Mark Oppenheimer: Hey friends, this is Mark Oppenheimer and you’re listening to another episode of Arc with Mark, the companion podcast to the web magazine, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which is online at arcmag.org and is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. This week on the podcast, something really, really special. You’re not going to hear a lot of me, you’re not going to hear me interviewing anyone. You’re going to hear the audio from a debate that we held at Emerson Auditorium at Washington University in St. Louis on October 16. The topic was “Should everyone be religious?” and it was a discussion with Ross Douthat and Philip Zuckerman.

Ross Douthat is a New York Times op-ed columnist. He has been one since 2009. He writes about politics and religion and he’s the author of a new book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” It was my idea to bring him to WashU and put him in conversation with somebody who thinks that, in fact, not everyone should be religious. In fact, we need more people who aren’t religious. We need more atheists and secularists and agnostics and skeptics. And so I invited Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College in Claremont, California to come be Ross’s debate partner, discussant, interlocutor. Phil Zuckerman is the author of numerous books including “Society Without God” and “Living the Secular Life.” And I was the moderator, they were the debaters, and we had lots of fun questions from the audience. It’s a spirited, delightful audio journey. So have a listen to Ross Douthat and Philip Zuckerman debating the question: should everyone be religious?

I am going to take the far right. Okay, so you can pick.

Ross Douthat: I’ll take the far left.

MO: You take the far left.

RD: Come on, come on, come on. We can do better than that.

MO: Actually, the evening peaked just there. We should just leave now.

It’s such an honor to be here. I’m Mark Oppenheimer. I teach in the Danforth Center here and edit our journal Arc. So excited to be here. This event was my brainchild. It’s one of the great things about being at this place is if they’re really interesting, thoughtful speakers and you want to get to know them and you want to expose them to a wider audience, we can do it and so we are.

My role here tonight is going to be to introduce these two gentlemen. I’m going to then invite Ross Douthat to speak for about 20 minutes and then Phil Zuckerman will succeed him, offer a response for about 20 minutes. Then they will, we will all join each other in the chairs, the chairs of great wisdom to have some further banter and then we’re going to open it up to audience questions at the end.

So please be thoughtful about what your questions might be. I’m going to try to leave as much time as possible for those questions, and I think this is just going to be immense fun. I also want to say that you probably have figured out by now that this is being recorded, so if you ask questions in particular, you will be on camera and we will be posting this to YouTube and sharing it promiscuously and virally throughout the world. So there will be presumed consent to being on camera if you ask questions. So I hope that you’re all down for that.

I’m so excited to have these two guests, Ross Douthat, whom I’ve been reading since the days when he used his middle name and his byline. There’s a door prize. Does anyone remember what he was? Gregory, right? Ross Gregory Douthat. His first book was Ross Gregory Douthat, and I’ve been reading him since then, which is a long, long time.

He’s now the author of many, many books, two of which I want to mention here. One is obviously the book that I think is most apposite for what we’re talking about here tonight, which is his recent book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” which wins the title for most modest title in my book. My next book’s actually going to be “Buy This: Why Everyone Must Buy this book.” It doesn’t work as well. It doesn’t work as well, right? “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”

But I also wanted just to mention another book of his that I actually was very, very moved by. It was called “The Deep Places,” and it’s about his multi-year struggle with Lyme disease. And I will say as someone who’s never thank goodness suffered any sort of prolonged or painful illness, it was the book that more than anything I’ve ever read helped me understand what it must be to regularly suffer from illness. And I think that “The Deep Places” deserve a very, very wide audience. But tonight he’s going to be, I think speaking from “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”

And his respondent is somebody who’s been writing about irreligion even longer than Ross has been writing about religion. Philip Zuckerman teaches at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and he’s also the author of many, many books including Living The Secular Life, which like Ross’s book will be for sale here tonight. That’s about the least interesting thing about him. In 1986, he won an episode of The Dating Game, which is a game show that if you don’t remember it, the good news is with YouTube all game shows live forever. So while we hope that you’ve all put your phones away and silenced your phones and everything, should you want to turn your phone on after this 90 minutes and after you’ve purchased their books perhaps…can it be found? Is it on…?

Philip Zuckerman: I haven’t found that clip.

MO: You haven’t found that clip, but this is one for the AI experts. Go deep in, go find this somewhere. He also—

RD: We can just generate it.

MO: We can generate it!

RD: With the footage from tonight.

MO: That’s right.

RD: Sam Altman, get to work now.

MO: Then you’ll be in it too.

PZ: We’re going on a cruise!

MO: He also, it bears mentioning, was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers video for their song “Catholic School Girls Rule.” That I’m certain is on YouTube.

PZ: Yeah.

MO: Anyway, as you can tell, if we never ever talked about the topic at hand, we would still have a fun time here tonight with these two thoughtful writers and speakers. But to kick things off, I would like to introduce Ross Douthat.

RD: Thank you, Mark. Thank you so much for that incredibly kind introduction, even if there’s really no way I can possibly compete with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dating Game double feature that is going to be AI generated on all of your phones by the end of the evening. But yeah, it’s a real pleasure to be here tonight. I’m so grateful to the Danforth Center for putting this together and I’m also grateful to Phil for agreeing to be a good sport and have to listen to me make, for 20 minutes, the case for why not just everyone, but he in particular should be religious and then he will have 20 minutes to let me down easy and explain why I’ve fallen just short. But I am going to try and make that case as sort of the opening move in our exchange and then we can sort go forward from there.

And I think I’ll talk about the subject in two parts. One more sociological and one more, let’s say, theological, philosophical, though that sounds a little ponderous and hopefully it won’t be ponderous at all. But one of the reasons that I wrote a book with an aggressive title like this one is that I felt like we had reached a moment in American culture when the time was ripe for a certain kind of religious aggression and religious aggression can get a bad name from time to time, sometimes for good reason.

But I actually started working at The New York Times in the very end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and for really a large part of my career as a representative of some kind of conservative Catholicism at a paper that, if you don’t know, is read by many, many people who are not conservative Catholics. And if you didn’t know that, I invite you to read the comments section of some of my columns and you’ll discover that that is the case. But anyway, in much of that time you show up for a job like that thinking that you’re going to be the champion of religious truth against sort of hostile secular readers. And then you quickly realize that actually you were sort of speaking for religion in a period when religion is in swift cultural retreat, which was basically the story of American life from around the turn of the millennium right up until the COVID pandemic. There were a lot of structural reasons and sort of deep tectonic forces at work in this trend.

But in the realm of argument and ideas, it was captured in sort of a particularly pungent and stylistically interesting way by the appeal of the “new atheists,” who, for those of you who were somewhat younger than I am, were a group of journalists and public intellectuals and leading scientists who sort of emerged somewhere between September 11th and the election of Barack Obama to announce that religion was really bad, completely false, possibly idiotic, definitely deeply destructive, and that the entire world would be much better off if we just sort of sloughed off its burdens, set aside its commandments, stop worrying about a sky daddy or a flying spaghetti monster and entered into the bright sunlit uplands of secularism.

I should say this was not the kind of argument that my interlocutor here tonight made or is likely to make, and I am slightly caricaturing the argument, but only slightly since in speaking of aggressive titles, the most famous “new atheist” book was in fact subtitled “Why Religion Poisons Everything,” so they did it to us first. No, but the new atheists were actually, I think incredibly useful for this kind of sociological and political analysis of religion’s effects because they laid down really clear markers, made really clear arguments about the ways in which American society, western society, the entire world was supposed to get better as it became less religious, it was going to become more reasonable, more sort of trusting and confident in scientific rationality, less polarized, less mystical and superstitious, a whole list of sort of beneficial developments that were assumed to follow naturally from setting aside any kind of literal belief in the God of the Bible.

