secondary competencies—abstract mathematics, higher reasoning, refined language—to wrest knowledge from the world, storing it in books and other records, and passing it down to the next generation to build upon. Like an elaborate cathedral whose final form transcends the capacities of any single laborer, our current understanding of the world is the product of centuries of accumulated effort, each scientist or philosopher’s contribution a very small piece of the whole. Thus whereas Douthat sees evidence for God in our scientific achievements, I see evidence only for a flawed, fallible, but socially sophisticated ape.

More pointedly, if our capacity for scientific knowledge exists only because God created our minds to comprehend the universe, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years to pull ourselves from the swamps of ignorance where we floundered for most of our evolutionary history? And why, at the very least, did God not reveal some elementary truths to those recording his sacred texts such as the existence of dinosaurs or the advantages of the heliocentric model of the solar system? If God designed the human mind to understand the universe, then the fact that thousands of generations of our ancestors wallowed in superstition and barbarism is puzzling indeed.

Those who think I am being unfair or unnecessarily flippant should reflect carefully on Douthat’s argument. Humans evolved over 200,000 years ago. For most of that time, they lived in abject ignorance. The unlucky died before they could suffer; the lucky endured unspeakable pain and loss. Yet in the last 400 years or so, humans have acquired impressive—though limited—knowledge of the universe, and this, we are told, suggests that we are playing a role in a cosmic story written by God. If that is true, then this is a cosmic tragedy, and the God who wrote it is either indifferent, malicious, or utterly inscrutable.

The persistence of reports of the supernatural and miracles

Attestations of miracles and supernatural experiences have long inspired belief in God or gods, as well as other invisible agents. Holy texts are filled with such accounts, and Christianity itself is founded on the miraculous claim that God became a mortal man by impregnating a virgin, was crucified, and then resurrected in body.

However, during the Enlightenment, intellectuals grew increasingly skeptical of miracles and supernatural encounters. As they penetrated some of the universe’s mysteries—uncovering the laws of motion and gravity—philosophers began to see the world not as an enchanted playground of magical and often inexplicable forces, but as a predictable and intelligible machine.

David Hume—capturing the spirit of his age—blamed belief in miracles on ignorance and barbarism, arguing that such reports arise primarily in uncivilized nations or, when found among the educated, are inherited relics of their ancestors’ superstitions:

It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that inviolable sanction and authority, which always attend received opinions.

Douthat argues that the modern presumption against an enchanted world—against the miraculous and the supernatural—is misguided. In fact, he contends that we have stronger reasons for accepting the reality of miracles and the supernatural today than in Hume’s time:

This means that we have proof of the resilience of spiritual experience under secular conditions that our ancestors inevitably lacked—and thus better reasons than in Hume’s era to believe that these experiences reflect something more than fantasy.

Douthat is right, of course, that people continue to experience miracles and report supernatural encounters. The question, however, is whether these provide evidence for God. And the answer, for essentially the reasons Hume enumerated, is no.

Miracles—and other supernatural occurrences—are, by definition, rare; they would not be miracles if they were common or ordinary. Thus, our prior belief in any miracle claim should be exceedingly low. So low, in fact, that alternative explanations—hallucination, illusion, mendacity—are always more probable than the supernatural. This is especially true given that we can reliably induce supernatural or miraculous experiences through drugs, brain stimulation, or sleep deprivation—and that humans are naturally prone to deception, exaggeration, or self-delusion.

Consider a concrete example: A person, Rebecca, claims that she witnessed a statue of the Virgin Mary crying tears of blood. We want to determine whether this is strong evidence for the existence of a miracle (and, by extension, the existence of God). We know that miracles are rare. And we also know that delusions, fraud, and fabrications, while also uncommon, are far more frequent than genuine miracles. Even the Catholic Church acknowledges that many reported miracles turn out to be fraudulent. Thus even if Rebecca is sincere, it is still more likely that someone perpetrated a hoax than that she actually witnessed a true miracle. As the proverbial saying has it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To date, extraordinary evidence is lacking—though a supernatural agent, were it inclined, could easily provide it.

