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Ep 14 - Ross Douthat, New York Times - "Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious"
166 Plays1 month ago
On this week's episode of the Sphere Podcast, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Publisher of Sphere Media, has his first returning guest! He talks to Ross Douthat, conservative columnist at the New York Times, about his just-released book, "Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious." They talk about why we need a new book about religion (PEG was originally skeptical, but reading Ross's book convinced him), why sociological change has made religious belief a newly-important topic, why spiritual experiences and miracles are serious topics of investigation, and finally, why demons are real.
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You should buy Ross's book, and you should even read it: https://www.amazon.com/Believe-Why-Everyone-Should-Religious/dp/0310367581
You should also subscribe to read Ross's OTHER book, the excellent fantasy novel The Falcon's Children: https://www.falconschildren.com/
Follow Ross on X: https://x.com/DouthatNYT
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Low Production Values Sphere podcast, which is shot from my terrorist hideout near Kidal in northern Mali.
Guest Introduction: Rust Outfit
00:00:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah I have with me ah the first returning guest in the history of the show, ah rust outfit, best columnist in the English language currently practicing the craft.
00:00:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And it's not like there are very good French-language columnists, to be honest, um and no other languages matter. So let's just say best columnists in the world in any language.
Discussion of Guest's New Book
00:00:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And you're here, so last time we talked mostly about populism and and the Trump administration and so on, but you have a new book out.
00:00:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And I was just telling you before, and I will tell the audience now, I finished reading the book, and it's a very good book. I enjoyed it ah very much. I, to be completely honest, I was sort of somewhat skeptical of ah both.
00:00:45
Ross Douthat
That's right.
00:01:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
the The concept of the book itself and whether there was a need for such a book, but reading the book changed my mind. I think i think it's a good book and I think it's a needed book.
Book's Argument on Religion and Truth
00:01:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah why don't Why don't you explain what it is in a couple minutes and then we'll we'll I have a bunch of things to talk about.
00:01:23
Ross Douthat
That's good. Thank you so much for having me back. I'm really grateful that, you know, you would, you would permit a rare double dipping for those of us, for those of us on, you know, on the podcast circuit.
00:01:36
Ross Douthat
Um, and, you know, when it's translated into French, obviously I can, I can come back and we can try and do it all, do it all. i'll say
00:01:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah it's good qua
00:01:46
Ross Douthat
Sorry, I'm sorry. Um, sorry qua um So yeah, the the book is called Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious. ah The subtitle sort of summarizes it, I think, fairly adequately.
00:02:01
Ross Douthat
um And it is, I think you were right to be skeptical. It is a somewhat curious sort of book in that most books that are about religion as a broad category and that are favorable to religion as a broad category are doing some sort of you know utilitarian sociological case.
00:02:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, it's good.
00:02:20
Ross Douthat
for religion, right? There's a lot of books about why religion is good because it's good for you. And then there's a lot of books about why specific religions are true.
00:02:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:02:30
Ross Douthat
um You know, yeah Jesus really did rise from the dead and so on.
00:02:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:02:35
Ross Douthat
And this book sort of falls somewhere in between in that I'm not making a utilitarian case for religion. um I'm very intent on not doing that from the start.
00:02:47
Ross Douthat
And
00:02:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:02:48
Ross Douthat
Not that I don't think that a utilitarian case for religion can work, it can it can work, if root but it works because religion gets at profound truths about the world.
00:02:58
Ross Douthat
And you would expect, you know if you get at profound truths about the world, it might also help your marriage or your community or help you you know build beautiful Gothic cathedrals and so on.
00:02:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:03:09
Ross Douthat
um The argument in the book is that there is a kind of um sort of general religious perspective on the world that you can reason your way to and accept without having some court kind of you know revelation from on high.
00:03:28
Ross Douthat
ah You can accept basically that you should be religious, that you should be oriented towards the source of ultimate meaning in the universe.
00:03:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:03:35
Ross Douthat
You should assume that that source of ultimate meaning, and you know we'll call it call it God, right? probably cares in some way about the human race, probably cares about you, had human beings in mind when the whole thing was set up to begin with and that there are various ways, um, is natural and supernatural through which you can align yourself with and sort of interact with higher forms of reality and that this is worth doing because
Exploring Religious Perspectives
00:04:03
Ross Douthat
guess what? We're all going to die.
00:04:05
Ross Douthat
Our life is time bound and finite and whatever we're here to do probably has to make sense in terms of some larger whole that we shouldn't ignore. um So that's that's essentially the argument of the first half of the book, right, is trying to make a kind of um basic case for thinking that the world is designed, consciousness is supernatural, other supernatural happenings, mystical, miraculous and so on are real, and that that's enough to get you to the point of Deciding you should be religious and then the next part of the book is kind of a kind of a self-help book Sort of an odd way but saying okay, so you think you should be religious. There are a lot of religions in the world ah If you don't have sort of a special sense that one of them is true, how could you? reasonably approach the task of exploring religion um so that goes on for a few chapters talking about stumbling blocks that people have why it's better to join a
00:05:02
Ross Douthat
a organized religion rather than just opening yourself to the mystery of the universe? And the answer is because of demons. um There are some other answers too, but that's that's one of the answers.
00:05:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
oh yes and and it's very well made i was uh
00:05:13
Ross Douthat
and then And then the book ends because it is in the end you know sort of a, it is sort of a case for Christianity in disguise. I'm sort of you know trying to walk the reader through arguments that you don't have to be a Christian to accept, but then the last chapter is explaining Very, well, i don't you know I mean, it's a little obvious, right?
00:05:32
Ross Douthat
Like I say it at the outset, i say I tell people they could stop reading before the last chapter, but I don't think very many people would do that.
00:05:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i I deleted my ah the draft of my letter to the Inquisition denouncing you for indifferentism, you know.
00:05:44
Ross Douthat
i i I appreciate it. The Inquisition these days is, you know, therere they're hard up. So they're they're they're after me for other reasons. um But yeah, so it ends by talking about why I think being Christian from my own perspective, but a broader perspective makes sense in the light of the kind of analysis of religion and religious phenomena that I've described. So it's sort of like if you started with a kind of, you know, William James, a variety of of religious experience meets, you know, you know one at one of these books about intelligent design and or or meets David Bentley Hart, right? You know, and then tries to get at the end to, um
00:06:28
Ross Douthat
why the figure of Jesus and the resurrection sort of stands out and offers a a a controlling revelation is the phrase that I use, but you could use a different phrase.
00:06:39
Ross Douthat
um So yeah, so that's that's the idea. And I think I'll just say, I think, you know, the use the usefulness, I mean, everyone comes at, everyone has a different set of encounters, right?
00:06:51
Ross Douthat
With people people who aren't religious.
00:06:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:06:53
Ross Douthat
um My set of encounters comes through writing for the New York Times, which obviously has a fairly secular, not exclusively so, but fairly secular readership and being around a lot of people who are either secular or have a kind of, you know, belief in belief, a sort of friendliness to religion. I think you and I both probably have a certain number of right of center friends who fall into this category.
00:07:20
Ross Douthat
um And some of those people would like to be maybe genuinely religious, but think that you just can't be and still be a reasonable, sensible, rational
Generational Shifts in Religious Awareness
00:07:31
Ross Douthat
person.
