Why Believe?
01:28:30 Share

Hey, John Dixon here. Before we start the episode, I wanted to ask if you could take a few minutes to complete our 2025 Undeceptions listener survey. We've been doing the show for five years, if you can believe that, and our audience has grown significantly, which we are so grateful for.

And we want to get to know you a little more, what you like, what you think we can do better, and the other things you're listening to. Maybe there's stuff we need to learn from them. Plus, if you finish the survey, you'll go into the draw to win a book pack with some of the books of our excellent recent guests. Head to undeceptions.com forward slash survey. It'll really help us out. Thanks so much. An Undeceptions Podcast.

In May 2024, the Vatican released new guidelines on supernatural phenomena, urging more caution when assessing the truthfulness or otherwise of people who say they've witnessed a divine apparition. According to one BBC report, the new guidelines come amidst a soaring number of reports of these sorts of things.

Particularly in the era of social media, where someone who claims to have seen a weeping statue or something can go viral overnight.

It's rare for the Vatican to weigh in on the veracity of an apparition. Mostly, Catholic HQ just leaves things to the local bishops to sort out, with an understanding that personal revelations should remain personal. But every now and then, the Vatican does declare something worthy of belief.

For example, in 1917, three shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to them once a month for several months, promising a miracle. As the months went by, more and more people showed up to the children's village of Fatima in Portugal, expecting to see the said miracle.

On October 13, they claim they did. It's known as the Miracle of the Sun and eyewitnesses say the sun seemed to dance in the sky. That apparition was officially recognised by the Catholic Church in 1930.

In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume had predicted that as the world grew more rational, more educated, more scientific, people would stop having supernatural experiences. Those experiences, he said, were more common among the ignorant and barbarous nations. He definitely should have listened to our episode 148, The Anthropologists, for more on where that idea came from.

But that's not how things played out. A big study by the Pew Research Center two years ago found that seven in 10 adults in the U.S. would describe themselves as spiritual in some way. 83% of U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.

81% say that there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can't see it. 42% believe that the dead can communicate with the living. And 30% say they have personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force.

Religious experience is a brute fact of our world, even our modern, educated world. We say we're a secular age, but the numinous, the spiritual, keeps on poking around in our lives.

Our special guest today, one of the best known US columnists over the last 20 years, has been thinking and researching on this topic for a while. And he has a pretty compelling argument that the spiritual but not religious among us have stumbled across something real.

and that they should then take the next rational step from the spiritual experience to a community formed by a definite theology. Formal religion, my guest says, is a more plausible destination for spiritual seekers. Yeah, but which religion? I ask him. All of them, he says. Sort of. Maybe.

or perhaps just one. This was a fun conversation. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions.

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their special Master Lectures video courses and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here on the show. Just go to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics individually.

that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth... I must begin by registering a complaint or maybe just a lament. Please do. I really miss the argument with Michelle Goldberg.

I loved that podcast. I mean, I miss it as well. The reality is that sort of... That's Ross Douthat, a long-time columnist, first at The Atlantic and for the last 15 years or so at The New York Times. Ross also hosts the Times opinion podcast Interesting Times, which he started earlier this year. He used to be on another New York Times podcast called The Argument, which I loved.

and I'm lamenting the loss of it here. I listened to it all the time. It was a shining beacon of how to continue to talk well to those with whom you profoundly disagree. Bring back the argument, I say.

Anyway, Ross is a pretty vocal Roman Catholic, and he's written a lot about the Catholic Church and the future of Catholicism, as well as the role of religion in society. He's the author of several books, including The Decadent Society, which was published in 2020, which you should definitely go out and read. His latest book is called Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

And it's that thesis that I'm most interested in for this episode. But the whole idea of decadence, as he understands it, is a really good starting point for this conversation. It's too bad. Yeah, it's too bad. That podcast put me onto your 2020 book. What was it? Decadence? The Decadence Society. Yeah, which I loved, recommended to tons of people. And I actually think it's a good setup.

for what I want to talk to you about religion. Can you give me the, well, my audience, the 60 second summary of what you mean by decadence and what you're saying in that book?

Sure. So it's a book. It's not about decadence, meaning long weekends at Las Vegas and chocolate-covered strawberries. It's about the idea of decadence as a era. A decadent society is a society that is sort of stuck and stagnant at a high level of wealth and development and civilizational accomplishment.

So decadence is a condition that sort of you reach as an empire or a society when you've achieved a lot, become extremely wealthy and are starting to lose confidence in yourself. Your institutions have grown all kinds of barnacles and function very painfully. Your artistic and cultural forms start repeating themselves.

and going in circles with, you know, endless Marvel superhero sequels. That's the sort of pop culture example. But it's not crucially a state of precipitous decline. Part of the argument in the book was that decadence can go on for quite a while. You can sort of get stuck, and especially if you don't have really strong external enemies, you can sort of just repeat the same patterns, not just for five or ten years, but for multiple generations. That's the basic idea.

And do you think this decadence principle sort of lies behind the secular malaise that we find ourselves in? Yes, to some degree. I think that part of what's happened in religion, especially since the middle of the 20th century, is that the religions themselves, Christianity and my own Roman Catholicism especially, have gotten stuck in sort of a round of...

arguments related to the sexual revolution and the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s. And no one has quite found a way out of those arguments. So people just sort of go in circles about that particular set of issues. And meanwhile, the wider culture has fallen into a kind of

sort of soft indifferentism, not a kind of hard militant atheism, but just a sense of kind of perpetual agnosticism. Yeah, and sort of pessimism about, I think part of decadence is a pessimism about the capacities of human beings to actually understand the universe, actually discover secrets and solve problems. And one of my, you know, maybe more eccentric claims in the book is that there is actually a connection between

scientific creativity and kind of religious interest and ambition and obviously the two are not always concentrated in the same people but you do there is a sort of link between the belief that you know the scientists belief that the universe is sort of made for us to discover and understand and figure out and the religious belief

That, you know, that God created the world for human beings to understand and flourish in. And when so you can get periods of sort of scientific and intellectual torpor that match onto periods of kind of spiritual and religious anomie.

In The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat gives the example of the American space program in the middle of the 20th century. As one of the last times we saw the strange alchemy of the scientific and religious quest for knowledge. He quotes Kendrick Oliver's history of the space program, which tellingly is titled To Touch the Face of God, The Sacred, the Profane and the American Space Program.

Apollo simultaneously kindled thoughts of God and the death of God. When religion was absent from the program, its absence became a point of religious concern. When religion was present, its presence meant more to more people than it did in any other national undertaking of the time. Only for as long as that was true did Americans live in an age of space.

The late 20th century's march toward secularism was accompanied by economic stagnation and a lack of scientific imagination. Actually, three years after Ross's book was published, the esteemed scientific journal Nature published a study that showed the slowing of major scientific and technological advances between 1945 and 2010. We'll link to that in the show notes. It sounds counterintuitive, I know.