And I think that we’ve entered into a kind of interesting new religious moment in the western world in part because over the last few years, again, I think starting somewhere around 2020, a lot of people, maybe especially younger people but not only them, looked around at the landscape of the western world which had in fact become substantially less religious and decided that the new atheists had kind of been full of it, right? That if you go down that list of supposed benefits of declining religion, none of them seemed to have emerged in the landscape of American politics and American culture in the 2010s and early 2020s. Fewer Americans go to church, fewer Americans practiced organized religion. America has indeed become much more secular over the course of my adult lifetime, and yet somehow we have ended up being more polarized, less trusting in any kind of scientific, or really any kind of authority of any sort at all. Often unable to agree on basic facts about material reality, let alone facts about supernatural possibilities more likely to regard our fellow citizens as sort of frightening ultimate enemies, right? You might’ve expected that the decline of religion would make people less apocalyptic, less prone to visions of doom and disaster, but in fact, the opposite seems to be the case.

And so I think out of that experience, we have a kind of cultural moment that I wouldn’t describe as a moment of religious revival. Rather I describe it as a moment when America is sort of considering whether to have a religious revival and sort of tossing the arguments around back and forth. But I do think that the last decade and a half has provided a lot of basic sociological evidence for the proposition that religion does a lot of interesting and important work in society. It provides a lot of communal structures, sort of mediating forms for interpersonal relationships, situations where people are brought together from classes and political perspectives different from their own.

And that even if you don’t accept all of the theological premises of Roman Catholicism or Zen Buddhism or Dutch Calvinism or any other faith tradition, there still seems to be a lot of things about religion in a religious culture that we end up missing when they’re gone. And that I think draws a lot of people to a kind of threshold position vis-a-vis religion, a sense that it would be nice if religion were true. It would be nice if it were possible as a serious early twenty-first century person to believe in at least some elements of the old time religion, and then people sort of hesitate there in uncertainty or maybe they experiment a little bit, but there is still this sort of threshold that is not quite crossed, and I think the reality of that sort of hesitant, uncertain on the threshold position is a kind of necessary but insufficient impetus towards actual religious belief.

And it’s insufficient in part because obviously in order to really throw yourself into the serious practice of a religion, utilitarian and pragmatic arguments are unlikely to be quite enough. It is in fact fairly challenging just to fulfill the minimal requirements of any of the world’s major religious traditions unless you have some sense that there is a kind of objective correlative, an actual God who’s listening to your prayers and so on. But it’s also insufficient for the related reason that sociological generalizations don’t capture all of individual reality.

Even if I were to induce Phil in the course of our conversation to concede that in sociological terms religion might have a lot of benefits for society, I still wouldn’t have come close to justifying the aggressive argument of my subtitle because he could counter entirely reasonably that even if generally religion has benefits, there are lots and lots of individual people who are perfectly capable of leading entirely ethical and serious lives and flourishing lives and so on without whatever sociological benefits religion offers. And so at best, at best, that kind of case could get you to the point of saying, “Believe: Why Many People Should Consider Sometimes Going to Church,” and that’s not quite enough for the purposes of our conversation.

So I’m going to go a little bit further and suggest to you that fundamentally the reason why everyone should be religious, not just the people who are likely to garner some kind of sociological benefit from it, not just the people who think it would be nice for American culture to have more people in church on Sunday, the fundamental reason is that a religious perspective on the world is very likely to be true to objectively describe the reality that you and I and every other human being find themselves inhabiting and existing within. And that in the end is the case I think that religious people have to press in order to ultimately draw more people across the threshold into actual churchgoing or synagogue attendance or mosque attendance or anything else. And certainly it’s the argument that you have to press if you want to claim that everyone should be practicing a religion.

So what is the nature of that argument? Now, I suggested that I didn’t want to offer a kind of ponderous philosophical case, and I’m ultimately, I think not really equipped to make that kind of case. I am a journalist by a profession, not a philosopher. It may be the case, and I have very serious religious friends who believe it to be the case, that there is a single slam dunk, philosophical argument for the existence of God that in fact, if considered in the proper light overcomes all objections, it’s somewhere in the Summa Theologica, it’s one of Aquinas’s Five Ways, it’s this proof or that proof. And in the end, if we could just clear our heads of all sort of false late modern presuppositions, we would see that philosophically this one argument can carry the day and prove that God actually exists. Again, that might be the case, but that’s not how I’m going to invite you to think about the question.
Rather, I think the argument that religion describes reality for ordinary people who aren’t likely to read intensely in theology and philosophy rests not in a single argument, but on a convergence of multiple aspects of reality as we understand and experience it. And I will just sort of set out three, what I see as sort of three converging lines that all make much more sense in the light of a religious perspective than they do in the light of a secular and materialist perspective.

So the first line of evidence has to do with the structure and nature of the universe as we perceive it and attempt to understand it. Let’s say there’s three levels of this argument, right? So since time immemorial, religious believers have defaulted in their arguments with non-believers to some version of what gets called the argument from design, the idea that the universe, guess what, is law bound consistent, mathematically, precise, mathematically beautiful even, predictable, orderly, all features that seem to bespeak some kind of creative intelligence designing and structuring it. This is an ancient argument. It’s obviously challenged in some specific ways by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and there’s various layers of controversy around it, but it does have a sort of a baseline connection to reality itself. Most people, non-religious and religious would concede that the universe is structured in these ways, is mathematical and predictable in sort of certain distinctive ways. Then to that basic reality, modern physics and modern cosmology, and by this I mean the physics and cosmology of the last 40 to 50 years, have added a new layer of insight and surprise, and this is the accumulating evidence that the universe is not merely sort of structured and orderly and mathematical.
It’s structured and orderly and mathematical in these incredibly precise, insanely precisely fine tuned to use the term that people use for this ways that essentially have a, let’s say, a one in a near infinity chance of happening if you were just plucking universes at random from a sea of possibilities. So it’s not the case that if you imagine 10 hypothetical universes, one would have the features that you need to generate basic order, then planets, stars, oxygen, complex life and so on. It’s more the case that one in a quadrillion of the potential imaginable universes have these features and that this is true across multiple different features of the cosmos, different constants, different forces, and how they exist in relation to one another. We are sitting in an incredibly unlikely universe whose unlikely features seem ordered to produce us. This reality in turn has forced critics and skeptics of religious arguments into belief in and arguments about what gets called the multiverse, which is the theory that says, well, yes, the universe seems like one in an infinity near infinity of universes because a near infinity of universes all exist, all those other universes exist as well.

We are in this one. We can observe this one because of the natural reality that if we weren’t here, nothing would be observed, but ultimately, they’re all out there. We just can’t ever hope to measure, encounter or measure them. This is no less than any theological position, a metaphysical theory. And so people have the idea that the debate between science and religion usually involves religious people appealing to theories or holy texts and the scientific materialist side saying, no, come here. Look through this microscope. Look through this telescope. You can see the things that we’re describing. That’s just not the case when it comes to cosmological debates. At the very least, I think we’ve reached a point in those debates where the claim that the universe seems to have been ordered and designed for us by some kind of presiding intelligence has just as strong acclaim as the argument that you just need to assume an infinite number of other universes in order to do away with the evidence for some kind of creator God.

So that’s one line of evidence. Then the second line, and I’ll try and be quick here, I’m going to exhaust my time in about three or four minutes. The second line is the mysterious fact that we as sort of semi evolved bipeds on a, there’s like the Douglas Adams “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” dismissive line about the Earth is like in the backwater of the Western spiral arm of the Milky Way and so on. We’re not that special, and yet somehow we can understand the cosmos. We have the ability to pierce through appearances, to measure and calculate and figure out not just basic laws, but sophisticated complex laws to make crazy predictions, to understand quantum realities, maybe even soon to build artificial, well not soon, but the ability to rewrite our own genetic code, create artificial intelligence, all of these things. So there is some kind of deep and profound connections seemingly between the higher order, the first line, the higher order of the cosmos that bespeak some kind of organization from above, and our capacity to reach upward and understand that order from below that seems like it tracks reasonably well with the biblical concept of a creator God who makes human beings in his image.