00:07:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:07:31
Ross Douthat
um And so I think there's some use in before you get around to the resurrection of Jesus saying that, you know, actually no, you can. And in fact, the religious person is a bit more reasonable and rational than at least certain kinds of aggressive atheists.
00:07:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. ah So that's that's a very good summary, and it segues into, I hate that word, um but it links to my next topic and why I thought the book was interesting and needed, which is, you know there's tons of books about ah religion and you sort of open by talking about the new atheist era, which was sort of both for me and you you know are sort of awakening to like internet punditry and like being in the world of you know fighting with other people who write for a living.
00:08:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And i I was sort of tired of this, but you make a very interesting sociological observation and one which I hadn't made and which, you know, I believe you when you when you say it is, but I haven't seen it, which is this sense that, you know,
00:08:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
15, 20 years ago when this this began, my God, um people still had a sort of background knowledge, awareness about Christianity, and therefore they were actively rejecting something that they thought they knew or that...
00:09:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
they saw christianity Christianity, especially in religion, as a live option. But now, apparently, you have there's been a shift to people who, ah you know, they haven't even rejected the sort of kind of weak, late 20th century Christianity. They've just completely grown up without
00:09:29
Ross Douthat
yeah
00:09:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Any sort of religious mooring any sort of religious ah and intuition and so you know all forms of religious belief are sort of equally foreign to them, which is well, first of all, frankly, it's something I can't even imagine it's like it's like living life in black and white.
00:09:36
Ross Douthat
Yeah.
00:09:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But i I don't know, I just thought that was a very interesting sociological observation.
00:09:50
Ross Douthat
It's there is there is. yeah
00:09:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's probably a first in all of human history because people fight over religion, against religion. They switch religion, but we've never had a sort of, not just post-Christian society, but post-Christian generation.
00:10:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
is that So i'm I'm just very fascinated in that. How did you see that? Is it like reader mail?
00:10:15
Ross Douthat
Well, it it will I mean, just to take a small example, i I apologize for forgetting who said this, but someone on Twitter, X, you know whatever, just the other day said something like um you know they were setting up a reading group on you know some famous essay, not a particularly religious essay. And they said they immediately ran into trouble because the essay takes as its central motif the story of Cain and Abel. And out of 12 people in the reading group, these are you know late teenagers or something,
00:10:46
Ross Douthat
10 of the kids had never heard of Cain and Abel. right um So that's you know sort of a small a small but telling case study.
00:10:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:10:54
Ross Douthat
But I think you can just see this, you I think you see this in sort of personal experience. right um i you know I'm not sort of, deeply involved in the education of the young, but I live in New Haven.
00:11:07
Ross Douthat
I do things at Yale. I have, you know, sort of exposure to university students in a way that I didn't 10 or 15 years ago. And that's sometimes helpful in sort of seeing how things are changing.
00:11:18
Ross Douthat
um I have exposure to peers and to peers' children. I had an interesting moment at a, you know, eating lobster with some friends five years ago or something.
00:11:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:11:27
Ross Douthat
And, you know, my mother, who was quite religious, was there. and somehow the conversation, she brought up angels because, you know, why not? um And it became clear that the nine-year-old daughter of this person we were having dinner with didn't know what an angel was, never heard of an angel, right? You know, so you get sort of small examples like that, and then you can just see it in the data, right? So 15 years ago now, I wrote a book about American religion that was called Bad Religion, and that was all about what I called heresy, right? The argument that American religion sort of existed in this
00:12:00
Ross Douthat
liminal zone, a brilliant, ah that was, yep, that was prophetic.
00:12:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Also a very good book and one which was you know another – you wrote not one, but two books that were prophetic about Trump and in ways that you know that nobody anticipated.
00:12:14
Ross Douthat
right and so true Right, and so Trump's support includes a number of the kind of sort of Christian adjacent cultural culturally Christian Christian, you know prosperity gospel You know these kind of things that I wrote about in the book and all of that is still part of American culture Don't don't get me wrong there.
00:12:31
Ross Douthat
There still is a lot of um You know sort of weekly Christian or attenuatedly Christian or heretically Christian forms of faith But I think the big change between when I wrote that book and this book is just that you have this cohort That is the you know
00:12:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:49
Ross Douthat
new atheist onward cohorts, um, where you just have large numbers, as you say, of people raised, you know, who who are, who are a generation away from Christmas and Easter Christianity.
00:12:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:13:00
Ross Douthat
Their, their parents were Christmas and Easter Christians and sort of stopped at some point in their childhood.
00:13:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:13:06
Ross Douthat
And, and that was it. They just didn't pick up, they didn't pick up anything.
00:13:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. there There is a difference between a kind of secularism that defines itself against Christianity or against religion and one that just ah just exists in a vacuum.
00:13:16
Ross Douthat
Right.
00:13:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah ah
00:13:22
Ross Douthat
umm I'm curious since, but since you, since you brought, brought this point up, I'm curious about your sense of the French experience here.
Religious Experiences and Their Legitimacy
00:13:29
Ross Douthat
Right. Cause in, in certain ways, in certain ways, France seems, you know, France secularized faster than the United States had lower church mass attendance much sooner.
00:13:41
Ross Douthat
Right. Um, but do you have a sense that like your cohort had that experience or is sort of the residual cultural Catholicism of France, the fact that you're, you know,
00:13:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:13:52
Ross Douthat
going into Notre Dame and Saint Denis and all these places, is that sufficient to sort of, is the French atheist of your cohort sort of culture still culturally Catholic?
00:14:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, I.
00:14:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
my My cohort, and who knows about Gen Z, Y, K, whatever whatever they're called, ah my my own my only experience through the youth is through my ah ah my own kids who are in Catholic school, so it's definitely skewed.
00:14:07
Ross Douthat
your coat your coat we Yeah, who knows, right?
00:14:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
my sense is so France has lower religious belief, but there's a kind there is a stronger sense of present French culture being the last link in the long chain and a long chain of culture that includes Christianity.
00:14:44
Ross Douthat
Right.
00:14:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so I would say that you know my sort of French peer group compared to my sort of American peer group,
00:14:45
Ross Douthat
Yeah.
00:14:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
My French peer group is definitely less religious in terms of belief and practice. But I never had the same kind of moment that you've, well, not never, but much less where I, you know, they're much less ignorant about Christianity than the average educated, the average educated French secular liberal is much less ignorant about Christianity as a kind of historical phenomenon than the average educated liberal in America.
00:15:07
Ross Douthat
Right.
00:15:25
Ross Douthat
liberal liberal, secular American, yeah. No, that seems that's that seems plausible to me.
00:15:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so.
00:15:30
Ross Douthat
Yeah, it's interesting.
00:15:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And so it's, I mean, right from from the perspective of, you know, the soul and like winning souls, I'm not sure if it's a better thing, but it sort of makes it, you know, less disorienting to live around, I guess.
00:15:48
Ross Douthat
Yeah, well, and I think, I mean, my my own view based on what i'm so what I feel like I'm seeing in American culture now is that there are actually benefits from a religious perspective to hitting a kind of bottom, right?
