Is It Rational to Believe in God?

[music] Well, I'm delighted to be here with Ross Douet. He's a regular columnist for the New York Times. Also, he's the host of the podcast Interesting Times. And speaking of Interesting Times, I just think Ross is one of the brightest and most interesting people writing today on culture, religion, politics. So, I want to talk to you for a long time. Also, he's the author of this new book, Believe, which we'll talk about quite a bit. I think a really good book of apologetics, fundamental theology. So, we have a lot to talk about. Thanks for being here. >> Thanks for having me. It's it's a pleasure. Those are very it's very flattering introduction. We'll see if I can live up to it. >> Let's see. We'll we'll test you for the next hour. I have every confidence. Um let me start with this. When I was a doctoral student in Paris many years ago, Bronsw was the president of France, right? The famous socialist left-leaning guy. He was asked one time about his religious faith. And I presume he was, you know, born and raised a Catholic. He said, "Well, you know, the ethics of Christianity are great." But then he said, "But la metaphysique, like, you know, no one takes the metaphysics seriously, the dogmas no one believes." And I thought of him when I read the beginning of your book where you, you know, there's the atheists, both old and new, that just say it's a bunch of nonsense. Uh, but then there's this kind of mediating position. Well, you know, no one believes the substance of it, but but it's a good framework to hang our ethics on or informs our our morals and you're unhappy with that. You're not satisfied with that. What I think really is a patronizing view toward religion. You do worry about lame physique. You do worry about the truth claim of religion. >> Yeah. I mean, one, it's worth worrying about, right? it seems like since it does touch on the most fundamental questions about you know life and death and who we are. I I think what you have in our culture now though is something that goes a little bit beyond um the miteran shrug, right? Where >> you have a number of people who sort of take the Mitron view but go one step further and say, >> well, it would be nice if >> if it were true, >> if metaphysique, right? It would be nice, but could one really believe that? Uh, and I think there are more of those people maybe in the 2020s uh than there were in the 2000s and 2010s. I think we've lived through a period of time where secularism has advanced where sort of, you know, the famous new atheists had a moment in the sun. And people especially in the United States but also in Western Europe I think feel very dissatisfied with where that's taken us. And so the then the question becomes for people who do believe in the metaphysique, right? We we can we can keep lapsing into French throughout this conversation. >> Um is whether you can take those people one step further, right? Whether you can take the opportunity and say, "Well, not only would it be nice if it were true, but there is in fact a pretty good argument that it is true after all." >> Yeah. You're surprised the new atheists faded as quickly as they have. I remember, you know, they were all the rage in the early zero, like right after September 11th, which is not an accident, it seems to me, you know, that September 11th revived the old enlightenment view that religion is irrational, therefore violent. And uh I remember talking to a young physician here at the Mayo Clinic, and he was a a high school student in Ireland right when all this was all the rage. And he said, "Dawkins and Hitchens, they swept through our high school, Catholic high school classrooms. We all believe them." >> But now they've really faded. Uh are you surprised by that how quickly it went? I mean, I think the new atheists deserve a lot of credit for making some pretty concrete predictions about the world. Like, you know, I'm in the punditry business and there's always a temptation to sort of hedge and be vague and say, you know, on the one hand, on the other hand, and Hitchens, Dawkins, you know, they just came out and straightforwardly said, >> you know, the less religion, the better the world will be, right? get rid of the bronze age superstitions and the sky god and the flying spaghetti monster and the world will become more enlightened and rational and scientific and so on. And if you're looking for a story about their fade, I think you just have to say that >> 10 or 15 years of a further retreat from religion has yielded basically the opposite of what they predicted. Nobody looks around at [snorts] US politics today and says, "Ah, as we got less religious, we became less polarized, more trusting of medical and scientific authority." Um, so >> in that sense, I think that they were >> victims of their own willingness to sort of push their chips in, right, and say, >> you know, leave God behind and the world will become a better place. Because then if you get the world we live in, people will naturally look around and say, "Well, even, you know, even if there's no God, >> that style, that that claim, that promise didn't work out terribly well, >> right?" >> And and not I mean, there to be fair, there's still plenty of people >> who I mean, I I have had these debates, you've had these debates, who hold >> effectively new atheist perspectives on the world. It just doesn't have the cultural currency that it did in that kind of post 911 moment. >> Yeah. A couple things that it kind of intrigued me still about the new atheists. One is I mean how poorly informed they were about sophisticated approaches to religion. So dealing with straw men all the time and they betrayed very little sense of what serious theists believe about God. That there's a a philosophically, you know, coherent account of God that rarely figured in. But the second thing that that still surprises and kind of infuriates me how bad we were. I mean religious people at dealing with them. The only the great exception is William Lane Craig you know the the Protestant philosopher who was using a lot of the Catholic intellectual tradition. But when I watched those debates between like Hitchens and somebody else or Dawkins, the pathetic performance of the religious people and this, you know, confirms my view that we had dumbed down the faith for so long that we lost our own ability to defend ourselves against relatively superficial uh metaphysical positions. >> Yeah. I mean, it seemed like you couldn't, you know, turn on public television for a while without seeing Dawkins or Hitchens having their way with some, >> I would say, halfless well-meaning bishop, but that would be the right but yeah, but I I think I think part of it was that there >> there was a kind of cultural equilibrium before that moment that was a little bit like the the Mitand line, right, where >> people who had ceased to believe or practice the faith or practice a faith would would say things like the French president that you know religion is good as far as it goes but I don't believe in the miracles or the dogma and religious people had gotten used to arguing