Is It Better To Believe In Anything Than In Nothing?

Wrestling with Ross Douthat's book, Believe

When I was in Mexico City in 2023, I visited the magnificent Anthropological Museum in Polanco and the impressive Templo Mayor and the museum attached to it in the heart of the historic city center, and between them I got a good survey of the evolution of pre-Columbian Mexican civilization and religion. This wasn’t my first encounter; I’d been to Mexico twice before, and had studied pre-Columbian history in college, and had some modest familiarity with Mayan culture specifically. But laid out in a line as it was in Mexico’s museums, it smacked me in the face how much more approachable and human-seeming the oldest strata and the more peripheral regions of Mexican civilization seemed to me than the civilization that arose in the central valley, and how with each historical turn from the Toltecs onward that core civilization grew more and more terrible until, by Aztec times, I felt like I was looking at the relics of something fundamentally evil, a civilization and a religion that would have done Nazi Germany proud.

This was an aesthetic reaction on my part, I confess, and I don’t pretend it was anything else, but it was authentic. I recoiled, violently, from what I saw. It wasn’t just that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice—the Mayans did so as well, and I had never found that a barrier to deep appreciation—and it wasn’t just that there was so much weird and violent imagery—there’s plenty of weird and violent imagery on the walls of Nepalese Buddhist temples, and they never made me recoil. Something about the entire gestalt of the Aztecs said: this isn’t just an alien culture, and this doesn’t just include practices that I find unethical. There is something abominable here at the core.

I thought about that experience repeatedly when reading Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and now my old friend Alan Jacobs has an excellent rumination at his blog that homes in on why I was haunted by the Aztecs as I read. Douthat’s book makes the novel argument, for a serious Catholic, that it’s more important to start believing than what you start believing in. If that is the case, then is it really better to become a believing Aztec than a sideline-sitting skeptic?

I think I know how Douthat would respond to such a question. In fact, he mentions the Aztecs in his book, expressing a revulsion for their religion not dissimilar to my own. I think he would say that, because the supernatural world is real, it’s entirely possible that the Aztecs were, in fact, worshipping some true demonic power, that their religion might therefore have been both true and evil. As such, recognizing that reality would be a step toward a more comprehensive truth about the spiritual universe that surrounds and permeates the material one that we interact with every day.

No, I suspect Douthat would say, you shouldn’t become an Aztec; that’s why he has a whole chapter devoted to arguing that the major world religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, each of which has stood the test of time, expanded across space, and built major theological edifices—should be the places to start. As for the hypothetical skeptic dwelling in Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish conquest, I could imagine Douthat arguing that this skeptic would, in fact, be less prepared to receive the truth of Catholicism than a true believer in Huitzilopochtli, because Christianity’s own tale of human sacrifice and a resurrected god was ideal for turning Aztec religion inside out and converting its adherents.

That, I think, is where Jacobs balks. No, he would say, the skeptic who refuses to participate in an orgy of blood-letting is closer to the truth than the Aztec priest. The person who sees no entity worthy of that kind of worship, and so declines to worship at all, is closer to God than the person who never doubts the reality of the supernatural and therefore readily plunges in the knife.

As a matter of historical progression, I think my imagined Douthat might have a point. There are a lot of reasons why Catholicism conquered Mesoamerica, brute force being a crucial one, but the availability of myths ready to be transformed was undoubtedly also crucial. Yet as a matter of ethics and, well, belief, I have to stand with Jacobs. David St. Hubbins is wrong, and an eagerness to believe is more dangerous, to the world and to one’s own soul, than a healthy skepticism.

Jacobs’s larger point, though, is that he doubts the entire category of “religion,” largely on the grounds that Christianity wasn’t just tailor-made to invert Aztec religion but is an inversion of religion generally. The word Jacobs uses is “unnatural,” and I think it’s apt. Specifically, Jacobs avers, Christianity rejects the idea of religion as magic—a way of appeasing and propitiating the gods—that is religion’s natural tendency, even within Christianity. Jacobs is a believing Christian, but his argument here can’t help but remind me of Marcel Gauchet’s view that Christianity was a stage in the process of disenchantment. If a big part of what is essential about Christianity is its claim, “all the rest of you have got God entirely wrong,” then can you actually stop that process from devouring Christian belief itself? Or, alternatively, can you stop Christianity from reverting to the more magical conception of religion that (in Jacobs’ view) it fundamentally rejected?

Maybe you can. I’m not as firm in my belief as Jacobs is, nor, relatedly, are my boundaries as firm as his—I’ve written on this subject before. I carry my skepticism along with me when I go to shul and God comes with me when I leave it. If they haven’t managed to happily coexist, they’ve at least achieved some kind of dynamic equilibrium for now. But I don’t hold myself up as any kind of model for anyone else to follow.

That, though, just highlights how different my mode of being is from Douthat’s which feels, for all its apparent ecumenicism, very Catholic to me. Douthat spends the first three chapters of his book making the case for belief as such, the thing I wrestled with in a Jewish context in that earlier piece I linked to above. But Douthat isn’t wrestling; he’s making an argument. First, he presents the argument from design (a sophisticated version thereof rooted in the remarkably fine-tuned nature of the various constants of the universe for making life a possibility); next, the apparent privileging of consciousness in the very structure of the universe (marrying the hard problem of consciousness to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics); and, finally, the persistence of human experience of the supernatural (including both the widespread phenomenon of near-death experience and the more than occasional weird inexplicable event or encounter with some radical other). On the basis of these, he suggests that people take religion seriously and, having agreed to take it seriously, undertake to explore what it is that they believe, and where that means they belong among the panoply of the world’s religions.