00:16:03
Ross Douthat
That sort of, and, you know, and again, America's bottom is different from France as we still have a stronger core of actual Christian practice, people going to church and so on, but it does feel like, and I feel like COVID sort of
00:16:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:17
Ross Douthat
finished this that like you know we were going through a kind of generational shift and it might have continued until 2030 before bottoming out but because of COVID you know people stopped going to church and and it just sort of accelerated some things let you hit bottom and then once you hit a kind of bottom you suddenly have a bunch of people who
00:16:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um oh Yes.
00:16:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right.
00:16:39
Ross Douthat
wouldn't have been interested in Christianity as it seemed to be still influential but declining, but are suddenly willing to give it a new look.
00:16:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:16:49
Ross Douthat
um And that's sort of where we that's sort of the environment I'm trying to write into in this book.
00:16:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. yeah Yeah, no, no, I it's I mean, we don't have any choice, but let's go let's accelerate. um So, ah you know, another thing about the book, which I really liked is that, you know,
00:17:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
You are an excellent prose writer. It's extremely frustrating. I found myself highlighting a bunch of passages. So you you know you're i I'm not going to quote everything. I'm just telling people it's ah it's a very pleasurable book to read if you enjoy high-quality English prose.
00:17:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so, for example, you know in the chapter on design, you write about, quote, the intuition that the world seems like a workshop and a cathedral and a theater and a machinist shop and more. And that was one of the best you know ways I've seen of rendering what this intuition, which then leads to the argument of design, is. So that's very good.
00:17:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um the The first chapters, you know you talk about the argument from design. You talk about these sort of classical arguments. It's fine. ah What I thought, what I really liked was when you get to arguments for religious belief that people usually don't talk about because they're too polite to, which is religious experience and miracles.
00:18:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So why is religious experience a sort of legitimate topic of inquiry for and the sort of legitimate reason to believe and one that sort of keeps researching itself ah and one that shouldn't matter to you know very reasonable and educated people?
00:18:33
Ross Douthat
Yeah.
00:18:43
Ross Douthat
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of lit, but you're right. I'm trying to sort of get out, get no, I think.
00:18:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, we can talk about the argument for design, but you know, people have had that conversation a million times and we're not the right people.
00:18:54
Ross Douthat
I think those are very, I think those are, there are interesting things about those arguments that have sort of changed with advances in modern physics, but the fundamental, the fundamental idea is very familiar from back and forth between atheists and non-believers.
00:18:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like
00:19:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:19:09
Ross Douthat
I think with religious experience you're getting into terrain that's interesting on a few levels, right? The first is that it's just a primary reason that religion actually continues.
00:19:20
Ross Douthat
And this is, I think, useful for, you know, the even the secular reader who sort of doesn't buy into my arguments, right, to to sort of grasp this fact about the world that, you know, you get these you get.
00:19:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, which, which is also a fact about the world that I hadn't grasped.
00:19:36
Ross Douthat
Right. that you hadn't grasped before encountering my brilliant book or just.
00:19:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, all of the people I, all of the people I know who have had religious experience or who, who I, unless they haven't all of the people I know who've had religious experience are Catholics.
00:19:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So finding out that, you know,
00:19:54
Ross Douthat
Oh, right. Yeah. So the scale, yeah, the scale and scope.
00:19:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
people all over the world and throughout all time and sometimes for no particular reason. sort of have these experiences, although I'm going to let you describe it because you're going to do it much better than me. Yes, that was, I mean, I sort of knew it in theory, but what what you explained really well is exactly this. It just sort of keeps happening and it keeps reasserting itself, even to people who are not seeking them, even to people who are sort of random. ah Anyway,
00:20:32
Ross Douthat
Yes. and and and that's And that's I mean, that's a big, you know, you ah an important reality because you'll get these, you know, these sort of sometimes interesting, sometimes not attempts to do sort of sociological and political explanations for, you know, what what is religion? Where did it come from? Why does it stick around? Right. And it's like, OK, well, you know, you have one conception of God in the tribal society and then another conception that emerges for political reasons once you have monarchy and and so on and so forth. Right. And, you know, and and those again, those those arguments can be interesting, but it's it's really useful to understand that, you know, why a big reason religion persists is that not only people who are out there trying to have a religious experience, but also people who are minding their own business, who don't believe in God at all um will have
00:21:26
Ross Douthat
you know, experiences ah that a Christian would describe as an experience of the Holy Spirit or an encounter with the living God. um they will There's also, you know, the range of darker experiences, ah demonic and otherwise, that recur throughout human history and take different forms and different cultures. But you see a certain kind of commonality and then there's the range of what you might call sort of the unclassifiable experiences that, you know, a 17th century French peasant or Irish peasant more likely would have attributed to the fairies and a 21st century person will say it was a UFO or it was aliens, but that too sort of persists and reinvents itself. um And that reality just it's it's important to say if you're sort of assessing how seriously to take it. It's not something that our friends, you know, the late 18th century rationalists necessarily expect it would happen. Right. If you go back and read
00:22:23
Ross Douthat
David Hume, you just have this real confidence that, you know, look, the reason people believe in miracles is that there are a lot of legends from long ago.
00:22:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:22:32
Ross Douthat
It's like Greek mythology. People like those stories. And then there's a church and it teaches them these things and they feel like they have to believe it. But, you know, once you got rid of this cultural inheritance and the Inquisition and everything else, ah then you would expect, you know, people to people people would still be credulous in certain ways.
00:22:51
Ross Douthat
You'd still have hucksters and so on, but you'd you'd expect religious you know sort of mystical mystical stuff to fade dramatically. And nothing like that has happened, right? Which means that you can't just sort of explain these things as sort of features of a particular sociopolitical order, a particular education system, all these things. you need it You need a different explanation. So at the very least, the religious believer can already sort of push the atheist backward a step
00:23:22
Ross Douthat
on these questions from this is just sort of created by, you know, politics and reading assignments to okay well this is something cooked up in the, you know, the the mysteries of the human brain, right, and which is the current, the current atheist materialist position.
00:23:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. OK, so I said, you know, I was going to say it wouldn't make sense for me to play devil's advocate on the argument for design, because I i i agree with you completely, 100%. And so, ah but I am going to play the the devil's advocate here, literally. um So, Ross Douthat, I mean, you know, people have been crazy forever, like people have, you know,
00:24:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Let's say sometimes people have hallucinations, sometimes people have sort of neurons that sort of randomly fire in the wrong way. Why why should this particularly make me believe in God?
00:24:23
Ross Douthat
Right. So in the in the numinous.
00:24:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
or in the Or in the numinous or in the existence of a spiritual reality?
00:24:26
Ross Douthat
Right. I mean, yeah, I think we should we should I think belief in God makes I mean, what one of the points I try to make is you get to belief in God in part through convergence of different different lines of evidence.
00:24:42
Ross Douthat
Right. So the fact that you have supernatural experience and the fact that you have evidence for order and design and other pieces of evidence all I think converges on the likelihood of there being a god obviously if you just have you know an encounter um with you know um well and let's say if you have one of the weirder spiritual encounters it's not telling you anything necessarily ah about god if you have the kind of experience that appears to be god himself that's a different matter but why why should why should we take this seriously well
00:25:14
Ross Douthat
I think the the first reason to take it seriously is there really just seems to be a significant distinction between some of the core forms of religious experience and what we understand of sort of hallucinations, insanity, and so on. right And I'm not saying there can't sometimes be overlap. Obviously, there's a whole theory that you know epileptic epileptic experiences map onto certain kinds of spiritual experiences and so on.