The situation is even worse for the advocate of a specific religion who claims that miracles support his faith, since different religions report miracles that often conflict with one another. For example, if the claim that Muhammad received divine wisdom from the angel Gabriel is correct in the way Islam understands it, then Catholic Christianity—which teaches that Jesus is the final and fullest revelation—must be false. As Hume wrote:

Every miracle, therefore, pretended to have been wrought in any of these religions (and all of them abound in miracles), as its direct scope is to establish the particular system to which it is attributed; so has it the same force, though more indirectly, to overthrow every other system. In destroying a rival system, it likewise destroys the credit of those miracles, on which that system was established; so that all the prodigies of different religions are to be regarded as contrary facts, and the evidences of these prodigies, whether weak or strong, as opposite to each other.

Hume’s arguments against miracles are strong, and the documented evidence for actual miracles or supernatural interactions is weak. However, there is yet another powerful reason to doubt miracles—and, by extension, their use as evidence for God's existence: they imply that God is capable of intervening in the natural world but chooses not to do so most of the time. And this makes God a moral monster.

Consider Douthat’s assertion that:

Neurological illusions don’t explain Shermer’s awakened radio, or Lurhmann’s smoking battery, or why a nun’s incurable Parkinson’s disease disappeared instantly the night she asked for the late Pope John Paul II’s intervention (to pick the reported miracle that sealed his sainthood).

In it, he appears to accept that Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre was miraculously cured by God through the intercession of John Paul II. If this healing were genuine, then it would mean that God can intervene in the natural world. But if God can intervene to heal a nun, why did God not intervene to stop Hitler and the Nazis? After all, countless people prayed deeply and desperately for God’s help during the Holocaust, yet they were met with silence. Is one particular nun’s health more important than the millions of people, including many nuns and priests, who were killed by the Nazis?

This of course is version of the problem of evil, a perennial obstacle to belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent God.

To his credit, Douthat attempts to address the problem of evil in Believe. Unfortunately, his answers are rather perfunctory and unsatisfying. For example, he oddly argues that the skeptical atheist who raises the problem of evil as an objection to God is actually assuming what he ostensibly denies:

To begin with, like the more confidently atheistic versions of the scientific project, the moral case against Almighty God assumes a version of the very premise it ostensibly denies—that human beings are so distinctively fashioned among all the creatures of the world that we are equipped to stand outside material creation and comprehend it so completely as to make a certain moral assessment of how good and evil are balanced or imbalanced in the cosmos. Indeed it assumes that we can identify good and evil as meaningful categories at all, as opposed to just flags of convenience for things we happen to instinctively favor and dislike.

But this is the atheist’s point! He argues that if a Christian God—or any other powerful and morally concerned deity—existed, then there would be objective moral truths, including clear distinctions between good and evil. Presumably, the gratuitous suffering of innocent people, especially children, would qualify as evil. Yet, innocent children do, in fact, suffer tragically and often. Therefore, the Christian God does not exist. Douthat counters that this is hubristic:

And if you’re sure that you have seen enough of the cosmos to know that a moral omnipotence couldn’t have created this one, you need to recognize the remarkable scale of that presumption, the confidence that if an explanation escapes your timebound consciousness it must not exist.

This is precisely backward. It is not a presumption to reject the idea of a morally omnipotent God in a world where innocent children die in agony. However, it is a presumption to assert the existence of an all-powerful and morally perfect God and then to demand that the skeptic shoulder the burden of reconciling that God with the undeniable evils that plague our world. One does not have to see the furthest edges of the cosmos to make reasonable moral judgements about human suffering. And if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, then evils such as pediatric cancer defy explanation.

Religion is inevitable, God is poetry

I have been critical of Douthat’s attempts to defend a literalist God who directly intervenes in human affairs. But I am more sympathetic to his worldview than I am to that of New Atheism. Religion is natural, and it is probably inevitable. Moreover, it is often healthy, lifting our gaze from the shimmering distractions of worldly pleasure to the lasting light of spiritual fulfillment. It fosters community engagement, social cohesion, and psychological discipline. And it protects against more pernicious superstitions.

The reductionist worldview—that the universe is nothing more than matter in motion—is alienating, a corrosive cocktail of materialism and atheism that undermines meaning and erodes social capital.

This brings us to an impasse. The bulk of this review has been devoted to criticizing various arguments for God’s existence and to belief in the miraculous or supernatural. But now I am claiming that we need the spiritual, the numinous, the religious. The contradiction is only apparent. The literalist God is intellectually indefensible. But alternatives remain.