What is being made in the image of God mean? It means having God-like capacities that are not the same capacities that the Creator God, but that match those capacities on a smaller scale and enable us to reach up and understand the intervening order created from above third line. This is the one that’s more likely to sort of unsettle some people, right? Is the persistence and resilience of mystical and supernatural experience under officially disenchanted modern conditions. And there’s a longer, you can have a longer discussion about this, but basically if you go back to the late eighteenth century and read people like David Hume, the great skeptical minds of 200 years ago, there was just an assumption that much of what gets called religious experience was just accumulated myths and legends that people were taught to believe by religious authorities that would mostly fall away as society secularized.

When it comes to actual religious experience, people’s weird mystical encounters, reports of supernatural healing, near death experiences, which have become more commonplace as science has progressed and we’ve gotten better at bringing people back from the dead, in fact, the weight of paranormal, supernatural and just fundamentally mysterious experience has increased I think in certain ways as the power of institutional religion has weakened, which is not what you would expect if David Hume was right about the cosmos, but is what you would expect if in that relationship between an ordering intelligence and our own intelligence, there was also a desire for a relationship and that desire and need for a relationship is of course ultimately the best case for being religious, right? You need to think there probably is a God, but you also need to think that that God probably cares about us, cares about you, cares about me, and is interested in being in some kind of communication with us.

And just to conclude, I would not deny that a non-religious observer could come up with non-religious explanations for each of these features of reality. I’ve already mentioned the multiverse as the leading non-religious explanation for the evidence for fine tuning. Obviously you can generate all kinds of complex psychological theories about the mysteries of consciousness and how it actually works and enables us to understand the world. And then of course there is a further set of theories that attempt to debunk and explain away mystical and religious experience. I would just stress though that all of those theories are going to be discreet from one another or they’ll tend to be, sometimes they will contradict each other somewhat, like you’ll get atheists and materialists who will say have a very reductive view of consciousness. They’ll say consciousness is basically just an illusion, right when it comes to explaining some of its mysterious properties.

But then when it comes to explaining mystical experience, they’ll grant it all kinds of powers to subconsciously create wild effects, sort of mysterious Jungian experiences generated by the subconscious. Where does this subconscious live? You ask the materialist, well, that’s a little hard to describe since of course, actually consciousness itself doesn’t exist. So there ends up being interesting tensions between these arguments and they require multiplying features of explanation, again, all the way to the point of positing billions and trillions of and quadrillions of universes that we can’t see. Whereas the advantage of the religious perspective that says, as most human beings have believed that some higher power created this world and exists in some kind of relationship to us, is that it explains each of those lines of reality. And each of those lines of reality are basically what you would expect to find if you lived in a cosmos that was created and designed for us. And that connection between what we actually find and what we might posit to explain it is in the end, the best reason why everyone, all of you should be religious because it is not certainly but very likely to be true. Thank you.

MO: Hi, this is Mark Oppenheimer again, and we’ll get you right back to the debate between Douthat and Zuckerman on the topic, “Should everyone be religious?” I just wanted to pop in and say that if you’re enjoying this podcast, please make sure that you’re a subscriber. Go to whatever platform you’re listing on, whether it’s Apple or Spotify, whether you listen on YouTube, you can follow us on any of those channels and make sure that you get every single episode of Arc: The Podcast. That’s all I got for you for now. I want to send you right back to the conversation. Here’s Ross Douthat and Phil Zuckerman with me moderating on the topic, “Should everyone be religious?”

PZ: Thank you so much, quite an honor. Ross, thank you for sharing the stage with me. Mark, thanks for inviting me and organizing this. Hannah, thanks for everything you did, including making sure there was no mushroom sauce on my chicken tonight. Thank you.

RD: Fine tuning.

PZ: Couple things before I start ranting. One is when I was invited to this talk, when Mark first reached out, I just assumed that Ross’s argument was going to be more sociological, that he was going to talk about all the benefits that come with being religious. I was going to concede a lot of that. There is a lot of psychological benefits, communal benefits, sociological benefits, all kinds that come with being religiously involved, no question about it, and happy to talk about that. But that’s not what his book is about. And in fact, in the beginning he explicitly says, I’m not going to make those arguments. So I was like, wow, alright, interesting.

The other thing I want to say is we atheists have a bad reputation as being kind of jerks. And so that hovers there, Du Bois spoke of double consciousness and there were many elements to that, but one was always seeing yourself through the eyes of the other who sort of despises you. And so I’m like, “Ah, gosh, my main task is to be a nice, likable guy,” and everybody’s going to walk away and be like, “Ah, that Zuckerman, man. He’s an atheist, but he’s all right.” But then I read Ross’s book and I was like, this is going to be tough. So I’m sorry you can all hate me, and I’m going to be a real downer tonight. Here we go. But I did my best.
Also, the last opening thing is I’m so glad that Ross exists. I think he makes the world a better place because when I look at the Christians and other religious folks that are running, or destroying, this country right now, I’m terrified of what strong Christianity is capable of. I wish there were more Rosses and I wish that he was running things and not the theofascists. So all I did was I read his book, I underlined stuff and circled stuff, and then I went back and looked at it and I tried to pull out what I thought were some of the more important arguments and provocative arguments, and I’m going to try to destroy them. So forgive me, Ross.

RD: You’re already forgiven.

PZ: That’s true.

RD: That’s the amazing thing.

PZ: Yeah, you got me. Okay. You don’t know what I’ve done. No, but no, but I appreciate that.

So Ross wants everybody to be a religious believer. That’s key because there’s many ways you can be religious. There’s belief, there’s behavior, there’s belonging. But he specifically wants us all to be religious believers. If religious belief was such a beneficial and good thing, then we would expect to find those democracies that have the highest levels of religious belief and those cultures and those populations and those families to be faring the best in the world today. And we would expect that those societies today where fewer the least amount of people have any religious belief would be the cesspools of the world. We find just the opposite. I understand correlation is not causation, but I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s wait for that.Ross’s big claim: no one can explain how human consciousness actually works, therefore it must be magic and not just any magic, but it must be Yud He Vav He of the Old Testament, Yahweh, Jehovah of the ancient Israelites.

Now, I’m happy to concede that we currently are ignorant of exactly how consciousness works, and as he says, we know where it occurs. It’s not in the elbow, we know it’s not in our toes. We know it’s somewhere up here, but aha, he says, ask any neuroscientist and they can tell you where things happened, but not how. And I immediately thought of, I’m sure, as you all did, Aristophanes’s play from 2,500 years ago called, “The Clouds.” So talk about this stuff going back to time immemorial. The religious worldview of the day was that Zeus was in charge, Zeus was in charge of everything, including obviously weather, and it was Zeus that made it rain, but the skeptic in the play, it’s called “The Clouds” by Aristophanes. He says, wait a minute. I think it’s the clouds that make it rain. And what’s his argument? Well, it never rains when there’s no clouds, when it’s blue skies. If Zeus made rain, it could rain when there’s not a cloud in the sky. But that never happens. And the famous quote that I learned was, “No Zeus up there, just a vortex of air.” That’s from 423 BCE.

Now, back then, people didn’t know exactly what caused rain, or thunder, or certainly lightning. They couldn’t explain. They knew where a storm occurred, but they couldn’t understand electricity. Did that mean it was magical? Did that mean it was supernatural? Of course not. We didn’t know why the moon glowed. We didn’t know what caused earthquakes. We didn’t know what caused the aurora borealis, and then we figured it out. Yet Ross falls into this very old and tired religious fallacy. If we don’t understand something about the natural physical world, well then it must be God. It’s the old God of the gaps, and it doesn’t have a good record.