00:25:43
Ross Douthat
I'm based on my reading, I'm somewhat skeptical of that, but let's assume that there's some some kind of overlap. Nonetheless, there's also a just a very wide range of very significant and substantial spiritual experiences that just don't appear hallucinatory in the normal way we understand hallucinations.
Near-Death Experiences and Their Implications
00:26:05
Ross Douthat
And just to take two examples, both of which both of which exist around the frontier of death, which you know is sort of an interesting an interesting zone, right?
00:26:14
Ross Douthat
um and the late 19th century and there was sort of a high tide of interest in this stuff. This is when William James wrote Varieties of Religious Experience and of course there was sort of the spiritualist craze, but there was and a good collection effort done on how often people see people they know like in a very palpable perceptual normal seeming way um immediately after the person has died um and often in cases where you have no way to know in advance that the person has died it would be like if you died tomorrow and I didn't know it and I walked out my front door and I saw you standing by my my minivan right um and then you disappeared these these experiences again common
00:26:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And yes, this does happen or people report this.
00:26:58
Ross Douthat
this happens This happens a lot. And and one thing one thing to emphasize about this stuff, too, is a lot of people have these experiences or weird experiences of other kinds themselves and assume that it's some weird thing that just happened to them because we're living in a culture that discourages talking too much ah right about these things.
00:27:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:27:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:27:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right. And so they don't, they don't talk about it because they don't want to seem weird.
00:27:17
Ross Douthat
Right. Right. And so these these kind of cases, one of the researchers studying them called them hallucinations of the sane. Right. um Because the people having them are not suffering from epilepsy.
00:27:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:27:30
Ross Douthat
they're not suffering They're not taking a hallucinogenic drug. We could argue about that category in a different moment, but they're they're just sort of randomly in the middle of a normal existence having a completely lucid, realistic, impossible encounter um that requires you to think not just that the brain does hallucinations or does dreams, but it has the capacity to generate very real-seeming, sort of supernatural-seeming manifestations.
00:27:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:27:58
Ross Douthat
That's interesting. and The same thing can be said in a stronger way of near-death experiences, which is a case where we just have, thanks to modern science and modern medicine, a lot more cases to work with.
00:28:10
Ross Douthat
right like A lot more people are brought back from the brink of death than was ever true in the 1700s.
00:28:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. Interesting. Yeah.
00:28:15
Ross Douthat
And what you get from near-death experiences is a similar thing, where the reports of them are not like the reports of dreams and hallucinations.
00:28:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:28:23
Ross Douthat
They're not fragmentary. They're not self-contradictory. They don't have dream logic. they don't you know they don't turn into so They don't dissolve into randomness. They're generally described as more intense than ordinary life.
00:28:37
Ross Douthat
More real than real is a phrase that gets used a lot. They have a lot of yeah you know a lot of some differences, but a lot of consistency across cultures.
00:28:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:28:47
Ross Douthat
um they you know and And they feature, again, the things that a religious person would expect them to feature, encounters with your departed relatives encounters with divine seeming beings, encounters with something that appears to be like God, something heavenly. There are also some that seem more purgatorial and hellish. um And I think you know you can come up with materialist explanations for these things.
00:29:18
Ross Douthat
It's hard to generate a Darwinian explanation because you have its because well because like note most most of them are presuming presumably happening to people who just then go on to die, right?
00:29:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, that's a good point. Yeah.
00:29:30
Ross Douthat
So if this is something that that happens to you and then you expire, that it's like you know the occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or something and it all happens,
00:29:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right, right.
00:29:38
Ross Douthat
in the you know the instant before you die.
00:29:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:29:41
Ross Douthat
What is this doing for you? And you have to come up with some story where, well, you know maybe it only happens to people who come back from death. like It's something the brain does as it's restarting to encourage people.
00:29:53
Ross Douthat
But even then, you it would happen so rarely in a in a pre-modern society that the idea that you would get selection for this in the brain is very strange.
00:30:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:30:04
Ross Douthat
um and Again, is this like 100% proof of anything? No, but like if you had gone back 150 years or gone back to human Voltaire and said to them, you know, guess what?
00:30:16
Ross Douthat
Over the next couple hundred years, we're going to bring a lot of people back from the dead. And some substantial number of them are, you know, going to say they've seen heaven and angels and had a had a life review like a lot of people have this life review where they have experienced sort of a feeling of judgment as they look back over their life experience.
00:30:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. yeah Yeah. Yes.
00:30:35
Ross Douthat
um And you know like that seems like a point for religion, not you know not the end of the argument, but it's it's a point it's a point in its favor.
00:30:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's very well put.
00:30:44
Ross Douthat
And that I think is what, again, you know there's a wider range of these experiences, but I think that the both the particulars and the range give you more, i suspect they they give you more reasons to to think that the religious world picture has truth to it,
00:31:03
Ross Douthat
than you would have expected before we secularized. And and also it's just like, you know, you you can just totally imagine a counterfactual world where people have near death experiences that are just like hallucinations or they are like dreams.
00:31:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:31:19
Ross Douthat
You're like, you know, I mean, the Sopranos did this a little bit. Tony had a near death experience, but it had a lot of dream logic in it.
00:31:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Of course, you had to bring up the sopranos.
00:31:27
Ross Douthat
Right. Well, you know, right. well Well, he does a good job. Chase sort of playing around. David Chase playing around with this stuff.
00:31:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes.
00:31:33
Ross Douthat
But yeah, you could imagine a world where people have near death experiences and they come back and they're like, yeah, I was in a car and there was a bird and someone had diarrhea in the backseat. And then we were like flying to the moon and then it all dissolved into chaos and so on.
00:31:48
Ross Douthat
Right.
Critique of David Hume's Ideas
00:31:49
Ross Douthat
And there are things that happen like that.
00:31:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:31:52
Ross Douthat
People do have hallucinations when they're delirium and on the brink of death, but they're just clearly a completely different category from the classical near death experience.
00:31:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:31:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right, right. Dreams are not the same things as visions and right and people can tell the difference.
00:32:02
Ross Douthat
Right.
00:32:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
By the way, and another good thing about your book is it reminded me, i I knew this already, but it reminded me just how much David Hume was the original Reddit atheist.
00:32:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's just like, Everything he writes makes me want to reach out across time and and space and slap him in the face because it it it's it's literally like every every sort of Reddit atheist idea comes from Hume. It's just it's despairing.
00:32:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:32:38
Ross Douthat
Well, and Hume is, I mean, one, I think Hume raises what I actually think is a very potent idea that for atheists today, which is also part of why I wrote the book the way I did.
00:32:51
Ross Douthat
Right. Which is the idea that, um, you know, if one religion is true, all the rest have to be completely fake.
00:32:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:32:59
Ross Douthat
Right. He says, look, there's no way, you know, that the, the Chinese and the, okay.
