In one of their sketches, the comedy duo Key and Peele are on a road trip. They decide to listen to some music, and Jordan Peele accidentally queues up some private recordings. “This is an audio journal of my experiments on my own human condition,” his voice intones, over the car stereo. Despite Peele’s objections, Keegan-Michael Key insists on continuing—“I want to hear your thoughts on things!” he exclaims—and the journal gets weirder as it goes on. “I’m hours into my daylong commitment to stare at myself in the mirror, nude,” Peele says, at one point. “I’m beginning to see my reptilian self.” Later, an entry consists mainly of Peele’s screams. “Why?!” he wails. “Ahhhhh!”
the case with Ross Douthat, the Times columnist, whose new book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” goes to unexpected places. Douthat, whom Isaac Chotiner described as “liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator” in a Profile for this magazine, is known for a certain levelheadedness. He specializes in presenting progressive readers with ideas they’d ordinarily dismiss, and in articulating questions that tend to vex conservatives—Has America become decadent? Do we need a new “sexual ethics”?—in ways that make them available to left-leaning thinkers. It’s not easy for a conservative to crash the liberal party; the guards at the gate will turn him away. But Douthat sidles in through a side door, mingles a little, and leaves an interesting book on the kitchen table, with a few passages highlighted.
Douthat argues that you should be religious because religion, as traditionally conceived, is true; in fact, it’s not just true but commonsensical, despite the rise of science.
our understanding of evolution has relegated divine influence, if you believe in it, to some pre-Darwinian time, perhaps even before the Earth existed (or before the Big Bang). The problem with believing in a God of the gaps is that the gaps shrink as science advances.
God was experienced as something that “exceeded our thoughts and concepts.” Religion, therefore, wasn’t a set of beliefs that could be proved or disproved but a collection of practices, often characterized by “silence, reticence, and awe,” that could bring us closer to a divinity we couldn’t really describe. From this perspective, the God-of-the-gaps problem seems avoidable; it might actually be better to see God more abstractly, as something that doesn’t readily fit into the physical world.
David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher known for his pursuit of empiricism, predicted that, as the world grew more rational and scientific, people would stop having supernatural experiences, which he thought more common among “ignorant and barbarous nations.” Douthat points out that this hasn’t happened. About a third of Americans “claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing,” he notes, and regular people continue to have mystical experiences of various kinds.
What about revelatory acid trips, “witchcraft and magic, the fairies or the djinn”? Douthat’s answer is yes, to some extent; in his view, these sorts of experiences should be considered potentially meaningful, even if the ways in which they unfold are eccentric. His theory is that, when the supernatural world breaks through into the real one, our perceptions break, too; we end up experiencing God as best we can, using whatever ideas we have on hand.