I’m not fully in harmony with Douthat’s account in those three chapters. The likelihood or unlikelihood of the universe being hospitable to life is something we cannot possibly assess rationally without knowing the distribution; there may be deeper laws to the universe that explain why things must be the way they are that we have not yet discovered. And if we did discover them, that would only raise the question of what underlies those laws—it’s turtles all the way down, and if you choose to call the turtles God then that’s your right, but you’re doing something similar to Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel Escher Bach where he posits God as an infinitely regressing acronym: “God” means “God Over Djinn,” which in turn expands to “(God Over Djinn) Over Djinn” which in turn expands to “((God Over Djinn) Over Djinn) Over Djinn” etc. We can feel wonder and gratitude at the fact of existence—we may in fact feel it more deeply the more we understand the universe—but that feeling isn’t an argument. (I would argue it is something more important.)

Similarly, while I take the hard problem of consciousness seriously and find the spooky relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics highly suggestive, I don’t think that takes consciousness out of the realm of science. Perhaps Erwin Schrödinger was right that there is some kind of universal consciousness, but while you can call that God it doesn’t bear much relationship to the God of the Bible. Roger Penrose’s heretical speculations on the same subject go in a somewhat different direction, toward a reductionism that doesn’t wave away the weirdness of consciousness and quantum mechanics but properly systematizes it. I don’t know that he’s right—he’s certainly not working in the scientific mainstream—but he’s trying to do science, and if he turns out to be right he’ll have pushed the realm of mystery further into the remaining dark corners of our understanding. As for weird encounters, I’ve never had one, nor do I know anyone who has. But even if I were willing to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in materialist philosophies—and I readily admit that possibility—that doesn’t really tell me anything about what those things might be.

Bottom line: those first three chapters landed with me more as an invitation to continue to debate these undoubtedly fascinating questions than as a knock-down argument in favor of the existence of God. Structurally, they seemed to me a poor foundation for belief, and more like buttresses to keep the walls of faith from buckling under the gales of skepticism. Nonetheless, if I did what Douthat suggests and started from zero, then surveyed the world’s religions for compatibility with the universe as it seems to me to be, there is no way I would wind up believing in an Abrahamic faith. Buddhism and Hinduism are far easier to reconcile with a universe of virtual particles and multiple realities, not to mention with Darwin’s account of human origins, according to which predation is part of the mechanism of creation. They are also far easier to reconcile with the kind of ecumenicism that Douthat himself seems to evince, according to which all religious understandings have some truth to them, if not an equal measure thereof.

But I’m not starting from zero. I’m starting as a Jew. I accept that as a given without even thinking about it. When I wanted to become more religious, I wanted to become a more observant Jew, and since the time when my observance cracked and shattered, leaving me to make a life among the shards, I have never once seriously considered the possibility that some other religious tradition was “true” or had the “answer” that I once looked for in Judaism. I don’t even truly understand what that would feel like. If something in Buddhism seems true, or valuable, well then my job is to find a way of making sense of that within a Jewish context; ditto if something about Christianity seems true, or valuable. There are limits of course—if I came to believe that worshipping idols was efficacious, or that Judaism had been entirely superseded by Christianity, well, I don’t see how such beliefs could be made sense of in a Jewish context. But how likely is either to be the case, really? Who, on a quest of the kind Douthat suggests, would ever wind up there, unless a key imperative of their quest from the beginning was to resolve their need to leave the place where they began?

Douthat’s book wasn’t written for me, though, any more than it was written for a believing Aztec. It was, he expressly says, aimed at the kind of person who has no choice but to start from zero, someone either raised with nothing or with the conception of religion as a smorgasbord from which you are free to pick and choose from various plates whatever bites look tastiest. The whole book is, on some level, an expansion of Chesterton’s aphorism—“Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid”—and an invitation to both sorts of people to sit down and have a proper meal. As such, it doesn’t really matter whether I found his arguments unpersuasive or his framework faulty. It only matters whether people do in fact come to the table he has laid.

Myself, I’m skeptical. When my wife and I went looking for a shul, I had some clear ideas about the kind of place I was looking for. I wanted a Conservative synagogue that had a knowledgable laity that was active in services, which meant a core group of people who were quite observant, but also diversity in terms of level of observance. I wanted a place that was diverse socioeconomically and in terms of age as well; I didn’t want to join a “young families” minyan full of people like myself. And I wanted to go somewhere I could walk to. But what sealed the deal—quite quickly—for the shul we wound up joining and have stayed with for a quarter century is that, on our first day there, other congregants invited us to lunch. And, when the congregation found out that our new apartment’s kitchen still hadn’t been installed, we were deluged with invitations to Shabbat dinners and lunches. The way to our hearts was literally through our stomachs.

I think that’s a far more likely route in general than one that goes through the mind, and that far more people come to belief for reasons that lie beyond reason than because they’ve been reasoned into it.