00:33:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
we'rere We're going to talk about that. No, because, okay, so religious experience, I, you know, the right, it's not in and of itself necessarily an argument, but it sort of is in the mix with the other arguments and point to it. And the fact that it's stubborn, the fact that it's sort of um It sort of imposes itself on the recipient in the sense that from the outside you can tell, oh, you know, it's a dream or it's, but like, if it happens to you, like, you know, you know, the difference between a dream and, so and, and, and a direct experience, you know, it's not, you know,
Miracles: Evidence and Interpretation
00:33:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
it's not that. And so there's a power to religious experience, a power, which is subjective. It's experienced only by the one who experiences it, but to that person,
00:33:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
who can be a perfectly sort of rational, intelligent, non-crazy person, they have this experience and they just know that it was not just um electrons firing in their brain. ah I wanna talk about the next chapter, which to me was perhaps the funnest chapter where you go into the even most more ridiculous argument for religious belief, which is one of my personal favorite arguments, which is the argument for miracles.
00:34:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, I, I mean, which is, uh, this was one of the things that frustrated me during the new atheist stuff, which is particularly Christian and Catholics, uh, failed to point to miracles. And you, um, you reference a bunch of them, you referenced the, the famous miracle of the sun where.
00:34:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah In 1917, tens of thousands of people saw the sun dance in the sky in in a in fulfillment of a prophecy. ah And you reference one of my favorite books, which is the book They Flew.
00:35:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Which is absolutely wild. Can you, can you, can you, well, first of all, talk about miracles in general and why they're important. And then then we're, you know, I'm going to have some fun. We're going to discuss our favorite miracles.
00:35:23
Ross Douthat
Yeah, so well, so miracle right. I mean, miracles are obviously important to Christianity because they're a big part of what happens in the New Testament, even before we get around to the resurrection.
00:35:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, but Christian and Catholic apologists will rarely discuss miracles.
00:35:32
Ross Douthat
Right. It's clear. Right. Well, even I think I think I think this is a maybe a Catholic Protestant distinction, actually. I mean, where, you know, sort of if you're in evangelical worlds, evangelical Christian worlds, you hear it, which I was for a while growing up, you but you hear a lot, a lot more about miracles.
00:35:53
Ross Douthat
And if you're in sort of, like obviously, if you're steeped in Catholic piety, you hear a lot about miracles.
00:36:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:36:00
Ross Douthat
They're a big part of you know canons canonization and beatification.
00:36:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
growing up
00:36:03
Ross Douthat
But yeah, it's not, I think, yeah, the there is an embarrassment about citing them too much if you're writing a column for The New York Times, hypothetically, right? um But, you know, the the New Testament strongly suggests that you should treat miracles as God's, you know, evidences and signs and indicators, right?
00:36:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:36:25
Ross Douthat
That they're that they're important to God's action in the world.
00:36:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Growing up, but
00:36:30
Ross Douthat
um They're not moral rewards. They're sort of signposts and signifiers, more than that. And you have an awful lot of them. and ah And again, you haven't you have a a lot of them, and by a lot of them, I just obviously mean a lot of claimed miracles because it's hard to establish with 1000% accuracy when a miracle has definitively occurred. But the Catholic Church tries very, very hard um to sort of generate and serious medical testimony and medical analysis of
00:37:02
Ross Douthat
every miraculous healing that is imputed to a potential saint. And the Catholic Church has had no difficulty over the last 200 years continuing to make saints, canonize saints, find cases where people prayed for intervention and something very strange and rapid and sudden and medically inexplicable seem to happen to them. um And so as with near death experiences and other forms of mysticism, you have a kind of atheist expectation that these things should fade under modern conditions, under the light of science, and they really don't fade at all.
00:37:38
Ross Douthat
And again, if you get beyond, if you get beyond the world where the Catholic Church is trying to get, you know, five medical experts to ratify something in particular, and just move into the larger circle of people who haven't tried to, you know, hire six doctors to certify something, but have just had a pretty crazy experience.
00:37:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:37:58
Ross Douthat
There are a lot of good books, again, including by evangelicals, sort of that try and to enumerate you know what what share of the Christian population around the world claims to have had some kind of miraculous experience.
00:38:11
Ross Douthat
It's a quite it's quite high.
00:38:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, wow.
00:38:13
Ross Douthat
I think I referenced one of them in the book, but it's a it's a quite it's a quite substantial share and you can find
00:38:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's an interesting question. Yeah.
00:38:22
Ross Douthat
You know, i don't I don't know what, an example that is is sort of, I didn't cite in the book, um I may have encountered it after the reading of it, but if you, you know, Google like pastor recovers voice miraculously.
00:38:37
Ross Douthat
you'll find just this tremendously, this is just tremendously moving. um It's an evangelical pastor who had a disease of the throat that basically rendered his voice you know but somewhat inoperable. He could still speak, but it was incredibly painful and strained. And he just sort of went on with his life. And one day he was giving a sermon about you know sort of miracles and how when God acts and you can hear they have the audio of the sermon you can hear on the sermon when his voice comes back and it's it's quite it's quite remarkable now is it remarkable in a way that definitively establishes that a miracle happens no and
00:39:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh wow.
00:39:22
Ross Douthat
there but But it leaves the non-believer in a position where you really have to impute this kind of extraordinary power to the human mind in a lot of these cases.
00:39:32
Ross Douthat
You have to say, well, it wasn't a miracle because the person expected a miracle. And so their mind, through some mysterious pattern we don't understand, contrived to you know increase antibody flow or blood flow or something and cause this miracle.
00:39:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:39:49
Ross Douthat
right And that is a It's a difficulty because the materialist is also, while they're doing that, they're also trying to prove that consciousness doesn't really exist,
Historical Accounts of Miracles
00:39:59
Ross Douthat
right?
00:39:59
Ross Douthat
So this is sort of the two, they're they're running, well, oh this it you see this a lot. Like each discrete thing that the materialist is trying to do to explain away, they may have some success.
00:40:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I'm trying to come up with this, because the atheist line is the god of the gaps, and it's really the void of the gaps.
00:40:12
Ross Douthat
ah
00:40:21
Ross Douthat
Right. The atheist is running around trying to reduce here.
00:40:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
When somebody is miraculously healed from a terminal disease, it's like, oh, you know.
00:40:28
Ross Douthat
That was their amazing consciousness. And then you're like, oh, consciousness is indeed amazing. And they're like, no, it's an illusion. You're like, OK, you have to pick one, right? But there is, you mentioned Carlos Ayres, they flew.
00:40:38
Ross Douthat
I think, you know, the Tyler
00:40:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
it it I mean, it's the one I really recommend it after you've bought Ross's book. ah it's It's one of the wildest.
00:40:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
books I've ever read. And another benefit of your book is that there's tons of references or recommendations to other books on all sorts of fascinating topics, such as, you know, scientific studies into religious experience, miracles, social history of religion, which I want to get to. ah It is an amazing book that um
00:41:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
describes the very real historical testimony, like the testimonies are real historical facts, like that people testify to these things, which is that for a period of about 150 years, mostly in Spain, but not only, a lot of Christian mystics flew and levitated and many times did it in front of hundreds or thousands of people.
00:41:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Many times they did it on demand.
00:41:45
Ross Douthat
Right.
