Ross Douthat’s Tame God

Ed Simon considers the invitation from Ross Douthat to believe in a deity.

By Ed SimonMay 23, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

ON A PLACID Oxfordshire Sunday in September 1931, the philologist and fantasy novelist J. R. R. Tolkien converted his friend and colleague, the increasingly disillusioned agnostic C. S. Lewis, to Christianity by an unconventional intellectual appeal.

Lewis’s disbelief, so often a mirror image of its opposite, had become unsteady as of late, and his fervent Catholic friend saw an opportunity to effect a turn of the soul. The tweedy catechumen, who would go on to become the most influential author of apologetics in the 20th century, recounted the circumstances of this Damascus Road moment a month later. As he explained, his conversation with Tolkien began the night before, discussions about faith conducted over pints as usual, but this particular autumn they stayed up until dawn, strolling Addison’s Walk along the River Cherwell as the orange sun rose above the dreaming spires of Magdalen Tower. Before breakfast, the reticent pilgrim had begun to adopt the faith. Tolkien supposedly convinced Lewis of Christianity’s veracity through comparative mythology, recounting the numerous legends that concern pagan sacrificial gods before explaining that the “story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

As conversion experiences go, Lewis’s lacks the theophanic pyrotechnics of Saul being blinded by Christ’s light or the eeriness of Augustine in his mother’s garden, implored by unseen angelic voices to take up the Bible and read, but this very Oxford transformation of the soul is just as personal as those others—not to mention just as effective.

I must confess, I have never been much moved by Lewis’s story. To me, it has always felt as if Tolkien’s gambit could be reduced to “All of those other religions are fake, but mine happens to be the real one,” more a creedal statement than an argument. That’s irrelevant, however. For if Tolkien’s purpose was to bring Lewis to Christianity (albeit as a High Church Anglican rather than a Catholic), he was successful. Yet I suspect that Lewis was less convinced by Tolkien because of rational reasons than by subjective and maybe slightly mysterious ones, as is so often the case for genuine shifts in belief—an irrational, if not absurd, conversion that is later papered over with the respectability of reason. All as it should be.

Lewis was on my mind as I read the conservative New York Times columnist and Catholic convert Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, wherein he argues that “religious belief might be not only socially or psychologically desirable but also an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality and the destiny of humankind.” A true myth, in other words. Though Douthat doesn’t mention Lewis and Tolkien’s sojourn, his buttoned-down confessionalism wouldn’t have been out of place in 1931 Oxfordshire, and despite denying that he is writing apologetics, Douthat clearly imitates aspects of that genre, albeit writing for a generation much more poorly catechized than that of nearly a century ago.

While I’d never argue that apologetics is impossible in the contemporary moment, Douthat does seem confused regarding the exact audience for Believe, other than those who already agree with him. That doesn’t mean that some agnostic reader somewhere might not be swayed, though I suspect it would be less by the soundness of the book’s contents than by irrational, and thus more interesting, reasons. And so, by one of the only standards that matters in popular criticism—has a book achieved its goals on its own terms?—Believe has most assuredly failed. The most stunning faith manifested here is not in the triune God or the incarnation but rather in the belief that an author can somehow syllogistically argue their readers from doubt to piety when it comes to supplicating before the entirely foreign, alien, and sacred realm of the Other.

Maybe it’s apparent in my tone, but I’m not predisposed to agree with Douthat, in matters of religion for sure, much less politics. Yet I will concede that, unlike his New York Times colleagues, smarmy Bret Stephens and the frustratingly naive David Brooks, Douthat is capable of the unexpected insight. Unfortunately, being the most interesting columnist at The New York Times is a bit like being the best football player at Oberlin. If Douthat were less interesting, however, he’d be blessedly easier to ignore, because Believe isn’t an unserious book per se, and where the author makes genuine contributions, it’s worth giving credit.

The columnist is correct that modernity’s disenchantment has been grossly overstated, that religion remains among the most potent of forces for all of humanity, and that it often manifests itself among ostensibly secular domains, from liberal humanism to the new cults of techno-utopianism. Not unimportantly, Douthat is an engaging writer who crafts readable columns; indeed, he must be to keep up with the grueling prolificacy demanded by his day job. So, in Believe, he’s often excellent on subjects like supernaturalism, miracles, and especially consciousness.

Despite my criticisms, if a reader doesn’t become a Nicene Christian by the conclusion of Believe (which Douthat unconvincingly claims isn’t his goal), then at the very least an honest appraisal must admit that he does a good job of tackling stubborn and arrogant materialism.

That is what is ultimately so frustrating here. Despite writing that “there are more things in heaven and earth than can be measured and distilled by scientific materialism,” Douthat remains dogged by a positivist scientificity. As the actual religion of our current world, positivism valorizes the rational, the instrumental, and the utilitarian, and regardless of Douthat’s protestations, Believe is very much a product of that culture. Certainly, reason has long had a central place in Christian theology, from the Thomism of Douthat’s own church to the baroque syllogisms of Calvinism and liberal Protestantism’s empirical historicizing. Beyond that tradition, however, Douthat far too often argues within the strictures of scientific rationality that he critiques so effectively in the middle of the book.