We're aging, comfortable and stuck, Ross says. We need something to move us forward. Perhaps a renaissance, a word that means a resurrection. There was a spike in atheist enthusiasm, you know, the old new atheism, that seems to have fallen out of fashion. In your book, you sort of give the impression that

that secularism, I mean, to personify it, almost regrets its total rejection of religion.

Yes, I think right now we're in a period of sort of regretful unbelief mixed with stirrings of interest. And that's quite different from where we were 15 or 20 years ago when, as you say, there was the kind of the, you know, the Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens assault on what remained of history.

the old forms of institutional religion. In their decadence, they were subject to a withering critique by the new atheists that sort of marginalized them further within the culture. And so now we've had a kind of 15 or 20 year experiment in a deeper form of secularism, especially in the US, people disaffiliating from organized religion.

More Americans have been raised without any kind of encounter with religion than probably at any point in our history right now.

And what we have now is a sort of general sense that, okay, the new atheists were wrong. The decline of religion does not usher in a bright paradise of reason and science and, you know, happy fellow feeling. In fact, you know, the decline of religion has left us more polarized, more paranoid, more deranged in certain ways. And certainly among the younger generation, just unhappier and more uncertain about people's place in the universe. And so out of that, you have...

Among some secular intellectuals, a sense of like, well, religion might not be true, but it certainly was useful. And that's a this is by no means the first era when secular intellectuals have sort of swung into that space. But then you also have, I think, a genuine belief.

which is part of the mood that I'm trying to write the book sort of into and for, right? A real openness to religion and religious ideas that you haven't had in at least a generation, I would say, in the West. In fact, you reject the secularism hypothesis. Some are going to find that confronting. Yes, I would say that... Well...

What I reject in particular is the idea that disenchantment is a complete reality or a complete description of the modern world, right? I think that disenchantment, you know, whether in Max Weber's sense or, you know, any other sense, is real reality.

As a description of sort of how official knowledge works in the US, right? So like, if you attend a law school and are writing down the facts of a case, you would not add in, and incidentally, the house that the plaintiff purchased was haunted, you know, by an ancestral spirit, right? You wouldn't put that in the brief.

And if you're writing a Wikipedia page, right, like Wikipedia editors who are sort of the producers of official knowledge right now, they're pretty hostile to, you know, any sort of... Sort of an operational atheism. An operational atheism. But experientially...

I think that the world has never ceased to be enchanted in the sense of people having weird, mystical, numinous, miraculous-seeming experiences as a kind of ordinary feature of human existence. And in fact, I think we have plenty of evidence

that as organized religion declines, these kind of experiences don't necessarily become any less common. Sometimes they might become more common because more people are just sort of wandering around doing weird experiments to seek them out. And they clearly fall on, you know, the non-believer as well as the believer. There's lots of

what I've called elsewhere sort of the non-conversion story, right? You can sort of collect these accounts by people who have something that in a different era would have been just recognized as a religious experience happen to them, and they're operating within a secular framework, so they have no idea exactly what to do with it. You know, just a few weeks ago, Sebastian Junger, the author of

The Perfect Storm and other bestselling books had a little book come out about his own near-death experience. Just a fascinating little text where he's just sort of reckoning for the first time, right, with, you know, the reality of spiritual experience as a feature of human existence and doesn't, you know, doesn't know what to make of it. And I think that's a persistent feature of our culture now.

Sebastian Junger, by the way, is an American journalist and contributing editor to Vanity Fair. He's won all sorts of awards for his work documenting the war in Afghanistan. His war documentary, Rostrepo, named after a platoon medic, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. So his latest book, In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, raised some eyebrows.

In a New York Times interview last year, Junger said that he found himself on the operating table after a ruptured aneurysm and he sensed his father, who'd been dead for eight years, in the room with him. He didn't come out of that experience believing in God, but it changed the way he thought about the world.

Ross Douthat reckons there are more supernatural stories like this floating around than most secular-minded folk would care to admit.

And coming up, we'll talk more about that woo-woo stuff, miracles, mysticism, and so forth. So stand by for that. Ross's book, Believe, takes us from this idea of a decadent secular malaise to how we might overcome it. He argues that religious belief isn't actually woo-woo at all. In fact, he says it makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it. It

It explains the persistent reality of our encounters with the supernatural, just like Sebastian Junger's near-death dad sighting. The so-called disenchanted age isn't really that disenchanted. In fact, non-belief requires us to ignore what our reasoning faculties tell us about the world. As Xenophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Cleanthes, Plotinus and all the other great, great

Greek philosophers would remind us every observant person notices the logos in the creation the imprint of rationality of logic in physical stuff and they pointed out it's spooky beyond all dismissal that our minds can perceive and describe that logos there's a logos out there and a logos in us

I want to drill down to that section of your book in a moment, but I sort of want to do it in order, if that's okay. I hope you've read your book recently because I have. Fairly so. I've skimmed it. Good. Now, I don't know if it was intentional on your part, but your book is rhetorically very Aristotelian. It goes logos, pathos, ethos.

Was this intentional or just obvious to a New York Times writer? No, it was not. I mean, it's been some time since I read Aristotle, so I will not claim any intentionality except insofar as, you know, the philosopher's ideas seep deeply into any educated soul, let's say. Good. So let's start at the Logos, because that's really where your argument begins.

And in a sense, your first two arguments, they go together and they are pretty much literally that there's a logos in the universe. And isn't it weird that it corresponds to the logos in our minds and that that resonance, that match is too spooky to be compatible with atheism.

I've just put it in two sentences, but can you give me- No, that's brilliant. I don't have anything to add. That's perfect. No, no, but no, no, that's- Your writing on this topic, I think, is near the best I've seen for a general market. Well, I appreciate it, but that really was a wonderful formulation because I'm taking up in those chapters ideas that are-

are by no means novel in religious apologetics. So on the one hand, I'm taking up basically the developments in modern physics that have indicated curious features of the cosmos, specifically the extent to which the basic laws that order the cosmos and give it shape and

and being seem to be incredibly carefully fine-tuned at the order of one in a quadrillion, not one in a hundred. Even a quadrillion underestimates the case to produce constants and forces and all of these things that are necessary to yield the kind of structure of the universe, stars,

planets, and ultimately biological life. And so the implication of what physics has uncovered is that there is a near infinity of possible universes that could never conceivably contain conscious life. And so ours is a, you know, one in 10 to the XXXXX shot. So that is sort of a peculiar feature of the cosmos that seems,

seems to be, you know, sort of read naively a kind of case for some kind of presiding intentionality, purpose, or design. Now, we don't need to go too far down the rabbit hole, but there is, of course, a materialist alternative, which, you know, is sort of all of the speculations that have

also seeped into our popular culture about the idea of a multiverse, which basically says, well, the reason our universe appears so fine-tuned, it appears to be one in a quintillion, is that the quintillion universes all exist. All the others are dead. Ours is the only one that has life. And so, of course, it's the only one that can be observed. That's why we're here observing it.