00:41:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They did it you know in front of people who traveled from across Europe to see it and didn't believe it. ah One Protestant ah queen sort of converted to Catholicism after she traveled all the way to Europe to see to see a man fly. And this is not even the wildest part of the book because it also discusses by location,
00:42:12
Ross Douthat
Yep. Yes, it does.
00:42:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah including the case of a nun who was cloistered her entire life in a Spanish village and simultaneously spent four years in the Americas evangelizing Indian tribes.
00:42:25
Ross Douthat
Yep.
00:42:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um it it is and it is It is by a professor at a very reputable university who writes this in a totally straight way with his tongue magnificently planted in his cheek.
00:42:32
Ross Douthat
Yes.
00:42:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It it is just an amazing book. Anyway,
00:42:51
Ross Douthat
Yes, and it's, it's so, it it's It's a great reading experience, as you say, because the author, Carlos Eyre, writes it as in a very so normal academic style. right And you as the unsuspecting reader, you have to get you get a certain distance in before you realize, oh, the the author does, in fact, think these things happened, doesn't he? um But it also gets at what is the you know the prime objection to ah claims about miracles, right which is, you know,
00:43:22
Ross Douthat
we I did a conversation with you know Tyler Cowan, the economist, who we both you know know his work well. And this is sort of where he he sort of got stuck on. right He was like, look, you know look Ross, fine. you know Healing miracles, all these things are are fine. But where is you know where is the video, the compelling video of um you know of the of the impossible? right like we We don't know what's happening at the molecular molecular level when someone suddenly recovers from cancer.
00:43:52
Ross Douthat
um There's endless debate about with endless competing academic papers trying to prove or disprove the existence of things like precognition and psychic powers.
00:44:03
Ross Douthat
um i know some people yeah i mean i know I know some people, smart people who think that basically we have good evidence for this and that it's just sort of ruled out by materialist premises.
00:44:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, I discovered that. Thanks to you, by the way.
00:44:16
Ross Douthat
But I also know smart people who think
00:44:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Don't, don't tell the CIA.
00:44:19
Ross Douthat
it Well to see it right well there's a there's replication crisis issues in this right where you get the you know you get a bunch of papers and you're like well, but you know we have a bunch of papers proving a lot of things and ah can you can you replicate it.
00:44:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:44:33
Ross Douthat
There's also phenomena where. um you can get replication from you know the ah the author who believes in the supernatural does a paper and the author who doesn't believe in it does a paper and they try and use exactly the same experimental controls and the one who believes gets favorable results and the one who doesn't doesn't. Right. So, you know, there's a lot going on there, but I think I think it is fair for the materialist to say, look, you know, in the past, it seems like we had claims of levitating saints and if we had a levitating saint,
00:45:04
Ross Douthat
right now, that would you know that would be a big deal. um I think to read the Arab book is to realize that the levitations of the 17th century really do pass every historical test except we have them on videotape.
00:45:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:45:18
Ross Douthat
right So then the question is, you know why don't know why don't we have them right now?
00:45:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:45:23
Ross Douthat
And I would not be personally surprised if you know at some point in the next 100 years, I mean, there there are a few cases claims of Buddhist levitations, but
00:45:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, i um i i I love our friend Tyler, but like this is this is obviously not true. like If you showed Tyler a picture of a monk in Spain taking off into the air, he would say, well, that's probably AI. That's probably special effects. That's probably – it wouldn't change his religious beliefs at all.
00:45:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And in a sense, to his credit, like if you completely change your worldview based on a single video, ah you know that ah there's probably something wrong. i mean
00:46:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I was having this thought experiment, like imagine Richard Dawkins is at a debate with some Christian apologist and all of a sudden with you know hundreds of people in attendance and all of a sudden a light appears in the ceiling and a loud booming voice shouts, I exist.
Skepticism and Evidence of the Supernatural
00:46:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Would Richard Dawkins suddenly, you know,
00:46:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I exist, and by the way, you know the Roman Catholic Church is the true church, and all its dogmas are correct. like would Would Dawkins suddenly convert to Catholicism? No, of course not.
00:46:43
Ross Douthat
I don't think he would. I do think, though, that you can imagine a world where, you know, let's say you I mean, the the argument that Ayer makes in the book that I actually think is quite convincing, right, is that you don't get levitation today because we just aren't a culture that has lots of people practicing crazy Catholic asceticism anymore.
00:47:03
Ross Douthat
Right. So it's like anything if you have thousands and thousands of people being crazy Catholic ascetics.
00:47:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:47:09
Ross Douthat
Right. I was you know talking to someone the other day who was like, you know, studies Vincent de Paul, it's like, how many hours a day did Vincent de Paul pray? It's like, well, you know, seven, 10 hours a day, right?
00:47:19
Ross Douthat
Like constant, this sort of constant prayer that you, you know, there are monastic communities that do it, but it's certainly ah less, less common.
00:47:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right Right.
00:47:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:47:28
Ross Douthat
um So it might be that you need that intensity. to get some of these crazier things. But i I do think that if you, there are certain things that could happen that wouldn't convince everyone, but would sort of,
00:47:43
Ross Douthat
cause something of a paradigm shift gradually back towards a more, you know, supernaturalist view of the world. um Again, without per se convincing one individual person, right?
00:47:57
Ross Douthat
So like there's this podcast series called the telepathy tapes right now that claims that as
00:48:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, it's there.
00:48:04
Ross Douthat
a set of autistic kids manifest telepathic powers and that this is like actually quite obvious and easy to establish if you you know watch these videos and and do these things and so on.
00:48:15
Ross Douthat
um I am quite skeptical of this series in part because it claims it seems to me to claim too much. like They're like, oh yeah, they're seeing things with 90% accuracy and so on.
00:48:27
Ross Douthat
right um And my impression
00:48:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and Like mentalism is sort of well-established as a kind of category of trickery where.
00:48:34
Ross Douthat
Right. the the I think the argument here is that it's not trickery. It's that the the parents are sort of without even being conscious of it are sort of guiding the kids in these certain ways.
00:48:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:48:44
Ross Douthat
Anyway, i' I have not I have not dug.
00:48:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like Like the horse that could do math.
00:48:48
Ross Douthat
I have not developed a complete opinion on this. I have a certain skepticism. But I do think that like if it were the case that, you know, you could run a bunch of papers establishing establishing this, it would in fact change some people's minds.
00:49:02
Ross Douthat
And in that sense, it is at least somewhat reasonable for the non-believer to say, you know, let bring out bring out the levitating saints, right?
00:49:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:49:11
Ross Douthat
I just think Tyler should be careful because we might bring them out at some point.
00:49:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:49:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes. Well, I mean, i I'm for it. i just I just don't think most people make up their mind based on evidence. um I mean, there's there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about, you see, but and we're almost one hour in.
00:49:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I guess, you know, I mean, well we could do three hours.
00:49:37
Ross Douthat
i can I can come back yet again, Pascal, and if you when you need it when you need a fill-in guest.
00:49:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:49:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I guess I do have to sort of poke you a little.
Religious Indifferentism vs. Commitment
00:49:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
As I read the book, I already questioned that you about this ah previously, and as I read the book, I sort of accepted it more. But there's a kind of, you know, indifferentist vibe to your book, and even though it ends with a sort of… Thinly disguised appeal for Christianity, let's put it that way because you you you it's an appeal to Christianity, but you put it and here's why it makes sense to me. So, ah and I sort of, I scribbled in the margin in my notes when I was reading it. i
00:50:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know There's a vibe of – you may want to explore this tradition or that tradition. you know if If polytheism makes more sense to you – and I sort of wrote this in my notes. i I wrote, are we going to get jihadist for Douthit?