Religion is not composed of empirical assertions or testable hypotheses; it is composed of compelling myths—poetic narratives that seek to explain not only the universe but also our place within it. The power and meaning of these narratives do not depend on literal interpretation.

Consider the concept of original sin. Genesis 3 recounts the now-familiar story of the Fall. Tempted by the serpent, the most “subtle” of creatures, Eve eats from the forbidden fruit, and Adam joins her. Their eyes are “opened,” and they realize their nakedness. When God discovers their transgression, He punishes them: women are condemned to suffer in childbirth and to submit to their husbands, while men are doomed to toil upon the earth and, in the end, to die.

From this story, early Christian thinkers—especially Augustine—concluded that all of humanity was born into sin and total depravity, incapable of attaining salvation without God's grace—His free and unmerited intervention in the universe. This, they argued, explained the wickedness of mankind—the lust for sex, violence, rebellion, and disobedience that characterizes our species.

Taken literally, this is absurd. Humans were not specially created by God, nor did they eat from a forbidden fruit, nor were they punished for violating God’s decree. Because this is absurd, defending a literalist interpretation of Genesis and original sin would be not only foolhardy but also self-defeating. It would alienate those who accept the current scientific consensus on human evolution.

However, taken poetically, the Fall of Man is a compelling drama that captures the painful chasm between our lofty moral ideals and our rather disappointing moral reality. We can imagine paradise, yet we are condemned to dwell in the purgatory of earth—a purgatory where our highest visions of the good are ceaselessly thwarted by human frailty and failure.

We aspire to exercise, eat well, and serve our neighbors, yet we are drawn instead to indolence, gluttony, and trivial pursuits. Even in ourselves, we glimpse the poetic truth of original sin.

What applies to original sin applies just as easily to most religious doctrines. Jesus was not literally born of a virgin or resurrected, yet his story poetically expresses a profound relationship between humanity and the universe—one in which the creator God becomes man, suffers as a man, and ultimately triumphs over death. The pain of Jesus is the pain of every human, for we are all condemned to die. But in his story, we also see how a mortal might reconcile himself to death.

But what of the God of Genesis, or the transcendent creator of later Christian theologians? Can poetry redeem him?

As I have argued in this review, the literalist God is not only implausible but logically incoherent. Yet the universe remains astonishing and mysterious, warranting awe, wonder, and gratitude. The transcendent God can thus be understood poetically as infusing the universe with meaning, inspiring reverence for the cosmos, our planet, and the life that fills it.

However, my advocacy of a poetic understanding of religion runs into the problem that many religious believers, especially those uninterested in the subtleties of philosophy or theology, will continue to be literalist believers. Reluctant to question their Church’s teachings, they will passively accept its dogmas. And they will be offended by the claim that their church’s sacred doctrines are “just” poetry.

In a large, diverse, and affluent society, some tension is inevitable between the convictions of educated intellectuals and those of ordinary folks. This has long been true. Even theologians often held beliefs that differed from those of lay believers, who inhabited a world infused with more mystery and magic than theologians typically acknowledged.

Superstition is inextinguishable. Humans will always seek to decipher the past, divine the future, and commune with spirits and mystical forces. At best, a tacit compromise emerges: intellectuals approach religious doctrines poetically, while lay believers take them literally.

We can live with this compromise because we now know that religious belief is not the cause of human irrationality. The true source of irrationality is not religion, but human nature itself. And for all its shortcomings, modern monotheistic religion may well be one of mankind’s greatest and most enduring creations. It is not superannuated.

My objection to Douthat is not that he is sincerely religious or that he believes literally, but that he attempts to persuade other intellectuals of the literal truth of many traditional religious doctrines. This is a mistake—one that is doomed to failure. Many educated intellectuals reject religious teachings as outdated and refuted by scientific progress. Bad arguments about fine-tuning, the mystery of consciousness, or the existence of miracles will not persuade them; they will instead trigger a cognitive gag-reflex, causing the mind to recoil. This, in turn, will breed hostility toward religion and fuel militant atheism or anti-institutional supernaturalism.

The literalist’s God has failed. And despite Douthat’s valiant effort, Believe only underscores this failure. But this does not mean that God is dead. Quite the opposite. God endures, as unyielding as the human mind that conceived Him, and as long as we yearn for the transcendent, the permanent, the eternal, we will be drawn to religion. My hope is that intellectuals will learn to provide better defenses of it.

Bo Winegard is an Editor of Aporia.

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