in that landscape and so to have people come along and say no it's all rotten you know god is not great how religion poisons everything to sort of take the fight more seriously in the old 18th century enlightenment ecclazam voltarian style yes I think absolutely um religious leaders and sort of believers weren't prepared for that. I think the internet also played a role here that you had >> a kind of you mentioned the you know the the new atheist going through a a Catholic high school or something like a like a whirlwind you know if you were running if you were doing religious education or running a church youth group or these kind of things before the internet I think you got kind of used to having a quasi captive audience right you've got these kids and you're the religious authority and obviously they have other authorities but the other temptations are sort of moral temptations ations, you know, drinking and sex and drugs and so on. The idea of these teenagers suddenly being able to go on the internet and be exposed to someone in a charming British accent explaining why, you know, their youth pastor is full of it. I think that was something that the churches had no inoculation. pathetic that was that that our even our youth pastors or high school teachers weren't able to make a fundamental case along the lines of a CS Lewis or along the lines that I mean you're proposing in your book too that we couldn't engage in that kind of fundamental apologetics that is a tragedy I live through that time I live through dumb down Catholicism and I think the new atheist period proved in a way what a disaster that was pastorally speaking not just intellectually but pastorally we we lost a lot of young people because our inability to engage their minds. When you read the accounts of why people left, I'm always uh struck by we didn't get our questions answered. Yeah. Science refutes religion, religion is stupid, bronze age, they'll use all the Hitchens language, but that's a failure on our part too on the part of religious uh leadership. >> Yeah. And I I think you had certainly you had patterns of sort of treating people with questions as problems, right? It's like, you know, and again, these are stereotypes and you don't want to lean too much into the stereotypes, but the idea of the troublesome kid in, you know, in religious education who asks too many questions and so on is it's a cliche, right, for for a reason because it does exist. And >> uh yeah, being ready with actual responses to that when you suddenly have a multiplication of the number of people with those questions is something that you absolutely needed and didn't have. I mean my one I think one theory I have is just that you know in a weird way institutions sometimes have to decline to some particular degree before they can start to recover. Right? You know mid-century American Catholicism was an incredibly powerful force in American culture that then entered into a period of chaos in the 1970s and then a period of decline. And it's it's not clear to me that you could sort of get new vitality without having a certain degree of um >> turnover and and indeed loss. I mean I you know >> sometime when you write a book people always ask why why now right why write a book like this now? >> And I'm not completely sure because in certain ways almost none of the arguments that I make in the book couldn't have been made 15 years ago or something. But as a writer, you're trying to read the culture, right? You're trying to say, you know, when are people ready to hear a particular argument? And I think there is a way in which a period of religious decline actually clears away a lot of sort of misconceptions, bad ideas, failed strategies, and also lets people approach things new. I I think one of the novel things about our era is that you really have a large population of people in the United States, maybe for the first time in our history, who have almost no exposure to religion at all. Right? And that's bad in many ways, but it also means that they aren't carrying some sense that like, oh, I already heard all that >> in Sunday school or catechism class. They're much there are people who have more openness who are like well I haven't heard about this at all this is interesting tell me about it. What that's a good segue way to know your your approach uh to I'd call it apologetics or fundamental theology how to make a case you know for God yours it's a cousin to Aquinus's sort of teological thing but it's more contemporary because it seems to me you rely on intelligibility that there's something remarkably intelligible about the world Yseph Ratzinger makes that very succinct argument you know that the universal intelligibility of the world upon upon which all of science rests. You can't do science unless you assume the world's intelligible. That universal intelligibility can only be explained through recourse to some intelligence that has thought it into being. You bring it out with a greater um scientific precision. And it strikes me as a hopeful way to do it for a lot of people for whom science is the great thing. Science is the ultimate. And you're saying, well, yeah, but what are the conditions for the possibility of science? Isn't it something like an ordered universe that would point towards something like someone who's thought it into being? Uh I mean it strikes me as a as a a hopeful way to go about it. >> Yeah. I mean, and I'm I'm I'm a journalist, not a philosopher, not a scientist either, but I am very self-consciously, I think, trying to make arguments that are one degree sort of closer to the ordinary flow of conversation than the most philosophically sophisticated case for God. Because while I agree with you that the new atheists, you know, their arguments were simplistic and reductive relative to the highest level case for God, at the same time, if God is real and if, as the Catholic Church teaches, certain things about God can be known through reason alone, then they should be intelligible to people who aren't going to um, you know, crack crack open the Suma Theologica, right? And I and I think that the the argument that what science has revealed about the world does not not only doesn't undermine the argument that there probably is some kind of creative guiding intelligence but actually strengthens that argument is I think a good >> one I think it's true. Two, I think it's a good counter to the the casual assumption that like well with every step of scientific progress, we must move naturally further away from religious obscurism and doctrine. And you know there are areas where scientific discoveries and arguments pose real challenges for religious faith. And you know the debate about Darwinism and evolution was a sort of you know turbulent argument a challenging argument for Christianity um and for biblical religion generally for a reason. I wouldn't deny that. But I think if you look at the last really the last hundred years but especially maybe the last 40 or 50 years of >> what we've learned about not just the intelligibility of the cosmos but the extent to which it has to it is s --- Jew writes the article called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. What struck him after a whole career of doing high abstract theoretical physics? Huh? Why should it be the case that I have to use the highest mathematics to describe the structure of reality? Why should that be the case? He never he's not religious. He doesn't talk about God, but he talks about the miracle of this, the odd, the strangeness of it. >> And it touches too on your your question about consciousness. It's like what is it about the correspondence between our minds and the the mathematical structure of reality that's not just here by some kind of dumb chance or random set of circumstances. Right. >> Right. It's it's very easy to just as it's easy to imagine universes it turns out where um the basic laws and constants never allow for life to get off the ground. Uh it turns out that the odds of this kind of universe as opposed to a dead universe are you know one in a quadrillion one in a quadrillion quadrillion like absurd absurd probabilities. No I think the same is true for >> both consciousness itself the mystery of self-awareness and the ability to seemingly stand outside the world a bit and reason about it. It's very easy to imagine, you know, all kinds of cosmoses that have some kind of life and have no consciousness, right? So, it's strange that we got one with consciousness. The fact that we did seems like again a point for religion. And then yes, the fact that consciousness, conscious reason works and there are all of these correspondences between, you know, figuring out how mathematics works and then figuring out that you can use this to unlock the physical secrets of reality. And this is something, you know, I've argued this back and forth with people. For some people, it just seems intuitive. They're like, "Well, of course, if you evolve some kind of reasoning faculty to let you dodge predators in the Serengeti, it certainly it just makes sense that that reasoning faculty would scale up to all these other problems and hopelessly. I >> I don't I don't think that's right at all. I think even even if you stipulate that some kind of some kind of reason is useful for primordial survival, there's no reason you should expect that capacity to also let you figure out the fundamental laws of physics, especially, you know, when you're into totally mysterious territory like quantum physics, right? There are all kinds of things that we've been able to do with our reason that I don't think you could reasonably predict given you know accidental accidentally evolved premises. >> Quite right. I there's there's the philosophical contient argument that you know no these are just op priori already in the mind so of course we read them into reality but that just begs the question but where where did this internal intelligibility come from? Where did this highly complex mind come from? So it just kind of postpones that question. Um, Aquinus defines truth as adequatio ray and intellectus. So the we say the correspondence between mind and reality. But adequatio is an interesting word like the sort of coming together of mind and reality. And I thought of that when I was reading your book uh the intelligibility of the world but then also this extraordinary capacity of the mind to enter into that intelligibility and to grasp it. Again, the unlikeliness of that in a purely random physicalistic universe. >> Well, and and also to get even weirder and more speculative, right? The apparent capacity of mind, consciousness, observation to actually shape reality itself, right? And and this is where, >> you know, you don't want to lean too hard on this argument because >> quantum physics is there's an inherent mystery there. There's an inherent spookiness. um that you know could yield to multiple interpretations. But at the very least it is quite striking that one of the simplest explanations of certain aspects of quantum reality is that conscious observation is necessary to turn contingency into reality. Which in turn is of course a version of what theists have been saying all along. when we suggest that consciousness is what sustains the universe in being at any given moment that you actually can't have reality itself without mind as a primary thing. I I again if you had said in 1840 that at the bottom of physics as far down as we could go you will find some sort of strange interaction between mind and matter that suggests that mind has some primary role. Yeah, >> the sort of materialist atheistic perspective would have been to scoff and yet that is what we have in contemporary scientific theory. >> And it's Bishop Barkley that goes way back SAS Pchipi to be is to be perceived and so Barkley speculates indeed God is the one that's always perceived in the universe. How that old philosophical theory is being ratified by the most contemporary theoretical physics is kind of fascinating to me. Uh Rottzinger said to believe in God is to believe in the primacy of logos over and against mere matter. It's a succinct neat way to put it I think. Yes. >> See when you say mere matter the problem philosophically is there's no such thing as mere matter. Matter is always at a particular intensity or speed or color or position or configuration. Right? You say matter and energy is the fundamental reality. It can't be because you say well matter in this form. Well why this form and not that form at this speed? Well, why that speed and not some other speed at this heat? Why that heat, not some other heat? In other words, matter always begs the question why. So, you can't say matter is the fundamental reality. You've got to say something that transcends matter. So, the primacy of logos over and against mere matter is what it means to believe in God. And I think you're you're pointing in the direction of that uh intuition. No, I I in crudder and non-ranserian terms, I've tried to make that >> case in arguments with non-believers who are sort of open to these kind of speculations. I I feel like in having conversations about this subject, you often encounter >> people who will sort of go a little distance with you who will say, "Well, that's, you know, that's interesting about the fine-tuning of the cosmos or you know the but um but why do you have to call it God, right?" Uh and so sometimes I just you just sort of start by saying, "Well, let's just talk about mind and matter, right? And these are the two things we have access to in in our in our lives. We have access to our conscious experience of the world. What it is like to have consciousness. That is in a way an undeniable the undeniable fact of human experience. Even though people like Daniel Dennett are there to deny it, right? You people do deny it. But do you have that and then you have material reality that you encounter through your conscious experience. And just at that starting point, there doesn't seem to be any necessary reason why you should say, well, we should prefer to say >> that the thing we experience secondarily is the primary thing in the universe and the thing we experience directly undeniably is the secondary thing. I I don't