It is exciting to have a book of Christian apologetics on the New York Times best seller list — debuting at number eight among nonfiction hardbacks!
I will give you a quick summary and my bottom line first: The book begins with chapters on how recent science on fine-tuning, human consciousness, and supernatural events like near-death experiences make it more likely than not that God exists; the case is then made for traditional, institutionalized religion over wacky, New-Age-type approaches, and answers are offered to the problems of evil, church corruption, and old-fashioned rules about sex. Throughout the author urges the reader to make a choice about belief — and, in the final chapter, outlines the author’s own embrace of Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism. It’s a good and short book, intelligently coaxing in an unshrill and low-key (almost to a fault) way.
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I don’t know if authors generally review a book’s summary on the jacket, or if Mr. Douthat in particular did so here, but it’s good:
In Believe, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat shows how religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural.
…
… Douthat argues [that] … religion’s claims about reality look stronger in light of what we understand about the universe today. With a rare combination of empathy, open-mindedness, and persuasive argument, he explores:
- How nonbelief requires ignoring what our reason has revealed about the world around us
- How modern scientific developments make a religious worldview more credible, not less
- Why it’s entirely reasonable to belief in mystical and supernatural realities
- How an open-minded religious quest should proceed amid the diversity of religious faiths
- How Douthat’s own Christianity is informed by his blueprint for belief
…
Here is the author’s own summary of the book (8-9):
… [M]y aim is for this book to be useful to readers who might take many different religious paths [i.e., not just the author’s Christian one]. The first three chapters make the case for taking a religious perspective seriously, covering the evidence for design and purpose in the universe and the indicators that human life was specifically selected for by this design; the way that human consciousness serves as a strange key fitted to the order of the cosmos; and the persistence and credibility of spiritual and supernatural experience even in a supposedly disenchanted age. The next four chapters provide a guide for moving from a general religious disposition to a specific religious practice: a case for joining a larger faith tradition rather than traveling solo on your quest; a sketch of the different issues, choices, and decision points that might push you toward one tradition or another; a consideration of the biggest stumbling blocks modern people face in accepting a religion; and finally a brief word of encouragement for the sojourner who feels like any religious choice is arbitrary.
Only then, in the last chapter, does the book become more explicitly Christian, analyzing my own Christianity within my taking-religion-seriously framework, as a case study of how a specific theological commitment maps onto the general arguments for religious belief. That analysis aspires to be nuanced and self-critical, acknowledging some of the difficulties that Christian belief presents. But there is no escaping its partiality, no refuge from its gospel message — unless you choose to close the book just before that chapter and let the general argument stand on its own.
Earlier in the introductory chapter (3), the author says he will be arguing “that faith in its traditional form could accurately describe reality, that the God of the old-time sort of religion — supernaturalist and scriptural religion, angels-and-miracles religion, Jesus-was-resurrected religion — might actually exist, that religious belief might be not only socially or psychologically desirable but also an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality and the destiny of humankind.”
The introductory chapter ends with the author’s rejection of the atheists’ pose of hardheaded and seriousness adulthood (11):
It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.
It is the religious perspective that grounds both intellectual rigor and moral idealism.
And most important, it is the religious perspective that has the better case by far for being true.
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Here are some odds and ends:
- The book is 206 pages along, with ten pages of notes (the notes for chapter 8 — on the author’s Christianity — are especially good) but no index. The author dedicates the book to his family, and he ends the “Acknowledgments” with God (!). As a preface there is poem, “God’s Grandeur,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book is published by Zondervan, and contains among the favorable blurbs one from Carl Trueman.
- There is an excellent paragraph (27) listing some of “religious physicist” Stephen M. Barr’s fine-tuning evidence from his 2003 book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.
- The author debunks the multiverse (35-37; there is a particularly brutal remark on 102-03).
- In the discussion of consciousness, I especially enjoyed the child “private language” analogy (see 60-1, then 62-3).
- The author takes demons and the occult seriously (e.g., 119-22).
- In the book’s final chapter, it endorses Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Peter J. Williams’s Can We Trust the Gospels?, and “the heavy tomes” of Anglican bishop and scholar N.T. Wright (194), as well as Lydia McGrew’s Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (195).
- That last chapter is worth the book, by the way, and the last page (206) is a solid ending.
- I noted some interesting personal information: the author mentions (159) his own struggles with a “tick-borne illness,” apparently Lyme disease, and (77) a mystical experience of his own mother.
- A short byway on religion and politics is interesting (164-65; see also 169-70 — odd for this paragraph not to mention out-of-wedlock births).
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A Washington Free Beacon review by Mary Eberstadt piqued my interest in the book, particularly her line that the book’s conclusion contains “an appeal that readers consider anew what amounts to Pascal’s wager.” Now, the wager is not mentioned explicitly — indeed I don’t think Pascal is mentioned in the book at all, which is a bit odd in an apologetic book by a Catholic writer — but in a sense the theme of the whole book is indeed to weigh the evidence and, then, urge the reader to bet on belief and to cultivate his or her faith. Thus, the book’s approach generally seems very Pascalian, and the bet/wager terminology specifically is used several times (see 113, 126, 193). (This blogsite’s other namesake, C.S. Lewis, is cited — see 7, 10, 196).
In all events, I think that the biggest contribution that the book makes is not just the arguments themselves — though they are well done — but the way the author puts them in larger context (see, e.g., 74). The book is sometimes, as I wrote earlier, a softer sell than I would use, but perhaps Mr. Douthat has in mind an audience — for example, people who read and even like the New York Times — that is going to be persuaded only that way, and for all I know he may be right. Evangelists, like St. Paul individually, must collectively be all things to all people if as many of them as possible are to be saved.
If you’re still on the fence about committing to the read the book, consider listening to a one-hour Trinity Forum podcast here. Some notes from it: The author early on notes that this book is his first to make the New York Times bestseller list referenced above; he says atheism is harder to justify than differences among or within religions; he uses “religious” to mean formal and institutionalized (see the book’s subtitle); and, in the “last word” given him in the podcast, Douthat says that he hopes his book gives Christians confidence — which they’ll need because the rest of the twenty-first century will be “weird.”
In the book itself (111), the author likewise says that it is harder to choose a specific religion than to recognize that the supernatural exists; but I think that the case for both God generally and Christ specifically are too strong to make that concession (I think the author sees some merit to that, too — 145-46). While I’m quibbling, I think his section (130-34), “The Case for the Big Religions,” reads too much like an atheist’s history of religious development, shortchanging the role of divine appearances (and what C.S. Lewis would call God’s signposts).
Instead you should start the way you would in any other area — by looking for wisdom in crowded places, in collective insights rather than just individual ones, in traditions that have inspired entire civilizations, not temporary communities. Even if you can’t know for certain which road leads closest to the truth, you can still assume that the better trodden a religious pathway, the more wisdom there is in following after the generations that have trodden them before.
Finally, I’ll end as I began this post — with the New York Times, noting a recent article there by reporter Maggie Astor on near-death experiences (May 2, 2025, “Jeremy Renner and the Science of Extraordinary Near-Death Experiences”).