So that's sort of the choice in cosmology right now between a return of some kind of prime mover or God hypothesis and multiverse theory, which has its own difficulties and problems. Yeah, some listening...

Just chiming in to say that you should definitely go look for our episode on the multiverse, episode 108, with astronomer Dr. Deborah Hasmer and cosmologist and Undeceptions mate, Dr. Luke Barnes. Yes, we have an episode on the multiverse.

And if the multiverse is true, we might in fact have many such episodes. Anyway, in this universe, it's episode 108. Yeah, I mean, you point out that it has its own problems, and there's a question about whether it's even scientific. But you say you don't think it weakens your argument at all. Well, I think, so I want to be clear, I don't believe in the multiverse, right? I do not, or I...

I think that ours is the universe and should be understood as such. I think that is both the more scientific and more philosophically credible perspective. That said, I also think that the arguments around the multiverse do not, in fact, as far as I can tell, do away with the problem that the multiverse is trying to solve. Because you end up with these peculiar situations where you essentially need a new form

of fine-tuning to explain how you get, you know, the universe-generating machine of the multiverse in the first place. There does not seem to be an escape from some version of the fine-tuning problem. The multiverse seems less like an attempt to do away with the possibility of God and more an attempt to restore human beings to insignificance. To say, well, maybe there's purpose or intentionality somewhere, but it's so many levels of

of universe away that, you know, at the very least human beings can be said, can be said to be insignificant. And that, that in turn brings me to the second question, right? The issue of our own capacities and the, the sort of logos from below rather than logos from above. Because of course, the curious thing about our universe is not merely that it includes, you

conscious beings capable of some form of basic observation. It includes conscious beings capable of deep and profound understanding and capable of attaining small g godlike power over the basic elements of the universe. And I don't think any of that

is obviously predictable from any kind of sort of multiversal conceit, right? It's a very peculiar matchup between design at the top and understanding at the bottom that I think just looks a lot like the traditional religious portrait of a creator God and human beings who are made in the image of God. What does in the image of God mean if not that we share with the creating mind

some form of understanding and some form of power over the material reality in which we find ourselves. Yeah. Some listening might say, oh, Douthat, all you're doing is saying the old caveman's argument. The caveman was in awe at the supposed heavenly order, but we now know or can replace that awe with mathematical explanation.

You, in fact, say the opposite. You say the mathematical explanation is the key. Yes, yes. I mean, I think that a caveman in awe of the universe is more likely...

and less surprising than a caveman who turns out to be able to, you know, do calculus and astrophysics and figure out quantum physics and, you know, and develop speculations about the multiverse, right? If the multiverse actually exists,

It's absurdly fantastical that, you know, jumped up apes, cavemen from, you know, a random planet, supposedly, you know, in the midst of the Milky Way could have figured out this invisible, impossible to discern reality. You know, this is a slightly tricky point because I think a lot of people are conditioned by Darwinism to assume that, well, you know, the mind, you know, human minds evolved to solve problems and

And so it makes sense that, you know, the toolkit that solves one set of problems on the Savannah would also, you know, happily yield, you know, the capacities to solve ever more complex problems. Yeah, there's not much difference between working out how to escape a tiger and doing calculus. Right. And I think the answer is pretty clearly there is and must.

And there's, you know, there's a lot of, again, rabbit holes we don't have to go down. But first, there's interesting evidence that I didn't actually get into in the book that some of the laws of the universe that we have discovered themselves seem to be curiously fine-tuned for discovery.

Right. That there are sort of realms of our understanding where we wouldn't even with our even with sort of godlike capacities, we wouldn't have been able to understand certain things had the universe been arranged slightly differently. Right. So there is actually an availability of evidence in interesting ways. It could have obscured itself, but instead it seems to be saying, look at the maths.

Exactly. And there's a way in which, too, the ability, you know, there's some interesting papers on this, again, not written by religious believers, on how curious it is that the math that people do in their heads...

you know, not you and I, maybe not, maybe, maybe just not I, right. But, you know, the most capable mathematicians can do maths in their heads and then have it turn out that the mathematical speculations they've done map onto experimental evidence that hasn't been conducted yet. Right. And again, I don't think that there is any, you have to describe it as an incredible, incredibly fortunate cosmic accident.

to say that the intellectual toolkit that evolved under the pressures of dodging, you know, saber tooth tigers or what have you would also turn out to enable kind of this level of abstract speculation that maps onto physical reality. Especially since you aren't actually dealing with

you know, millions of years of evolutionary pressure between the, you know, 10,000 BC and the present. It's not like we've had, you know, a million years of pressure to create, to get us to the capacity for calculus. Not at all. That's something that evolved pretty rapidly in the context of human cultural exchange. And it is, I think, an underappreciated mystery that the key of our consciousness, our conscious reasoning, fits the lock of the universe in all of these different ways.

So why don't scientists fall on their knees and worship the creator? That's a question you actually ask from the book. Yes. And I think, and it's a reasonable question for the reader to ask, right? As you know, you were saying kind things about my explanation earlier, but I'm obviously a layman, not a great physicist. My understanding of these things I think is generally correct, but

you know, I'm not presenting myself as an expert here. And many of the actual experts, while they might not be militant atheists a la Dawkins, are at the very least agnostic skeptics and so on. And I think a few things are going on here. But the basic one is that, you know, the methods of science work best,

if you exclude agentic explanations and supernatural happenings. You learn much more in the end about the orbits of the planets if you don't just default to the idea that, well, if there's a squiggle in the orbit, that must be where the Archangel Gabriel steps in and pushes the planet a little bit around. Almost all of what modern science has achieved

has been based on the idea that, you know, there are impersonal regularities in the world. And that's what we're looking for. That's what we're trying to understand. And if you bring the personal in, you sort of throw the whole system into the danger of becoming arbitrary and uncertain, right? And I don't think that's completely...

True in the sense that, you know, I think you can have a sort of a physical system that exhibits regularities and predictive and study those regularities and also assert that, OK, whoever's running the system maybe steps in from time to time and tweaks things. But even allowing for that, it's not crazy to say that the practice of science should be functionally a bit atheistic.

The problem is that if you have a sort of functional atheism in your habits of everyday work, it's very easy to shift from that to a kind of philosophical assumption that is, again, I think not only not warranted by the evidence, but actively, actively contradicted by the evidence. In 1936, a little girl wrote a letter to Albert Einstein.

My dear Dr Einstein, we have brought up the question in our Sunday School class, "Do Scientists Pray?" It began by asking whether we could believe in both science and religion. We are writing to scientists and other important men to try and have our own question answered. We would feel greatly honoured if you would answer our question, "Do Scientists Pray?" And what do they pray for? We are in the sixth grade, Miss Ellis' class.

Respect for yours, Phyllis. Five days later, Einstein wrote back. January the 24th, 1936. Dear Phyllis, I will attempt to reply to your question as simply as I can. Here's my answer. Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature.