um and then once you have conceded that possibility, I don't see why you wouldn't lift up from that to say, well, if mind is primary and our minds are one manifestation of mind, presumably there are higher manifestations than our own. I just taped a podcast with um actually one of the new atheists, I guess, Sam Harris. Yeah. >> Who's a very interesting figure because he's very into meditation. He wants something some >> very interested in ideas about mind and you >> I think he and I could achieve not agreement but some sort of common ground in talking about like >> you know direct experience is undeniable mind is some perhaps some essential aspect of the universe but then he's hung up on you know the idea that that if there were a god he could manifest himself through scriptures from 2,000 years ago that seemed to Sam Harris's 21st century mind to be antiquated and so on. Right? Like everyone everyone has a different point where they they want to sort of stop stop the train. >> Right. So >> right you know as I was reading your book on these these issues I kept thinking of this metaphor it's helpful to me. God is like the author of a book. Uh so you think of a great novel like a Tolken or something you know sprawling >> hypothetically Tolken >> a sprawling narrative and uh Tolken's mind is in every nook and cranny of that book every comma every period every subplot every character everything is shaped by Tolkien's mind but the one thing you'll never find in the book is Tolken Tolken is not a character in the novel I think atheists both old and new always make that category error I'm looking around the physical univer iverse for evidence of God or I'm looking for God. Where is he? You know, uh what's the fame of the cosminaut? You know, goes up into outer space. I've been up in the heavens. There's no God. There's >> no God, comrade. >> It's a category mistake that that God is in fact everywhere in the universe. His his mind, not just from a deist, but I mean is now actively thinking the world into being. So God can be seen everywhere, but God is not in the universe that he's made, not an item in it. And that's the the mistake I think a lot of the atheists have made both old and new. >> No. Well, they want I just not to cross the podcast streams, but Harris said to me something to the effect of, well, I would believe in God if he had just encoded the laws of written down the laws of physics in the New Testament, right? If it it was like, you know, just give me the strongest possible indicator that someone is writing this story, right? And for and for Harris that would be yeah something you know Jesus says blessed are the meek and by the way you won't understand this for 2,000 years but E= MC² and I mean I I do think I I said this to him and I've said like it it is the case that in taking this authoral role God allows for people not to believe in him right like the the system is I mean I I'm sure you find this as an apologist for Christianity It would be easier to be an apologist for Christianity if we, you know, snapped our fingers in the course of an argument and someone levitated behind us on on command. And God could have designed, he could have written the story that way. Uh, and so there is some there is some >> mystery here or some aspect of God's plan where it is important for people to live inside the story without acknowledging the author. that that the allowance for that is clearly part of the universe that we have. >> Um but yes, the story I I I like that argument as a writer. Of course you you know every everyone imagines God as the highest possible version of the thing they do. The computer engineer is like you know God is God is the engineer. The writer is like God is you know God is a storyteller. Um, but I I found that useful too for arguing about the the question of that people also raise like all right there might be a god but how could this god possibly care about every single person right you get a lot of people who will say I'm it's immodest to imagine that the author of the universe cares that much about what you >> slaying over the death of one of his characters >> right and that's no that's that if if Tolken or Dickens or any other novelist >> can care you know in a limited way. There's only so many characters you can create. But Dickens cares about all his characters. That's that's >> utterly responsible for every one of them in every detail. See, that's why I like the the metaphor because it touches upon providence. And Aquaintus says God's providence extends to particulars. We think in a devious way about maybe at high high levels, God is providential, but that's not the way a novelist. His providence extends to every particular in the story, right? Uh no, I think that's very illuminating. it it uh it it handles a lot of problems within theology that that image. All right, we've been talking about philosophy which I love. That's my background. I love philosophical approaches and they appeal to uh a lot of people and especially scientifically minded people I think might find this approach, you know, illuminating. But I also love the part of your book where you talk about the spookier side of religion. And now I I speak here. I'm I've been a philosophy professor and theology professor, but I've also been a pastor. I've been a priest for 40 years. Worked in parishes. I find the kind of stories you told there about what will we say experiences of of a higher world that break into our world once you scratch the surface they come roaring out. Uh a lot of people have these experiences. I remember Andrew Greley who was my Chicago priest colleague many years ago. He said we're a nation of mystics because he uncovered that too in his statistical research. Um and I found it pastorally especially like like near-death experience. If you start talking about near death, suddenly the whole room, oh, everyone's got a story about it. >> I love the story about the um the German radio that sprang to life. Tell that if you can, like a brief compass because I thought it was a >> So, so this is this is a story that I take from Michael Shurmer who is of course a noted atheist, skeptic of religion, critic of religion, uh who I I have actually debated. Um, and to his great credit, he had a spooky thing happen to him and his and his fianceé, his new wife, uh, when they were married. His she had a radio that had been a gift from an older relative who had passed away from Germany. Um, who had been the kind of person who would have given her away at the wedding had he been alive. She was getting married in a foreign country in California. To her, a foreign country. um was feeling lonely, was with her husband's friends, and this radio was broken. >> Yeah. >> Shurmer had never been able to get it to work. Batteries, no batteries, it didn't matter. Totally dead. And on the day of the wedding, it just starts playing from the back of the house. And he can't figure out where the music is coming from. >> iPhone. >> I mean, I always feel bad. This is Shurmer's story, right? I'm I'm I'm stealing it --- se experiences than hard-headed Swedes or, you know, the