In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat makes a powerful case for religious practice and belief — a case which, despite (or perhaps because of) its correctness, contains an internal tension rising almost to the level of self-contradiction[…]
Douthat’s first two chapters masterfully show that the world is an ordered creation, fine-tuned for our existence and arranged to be legible to us. The triumphs of science do not dethrone God, for the true God is not a “God of the gaps.” Rather, the more modern science scales the heights of astronomy and plumbs the depths of fundamental physical laws, the clearer it is that the universe is an exquisitely rational machine, bespeaking a Designer who not only calibrated it perfectly, but also clearly cares that we understand and appreciate His work. The universe’s rationality is evidence of God.
Douthat’s third chapter takes that beautiful, rational machine and blows it to smithereens. We read that actually, the world is not so amenable to reason. The world’s locomotion is caused, rather, by as many ghosts as gears, as many demons as drive-shafts. We live in a world where numinous experiences are exceedingly common, where strikingly similar near-death experiences are a human universal, and where even abductions by the faeries have never gone away (we just think of them as aliens now). Not only are these spooky truths attested in spite of modernity’s novel insistence that they are false, but Douthat holds up the lack of scientific explanation for these phenomena — healings with no medical explanation, for example — as proof of their (super)nature. And so — contra the first two chapters — we don’t live in such a Palace of Divine Rationality after all; we live in a haunted house. The God of the gaps returns with a vengeance; the universe’s irrationality is evidence of God.
Can rationality and irrationality both be evidence for the same case? Yes, if they
both point to the same third thing. And, in this case, they do[…]
Seth Chalmer 