Therefore, a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish. However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end, the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith.

Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science. But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.

In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive. With cordial greetings, yours, A. Einstein. I'm not claiming Einstein for Christianity. I've said before, and perhaps this deserves a whole episode, producer Cayley...

Einstein rejected both atheism and formal religion. He once told a New York rabbi, quote, I believe in Spanoza's God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

He believed in God the way Aristotle believed in God, as the source of reality and rationality, but not a personal being involved in our affairs directly. Some people call this deism, as distinct from theism. Both words come from the same Indo-European root word, meaning just God, which is why the Greek and Latin words sound almost identical, theos and deos.

But people began using deism and deist as distinct from theism and theist in the 17th century, 1682, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to talk about a more distant notion of God. God behind nature rather than God involved in nature and in our lives. Anyway, that's just for free today.

The point is, the way Einstein spoke about God, the author of books in a library, as he once put it, makes him sound like an early adopter of the category of spiritual but not religious. It's a curious thing, and a lot of people have written about this, right, that, you know, early modern science presumes some kind of creative power and presumes that in the end, you

The work of science works and makes sense and can be trustworthy because you're uncovering some underlying design. And I still think that is a better and more coherent grounding of the scientific project than philosophical atheism.

But the practical atheism required of, you know, doing ordinary scientific research has over time displaced that original assumption. I think undercutting some of the foundations of science in the process, but not in a way that necessarily undermines people's everyday scientific work. So you don't necessarily even notice that you have a kind of philosophical problem undergirding your practical efforts. Love it. More of that to come.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academic and their new book, Boy Jesus, Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times, by the wonderful Joan Taylor. The Gospels don't tell us much about Jesus' childhood. They tell us that he was a child of Joseph and

and Mary from the line of King David that he was born in Bethlehem and that after his birth his family fled to Egypt for a period before returning to Judea and settling in the north in the town of Nazareth. With so much of his childhood shrouded in mystery, scholars approach these early stories with some scepticism.

That's where Joan Taylor steps in. In this rich historical analysis, which I've really learned a lot from, Joan fills in the gaps for readers, explaining how the volatile situation in Jesus' homeland, his status as a Jew in Judea of the tribe of Judah, and growing up under Roman occupation, all influenced his outlook.

She also does a wonderful job of showing why some of the elements of the story that have been traditionally viewed as unlikely by some scholars actually deserve to be taken very seriously from a historical perspective.

like Jesus being born in Bethlehem, being born of the line of David, Herod's infamous massacre of the innocents, and so on. Boy Jesus is out now. So head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash underceptions. Don't forget the underceptions, where you can find discounts, free chapters, and of course, the book itself. ♪

Let's turn to what Aristotle might call pathos, the sort of the emotional, psychological, experiential dimension of our decision-making and of persuasion. You spend quite a lot of time on religious experiences. The sort of thing David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, said would disappear from our world once we got more education. But you say not so fast. Spiritual experiences are everywhere. Tell me what you think are the most important

important spiritual experiences that you raise in the book and what do they tell us?

I mean, I think the most important ones are the ones that challenge materialism and materialist conceptions most directly. So the most commonplace spiritual experiences are sort of a, I call them generic spiritual experiences. I don't think there's anything truly generic about them. It's just a way of saying that they are the most common, right? But, you know, these sort of feelings of oneness with the universe, connection with the universe, a sense of sort of the self-sufficiency

Or this the alternative and this sort of sudden sense of like the self's immortality. Right. It's sort of separation from the material. And there's a lot of really interesting writing on these things. But I think I think those kind of experiences, you know, the materialist doesn't have that hard of a time saying, well, these are, you know, interesting brain states, right?

you know, something in your brain chemistry is causing some kind of dissolve of the separation you normally feel between other things. And that's all that's going on here, right? Again, I think with all of these experiences, it's important to imagine a world in which they did not exist, right? Like it is pretty easy to imagine a world where spiritual experiences weren't commonplace. And as you said, I think a lot of enlightenment philosophers expected that world to obtain once you got rid of

you know, priests telling people to believe in miracles. So it is, I think it is, you know, always a point.

in religion's favor, just the general persistence of these things. But I do think it is, you know, the more specific and concrete and harder to explain experiences that challenge materialism the most. And so that starts with, you know, sort of direct and personal encounters, running the gamut from sort of intense experiences that feel like

a mystical encounter with a supernatural person to sort of more like literal encounters, like the tendency of, for instance, people to report encounters with dead loved ones around the time of the dead person's passing in situations often where they didn't even know the person had passed on and where it's just a very concrete, you know, not I had a vision, but, you know,

I saw this person here in this way. It was just a normal part of my everyday reality, right? And, you know, what makes these experiences interesting is that they just don't map onto the

other, other dynamics of understanding consciousness, right? Like, you know, they're, they're not, they're not really equivalent to hallucinations. They don't correlate with mental illness. They aren't at all like the experiences that we have in dreams. They're just their own category, right? And there's this term, I think a 19th century researcher used for some of these things called them hallucinations of the sane, right?

So it really is a striking thing that people who have no other, there's no other obvious explanation in their psychology or their personality for these experiences nonetheless have them.

And then you push on beyond that and, you know, you get into things like near-death experiences, which, you know, are a, you know, a topic of great contestation and debate. But the basic thing you can say about them is that we know a lot more about them in the early 21st century than people in the more religious past did, because thanks to modern science, we bring many more people back from the brink of death.

And they, again, have a bunch of persistent, coherent features that obtain across cultures, you know, the bright light, the ancestors who have passed some kind of life review, moral scrutiny of your life, and also the sense of truth.

them being reported as sort of more real than real. Again, sort of the opposite of like the fragmented dreamlike hallucination or a dream itself. And the fact that they have profound effects on the people who experience them. They lead to, you know, they change people's views about the cosmos. People who have them who are atheists and materialists, and certainly atheists and materialists have these experiences, tend to change their perspectives. People undergo moral transformations. There's all kinds of curious things about them. And

That doesn't mean that you have to, you know, definitely believe that they correspond to a literal afterlife. Although I think, you know, I think there's some good reasons to think that they do. But at the very least, you have to say, look...

Imagine a world where modern science progressed. We started bringing people back from the brink of death and everyone came back reporting either nothing at all or just dream logic, hallucinations, like you're seeing a giant chicken attack your uncle as a purple sunset falls over the... You can easily imagine a world where 98% of near-death experiences were incoherent and...

and indicative of nothing waiting after death.

And that is probably the world that, you know, the atheist paradigm would have predicted. So the fact that instead we have a world with consistent recurring near-death experiences that are difficult to explain as evolutionary adaptations because people weren't reporting them thousands of years ago because they weren't coming back from the dead on the regular. The fact that we have those experiences is a point for religion, whatever else you make of it. It's a win. When we...