Historically, as one of my colleagues, professor Brian Keeley wrote to me after we were discussing this 150 years ago, scientists were baffled by the mysteries of reproduction and how life perpetuates itself. At the time. Religionists seized on this ignorance and argued that it shows that God must exist to quicken matter into life. Thanks to 150 years of post-Darwinian, post-Mendelian biochemistry, we now have a much firmer grasp of how these processes happen, and the religionists have moved on onto the next area of current scientific ignorance: consciousness. What a brittle argument. What a precarious argument.

Is Ross saying, if neuroscientists can’t explain everything about consciousness, then his God exists? But if neuroscientists do or can explain everything about consciousness, God doesn’t exist? Yikes. I would argue that the most sane, rational, and reasonable position to take is when we encounter a mystery, remain in a state of unknowing, be humble, be agnostic, and say, wow, we haven’t figured this out. We don’t know. It’s much more rational and reasonable to simply admit we don’t understand everything than to say, ah, it must be the Lord.

Next point, Ross says, I hope I can call him Ross. He’s forgiven me.

Ross makes his claim. And you got to wonder, I figure there’s a reason given his affiliation, but he says he wants ever to be religious. So if you want to be religious, he says, probably the best idea is the ones the most true religion is those, or that one that has existed the longest and has the most adherence, that’s most likely to be the most correct and true. Put your faith in popular beliefs? Trust the largest crowds? I guess that makes sense like if you’re camping and you got to pee, follow where everybody else is going or whatever, yeah, it’ll probably lead you to the bathroom. But when it comes to deciding what to believe regarding morality and existence, what religion to join, terrible advice.

As Ibsen clearly expressed in “Enemy of the People,” but I’ll just spell it out for us all here. One, the truth of a claim is not established by how many people believe it. Second, the truth of a claim is not established by how long it has been asserted or believed. Let’s take Mormonism. Church of Jesus Christ Latterday Saints, which Ross conveniently ignores in his book are its claims true, makes a lot of claims. So let’s use Ross’s measures here of does it have a lot of believers? Does it exists a long time? According to Ross, we would have to say yes, it’s true given its huge growth in such a short amount of time, millions and millions of members since the 1840s. I mean, this is tremendous success. No world religion has ever grown so quickly, so it must be true. But aha, it hasn’t been around very long. So according to Ross’s calculations, it can’t be true because it’s new. Oh, but what if Mormonism still exists in a thousand years? Is it suddenly true? Then how many believers must a religion have to make its claims factual? How long must it exist? Can Ross provide thresholds here that are not arbitrary? Of course not.

This is epistemologically indefensible. If my kid asked me, “Dad, papa–he calls me papa–what should I believe? What movement or ideology should I commit to? What religion?” I would never say, “Go with the most popular and the one that’s been around the longest.” I’d say, “Find out for yourself. Investigate, be skeptical, read all you can. Seek out competing views, demand evidence.” And then, just before bedtime, I would hand him a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 “Self-Reliance.” And I would highlight the sentence, “Nothing is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind.”

Finally, and I won’t get into this, but Ross does leave out the role of colonization and enslavement, imperialism, missionizing and advertising in creating greater numbers of believers. Look at Latin America. Why is it Catholic? Because it’s true or because the Spaniards landed there? Costa Rica is not Latin. It’s Spanish for rich coast.

Next, this was a trip, and I’m sorry, Ross, but I’ve told all my friends about this and they don’t believe me. Beware of demons. I had a hard time with this one because I respect Ross tremendously. I read everything he writes, and I was like, what? This dude writes for The New York Times and he thinks there’s demons? And not only do he think demons, he’s scared of them. When I go to bed at night, I worry about the country and my kids and poor Ross worries about demons. I don’t know how to answer this other than I’ll just appeal to the general epistemological principle that one ought to have evidence to make such claims.

Ross provides none. I mean, do bad things happen? Of course, do we experience phenomena that could be characterized as evil? Of course, but that doesn’t mean demons are behind them. I don’t know how to say this politely so I’m going to be impolite to believe in demons is to remain in a permanent state of early adolescent summer camp, tingled by tall tales and spooky stories. I mean, it’s like believing in poltergeists or gin or vampires or werewolves or mermaids or harpies or ghosts. I mean, all evidence for such creatures are purely anecdotal and imaginary.

But guess what? Let’s say Ross is right. Let’s say there are demons. What does this say about Ross’s God? If God is all good and wants to have a relationship with us, or even kind of nice, I mean, why would he permit demons to whisper around the world, sowing discord and causing illusion and delusion and distress and pain? I mean, the guy that murdered my friend Clinton, when he was finally arrested, we put him in prison and he’s there right now. And the idea is that we take murderers that are out killing and we try to prevent them from killing again. So why wouldn’t God just lock up these demons? He wants them to go around and do all this terrible stuff. He must have a plan. And if that’s the case, then those demons are part of God’s plan. And if they’re part of God’s plan, then they’re ultimately part of this relationship we’re having or he wants to have. And it’s kind of a good thing. Belief in demons and the like, arise from pervasive cognitive biases as Hobbes explained in 1651 in “Leviathan,” our brains are wired to seek out deliberate causes of events that affect our wellbeing even when there aren’t any.

If something good happens to us without an obvious cause, our brain immediately assumes someone or something did us a good turn and if they’re invisible, so be it. If something horrible happens to us and we don’t know why, we automatically cognitively think, “Oh, something must, there must be a cause, a reason, something malevolent, a spirit, a devil, a demon, an evil eye.” This is the root of superstition, as Hobbes knew. It’s also much of religion, or certain kinds of religion.

A lot of the things we experience, the misfortune we experience, is part of the natural world. Viruses, bacteria, hailstorms, floods that have no deliberate intention towards us at all. The mudslide that killed my beloved cousin, who was the light of so many people’s lives, had no agency. It wasn’t seeking her out to punish her because she lied to someone the day before. Physical occurrences simply took place. She was at the wrong part of her house. She was running across to save her disabled daughter. And the Mud God and that was the end of her.

But her friend who was in the guest house survived. The mud came in, but she climbed out through the sunroof, or the skylight. Did demons cause that mudslide? Did the devil murder my cousin? Did God save her friend? None of these claims have any evidence backing them up. And the sooner we can stop thinking this way, I think the better. As William Butler Yeats knew, “The stars above are indifferent.” The stars are beautiful. Shooting stars are amazing. Guess what? The stars twinkled beautifully over Haiti in 2010 as an earthquake killed nearly 200,000 people. The shooting stars didn’t stop. They twinkled over Phuket. They twinkled over Aberfan. They twinkled as the bubonic plague killed one third of Europe and they will twinkle tonight as we enjoy each other’s company and others succumb to bacteria, virus and assorted natural forces.

Ross’s next point, which you brought up tonight. Miraculous healings are proof. There is a God, he says. So here’s his claim:eEvery now and then someone is cured against all odds with no explanation. Must be God. This is deeply flawed thinking. A more rational and reasonable position is this: sometimes people suddenly recover and we don’t exactly know why, we can’t explain it, and sometimes perfectly healthy people suddenly drop dead, or have a stroke and we don’t know why. Hopefully more empiricism and more study will shed more light, but our conclusions on why things happen should remain in the existing light of empiricism and not go beyond.

But again, even if Ross is correct, maybe there are miraculous healings because God makes them so. Now let’s consider that scenario. So what did I do when I prepared my notes? I just went online, did some quick Googling and what did I find? Wow, a miraculous healing. In 2020, a woman named Wanda in Jackson, Wyoming was rear-ended. Her neck was badly damaged, causing her to constantly be bent over, couldn’t straighten her neck, horrible disfigurement. For two years she lived in suffering and pain. And then one day a bunch of Christian colleagues at her place of employment in February of 2022, they gathered around, they placed their hands on her. I’ve never quite understood how that works. Is it electromagnetic? Like what is Anyway. And they prayed for her to be healed. 15 minutes later back in her car, she could lift up her head, her neck was straightened. Proof of God? Let’s say yes. So I did some more Googling on that exact same day in 2022. God then caused or allowed the following. Over 1000 kids died from diarrhea. 2000 kids were diagnosed with cancer. Nearly 2000 people died from malaria, half of them under the age of five. About 14,000 people died from a stroke. And 15,300 babies in a single day were born dead, died during childbirth, or died during the first month of life. So God cured Wanda’s neck, and that’s evidence of God than what are 15,000 dead babies evidence of? That’s some problematic thinking.