secular Dutch. I I don't know about that. But there probably is some connection between how mystically inclined you are and what what happens. But nonetheless, you don't have to have a religious culture for religious experience to keep on breaking in. People have near-death experiences when they have absolutely no expectation of seeing anything, you know, beyond beyond the grave. People have encounters of what we would call the Holy Spirit when they're, you know, kind not in any place where they're expecting it or believing believing in it. And this is one just a sociological level. This is an important key to religion's resilience. Yeah. You know, it's like why doesn't religion go away? Everyone the sociologists have all their theories about the utility of religion. Some of those are >> useful. But one big reason religion doesn't go away is that people keep having experiences that seem to be God, angels, demon, I mean demons, right? People Someone, actually a couple people have said to me that in this moment we're in now where people are interested in religion but have less experience of it. that they as pastors have way more people coming to them than previously saying, "I'm here because I had a scary experience of something supernatural and I didn't know what to do with it." Right? Um and that whereas 15 or 20 years ago that would that would happen happen less. So it seems like you remove the structures of religion and people are sort of wandering a bit in the dark and sort of searching and groping and sometimes having good experiences, sometimes having darker ones maybe than they would have in a more formally religious culture. And of course that's, you know, one reason I'm interested in this stuff is that one reason that I am a practicing Catholic today is that I sort of tagged along with my parents as a child when they went from a very straightlaced Episcopalian world into the world of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. So I grew up as someone I didn't have these experiences. I was, you know, I was I was around people I was around people speaking in tongues. >> Yeah. sort of supernatural healings and >> there are people who are in those worlds who decide it's all fake. >> I had the opposite experience. I >> again was not a wash in mystical experiences myself. But I was always quite confident that something real was happening around me. But who knows what the correct theological interpretation was. But it was an aspect of reality that we were seeing that maybe the average, you know, average secular liberal person, you know, at an elite college that I ended up going to, whatever, had not had not encountered. But you had to fit it into your world picture. No world picture could be complete. No explanation of reality could be complete without a deep explanation of what this phenomena >> phenomena phenomena phenomenon is. And the secular accounts are just, you know, they feel like, you know, sort of sketches when you're trying to capture a painting. >> There's such a dogmatism about it. I'll tell you a story. When I was in California, I went to this party and there were some prominent people there, you know, and I went with my Rome color and uh I'm just introducing myself and I this lady came up to me and I said, "I'm I'm a Catholic bishop." And she goes, "Well, I'm a I'm a visionary and a seer." And I said, "Uh, oh, really?" And she said, "Uh, yeah." and a lot of Catholic saints uh talked to me. I said, "Oh, really? Which which ones?" And she said, "Uh, well, St. Bruno came." And that struck me like, "St. Bruno." I said, "Brun the Carthusian." She said, "I guess." [laughter] But it's sort of surreal California moment, you know, where But I, you know, as a Catholic bishop, I'm not going to say, "Oh, that's so much nonsense, you know." But you know what I did say to her? And it's kind of to your point. I said, "Well, our perspective would be, yeah, there is a higher world and sometimes there are communications, but I'd be a little wary because not everything coming out of that channel is good." And she looked at me kind of blankly, you know, but I think that's the right attitude toward it. There there are as in our ordinary experience, dark and light. So, in that higher spiritual world, there's both dark and light. Um, but the people experience it for sure, it seems to me. >> Yeah. I mean, right, the whole all of Californian spirituality, I think, tends to be premised on the idea that >> if you just sort of go wandering, >> you will probably encounter an angel of light. And of course, there's some warnings in the New Testament, right, about about things that appear to be angels of light. And not everyone people have dark spiritual experiences but they also in kind of mystical experimentation I think have experiences that appear to be positive initially and maybe turn out to be less positive later on. But there is one of my other theories about this moment is that there are yeah there are a lot of people who are open to religion can't get all the way to the idea of a singular creator god or a triune creator god to you know get even get even wilder right >> um but are in the kind of religious mode of looking for intermediate powers right like the void it's like oh I don't know if I believe I don't know what the woman you talked to would have said but I can imagine someone saying I don't know what I think about god But I'm open to hearing from a saint. But that same person might be open to hearing from an angel, a ghost, a small G god, and so on. And there's >> there's a lot of that energy, I think, in the culture that also spills over into how people approach AI, how people think about UFOs that like there's a yeah, there's a desire for a kind of middleman between Ultimate Divinity and and us. easier to cope with maybe you know >> well and you can I mean look this is the most ancient rel human human religious practice maybe you can bargain right like people you know there's a kind of transactional spirit that of course again is um a zone of danger from a Catholic perspective >> yeah I did my darful work on Paul Tillic in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas and Tillic fascinating figure you know but he said one time modern people don't believe in miracles and someone said yeah But look at all the people that go to you know Guadalupe and Lur and he said those are not modern people [laughter] which is a lovely tautological way to handle the problem but um that's such a dogmatic reductionism isn't it you know that uh this is part of of our experience I love the fact that you mentioned Craig Kenir uh in his book on miracles >> oh yeah I knew the attempt to catalog >> yeah I knew him as a Bible scholar very high level serious Bible scholar and then So I'd read a number of his books. Then this book, it's two volumes. It's about this big. >> Yeah. >> And it account after account after account from modern times, from our time about things that are really hard to explain. Um and I've recommended that book to a lot of people who are stuck in a sort of rationalism like make sense of this. Yeah, it well it is the kind