When we edit this show, we might try and convince my wife to tell her story of a very potent near-death experience. I think that it might be a nice addition. Her own? Her own. Her own. Has she written about it? She hasn't. She's talked about it in public, but she's never written about it. But I might be able to get her to talk about it on this show. Extraordinary. That would be very interesting.

Well, I did ask my darling Buff and she reluctantly said, "Okay." The date was 7th of June 1999. We were staying with family in Melbourne. Buff was three months pregnant with what we thought was our third child. One morning she woke up in a lot of pain. Now, she has a very high pain threshold.

I know all women do compared to blokes, but really, we knew something was wrong. So we shot down to the hospital. Sadly, it was a long weekend and the specialist was about an hour away having a well-earned rest. When the doctors on duty watched Buff go into convulsions, they called the specialist and begged her to come back. An hour or so later, she appeared. And I tell you, I will never forget that amazing convulsion.

calm, commanding, professional Scottish voice. Buff had really deteriorated. Blood oxygen levels were, I think I remember correctly, in the 70s. They were worried she was about to stroke. The specialist immediately realised Buff had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. The baby had been growing in the fallopian tube and it had burst open. By now, Buff had internally hemorrhaged half of her body's blood.

We all raced to the surgery room. Some poor patient was already in there being prepped for surgery, but they shoved that person out of the way. And within what seemed like 60 seconds, Buff was unconscious and opened up. I was, of course, moved right out of the way, told to call family. And then I waited for the longest hour of my life. During those convulsions and the confusion I mentioned...

I was of course terrified. Buff had a different perspective in that room, literally. As it turns out, I'm writing this on the 26th anniversary of my emergency operation for a ruptured ectopic. It was the June long weekend, 1999. We were staying at my sister's and I had to crawl down her long hall to the front door

and lie on the back seat of the car to the hospital where I was triaged immediately. I remember them trying to understand the cause of my pain. They knew I was 12 weeks pregnant but I had no external bleeding as it was all going into my stomach. I was in so much pain and I felt really, really cold. Now a bit of background here.

I was at that stage of life, which maybe some women listening might understand, where after two kids, I was going to reclaim my life and my body a little bit. I started going to the gym, etc., etc. Anyway, at some point, I found I was watching myself from up in the corner of the hospital room. And I wasn't alone up there. I could feel someone standing at my shoulder,

who I sensed somehow was Jesus. Below us, I was convulsing on the bed and they put some sort of silver foil blanket over me and I turned and said to him, now there's a woman at her peak wondering at how all that reclaiming could go downhill in just a moment. But I also felt that that moment and the next moment, whichever way it went, would be okay.

I remember from my vantage point, I saw a dark-haired woman enter the room. She spoke to another nurse and they were having this intense discussion at the end of my bed. John told me later that she had come in with the results of my rapidly lowering blood oxygen levels and was telling them that whatever they were going to do, it needed to be done more quickly. I don't know how long I was up there.

I know that not too much later, the senior doctor introduced herself and I was lucid enough to answer some questions that helped narrow down my diagnosis and go straight into surgery and the blood transfusion and so on. I can't be absolutely sure it wasn't the result of some very strong pain meds. Perhaps disappointingly, I didn't see a tunnel or a light. But I do know that in those moments, while my body was convulsing,

And anyone looking at me would have feared for me and presumed I was in absolute agony. I was safe. I felt peace. And I wasn't alone. I've never forgotten it. All these years later, it is vivid. And I'm so grateful. You push beyond that experience of the nearness, the experience of near death, through to miracles. You're actually pretty chipper.

about the ongoing miracles that happen in our world.

Yes, I mean, there too, right? You are dealing with a phenomenon that in the late 18th century would have been assumed to be something that is, you know, is reported in legendary form, garbled stories passed down through would-be mythologizers and repeated by Catholic priests to, you know, keep people in thrall to the church, right? I mean, that would be a very sort of Voltairian view of

of miracles, right? And the 18th century skeptics would have also said, well, they'll probably persist in some form because people are credulous, right? So they wouldn't have been entirely surprised by their persistence. But yes, we do continue in the developed scientific world to have lots and lots of people who report themselves to have experienced miraculous healings,

There is an institution, my own Catholic Church, that only approves canonizations of saints when you have two of these supposed miracles attested to by medical experts as otherwise inexplicable and connected to some sort of prayerful intercession.

And really, you know, again, one of the points I try to make is that, you know, I was saying earlier that the world isn't disenchanted, just official knowledge is. But the disenchantment of official knowledge means, I think that even when people...

have these kind of experiences themselves, they underestimate just how many weird experiences like them there are out there because it's a little bit de classe, right? To talk too much about it. But there, you know, there are both Catholic and other, you know, other faith scholars who've tried to sort of assess like how many people, you know, in the world report having some kind of miraculous healing, developed world, developing worlds, just really large numbers of

And, you know, I think there too, the difficulty for the materialist is that in order to explain the features of a lot of these experiences, if you don't want to assume some sort of divine intervention and you're perfectly free not to, you really have to ascribe some kind of mystical potency to consciousness itself. Right?

Right. You have to basically say, OK, you have these people who, you know, get prayed over in these ways and have these, you know, really serious medical conditions with no obvious prognosis for recovery. Just get better really, really quickly in ways that baffle medical science. So if it's not God, well, you can say it's obviously some kind of mind over matter problem.

Right. It's, you know, your mind believes in the healing so intensely that, you know, it ends up flooding your body with, you know, antibodies or, you know, protein, you know, whatever, whatever vector pathway you want to you want to make. Right. You want to offer. And I just think that is interesting.

That idea, while not impossible, is then in deep tension with the other determination of materialism, which is to make as little of consciousness as possible, right? To say that consciousness is essentially an illusion sort of stapled together on top of processes that are fundamentally just deterministic biological processes working themselves out. And I don't really think you can have one, have both of those things be true, right? I think at the very least,

the evidence for miracles should get you to a kind of mystical view of consciousness itself, even if it doesn't get you all the way to believing in the Christian God directly healing people. And then there's, this is a subject that comes up a lot in these conversations because interviewers are always interested in it. But I think the follow-up question from

from the secular person is, okay, healing miracles are all well and good, but they're very, you know, sort of, they're very internal. Whatever is miraculously happening is happening deep inside your, you know, inside the human body. Where are the levitating saints, right? Where are the things that we can, you know, we can put on video as evidence of the miraculous?

And that's, I think, a perfectly fair question. I do think that the book that I recommend to some of them is a book by Carlos Ayer, who's a

professor at Yale here in New Haven, Connecticut, where I live, and it's called They Flew. And it is about literal levitations in the 16th and 17th century of Catholic saints and others who were widely reported to levitate in ways that would have passed any kind of test of historical reality that you care to offer.

Apart from the photographic, because there were no cameras and no videotapes, right? And I think an interesting question for both religious and non-religious is, you know, what was going on there? And could it happen nowadays? Could it happen again? I would not be surprised if over the next hundred years, something happens in the world that challenges the materialist paradigm a little bit more directly, right?