Furthermore, consider the role of prayer here. Her Christian friends gathered around and asked God to pray for their friend’s neck again. What does that say about Ross’s God? I mean, my kid loves to ride a skateboard and I always, always taking him around. I laid a different skate park. So imagine if I took my 12-year-old son to a skate park and I’m sitting on the bench with some other parents who were sitting there. The kids are skateboarding and my son tries this trick. His helmet flies off because it wasn’t fastened properly. He lands on his head and he’s just laying there on the cement. Blood is oozing out. And all the parents ask, “Whose kid is that?” And the woman says to me, and I said, “Oh, that’s my kid.” And the woman says, “Well, why aren’t you helping him? He didn’t ask.” What kind of a father? He didn’t ask. So God had to be asked to cure Wanda’s neck? And if those friends hadn’t asked, what kind of a God needs to be asked to cure anybody of anything? Not a God I want to have a relationship with.

Finally, if God miraculously heals people, then wouldn’t we expect rates of disease and illness to be lower among his ardent followers than among atheists and agnostics or Buddhists or anybody else? But we don’t. There are many reasons for that. I’m not saying it’s all boils down to one thing, but I can tell you this belief in God doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor.

How am I doing on time? Three, four minutes. Oh, okay. Alright. Quickly.

Ross claims that the cosmos is characterized by order and design specifically with humans in mind. With demons? Has anybody ever played Sims? I mean, would you put demons in your family’s house? What kind of a God designs the universe? Does anybody here raise your hand, know what the leading cause of death for women is in human history? Childbirth. What kind of a God would be like? The very mechanism by which I bring people into the world that I want to have a relationship with is the most deadly process. Evolution can explain it.

I’ll just tell about how about raccoon poop. If this universe is so great, my dear friend had a–no, actually friend, I don’t want to oversell it here. Her beautiful two-year old daughter was at preschool digging in the sand with a shovel, saw something that looked like a raisin, smelled kind of interesting, ate it. It was raccoon poop destroyed her brain. She became blind, deaf and brain damaged, unable to speak or understand language forever. That’s some messed up design if you ask me. Like, come on, just don’t put the raccoon poop in the sand at the preschool.

In conclusion, when I look at the world today, I see religious people, especially strong vocal Christians with that crucifix, that gold crucifix between their clavicles behind so much suffering and so much injustice. I know that’s not all, it’s not even most, but they’re the ones with the power right now. This is not a time for more religion, more faith, more superstition. This is a time for humble agnosticism, sober reason, unbiased and empiricism rational decision-making about how to solve the world’s problems. Prayer is not going to do it. I wish that religion’s obsession with the afterlife could be morphed into a here and nowness. I wish religious people would do good, not because it’s commanded or they fear punishment, but because it eases suffering and increases wellbeing and justice. I wish religious people would stop teaching children that there are demons out to get them. Ross wants us to believe in his deity. I suggest we’ll have better outcomes if we believe in ourselves. Sorry to all of you that I have offended. Thank you.

MO: So you liked the book?

PZ: Oh, I actually—

MO: You dug it.

PZ: I forgot. I didn’t even read the first part. It is a crisp, clear read. It’s kind, it’s thoughtful. I intend to assign it to my students as an example of thoughtful, contemporary, compelling theism. Sorry, I forgot to say.

RD: So you’re saying I’ve sold a few copies then we’re square.

PZ: However, I am going to pair it with William Lobdell’s book. He covered the religion beat for the LA Times. So I’m going to have them read Ross’s book and Bill’s book together.

MO: I think he lost his faith as I recall.

PZ: Right.

MO: Covering religion actually drove him out of religion. I remember that book.

Well, thank you. Thank you both. I could ask lots of questions, but I have a feeling you guys could do better without me in there. So maybe I’ll just kick this off with Ross, anything you want to respond to?

RD: Why would you say that?

MO: So we’re going to take about 15 minutes now then we’ll get to the audience questions.

RD: I don’t want to go too far with any point. I would say what was striking to me about, I won’t say it was Hitchensian, but you’re stinging—

PZ: If only.

RD: Your stinging brief against religion was that it was primarily a moral case against God rather than a, I would say, there was a lot of appeals to sort of authority and secular presumption when it comes to evidence that God or demons exist who could possibly believe in demons. And then you got extremely passionate and detailed when it came to the ways in which you think that a hypothetical God falls short of your moral standards. And I think that’s actually, I’ve now had a lot of conversations public and private about these issues. I do think that for twenty-first century people, for a variety of reasons that are sort of interesting to unpack, that is often where things end up. You start reading, you see this in a lot of both kind of skeptical polemic, but also the kind of books written by working scientists who are sort of interested in religion and can see some of the scientific slash philosophical arguments for God.

And we’ll sort of toss them back and forth, but then they’ll come around to the same place where you ended up and saying, well, in the end I can’t, no matter what the evidence for fine tuning or structure or design, I can’t believe in a God who would allow maybe not even suffering but this much suffering, right? I think it’s not even suffering, qua suffering that is the root of the objection. If I said to you, well, here’s a cosmos where people are created to be in relationships with God and for reasons that have to do with free will and the need for learning and growth, they have to have some suffering. You might concede that that was reasonable, but you’d say, why do you have to have the Holocaust or all the dead babies or the moving stories that you told about your friends?
I think that tends to be my sense that it’s not, the argument from against God, from the existence of evil isn’t even about evil per se. It’s like there’s just too much of it. And I think in a way, obviously that’s an extremely potent moral case against the goodness or at least the omnipotent goodness. It’s a strong case against a particular Christian, usually Christian conception, conception of God. It still does seem to me to sort of not really address the reasons to think that that God exists. It’s a reason to say in the end, there might be a God and I would shake my fist at him. Which the reality is if you read the Old Testament and the New Testament, you’ll find a lot of people who do believe in God doing some fish shaking at God and some arguing with God, some strenuous sort of moral examination.

I tend to think that the great religious traditions are more capacious than atheists give them credit for in inviting people into the kind of moral argument and moral reckoning and even moral critique of God that you want to offer. But in the end, we also don’t have the perfect tools to judge and assess completely the ultimate balancing of all experiences of suffering and death and misery and how that fits into human life. If human life continues after death and if human beings have a cosmic destiny and not just a material destiny, right? There is some limit to our ability to do this kind of moral quantification and say, this amount of suffering shows that God couldn’t possibly have our good in mind. And meanwhile, it is still the case that we find ourselves in the universe mysteriously fine tuned to allow for our existence. It’s still the case that again, it’s not just that our consciousness is mysterious and hard to explain in a kind of God of the gaps sense as you described.

It is also the case that our consciousness can do all kinds of things that it’s hard to explain how and why and in what possible way evolution would’ve successfully selected for the ability of human consciousness To understand the cosmos at a deep and profound level is as mysterious as the immediate experience of consciousness itself. These are both mysteries of consciousness, right? It’s not just one mystery, it’s a couple. There’s also the further mystery of how consciousness relates to matter itself. I didn’t want to bore us with a diversion into not bore us, entertain us with a diversion into quantum physics. But one of the other fascinating apparent discoveries of modern physics and cosmology is the extent to which the human mind seems to exist in a kind of weird dynamic interaction with material reality. Where material reality itself seems to exist in states of contingency and possibility that only collapse into reality through some kind of observation, some kind of conscious experience, which again, is what you would expect if the religious portrait of a universe created and held in an existence by a supervening consciousness were correct and really not at all what you would expect in the universe as described by pure and strict materialists.