of thing that you would expect to find in a world >> created by an agent agency that is interested in a relationship with >> whose province and in a world >> that didn't have such a god you would expect you know still some some sort of law of large numbers random happenings but I would say many fewer correspondences between people reaching out and asking for help and having just some of the craziest things happen. And you get I mean one of I think this is where the internet we were talking earlier about how it was an engine of secularism uh you know when it unleashed you know Christopher Hitchens on the unexpected unsuspecting Christian youth groups but it's also an agent of re-enchantment in its own way in part because >> you can I mean you can go online and in fact you know you don't want to overweight any particular case but see you know there's there's an there's audio of um I think it's an evangelical pastor who had a terrible throat condition and he's giving a sermon. He he he had lost his ministry because he couldn't preach anymore because he lost his voice. He sps incredibly horsely and um he's giving he's pressed into service and he's giving a sermon and it's literally a sermon about miracles and why you have to have a balance between you can't expect a miracle but you also can't say they ended with the apostles in the course of this sermon his voice returns to him >> um and you know again could there be some crazy physiological explanation you know of course in any case like that you can say There might be, but the internet has has multiplied the ability of people to encounter the proliferation of strange happenings out there. And through that then you're still, you know, in the end you also you're you're still thrown back a bit on the question of why do some people get them and not others, right? It's the same again the same sort of allowance for unbelief is present in the miracles are not there to fix everything. That's very very clear, right? They're there as signs and indicators and sources of help. But certainly it's true not everybody gets them >> because they wouldn't be miracles if everybody got them. We wouldn't wonder at them if everyone got they become a commonplace part of the world. So in a way that argument is self-defeating. You know to be a miracle it has to be rare. >> That's true. But but you do have, you know, I've I've been fascinated by um Carlos Ay's book on levitating saints. They flew. >> They flew. Yes. >> Right. So it was a good point. >> It's a really good, you know, he's a Yale historian and it's about >> faintly levitation in the 17th in the 17th century. Um and it's a great book to read because he is a very serious academic and it takes you a while reading this serious historical book to realize that well he thinks this really happened, right? he and he thinks sort of you can be a historian and think this think this happened. Um, but you know, I I would someone might reasonably say, and people have said, well, why are these lev saints levitating back in the 1600s? Can't we get one on video today? And I would, you know, I would take a I would take a levitating saint. Sure. >> Right. Right. Now, as a as a mode of apologetics, of course, as soon as you had one, everyone would say it was an AI deep fake, right? So, you know, >> there's always room for doubt and dis. was reading that book and then I went on a retreat at a Benedict and monastery >> and you levitated. >> No, that would they were reading that book at at a table. [laughter] So I sit down for dinner. Okay, God wants to tell me something here. >> Well, one I mean one of the arguments I think he makes right is that you know we just actually don't literally don't have an adequate level of religious devotion to generate to generate the levitation. So maybe the Benedictines were working their way to that level. >> They were getting there. Hey, let's we've been talking about sort of like religion generically, God in the more abstract way, but now we have to get over Lesing's gulf. You know, God holding 18th century says there's great gulf that yawns between the what he called the contingent facts of history and the universal truths of reason. Yes. And most moderns Kant Hegel Slyer, they're all lamenting over Les Gulf. You know, Kant gets over it by just saying, "I don't care about the contingent facts of history. Jesus is an archetype of the perfect moral life and that's how he functions and so don't worry so much about the historical Jesus and all that >> but when I listen to uh my friend Jordan Peterson sometimes he reminds me of Kant you know that that Jesus becoming more like a psychological archetype >> so that's a unionian figure >> yeah and that's a way to handle it so you say well I'm not going to worry about that but of course Christianity can't do that and uh we're very concerned about the contingent facts of history Because at the heart of the religion is not just an abstract belief in God as the great mind behind universal intelligibility but this Jesus this Jesus first century Jew who said and did rather remarkable things the claim is made that he rose from the dead physically. So my my say many many people are saying >> true story you know uh so we we can't u jump over leings Gulf. I mean we have to deal with the contingent facts of history. So now the transition to uh Christian belief specifically um make a case. So we've we've talked about God. Make a case in in short compass. Why Christian belief? >> Well, this is this is in a way another case I think where it's useful to have a period of kind of deconstruction >> so you can see the thing again for the first time. So if you present you know in a fully Christian culture with a hierarchical established powerful church and so on right you have the gospel narratives presented as you know their divine revelation the pristine word of god and so on but then you know you you get critics and skeptics who come along and say well they're the pristine word of god um But historically, Luke seems to have the wrong Roman governor identified in the infancy narrative. Or John has the clearing of the temple at this point in the timeline and another gospel writer has it at the synoptic gospels have it at another point and there's this tension, this contradiction and so on, right? Um and I think that we have sort of reached the end of a kind of academic intellectual process of that kind of deconstruction that has you know interacted with the decline of religious power and religious institutions and at the end point you can sit down with the gospels and sort of come to them fresh and say okay I'm not sure if these are divinely inspired right maybe maybe there is you know attention here or you know the synoptics are saying this and and John John is saying that. Um, but how do they seem like if you were just presented, you're presented with them fresh. You don't don't have any preconceptions. >> Don't they seem like works of first person narrative by people who actually saw the things themselves? And when you actually dig deeper into the places where they --- re spirit of historical inquiry and as a sort of