00:50:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know It's like, oh, I read Ross Douthat's Believe, and you know, I followed his advice. And I realized that, you know, Wahhabi Islam is, you know, it's what worked for me.
00:50:48
Ross Douthat
I mean it it's yep that that that that is when that happens when that happens I will yeah no I think that's that's a
00:50:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And and so, you know, that's that's that's when that's why I shot up the shopping mall. ah I mean, joking joking joking aside, I guess um ah a way of framing this and in in a way that's not just ah you know ah saying that it's bad or it's good.
00:51:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um one One way of contrasting this is with the approach of somebody like Bishop Barron, who I think starts from the same premise as you, which is that society is completely said secularized. And his thing that he's quite open about is, therefore, we should sort of lean into the weirdness of Catholicism. We shouldn't be like, oh, you know,
00:51:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but Almost every great religion or every great religion has elements of truth in it. Let's sort of ease you into the idea of belief. No, let's lean into the weird. Let's lean into like the ah Catholicism that's sort of like extremely Catholic because it's unsettling, because it's sort of differentiating.
00:52:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And of course, you know, one answer is to say both approaches are fine. We need both, but I guess, you know, if I'm going to phrase it as a question, you know, what made you choose that approach, I guess?
00:52:16
Ross Douthat
I, well, no, I think, well, I, I think, and this may be a tension, you know, that on which my project founders a little bit, but I think that the representatives of the institutional Catholic church.
00:52:33
Ross Douthat
should do exactly what Bishop Barron says they should do.
00:52:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:52:36
Ross Douthat
right And i I've been tweaked a little for the book.
00:52:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:52:38
Ross Douthat
like Folks like Andrew Sullivan have said, oh, Ross, you know you sound like Pope Francis. um And of course, I've been you know critical of the Holy Father in the past.
00:52:48
Ross Douthat
right um But I guess my view is that the position of the lay delay professional arguer speaking to you know, a very mixed audience is somewhat different from the position of the pope.
00:53:05
Ross Douthat
And I want the pope, yeah, I want the pope and the bishops to be to be weird and to assert that, you know, Catholicism is the true faith and everyone should be converted to it. That that is their that is their job.
00:53:16
Ross Douthat
But um but I think it's OK for that to be their job and for me to say to people that, um you know, what that clearly
00:53:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:53:27
Ross Douthat
God works through a lot of different avenues and agencies and institutional forms, right?
00:53:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:53:34
Ross Douthat
and And striking that balance is really hard because once you say that, it becomes really easy to say, and therefore, all religions are equal. And honestly, I think the Pope himself falls pretty...
00:53:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:53:48
Ross Douthat
I see I can't resist criticizing the Pope, but I think the Pope, you know in in some of his comments, doesn't seem to get this balance quite right. You want the Pope to say, yes, many religions contain elements of divinity and you know there are virtuous people in all the major faiths and God is present in different ways, but
00:54:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:54:06
Ross Douthat
you know, Catholicism is the fullness of truth and you should convert to it. And the Pope is hesitant about that. So I'll be straightforward. I think Catholicism is the fullness of truth and everyone should convert to it. But there are lots of people who sincerely have a set of experiences or have a set of intellectual reactions to things that do not immediately lead them to be catholic to be Catholic.
00:54:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:54:29
Ross Douthat
And what should those people do? And one answer is they're fucked. Right. And sorry. And um My view from knowing and observing the world, right, is that there are people who, you know, are just not like there are people who are raised as cradle Catholics who have a totally dead sterile experience of the faith.
00:54:49
Ross Douthat
And some of those people, you're not going to get them immediately by...
00:54:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:54:55
Ross Douthat
say like god I'm not going to say I. God is not going to get them immediately by just pulling them into landmass Catholicism.
00:55:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:03
Ross Douthat
he's you know he's He's going to walk with them through some other things that let them come back to, hopefully, the truth at the end, or even if they don't get back to the truth all the way, and this is where I am a little bit of a lib, right? I think that the sincere the sincere person who goes in search of God and finds God in some form outside the Catholic faith and tries to live their life in a proper relationship to God, that as long as that person is not aware that Catholicism is true and rejecting it,
00:55:39
Ross Douthat
You know, that that person is, i I don't think that that person is, you know, doomed dooomed to perdition. um i do you know I do think hell is real. um I'm not a universalist in that sense, but I am a lib of some sort in my view of how and who gets to heaven.
00:55:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that that that that that's That's fine and your, you know, your lib habit your liberalism, quote unquote, happens to be perfectly orthodox in this specific case.
00:56:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:56:13
Ross Douthat
reason Reasonably.
00:56:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, i i I just think it's an interesting, um you know, the the sort of the heart of the book and the most, you know,
00:56:15
Ross Douthat
reasonably
00:56:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
The trade-off implicit in your approach, and that's the approach you went with. and then so and and you know i I agree with you. I think it's needed in the discourse. It's not the way every public Christian should speak, but it's a very good way to sort of get people to it. But you you get to this issue of, you know, you make, you see, you say, oh, there are all these ways that point to religious belief, like the appearance of design, like religious experience, like The Mystery of Consciousness, and so on and so forth. And you know there's – all of these great religious traditions have some wisdom, some purchase on the truth, etc., etc. And then you sort of talk yourself into saying,
00:57:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, doesn't that mean that you should just be like an agnostic and a seeker and then you're like, no, actually that means you should commit to something. You should commit to a a religious tradition.
00:57:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um i That's the hardest thing for a sort of modern person to do, to commit, to commit to anything, to commit to a marriage, to commit to, you know, ah military service or any sort of form of vocation that's seen as like onerous and demanding service.
00:57:40
Ross Douthat
ye
00:57:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And so the issue of commitment ah that you sort of work through and struggle through is, I think in many ways, the key to the book. so i guess You know, I want to ask to just talk about that or explain, you know, what your argument.
00:58:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Just talk.
00:58:04
Ross Douthat
Yeah.
00:58:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What, what is your argument for commitment? Why should somebody who sort of has a sense that there is a spiritual layer to reality, there is a out there, out there, but they shouldn't just be an agnostic seeker.
00:58:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They should commit to a faith tradition.
00:58:24
Ross Douthat
I mean, I think it's okay to be an agnostic seeker for a bit, right? Like you start, you know, you start, you read some scriptures, you say some prayers, you conduct some experiments, right?
00:58:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. it It was a phase in college.
00:58:37
Ross Douthat
I mean, yeah, like that. But at a certain point, you have to assume that religious practice is like any other form of human endeavor.
00:58:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:58:50
Ross Douthat
It's really hard to get that far on your own. And it's hard because it's hard for intellectual reasons, because, you know, we we all know autodidact to, you know, sometimes come up with great insights and have interesting things to say, but generally the autodidact at some point has to benefit from entering more fully into the conversation of the educated world. That the same has to be true in religion.