We can talk about demons a bit more in the Q and A, but I guess that’s sort of, I think the question of evil and the question of what God has in bind for humanity, why God allows so much suffering, why God if he offers miraculous healings, offers them as signs, as reasons to believe, but not as solutions to all of our problems. Because clearly, I completely agree with you, whatever miracles are doing, they’re not doing that. They’re not there to do away with suffering from a Christian perspective. They’re there as reasons to have faith and believe, but they aren’t like a Mr. Fix-It for the problem suffering. But again, all of those questions are questions that you confront once you say, well, in a lot of other ways, seems like there might be a God, right? And I guess I’m curious if you think that argument has any force at all, or if you think that the moral questions are enough to just sort of wave away the other reasons drawn from the nature of the nature of reality as we understand it, to think that all of this was put together non accidentally.

And the last thing I’ll say, just on the consciousness thing we have, here’s a different way of looking at it that might be a little bit more congenial to a sort of non-religious perspective or approach to things. Human beings have experience, direct experience of two things. Mind the experience of consciousness, the experience of selfhood and matter, the stuff that we’re touching and experiencing out there in the world.

And we have in a way the much more direct experience of mind of consciousness. This is the first thing, the primary thing we experience, we experience matter secondarily. So these are the two constituent features of reality that we have access to mind and matter. The materialist claim is that mind in the end has to be understood in terms of matter. And that is the only reasonable assumption to make the religious perspective is that these are both things we have some kind of access to. They seem to be somewhat different things from one another. And it’s possible that mind comes first. That’s the basic religious claim. Before you get to, is God omnipotent? Is he all good? Are there demons? Are there discarnate minds out there that want something bad for you? Before you get to those questions, the basic religious claim is maybe mine comes first. And I do think that there’s a substantial amount of evidence, the evidence for design and the cosmos, the evidence for mind as a kind of distiller of possibility into reality and quantum physics. And I could give other examples to think that maybe that’s right. Maybe mind comes first. What do you think of that suggestion?

PZ: Did I ever tell you that I won the Dating Game? No. Let’s see. Well, you said so much, Ross. What’s your question specifically?

RD: My question is just like, I think it’s very unlikely that in our discussion tonight I’m going to convince you that God is all good in the way that, but I’m curious if you think that’s enough to sweep away claims that claims about, we’ll call it mind or intelligence as a primary feature of existence.

PZ: Okay, I’ll do my best. And also, Mark said if I did convert to Christianity tonight, this would probably go viral. So I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to—
RD: I would say it’s clear that we would need an actual miracle, which would indeed go viral and Mark would be very pleased, but then he’d have to convert to Christianity too.

MO: To be fair, if Ross loses his faith tonight, it goes even more viral.

PZ: That’s right.

MO: It’s not all on you to make this the best night of my professional life.

PZ: Okay, so alright, I’ll do this as best I can. I completely agree with you, Ross, that the moral critique of God is a totally different, in other words, yeah, God could still exist and I could just have moral qualms with him, or I could be judging him from a human-centric, ignorant way, or whatever. So yes, you’re right. I could have just stood at the podium and said, “No evidence. Thank you for inviting me,” and sit down. But I was trying to address your point specifically, so I felt like I owed it to you to like, well, you make this claim and this is my response.

RD: Wait, wait. But also that’s where your, I mean not to psychoanalyze you here, but that’s where your passion was. I would say you have a strong moral objection to God and that’s fine.

PZ: I don’t have a strong moral objection to God any more than I do to Darth Vader. But what I would say is to me, if you’re going to say something like the universe was created with humans in mind, I have just experienced too much evidence in my life to see that as the opposite. And if you’re going to say mind, “Oh, we consciousness,” do you know anybody that’s had Alzheimer’s or dementia? All it takes is a stroke. And see how conscious or mindful–people that have brain damage do not ponder the nature of the universe and have an experience of consciousness. They sit there like vegetables. I’ve sat when my wife had a stroke, I was there in the hospital for six weeks. I saw a lot of people that did not exhibit the consciousness you’re talking about. They had a brain injury, so clearly something material happened to their brain.

They were deprived of oxygen. They were in a car wreck, they had a stroke. Okay, and then the final thing I’m going to say is all of your arguments, Ross, are the general fallacy of informal logic known as the appeal to ignorance. It’s all just, wow, how could this be so? It must be God. But that leap is not justified. And just all you can say is, wow, look at this world. Look at ferrets and look at weasel. Isn’t it all amazing? Look how I can write a book and I can listen to music.

RD: I like ferrets, weasels on the other hand…

PZ: All we can do is say—

MO: Raccoons, weasels, ferrets.

PZ: See what I’m into.

RD: But what I’m trying to suggest is that in fact it’s not just, put it this way, I’m saying if you reran the clock, if you ran the clock back 50 to 75 years in the case of debates about cosmology, 150 to 200 years in the case of debates about let’s say the persistence of religious experience, the materialist and atheist side of the argument would have a bunch of expectations that have not at all been vindicated by events. And in the case of religious experience, there’s an expectation that this is something sort of, it’s like as you described, that it’s just people who don’t understand how clouds work and posit the Zeus is out there. And so once that stops, people will stop claiming to have encounters with God or the gods, but they don’t stop. So atheists have to lose a little ground there.

And then with cosmology, it could be the case that there are only 10 possible universes and seven of them would produce life. If that were the case, it would strengthen the argument for materialism and atheism and you would be here touting that if it is the case that there are a near infinite number of universes. And ours does appear to have been fine tuned. Again, not necessarily for our happiness, but just for our emergence. It does seem like not an appeal to ignorance. I’m making an appeal to knowledge. I’m saying the accumulation of cultural knowledge has made religious experience clearly a more resilient and persistent feature of human life than atheist. And skeptics once thought and the accumulation of cosmological knowledge has made the claim that the universe is constructed non accidentally stronger than it used to be.

MO: Can you respond to that? Then I have a final question for each of you before we go to the audience, but what would you say to that?

PZ: I don’t really know what to say. It’s like, first of all, I don’t expect religion to disappear. I think it meets deep psychological, communal, familial needs in humans. Clearly humans have a need to believe and it gives them tremendous comfort in a world full of suffering and pain. So I don’t have some grand notion that, oh, religions just going to disappear. Not at all. So I’m not going to defend any atheist who’s sure of that. I agree. There were some thinkers who were sure of it. I’m not one of them. But the idea that I guess fine tuned–this is what I’m trying to say, a fine tuned universe for us, where the leading cause of death is childbirth, if that’s fine tuned to you. Would you want a car that, guess what, every third time you get in this car you die?
RD: No, we’re collapsing, we’re collapsing—

PZ: It’s a moral argument. It’s not the physical reality.

RD: Were the Hunger Games designed? You’ve seen the Hunger Games, right? Did somebody design them? If you woke up tomorrow—

PZ: You went through that argument. I’ll go there if you want.

RD: I am saying if you woke up tomorrow and found yourself inside the Hunger Games—

PZ: Oh shit.

RD: You would say somebody created this game and it’s bad. Right? But you would believe that someone created the Hunger Games.

PZ: Okay.

RD: You wouldn’t say, oh, no one could have possibly created this. Everyone’s trying to kill me. Right. That would be crazy. You would say, I mean, I guess I’m trying to convince you to end this conversation by saying, “There’s probably a God and I think he’s a–pardon my language–asshole.” That’s my goal for tonight. I want you to say–I want us to get there and then we’ll reconvene.
PZ: I don’t think there’s a God and I can’t speak to his personality.

MO: So maybe we’ll pick up some of this in the audience question. I have one question I want each of you each have one minute for this before we go to the audience.

I want to know from each of you what’s your opponent’s strongest argument? I want to know, Ross, is there anything that Phil said or that other atheists have said that gives you the most pause or inserts any doubt into your Christian worldview? And Phil, I want to know, is there anything Ross has said, or that other believers have said that makes you think, “Huh, maybe so.”