We've pointed out before that the rationality or otherwise of believing in miracles depends on our background beliefs about the universe. If you assume there's no mind behind the logos of the universe, it's pretty hard to stomach miracles unless you actually experience one, I guess.

It was the 18th century Scottish atheist philosopher David Hume, whom we mentioned earlier, who wrote, "...no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

A miracle can only be established by testimony that is practically impossible to disbelieve. That is, testimony which is so irrefutable it would be miraculous if it turned out to be false. Now, loads of people used to quote this saying until an array of philosophers, including atheist philosophers, pointed out that this seems to be a statement designed to rule out miracles from the beginning, not to probe whether they can be rationally accepted.

One such book is titled Hume's Abject Failure. If you hold one view of the universe, you're compelled to deny miracles. But if you hold another one, you're free to accept miracles under certain conditions. So I often put it like this. If I hold that the laws of nature define the limits of what is possible in the universe,

that no lawgiver or God exists behind the laws, then in principle miracles can't be viewed as rational and no amount of evidence could be accepted as evidence that a miracle has actually taken place.

But if I hold that the laws of nature do not define the limits of what's possible, that the laws themselves point to a lawgiver, to God behind the laws, then given that such a lawgiver could act through and beyond those natural laws, it is, in principle at least, rational to believe in the possibility of miracles, and I'm free to accept a miracle when there is good evidence in its favour.

That evidence doesn't have to be miraculously good. Sorry, Hume. Given the background belief that there is a God who could do a miracle, the evidence just has to be the kind of evidence such a miracle would leave behind. And more evidence than you'd expect if it were a fraud or a mistake.

Anyway, as I said, if you actually experience a miracle, none of this philosophizing is relevant. The experience itself is a nudge, not just to spirituality, but maybe even to formal religion. And that's where Ross takes this whole conversation. Despite your endorsement of spiritual experiences, you don't end up endorsing religion.

I'm spiritual, not religious. The curious thing about this book is you say, no, no, no, you ought to be religious in a formal sense. So let's talk about that. What's wrong with just being the captain of my own soul? Well, the same thing that's wrong with being the captain of yourself in any serious endeavor, right? I think that people treat religion as if it's in a category apart from religion.

Other forms of human effort and engagement. But, you know, it would be quite curious, let's say, to say, you know, I intend to be

I intend to take a strong interest in football and become the world's best footballer. And I'm going to do this all by myself in the backyard with a soccer ball and never, you know. I was hoping you meant soccer. I did. Well, I try and, you know, I try and go back and forth between the terminologies, right? I said footballer, so you know I don't mean, we don't say footballer for American football players. But, you know, there's in any kind of athletic sport,

Endeavor, right? You know, even if it's even if it's a singular solo endeavor, right? The idea that you would do it without a team without a coach without partners without some kind of community is pretty much absurd, right? And similarly, like if I said, well, I'm really interested in becoming politically engaged.

And, you know, what that means is I'm going to read books about politics and, you know, take those books and write a bunch of social media posts on my own about politics. And that's it. Now, that's actually how a lot of people engage with politics nowadays. But it's not a good way to engage with politics. It's not being actually political in the political animal sense of the word. Right. And religion, I think, is generally political.

like that. You should assume if you're coming to religion fresh, you're newly interested in it, you should assume that these big evolved antique systems exist for a reason. You should assume that you're better off, at least initially, in sort of stepping into an existing conversation and an existing set of disciplines rather than trying to just figure things out on your own. You should assume that you will stick, you're much more likely to stick with any kind of spiritual practice.

If you have an institution around you encouraging you to actually do it, a community encouraging you to do it, I am not the most prayerful person in the world. And when I consider how much praying I do because of

the Catholic Church requires me to go to Mass once a week versus how much I would do if I didn't go to Mass once a week. I think I can say very clearly that just that one requirement of being Catholic quintuples my prayer, my prayer life every week, right? So, you know, it's things like that. But then the final point to, you know, bring it back to the supernaturalist side of things is,

If you assume there are spiritual realities out there, there's absolutely no reason to assume that they're all friendly or safe or easily navigated or that once you get beyond the material world, everything is just a warm, warm bath of new age light and happiness.

And in fact, there is plenty of evidence and testimony and data from recent human experience and all of human history to suggest that, you know, the spiritual world is a landscape of danger, that there are powers, spiritual powers that do not have your good in mind.

And so you'll encounter like, you know, in the literature of people who take psychedelics, right, to have spiritual experiences, people saying, I had an encounter with a negative entity and I don't know what to do about it. What, you know, what should I do? Right. And

You know, not the only reason, but not a small reason to join a traditional religion is that traditional religions have a lot of experience with negative entities and trying to figure out how to guide people through spiritual experiences so that they don't accidentally fall prey to what not only Christians, but you know, practitioners of other faiths would reasonably call a demon.

So the demons are, in fact, part of the case, not the whole case, but part of the case for being religious and not just spiritual. And in urging people to be religious, you really mean go and be a Hindu, go and be a Buddhist, go and be a Muslim.

It is the striking thing about the book how, I don't know, cosmopolitan you are at one level, pluralistic. We'll get to the end of the book in a moment, but you are. This is striking to me anyway. Yes. The assumption of the book is that it is a liberal assumption in a certain way. I'm a conservative Catholic as we parse these things in terms of what I believe about Christianity.

the Catholic faith and its truth claims and so on. But I am a liberal insofar as I think that it is pretty evident that if God exists, he is present in some form across the world's major religions. Not always and everywhere, but whether you're reading

philosophical literature or reading about mystical experience. It seems clear that people in, you know, Hindus in South Asia have some kind of encounter with the same kind of reality as Christians in the West, right? And that's, if that's true, then while from a Catholic perspective, it is not ideal for someone who feels impelled towards religion to start out in

in Hinduism or Islam instead of Catholicism, because the Catholic does think that Catholicism has core truths that are not available in other faiths. It's still better, but

generally, to have someone start where they feel called to start than to hover permanently in some kind of agnosticism and never actually try or do anything. And yeah, part of this reflects just the reality of pluralism. Pluralism is just an established fact of the developed world right now. And there's no obvious path to

an American future, certainly where only Christian options are on the table religiously, or to say nothing of only Catholic options or anything like that. So in that environment, I think that the Christian has to have a certain kind of confidence that, you know, God is not out to trick people. And, you know, if people are not, if people's initial move into religion is

is not a move into Christianity, that God can still work with that, right? And, you know, I have a case study in one of these chapters that, you know, is a Christian case study in the end, right? But it's sort of useful. It's the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, who's, you know, from the UK, right? And he was raised with just the most attenuated form of

English Christianity somewhere in the 1970s or 80s, right? And there was just no like this was presented to him as this completely dead religion that had nothing, you know, no purchase on modern life.