00:59:20
Ross Douthat
um that you, you know, you have you have to enter into some shared conversation that has some shared premises to make any kind of intellectual progress. um The same is true sort of practically, right? You know, to the extent that religion is a discipline, you're trying to pray and do good works and all of these things. It would be very weird to say, you know, I'm going to take up soccer or football, as as you would say, call it, right? and just Just kick the football in the backyard you know and and become really good at kicking the football in the backyard and never join a team. right like You would be missing something, clearly. um And more than that, you probably wouldn't actually pull it off. right like This is the reality. you You may say, every day, all by myself, I'm going to you know read the Bhagavad Gita and say these 16 prayers and then go give alms. right And it will just be my religion. OK.
01:00:17
Ross Douthat
Are you really going to do that unless you have some form of sort of community and some kind of you know sort of social pressure?
01:00:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um Right, right.
01:00:25
Ross Douthat
you know ah would i go to Would I go to a random church every weekend if I didn't belong to a church that tells me I have to get my kids to mass every week? I think I know what the answer is. I would not.
01:00:36
Ross Douthat
right um so they're all i mean and these this is this This is a utilitarian argument, right in a sense. There are sort of benefits from tradition and community and All of these things that are really hard to recreate in the individual um But then also this sort of that the final point and I guess um You know, I said this close to the
Spiritual Protection and the Role of Religion
01:00:59
Ross Douthat
start, right?
01:00:59
Ross Douthat
But it's the demons right that are also an issue here which is that and Well, this is yeah, this is where we can and we can end here um because I have to go back and take care of some of those children but the um the
01:01:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i i that That was my next and final question. there's
01:01:14
Ross Douthat
If you assume that spiritual realities exist and that supernatural realities exist, there's really no reason to assume that they're perfectly safe.
01:01:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:01:23
Ross Douthat
Like if the natural world is not perfectly safe, why would the supernatural world be perfectly safe?
01:01:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Tell us everything you need you think about demons, Rust Outlet.
01:01:32
Ross Douthat
Well, I don't i have very conventional opinions about demons, which is that there are supernatural entities out there. um that are not in a positive relationship with the higher order of the universe and are not in a positive relationship with us and want bad things to happen to us. um and you know there And if you go around sort of declaring yourself spiritually open in some way without having any sense of like what you want to enter into you, ah these you know these these forms and these these beings um might
01:02:07
Ross Douthat
might very well prey upon you, right? And, you know, you can do a version of this argument where, you know, you you don't have to assume the demons are real.
01:02:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:02:15
Ross Douthat
You can just, you know, assume that, like, there are bad experiences out there. And, like, if you take ayahuasca, you know, maybe the demons you encounter aren't real, but it still, you know, messes you up.
01:02:26
Ross Douthat
I mean, yeah that's fine if that's by the Mesoamerican.
01:02:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you you You still get one-shotted by the 60 Mesoamerican demon.
01:02:31
Ross Douthat
Right. Yeah. But but but I I think, again, I think from a from a the the case for religion that I find persuasive encompasses the reality of demonic experiences.
01:02:45
Ross Douthat
And you see these people now, right? yeah I mean, to you'll see people who take psychedelics who will say, they'll say what do what do you do when you encounter a negative entity?
01:02:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:02:55
Ross Douthat
And there's all this debate about it on the online forum. It's like, well, maybe it's a part of yourself and it's like your Jungian shadow and you need to integrate it.
01:02:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right.
01:03:02
Ross Douthat
And I'm like, maybe, but probably not. Right.
01:03:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:03:05
Ross Douthat
um Or you have, you know, our our mutual friend Rod Drier, right? He was, you know, he's posting a lot about UFOs these days. um And he posted, is he yeah, you've noticed, them right?
01:03:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Is he?
01:03:17
Ross Douthat
But he posted something, you know, there's these people who think you're supposed to get in touch with UFOs psychically, right? And the way you do it is by standing there and saying, I'm here, whatever's out there, please come on in.
01:03:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Of course there is.
01:03:30
Ross Douthat
And I don't think that saying whatever's out there come on in is a good idea, right?
01:03:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That, yeah, that's definitely not a good idea. That's definitely not a good idea.
01:03:34
Ross Douthat
And ah and one of the uses, one of the uses of a the technology of a traditional religion is that, and this includes the Eastern religions, right?
01:03:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:03:44
Ross Douthat
They also have conceptions of of demons and the demonic, um is that, you know, you were saying, okay, here's how you try and do mystical experience.
01:03:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Probably.
01:03:54
Ross Douthat
Here's how you protect yourself. and your soul while doing it, here are some guidelines for the kind of experiences you're looking for and the kind you aren't.
01:04:05
Ross Douthat
And that's just, I think for people, again, like the people we've been talking about, sort of who have no grounding in religion, who are sort of setting off on a spiritual journey, um that those kind of defenses and guardrails are just um tremendously, potentially valuable.
01:04:25
Ross Douthat
And there's a lot of stake, right? Like once you stipulate a soul, um there are real stakes to spiritual exploration.
01:04:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes,
01:04:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right, right, right. I mean that that's that's the sort of smackdown logic, which is once you accept the existence of souls and you accept and the existence of a kind of spiritual realm… why wouldn't you also accept the existence of demons? That it seems totally arbitrary to accept the first two and not the third. And if you accept the existence of demons, then you need you need to take precautions. And the best ah or or the most common sensical precautions come from sophisticated, longstanding ah faith traditions.
01:05:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah So that it that is the argument for religious for religion from the demonic by… yeah
01:05:19
Ross Douthat
The argument from demons. Yep.
01:05:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah and from demons which is a which is a very good art. I mean, i it's one of my regular tweets, but it's absolutely true, which is, I understand why some people don't believe in God. I don't understand people who don't believe in Satan, because like if you look at the world for five minutes, like the the case for the existence of Satan seems ah very, very straightforward in a way that um ah Yeah, i i I don't know.
01:05:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i i You and I like to joke about ah the demonic the demonic and such, but on on the merits, I absolutely agree with you. um There are negative spiritual forces out there.
01:05:59
Ross Douthat
yeah I mean, you want to be careful, right? Like like I think you're, I once knew, I've known like Catholic exorcists who say, you know, that they'll have people who will write to them who are clearly looking to have faith, who will be like, well, show me some de evidence of the demonic because it will help me become religious.
01:06:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Show me a TV.
01:06:15
Ross Douthat
and And you want to be careful with that too. I don't, I don't, I didn't write a lot about the demonic in this book in part because I think I think it is a strong case for religion, but it's a bad idea to even think about it too much.
01:06:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, don't seek out demons, kids.
01:06:30
Ross Douthat
so
01:06:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's true. That's also true.
Conclusion and Encouragement to Read the Book
01:06:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Which is why I kept it for the end of, uh, for the end of the podcast.
01:06:34
Ross Douthat
For the end, that's right.
01:06:36
Ross Douthat
See people off. um Pascal, I can't thank you enough.
01:06:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right.
01:06:40
Ross Douthat
This was wonderful. And I am delighted to come back you know and be your first three-peat guest at some point in the future.
01:06:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes thank you very note the The pleasure was all mine. It's a great book. People should definitely buy it, hopefully read it, and you know give it to their friends, and so on and so forth. All right. Goodbye.
01:07:22
Ross Douthat
Good night.