In all fairness, Douthat condemns my favored theological predilections, what he describes as the treatment of “religious belief as desirable but nonrational—a leap into mystery, a rejection of evidence and empiricism,” but when he claims that that view “concedes far too much ground to skeptics,” he has it exactly backwards. Rather, this obstinate insistence that God is merely an issue of data, that there is something obvious or self-evident about God’s existence, is at best simpleminded and at worst disingenuous. “We have much better evidence for the proposition that the universe was made with human beings in mind, given our extraordinary success in discovery and interpretation,” writes Douthat, “than ancient or medieval peoples ever did.” This is, charitably put, a bizarre assertion.

Whether or not the wonders of science convince someone of theism, or if they’re even wonders in the first place, is between the scientist and their God, but an honest reading of nature itself doesn’t give up its divine secrets so easily. Douthat’s brief is basically an updated version of Reverend William Paley’s 18th-century watchmaker argument, which compares the intricacy of nature to the complex mechanism of a pocket watch, arguing that if we would understand the latter to be created by an engineer, then so too should we assume the same about the former. As such, he invests great significance in the various constants that define the parameters of the universe. Had the cosmological constant been a different value, or were the speed of light faster or slower, gravity stronger or weaker, quarks bigger or smaller, then it would have been impossible for life ultimately to evolve, and isn’t that proof enough for a designer? Douthat is offering nothing new here: whether intelligent design or the anthropic principle, such claims that the universe seems made for us are as spurious as they were in the 18th century when Voltaire sarcastically quipped that the Lord created noses to hold our glasses. Asking what would have opened had the fundamental texture of reality been different is like asking what we’d be like had our parents never met—there would be no asker to ask, and that would be that.

More importantly, Douthat never considers why an omnipotent God would ever be constrained by physics. Presumably, an all-powerful God doesn’t need to factor in the speed of light or the cosmological constant when allowing for the existence of life; if he were omnipotent, surely the speed of light could be 10 miles per hour and gravity nonexistent, and yet life would still endure if God wanted it to. The anthropic principle assumes that things must be organized according to certain parameters, but these standards strangely seem independent of God. The argument-from-design presumes a God that’s not radically different from us, but rather like us, only bigger. This seems a category mistake: making science perform what should be the job of faith.

Historically, it’s no surprise that Paley offered the earliest version of this argument during the Enlightenment, right when the Scientific Revolution threatened traditional belief. This resultant model that sees God as an engineer tinkering with this or that value of the physical cosmos (and Lord, help us if you’re an engineer) is merely another anemic deity of the gaps, at risk of constant challenge by this or that discovery. To argue against materialism but then consent to its framing, as Douthat has, is to have already lost the debate. Science simply doesn’t offer what Douthat claims it does. Though there may be little evidence of the Lord in the heat death of the universe or the ceaseless competition in brutal nature, if we seek what Barbara Ehrenreich called a “wild God,” we must look somewhere other than mere reason.

Data is data, but reality is something else entirely. I’m a committed disbeliever in this rationalist God—I’d rather be compelled to worship a wild deity. Rather than apologetics, we need meaning, transcendence, immanence; rather than the deity whom William Blake slurred as Mr. “Nobodaddy,” we’d do well to supplicate before Paul Tillich’s Ground of Being or the mystics’ holy nothing. There is no convincing somebody of this kind of force through bullet-pointed claims, no easy outline to faith. An experience of the ultimate doesn’t belong in the realm of mere facts, nor is it allegory or symbol, but rather an intimation of something for which we don’t have a word, indeed where words themselves fail. God is only three letters; whatever the Other is happens to be altogether more wondrous and inexplicable, a sacred mystery. To argue against reason could be seen as capitulating to pernicious relativism, but whether we like it or not, God isn’t found in the gaps but in a different place entirely. We aren’t sent to Sinai, Golgotha, or Mecca by way of a lawyer’s brief, but we find ourselves there sometimes, against all reason.

Despite his denigration of mystery, I suspect that at his most antinomian moments, Douthat might consider genuflecting before the wild God as well. At the risk of violating the reviewer’s commandment of suggesting that another book should have been penned instead, Believe does sometimes present the shimmering possibilities of what it could have been, nowhere more than in the final chapter, where Douthat recounts his and his family’s shift from Anglicanism to Pentecostalism and then, finally, to Catholicism. The autobiographical idiom remains his strongest, perhaps because he’s willing to abandon the prescriptivist recipes of the bulk of Believe.

Near the end, Douthat argues that the “choice between transcendence and immanence matters, but there is a sense in which all serious religion is trying to either discern the transcendent in the immanent, or else wrestle something that seems transcendent […] into something that we can hear or serve or understand.” Maybe the only real option, then, is to lose, to submit. Whatever stories we make up about why we believe, it’s ultimately not because of reason, but in spite of it—that’s belief’s beauty. That’s its strange and cracked truth.