And so there was just no obvious scenario once he became interested in religion where that was going to be the place where he started. Instead, he was an environmentalist. He became interested in eco-spirituality, then Zen Buddhism, then even a kind of neo-paganism. And only after he had gone on this journey did he suddenly feel drawn towards, in the end, Eastern Orthodoxy, towards Christianity and became a Christian.

And I just don't think a Christian should look at that story and say, oh, Paul Kingsnorth, he made a series of terrible blunders, and then he finally chose right or finally received the grace he needed to choose right. I think you have to look at that and say, you know, there was a journey there that was the only way that Paul Kingsnorth was going to end up as a Christian.

Right? I think that's, you know, maybe presumptuous, that confidence, but I think that's generally the sense that a Christian should have in a pluralist environment, that people trying to reach God, it's better off and God can do more with people taking steps, even if they aren't starting in what Christians consider the right place, than just holding out for a world where everyone immediately becomes Christian. Here's how Ross puts it in his book.

The theme of this book is encouragement. To urge people toward religion generally. To suggest that it's better to start somewhere, even if it isn't the place I would start, out of a trust that God's providence will ultimately reward all sorts of efforts and enfold all manner of sincere beliefs. And I do believe this. The difficulty of human life, the burdens that each one of us carries,

The mystery inherent even in a cosmos that offers good reasons to believe. All of this makes me optimistic that God will repay even the most mediocre effort. The halting attempt to reach upward to the truth. The good faith attempt to understand our purposes that doesn't necessarily reach the mark. Regular listeners will know that the host of this show isn't super on board with this.

I'm a bit more hardcore Protestant than Ross. I agree that God is inclined toward mercy toward everyone. I accept that God's standard of judgment can't be how you responded to the gospel of Jesus, in the case where someone never learned about Jesus. The criterion must be something more like, did a person trust the parts of the truth about God they did intuit and encounter?

I just worry that people don't actually respond like that, with simple trust. I also worry that many claims in other religions are flat contradictions of what is true. The Theravada Buddhist claim that no God worth worrying about really exists, or the Islamic claim that God would never become a human and die for the sins of the world.

So, full disclosure, Ross goes beyond where this classical Protestant feels comfy. But I find his thoughts compelling. I think I agree that formal religion is mostly better than hand-tailored personal spirituality. And I love, I mean, I love where Ross really wants to take this conversation. So, stay with us.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Speak Life and their new video-based course, 321, presented by the wonderful Aussie, now living in England...

Glenn Scrivner. G'day, mate. Glenn is a fantastic public advocate for the Christian faith in the UK. And in this course, he walks you through the core beliefs of the Christian faith. Glenn provides a basic Christian perspective on life, the world, and our place in it. 321 is a fantastic new way to explore Christianity. And it's also a brilliant way to share and deepen your faith if you're already a believer. So we

So it's both for skeptics and for believers. You can do 321 online in just a couple of hours, or you can space it out over a few weeks. I'm really excited about this because honestly, Glenn is an awesome bloke. Head to 321course.com forward slash underceptions to give it a go. There's no spam and no cost. That's 321course.com forward slash underceptions. You won't be disappointed.

You turn in the book to what I would call ethos questions, or what Aristotle might call ethos questions, questions of the morality of formal religion, the credibility questions. And you say there are a big three, and I know this is a crime to ask you to do this. Can you give me 60 seconds on each of the things that turn people off the credibility of religion? They are

suffering and evil, the bad behaviour of religionists and restrictions on sex. Right. One is about the credibility of God. One is about the credibility of churches. And one you might say is about sort of the credibility of religion

the moral vision, right, offered by these, offered. I think, you know, again, you cannot, the problem of evil is not a 60-second problem. It's a very serious issue. The argument I make in the book is basically that it is a serious issue that should still be wrestled with in light of all the other evidence that there is probably a God, right? So if you are stuck on the problem of evil, you can't, you just can't see how the, you know, a perfect person

a perfect God outside time and space would have made a world that has, you know, suffering in it. Then, uh,

You maybe you can't be a classical theist, right? You can't say that Thomas Aquinas was right But you still should believe in some conception of God because all the other evidence for God is still there and maybe you should be a deist or a pantheist or believe in process theology or something like that right there there are theologies available to you if

you find theodicy a complete stumbling block in some way. But with the other point being that you won't find, you know, more argument with God, like complaints against God, arguments with God, wrestling with God, than inside the pages of the Old and New Testament, right? So you can become a Christian or Jew and be feeling confident that you're entering traditions that take the problem seriously as something to be wrestled with,

And I just think that that's the more sensible approach than leaping toward an atheism that would not be justified even if the argument from evil made a good point against a particular conception of God. So then the sins of churches, I mean, there I think...

I think the argument, that argument is in a way just fundamentally pretty weak. It's not fundamentally weak as a case for someone's relationship to a particular church, right? Again, I'm Roman Catholic. I've known people who have lost their faith in the Catholic church because of the sex abuse crisis.

You lose faith in the bishops, you lose faith in the hierarchy, and it can be hard to hold on to faith in the institution itself. And that can be totally understandable. But the idea that that's a reason to walk away from religion is, again, like saying,

Man, there's so much, you know, abuse and, you know, terrible behavior inside the family. And so we should just abolish the family. Right. Or there's so much politics. You know, politics leads to so much corruption and abuse. So we should all be anarchists and live in the wilderness. Right. Business. There's so many corrupt businessmen. So we'd be better off.

You know, if, you know, there'd never been, what, there'd never been an industrial revolution or, you know, never been a merchant ship setting sail anywhere. I just think these are fundamentally adolescent stances saying, I can't be in a particular church because it seems corrupted,

is one thing saying I can write off all religious institutions because they include bad people just seems like a big mistake, especially again with the point being that, you know, if you read the Old Testament and the New Testament, nothing in Judaism or Christianity advertises perfection, right?

The claim in the Old Testament is, hi, we're God's chosen people. Here's a long history of all the times we screwed up and failed terribly, right? It's not, there's no claim there that either the chosen people or the church are pristine in some way, which doesn't license bad behavior.

But it is an expectation of the traditional religions, not something that, you know, that they aren't sort of upfront about. And then the sex stuff, again, the particulars, like if you just disagree with the Catholic Church's position on contraception or masturbation or any other issue, right? Those particular points, right?

can be a valid reason for dissenting from a particular religion, stepping outside a particular religion. But the idea that God would care about sex and would lay down some stringent rules for how and when and with whom you have sex with, that idea makes perfect sense if you think God cares about anything at all. If you think God cares about morality...

There's no act, no aspect of human life that has more profound personal and social effects than sexual intimacy. And so the complaint that, you know, the creator of the universe couldn't possibly care about sex just seems like a bizarre complaint. It's like saying, you know, it's no different from saying, how could God possibly care if I, you know, stole from someone or lied to someone, right? Like all these areas of human life, if they're serious, then sex is serious too.

These three stumbling blocks are episodes of their own on the Undeceptions podcast. We'll pop out episodes on suffering and on sexuality in the show notes at Undeceptions.com. We're actually planning an episode for later this year looking at the awful child sexual abuse scandals in the church. I can't say I'm looking forward to that one, but it's a definite gap in the Undeceptions episode list, so we really want to address it soon.