PZ: Oh, I just love the way Ross describes the awe one feels at being alive and at the universe. I mean to me, I think that religion does a really, and Christianity, it’s an amazing experience to be alive. The world is full of beauty and wonder and mystery. I just stop there and become agnostic. It doesn’t lead me to the same conclusion as Ross, but I think he does it. I really love the way he articulates that and think it’s powerful and moving.

RD: I’ll cheat and say two things. I think that the case against the goodness of God is clearly a primary and powerful obstacle for some people, many people to thinking that they should be in a relationship with God. I think that they confuse that for a strong case that God does not exist. But I think clearly that is an incredibly powerful argument. I would say it doesn’t carry the same personal weight for me that it does for other people. But that is probably sort of a quirk of my own psychology and own experience. I am happy to sort of say that there’s a mystery, there’s a problem of evil, but there’s also a problem of goodness. You would not expect the kind of superfluous amazingness that you’ve just eloquently described to be present in a blind and accidental universe either. So someone who just wants to say that God is probably bad has to deal with the super fluidity of things that we call good. I think from my perspective, the actual strongest material case is—I do think that there are multiple ways in which consciousness provides strong evidence for supernatural purpose and supernatural reality.

But it is the case that consciousness emerges under conditions as far as we can tell, of gradually evolving life. And it certainly is hard to say what is the moment when this kind of consciousness counts as a soul, that kind of consciousness does not. I do think, I didn’t write much about Darwinian evolution in the book, but I do think there are some particular challenges that evolutionary theory poses for Christianity, in particular, that not for every religion that have not been fully addressed. And I think that general intuition that you’ve expressed that somebody gets Alzheimer’s and their consciousness doesn’t work as well, combined with the gradual development of the conditions in which consciousness arises, that’s probably the strongest. I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t go all the way with it, but there’s something there.

MO: Thank you. So I want to take some audience questions. I’m going to ask these guys, I’m sure your questions will be brief and they’ll be questions, not comments. And I’m going to ask these two very loquacious gentlemen to be fairly brief in the response because I’d like to answer as many questions as possible. So we’ll start with you, sir, and then we’ll go to you right there.
In the pink and then, yeah, then to the woman in two rows in front of him.

Speaker 1: So I wonder if you can explain how is it the people who actually study cosmology and actually understand the equations that you liberally quote and probably don’t understand it deeply as these scholars do, 90 plus percent of them are atheists. Explain that please.

RD: That is a really good question that I actually do spend a little bit of time in the book sort of thinking through. But I think part of it is culturally contingent. I think western scientists and cosmologists are somewhat more likely to be atheist agnostics than similarly situated scholars in other parts of the world, in part because of particular reasons related to church state controversy, Catholicism and Galileo. There’s sort of a particular western history of institutional religion and science and sort of institutional science being in conflict that contributes to some degree, to a kind of reflexive scientific skepticism of religion.
But the other reason is that the materialist paradigm that you’ve heard defended here tonight is a really important way. It is the frame through which you should conduct serious science. It does not make sense as a working scientist to say at the end of the day, “Well, we have this mystery here and I’m going to say a demon did it. Right? Absolutely. That science would never advance if you took that, if you had that kind of presumption. It makes sense for scientists to have a kind of practical anti-supernaturalism, which is why when you do have scientists, you’ll often have scientists who are religiously curious, agnostics or deists who draw the line at miracles, the supernatural and demons, right? You’ve probably known, I certainly have known scientists who fall into this category who will say, yes, all these cosmological arguments are interesting and maybe do suggest that there’s some higher purpose, but I can’t go with you to the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

But I think the mistake that they’re making, and obviously it’s a presumptuous thing for a non-scientist to say, but you’re mistaking useful practical guild rules for statements about the entirety of reality. Like yes, if you’re trying to understand the regular operations of material reality, you should not ever leap to the conclusion that it’s supernatural. But that doesn’t mean that the supernatural doesn’t or can’t exist. And if the accumulation of material evidence provides a strong suggestion of cosmic order or design, you should be open to that even though it’s not something that you want to call upon to explain why a particular chemical reaction works the way it does.

MO: Alright, right here. Two rows in front of that gentleman. Yeah, wait for the microphone please. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Hi. So Mr. Zuckerman, I was just wondering, do you find any of the philosophical arguments, especially from a thousand or so years ago, to be convincing about theological matters like the Summa or things like that? Or does it all just kind of seem like nonsense?

PZ: No. For example, I practice a form of non-theistic Buddhism. I think there’s wonderful wisdom in the philosophy of Buddhism. I love reading the holy texts of all religions and think there’s–the Vedas or the are a lot of fun. So there’s a lot of–I think humans created all religions, and so I think all religions express the beauty and wonder that’s in the human experience.

MO: All right. I’m going to take this question over here and then I’m going to take one from in here somewhere.

The gentleman in olive Green will be next. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you both for being here. Philip, I would just suggest to you, you spoke movingly about suffering and I would just point you to Jesus on the cross.

Ross, my question for you is that your statement about belief you gave a really interesting and thoughtful explanation about belief. I’m just wondering, and specifically about Christian belief, and I’m just wondering if that only is your argument or if you’re talking about any belief of any religion. We know what multiple beliefs of multiple religions historically can lead to. And then even if you see the war within Christianity right now with Christian nationalism. So if you can comment on that.

RD: I think there’s a couple levels at which you can think about belief. I think that a general religious attitude, a belief that there is some higher power, some sort of intelligence responsible for our existence is essentially justified intellectually on the evidence having come to that conclusion, then you have a kind of multi-layered approach to figuring out what religion you should actually practice.

One part of that approach, which I think you slightly caricatured, but fair enough, is to essentially look at the accumulated wisdom of the existing experience of human history, which is not something that we just do in religion. Most people believe in democratic self-government in the United States, not because they went into an Emersonian reverie and it came to them that democracy was the best. But because they did look around at the world and said, okay, there’s been sort of moral development in human history and we figured out this and we figured out that, and there is sort of a rough consensus in favor of democracy, I think you can see something similar across the great religious traditions, Buddhism, very much included. There are certain moral perspectives and even some theological perspectives that most of the big religions that have shaped entire cultures across human history have tended to converge upon. And C.S. Lewis talks about this in one of his books. He describes it as the Dao, not meaning Daoism, but from a similar route, meaning the places, if you read Islamic texts and Buddhist texts and Hindu texts, you’ll find certain kinds of moral agreement with Christianity, I think. Which again, it’s not true of every religion, right?

MO: Phil was jumping out of a seat about to say something.

PZ: They were all invented by humans. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s similarities.

RD: But I’m saying, I’m saying just imagine with me that you’ve decided that there might be a God having decided that you might look somewhat differently on human efforts to think about that God than you did before. You might say, which ones have lasted and which ones have been discarded? Which ones have produced—

PZ: I’d go Quaker. Silent friends in a minute.

RD: Okay, good. Well see, now we’re making progress.

PZ: Hands down.

RD: We’re making progress. But then to finally to come to complete agreement, I wouldn’t say, okay, so just decide, all right, it’s a coin flip between Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism—Judaism for you Mark—

MO: Thank you for recognizing Judaism.

RD: Then you say, all right, well now I want to actually have an encounter, maybe it is an Emersonian encounter with the, with the New Testament, and there is a point where, yeah, that’s where you make the decisive choice that is based on some combination of intellect and experience and whatever grace God decides to give you. And in the end that direct sort of experience is why I am a Christian.

MO: Can I interrupt? I want to give Phil a chance to respond. And then we’re going to take two more questions, but then, and we have this gentleman here and we have this woman right here. And then these guys are going to hang forever. So if you want to come up and talk to them afterwards, they’re not flying out till tomorrow. They have nowhere to be. They will be signing books, but I mean, if you buy a book, they’ll talk to you. There’s no better way to get a writer with a book for sale to talk to you.