sincere and somewhat naive reader, you will find them to be the most compelling account of a profound religious breaking into reality available among the great religions of the I can't prove that to you but that but I I think >> I that is certainly my personal response to them and I think it is the reasonable response and what that means in turn from my perspective is that therefore they become like if you're if you're a person in the world you're a character in the story right to go back and but you're trying to figure out what is the author up to >> right and you're like okay You know, it's a weird place to be. You're inside a story and you're trying to, you know, figure out what kind of story you're in and what, you know, what you're supposed to do in this story. You are looking for moments of strong authoral intervention, >> right? Where it's like the author, the pen seems to push particularly hard, right? The author >> maybe has entered the story. That's the radical claim, but at the very least is, you know, is sort of doing something with the story that you as a character in it need to pay attention to. I just think that um the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the story of his life and death and the claim of his resurrection is um unrivaled as an example of that. And so if you are sort of approaching religion as a category and trying to do a certain kind of rational analysis of like is there probably a god and so on, >> it then makes sense to treat the New Testament as a kind of interpretive framework where you say okay there's a lot of conclusions I could draw from the run of mystical experiences. But if I start out with the idea that um you know that the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth is the key revelation, then that will determine how I read this piece of evidence and how I read that piece of evidence. So that's my I'm not going to say it's exactly my approach, but it's it's it's at least one way that I >> think about these questions. you cite Lewis and everything and and CS Lewis who said people that think the gospels are mythic just haven't read many myths and Lewis knew a lot about myths and I always think of that when around Easter time we read from Acts 10 and it's that speech of Peter and he says um you know how things started up there in in Galilee and then the baptism by John and the Jordan and then you know things in Jerusalem about Jesus of Nazareth and how our our um you know the the elders persecuted him and like he he's not saying once upon a time, right? It's not a it's not a it's the way you'd say, "Yeah, you remember when you were in Minneapolis and then you came down to Rochester? Remember that?" Right away, what you're signaling is I'm telling you a story about something that happened, you know? And then when Peter says, I always find it breathtaking. We who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead. I'm not in a galaxy far far away or once upon a time. He just >> not having a mythical dream. He just told me about Galilee and about the Jordan and John. Yeah. Yeah, I know that. Well, and and we ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. >> There's something deeply weird going on in that in that telling. >> And it's and it's so clearly Peter himself. I mean, this is this is one of on the kind of biblical scholarship point, right? You're never going to prove 100% that the Gospel of Mark was the memories of Peter filtered through St. Mark. not going to I mean may maybe we'll find some scroll or manuscript that proves it but pending that it has to be a supposition but it's a really strong supposition like if you read Mark and you're reading sort of the way that Peter appears in Mark in particular and the phrases I you know the the different things the specific like when a story is repeated in a later in a synop in one of the other gospels that's also in Mark there's this particular flavor in many cases where you're like oh that sounds like how Peter would have told the story >> and if he was Peter's Emanuencus, he was Peter's companion, >> right? And it's just and and this is I think true generally that the gospels again if you approach them naively without too much baggage. They just make much more sense as >> either direct or you know one writer removed accounts of things that people >> really experienced which again doesn't prove the resurrection but makes it something that you have to reckon with in a way that is distinct from >> um you know a a lot of other religious texts and accounts where there is more of a kind of mythic filter more you know more layers of history between the sacred text and the thing itself. Just the fact that you would set up your religion on the basis of, you know, four different guys telling the story is is kind of an amazing an amazing thing, >> you know. So, we've talked about belief in God. We've now narrowed it down to Christianity, but let's get into Catholicism. So, am I getting this right? I I like the um distinction you make between a like an ethical approach to religion, a more experiential, and a more lurggical. and all three of those and it's a bit like like Newman, priest, prophet and king the different dimensions of ecclesial life and that you find all three of those in Catholicism that they come together and I found that too see when I was growing up go back to the 70s and 80s there was a real contean reductionism >> uh most people would have said something >> they wouldn't have called it that >> no but but they would have said you know it doesn't really matter that much what you believe what's really matters is do you care for the poor and are you for social justice well that was a popular Um, Catholicism at its best has always said yes, yes, yes. You know, Rozinger, in fact, I've always loved this, said the church does three things. It worships God, it evangelizes, and it serves the poor. Those three. And each one implies the other. They all belong together. If you isolate one, the thing is not going to work. That to me is very illuminating. And it it reminded me of your distinction there. And that part of the genius of Catholicism in particular is how it holds those three things together >> at its best. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I think you know it's it's interesting for me as someone who moved through um moved through Protestant worlds and ended up as a Catholic that I think I was very fortunate in >> the part of Catholicism we ended up in um which was not traditionalist not Latin mass but sort of very very lurggical sort of serious in that serious and intense in that way um in in a way that was actually sort of correlated with the kind of mysticism that was available in Pentecostal and charismatic traditions but in >> in a form that had more emphasis on form and beauty and and these kinds of things >> but you know you will meet and I I have known people who are raised Catholic um who just don't find anything that seems like the direct experience of God right and this is you know one one of the main sort of pathways out of Catholicism into uh evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is this sense of like well you know I have my suburban Catholic parish and you know we sort of go through the motions but we never we never you know have the encounter right and it's it's a very it's a big challenge for I think it's not it's not really about liberal or conservative but there is a suburban style of American Catholicism that sort of ended up in like this, you know, neither fish nor foul position >> where it's not as sort of personal and intense as megaurch Protestantism and so on, but it also doesn't have a sense of sort of its own traditions or or anything like that. and how you how you regground that kind of Catholicism in something that is actually competitive with the availability of God in some Protestant churches is a really big question. Then you also have I think in the more successfully liturggical forms of Catholicism there is a danger too in losing you know some of the pastoral care for the poor and so on. I mean I this is again a sort of a caricature sometimes that people make of traditionalist and conservative forms of the faith but it's not it's not always entirely unfair either. So there is I think there is this constant struggle to make sure you are fitting all of those pieces together but when you do you have something that really does I think feel like the fullness of Christian faith. >> I'm not blaming the council at all. It's not the council's fault. after the council, the church I came of age in, um, those things fell apart. And when you look at the great figures prior to the council, think of a Thomas Merin, a Dorothy Day, a Fulton Sheen, uh, think of even like a Graham Green and these great figures, there was an integration of those elements that I think was compromised and it it fell along political lines. I mean, so talk to older priests today. It's all about the streets and the poor and social justice. Talk to the young guys. I know them very well. They loved Catholics and surpluses and the liturgy and so on. And I keep saying I I tell my priests here, my young seminarians, >> the higher you go liturggically, the lower you should go in service of the poor and vice versa. >> Uh Dorothy Day who no one served the poor more ardently than Dorothy Day. And she loved the benediction and the mass and retreats and she was constantly in prayer on her knees and so on. I I think we have lost something in the years after the council. Those things fell apart and it's still a problem, you know, as we debate within the church today. Uh I I want all that together and I like I like your focus on all three. We're running out of time. Can you can you come back? I hope when the weather maybe is nicer next summer come back. But can I ask you one last question? So it's related to religion but it's more into the political cultural. I was reading something recently about this idea of the west, you know, people defending Western civilization, the West. Couple things. Does the West still exist in some coherent way? To what degree is Christianity related to it? >> What What are the What is >> a small question to see me out? >> 30 seconds. Um, is is the West still there? Let me put it that way. Is there still a West that's either worth identifying or defending? I'm not completely sure. Yeah, I I I have a lot of mixed thoughts on this question because, you know, I am a political conservative, cultural conservative. I have this this sense that sort of Western civilization, Western Christendom, the links between the United States and Western Europe, that, you know, that this is this is what the civilization is that I'm invested in. um and and defending. But I do wonder if we are in some kind of >> turn where the the Christian civilization of the future, it may not it may not be right to see it as a a simply global civilization, which is I think again where the postvatican 2 church sort of assumed that we were going, right? That there would be this sort of global culture. Catholicism is obviously a global religion so it has to sort of think exclusively in those global terms. Um, I tend to think more that I feel like America is likely to remain a place of resilient cultural dynamism, >> religious and otherwise over the next century, even as other parts of the world, for reasons frankly connected to basic things like demographics and birth rates, >> um, go through an extremely painful period of retrenchment and transformation. And this is true of Christian parts of the world like Western Europe and Latin America. It's true of non-Christian parts of the world or less Christian parts of the world like East Asia. And in that environment, I don't know. I I wonder if we are just living through the turn from the western era to the American era. M >> like I I think if you're thinking optimis like who knows you know Christ may return you know who who knows what the the machine god may enslave us all who knows what the 21st century has in mind but if you are someone who >> is some kind of cultural conservative but wants to look forward in a dynamic way you know American civilization is western it contains core aspects of the western heritage but I do sometimes think that there's more of an advantage in this moment in saying as Americans that we're defenders of American civilization. We're trying to figure out what American civilization looks like in the 21st century. It's a big question. We're all arguing about it. We have pretty painful politics because we can't agree on it. But that that is the right way to think about it that we're sort of in a new chapter of the story rather than just sort of trying to extend the European drama. Mhm. >> through another century or two. But I'm not sure if that's right at all. So, and I and I do think Americans and especially American Christians are naturally invested in a particular way in what's going to happen >> to Western Europe and you know, which is much more secularized, has a very different landscape of immigration and cultural change around Islam. um much, you know, direer demographics. I I I don't want to say, "Oh, well, we'll just, you know, we'll we'll we'll see you in a hundred years while we do our own thing." But even like, you know, we're I'm from the Northeast. We're here in here in Minnesota. The energy and dynamism of America right now is in this belt that runs from the Southeast through Texas, up through the Southwest, and then up up to Silicon Valley. Parts of it are quite religious, parts of it are secular and weird, parts of it are California religion and so on. >> But that's where the energy is. It's in the south and west. That's where Catholicism's energy >> has shifted. That's that that it feels like even geographically we're moving physically away from the old sort of Atlantis center center of gravity and something >> something new and weird and different and American is might be might be coming into being there. I don't know. >> No, I appreciate that. Well, next summer we'll figure out all the details. >> Yeah. In in you know Santa Fe. >> In Santa Fe. Okay. Listen, thank you Ross. It's a delight. This has been a great pleasure. >> Great conversation. Thank you. >> [music]