I got very near the end of your book and I thought, how fascinating. Ross Douthat isn't a convictional Christian after all. He's really happy for people to end up Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists. I thought, that's really interesting. And then whack, at the end of the book, you make...

A pretty strong argument that the New Testament and Jesus in particular stand out, you say, on the religious landscape. So let's hover there for the end of our conversation. Why? Why does Jesus stand out? So the argument, what I try to do is basically fit my views about the New Testament and the Gospels.

into this larger pattern that I see with other more general areas of religious inquiry and argument, where there are these assumptions that modern science has disproved the case for divine design. Well, actually, it hasn't.

Or that modern science has proven that human consciousness does not really exist. Well, it hasn't. Or modern science has proven that we don't have to argue or think about what religious experience means. Well, it hasn't, right? And then as a parallel, there's an idea that modern historiography has shown that we shouldn't take

the Gospels and the New Testament seriously as real eyewitness accounts of what actually happened in, you know, Roman Palestine in that crucial moment in human history. And very briefly, I

I make the case that, in fact, that's basically rubbish. And there are very good reasons to take the gospel seriously as memoirs, eyewitness accounts, real testimony about things that really happened to a large group of people in the light of history. And that once you do that, then the story of Jesus, his life, his death, his alleged resurrection,

looks like other religious stories, but also different in various important and significant ways. And, you know, that it sort of, it stands out in the specificity of its supernatural claims, in the way that the, you know, the revelation is transmitted and the effects that it has on society, the mechanism of its spread, a whole bunch of different things that are, again, familiar from Christian apologetics, but I think are broadly correct and

And if they're correct, then again, go back to the idea that I just expressed making the case for, you know, sort of being open to people entering religion through different doors, right? The idea that God is not out to trick you. Okay. If God is not, if that, if that idea applies to, uh,

you know, people sort of making their first foray into religion, then it should also apply to someone who looks at the diversity of religious traditions, looks at Christianity and says, huh, Christianity's origins seem, you know, seem to stand out. They seem to be, you know, a more radical breaking in of divinity into history.

Okay, if that's the case, then if God is not trying to trick you, then there's a quite good case that you should treat the Christian story, again, not as the only manifestation of God's presence, but as a kind of controlling revelation. You should say, okay, as best we have and know, this is the story through which I should read the larger diversity of religious experiences, not in a way that effaces or rules out the

everything that doesn't quite fit with Christian doctrine, but in a way that sort of provides the basic interpretive framework for thinking about religion writ large, and that provides some confidence for the Christian, right? That if God went to all the trouble...

to, you know, intervene in history in this very particular and distinctive way, then you should have some confidence in the churches that were set up because of that intervention and the traditions that were handed down that God probably didn't go, you know, with all respect to my Latter-day Saint friends, sort of full, like, you know, oh, I did this and then everybody got it wrong immediately, right? Like, I think, yeah, and that's, I think you should have some confidence, some confidence that,

If this seems like the controlling revelation, then probably the institutions founded on it have a certain degree of trustworthiness in our own day 2,000 years later.

That last section of the book, it was delightful. It read to me like a list of Undeceptions episodes because you mentioned the important work of Peter Williams, who we've had on the show, Richard Borkum, who we recently had on the show, and then Tom Holland, of course, and the impact that Christianity has had on culture is nearly miraculous. I can't let you go without asking you, please,

Tell us the story of your conversation with Christopher Hitchens in DC years ago. Well, I mean, I had a few encounters with Christopher Hitchens and sadly the first one was when I was called upon, was called upon to actually fill in for a more prominent Christian and debate him at a festival on the Isle of Nantucket. What a scary, scary thought. It was, you know, I was very young and naive and he was at the peak of his powers and

So this entire book is, in a sense, sort of, you know, me finally getting the last word in with Hitchens after he wiped the floor with me, you know, 20 odd years ago. But sometime later, after he defeated me, we encountered one another at a Christmas party. And, you know, it was late in

in DC and it was late at night in the kitchen. And he was well known for wanting to have arguments about religion with believers, right? This was one reason that believers were always sort of hopeful that he would switch sides, right? And he wanted to pursue me on this particular idea where he ended up saying, "I won't do the English accent because if I were with an American, I would do the English accent." But something along the lines of, "Well, suppose that it were proven

that Jesus of Nazareth really, suppose that we knew for sure that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. I said, all right, suppose we did. And he said, but what would that prove? And again, I didn't have a brilliant, right? It was very unexpected, right? But I use that line in the book to basically push against the attitude that he expressed. I think a lot of people who are sort of on the borderland of religion sort of have, right? The idea that

You know, there might be things out there, you know, crazy things happen, mystical experiences, brushes with brushes with ultimate reality. But who could possibly make sense of them? And, you know, we just need to get on with our lives. Right. And a big sort of concluding argument of the book is, you know, drawing from from Jesus of Nazareth, who had a few words to say on this, the idea that in fact, the

If you think there's some reality, some higher reality there, then even if you have no confidence that you can get everything about it right, it's still a very urgent question.

That, you know, there is there should be an urgency about religious questions because they touch on ultimate reality. We're all going to die and have some encounter with that ultimate reality eventually. And if we're asked what we did with our life, we shouldn't we shouldn't, you know, be in the position of saying to God, well,

They were intimations of transcendence, but I kept saying to myself, what does that really prove? Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, evangelist in chief. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, that's our last episode for season 14 of Undeceptions. That's episode 157. So cool. No, I'm not tired. You should see the ideas we've got for episodes coming down the pipeline. We're going to take a little break in terms of what you're going to hear because we're busy at work preparing the next season.

The team and I also go on a bit of a tour around Australia hosting special screenings of the first Hymn documentary.

in cinemas right around Australia. I'm super excited to see heaps of you at the events. Just go to thefirsthymmovie.com and you'll get all the information about where we'll be and when around the capital cities of Australia. We are hitting all of them really soon. thefirsthymmovie.com We'll be back in your podcast feed from August,

with a new season of Undeceptions. We're going to be talking about things like the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. I can't believe who has agreed to be our guest. We've got an episode on Christian persecution, Dante and his Inferno, and a whole lot more. See ya. Music

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by someone. Alistair Belling is a writer-researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveson remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant, editing by the wonderful Richard Humwey. Our voice actors today were Yannick Laurie and our little friend, Lucy Doust.

Lucy, thank you so much. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. Okay, we're directed by Mark Hadley. An Undeceptions podcast. Yes, we have an episode on the multiverse. And if the multiverse is true, we might in fact have many such episodes. Anyway, in this universe, it's episode 108.

See, I did some sci-fi. Mark, I did some sci-fi. You're so happy. You know, I'm thinking of you as I say that. I think there's something of the sci-fi in your character that's going to emerge as you get older. Lord have mercy.