Speaker 4: So this was already somewhat addressed, but there’s the problem of which book to pick. So we already have one logical gap, the argument from design. So that’s one gap, but another jump is which book to pick, because now you have this creator, then you have the question of what does this creator want from us? And then on top of that Ross’s argument in favor of theism, and someone undercuts the argument for Catholicism because you cannot be both Jewish and Catholic at the same time. They’re fundamentally different beliefs. So I’d be interested in how Ross addresses his belief in theism while also being a Catholic.

MO: I will say personally that I found this, I mean, it’s the most intentionally under baked part of your book because you’re not writing a pro-Christian tract. You wanted to reach people who are not considering Christianity as well. I think that’s fair to say.

PZ: He says, start where you are, but eventually you’ll get to Jesus.

MO: I didn’t see it as heavy handed as that, but go ahead.

RD: That’s somewhat fair.

MO: Why don’t you address the gentleman’s question?

RD: That’s somewhat fair.

MO: You’ll own that.

PZ: I read it twice.

RD: I am sorry. Yeah. I do think that on the point about different books, I do think this is the case where, again, I think there is a substantial degree of moral and theological overlap between the great world religions. That should give you some confidence, again, in the context of thinking there might be a God that they are all sort of groping in a similar direction. At the same time, I think that you need to take, I don’t think this is an impossible intellectual exercise at all, to read the Quran, read the Old and New Testaments, read some sacred scripture from India and East Asia, and assess for yourself the plausibility of the stories they tell their historical credibility. Wrangle a bit with the text and the passages and the Gospel that you may have accidentally misinterpreted or something. Right. And I mean, just to your point about the book, about the Book of Mormon, I think it’s totally reasonable.

Look, I think that God is present in Mormonism, and one reason I think that God is present in Mormonism is that it has produced a really impressive culture of what I as a Christian consider great Christian works. I think that is suggestive evidence. At the same time, I don’t think the historical claims of Mormonism are credible. And so that’s part of why I’m not a Mormon. But I think you can hold both of those conceptions in your mind at the same time and say you have one truth, you have a bunch of different religions driving at it, you have some other religions that have gone off in completely the wrong direction under demonic influence, but then among that group of religions, you yourself have to make a choice. And being a reader of history and scripture and having life experiences and so on are they’re among the various ways that one might make such a choice.

MO: Alright, could we have a microphone in the front row here for our final question of the formal night, and then when it breaks south informally—

RD: You keep selling this Mark, my schedule says bed at 8:45.

Speaker 5: Thank you. This question is mostly for doctors commend, but Ross, feel free to also answer it, Mr. Dow, that, I guess I should say, this is a question kind of about your sources, if I can ask that. It seems you presented materialism as what seems to be the most credible lens through which to view the world, yet a lot of the sources in your presentation, you quoted a lot of poets, and then you even seem to favorably Thomas Hobbs. I found that interesting to cite him as a source for a materialist view of the world, particularly regarding consciousness and his view of human beings being mostly materialist. I found it interesting because at the very beginning you seemed to speak with disapproval of what you called Theo fascism, and I can tell that, I mean, I assume that you’re worried about the political implications of certain beliefs that people might have. So how do you square, I guess, appealing to someone like Thomas Hobbes with a political project that you would find favorable? Because Hobbes doesn’t exactly lead to a progressive democracy. It seems like that’s something you find to be good.

PZ: I definitely am not here to defend Hobbes. I had two reasons for mentoring. Aristophanes, Ibsen, Hobbes, Yeats, who else did I mention, Emerson. So the first reason, no three reasons. The first reason was so some people would go like, “Wow, that Zuckerman’s really smart.” The really smart people would be like, “Dude, that guy is trying really hard to seem smart. What a jackass.” But the real reason was I just wanted to show how long these arguments have been confronted, for thousands of years. And I have to say, I was a little surprised that Ross used William Paley. I mean, these are arguments that have been so I just wanted to sort of show that over history. Many, many people have grappled with these, but no, the Leviathan, I just picked that one aspect that I thought was useful for this point. But I’m in no way trying to defend Hobbes or that.

I think I’m defending agnosticism. I think we go where the evidence leads us. And when we don’t know, we say we don’t know and leave it at that.

RD: Can I? Sorry. What would you consider strong evidence?

MO: We’re now in overtime.

RD: We’re in overtime.

MO: No more than two minutes.

RD: Mark, you want a conversion. I don’t think we’re close. I just—

MO: I need my conversion. I need my viral moment. Go ahead.

RD: I can see that clearly we live in a universe where if there is a God, he’s a God who allows for atheism, right? He doesn’t descend in the midst of every panel discussion of religion to say, “Ross was right. Zuckerman good on the Dating Game, not so.” Right? So I concede God is allowing you to be an atheist.

PZ: I thought I have free will?

RD: You have free will absolutely.

PZ: What do you mean God’s allowing me?

RD: Well, he could override your free will as the author of the universe.

PZ: Then I don’t have free will.

MO: What’s the question?

RD: I just want to know, what’s your ask of God, I guess?

PZ: Well, what’s your ask of the Ouija board? I mean, I don’t believe in a God. Do you mean to make me believe in a God?

RD: I don’t ask the Ouija board. Didn’t you read my book? I don’t ask the Ouija board. It’s very dangerous.

MO: You’re saying what would it take?

PZ: Okay. What I would say is, to me Ross, life is full of mystery. I can’t even conceive of these things. But the minute you say, “Oh, it’s daddy God that did it.” I’m like, do you have any evidence? It’s just the appeal to ignorance.

So I’ll give my quick anecdote. You may have seen it on YouTube, which is the bane of all college speakers, but here we go. If you’re on an airplane and the person sitting next to you says, you’re on an airplane, you’re going to Thailand, you’re looking out the window, and this person, you don’t know X, you says the pilot’s name is Root Beer Saskatchewan Sassafrass. And you’re like, “What? Really? That’s the pilot’s name.” “Yeah. Root beer Saskatchewan Sassafrass.” And then you say to them, “Well, do you know the pilot?” “No, I don’t know the pilot.” “Did you see their name tag when they came?” “No.” “Do you collect odd names?” “No.” “How do you know?” And then the person turns to me and says, “Well, do you know what the pilot’s name is?” And I’m like, “No.” Aha! No, there’s no aha. You haven’t proven what their name is. I’ve admitted, I don’t know. And I don’t accept the evidence that you do know unless you aren’t. And now, I look out the window, I almost done, I’m almost done. Now. I look at the window and I see these clouds, and they’re amazing. And I see this universe and the person next to me says, “Look at that. Look at that amazing sky. A magical, invisible deity made it.” And I say, “I don’t think that’s true.” “Well, do you know who made it?” “No.” Aha! It must be Yud He Vav He, this is flawed thinking.

RD: So if the clouds, I had a different rebuttal, but we’ll end this here.

PZ: Okay, go for it.

RD: If the clouds form the words Root Beer Sassafras–

PZ: Saskatchewan.

RD: Root Beer Saskatchewan Sassafras, would that be enough?

PZ: Enough for what?

RD: For you to concede that that’s probably the pilot’s name?

MO: I would.

RD: Watch the sky tonight.

MO: Thank you, gentlemen.

PZ: Oh shit.

MO: I am Mark Oppenheimer. This has been Arc: The Podcast. I’m grateful to my colleagues at the Danforth Center, including David Sugarman, Debra Kenard, Abram Van Engen, Mark Valeri, Sherry Pena, and interns Caroline Coffey, Avi Jonah Holtzman, Ben Esther, and I think that rounds out everybody.

If you have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions for future debates, why don’t you write to me at mark.o@wustl?
Specifically, we were grateful for the audio production and the video production of Dave Rutherford and his team. Make sure that you’re a subscriber and we’ll see you next time. Thanks so much.