Belief In Fairies Is Not Rational, Ross Douthat
Full Transcript:
Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that goes through a book by Ross Douthat.
Ross Douthat is a pundit on 60 Minutes, a Christian nationalist who was appointed to that position by Barry Weiss, and Barry Weiss was given that position because she's a right wing ideologue. She was paid to go into CBS and make Donald Trump happy to appease him by censoring actual news reporting by 60 minutes in CBS news and replacing it with puff pieces and things that will keep our orange dictator feeling happy. It was a crass corporate decision. It was surrendering in advance.
Anyway, this is not about 60 Minutes, so much as it is about this book that was published by Ross Douthat. It's called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
Up to this point, Ross Douthat has been a sloppy thinker. He has been writing in contradiction to his promise that this is going to be a book that provides a rational platform for religious belief, a reasonable, logical way to understand what religion is and to believe in God and all of that stuff. Really, he's arguing for Christianity, even though he pretends it's just a fig leaf, to be doing for religion in general.
But now we're getting to page 18 in the first chapter, and wow, the rationality just gets thrown away. The logic, the reason is gone.
I mean, up until this point, he's been sloppy in his thinking. There have been huge gaps in his logical process. He has lacked evidence for his claims, but this, this is on a completely different order.
You may remember that from last time, Ross Douthat essentially was arguing that if you just ignore all of the discoveries of science from the last few hundred years, well then, religion is the most rational choice. He was also arguing that if you just go back to the time when you were like three or four, you'll see that your advanced young child's rational faculties and knowledge will naturally conclude that there is a Creator of the universe, and that's got to be God. This was his actual argument on the last couple of pages.
That's silly enough on its own, but now we see where he wants to go next. He says, “Positing a realm of supernatural mind above and around the realm of matter also explains a 3rd feature of existence that makes your naive religious self feel justified in its belief. The fact that the world seems not just ordered, but enchanted with many individually tailored signs of a higher order of reality. These come through the incredible variety of encounters described by words like spiritual and mystical, and which vindicate religion through direct experience.”
What is Ross Douthat talking about here? What are these variety of encounters, incredible variety of encounters described by words like spiritual, mystical, and numinous?
“Numinous” is a fancy philosophical world, word that just means, uh, woo, woo, woo? Fancy woo-woo stuff that's kind of, wow. Yeah, it doesn't really mean much. It means the things that, wow, are out there behind the veil of woo.
I know philosophers would beg to differ with me on that, but I think it really does boil down to that.
So, what are these direct experiences of the mystical, the numinous?
Let me tell you what Ross Douthat is talking about here: “The psychic powers of the oracle,” “the miracles of holy men and saints,” “the brush with the ghostly or demonic.”
Ross Douthat is talking about psychic powers. He's talking about miracles, supernatural miracles, performed by Catholic saints. He's talking about ghosts. He's talking about demons.
Oh, but it goes on further. He's talking about gods and spirits and angels and demons and witches and magic, like from magicians, like from wizards and fairies and genies. Yes, fairies. Fairies, and genies, and witches, and demons, and angels, and, and of course, on top of it all is God.
Ross Douthat is saying here that the fact that people say that they see fairies is a rational reason to believe in religion.
Sure, but people do say that they see fairies and demons.
Okay, I saw a demon once. I did. I actually saw a demon once. I admit this.
Let me tell you about what was going on. It was back when I was in college. It was my third year of college, and I was staying in a dorm room, essentially. I had a new roommate and, um, right out in the hallway. There was this bright light. My roommate was a very muscular, tall rugby player. Imagine that physique.
So here's what would happen: The first couple nights I was sleeping in that room, he would get up in the middle of the night to go take a pee, and then he would come back. He would open the door. The light was bright. It was practically shining into the room, and there he was standing in the doorway, and it would wake me up.
This happened two nights in a row. I thought I saw this muscularkind of silhouette of a person and my dreaming mind, just for some reason decided that was demon.
So, I would yell at him. I would say, “Get out! Go away! I know what you are! Get out of here!”
It was because I wasn't thinking straight. I was just waking up from a dream, and all I was in a new location, a new situation with a person I knew a little bit, but not a whole lot.
And so, two nights in a row, I did this. You know, and I started to think, I don't know how this is gonna work. Well, on the third night, I was used to this new pattern, and so I didn't do it anymore.
I saw a demon, but I saw a demon where there wasn't one. My roommate was not a demon. He was a rugby player. You know, and maybe if you're really good at playing rugby, you can call yourself a demon, in a metaphorical sense. But no, he wasn't a demon. He was just a guy, a big guy who needed to pee in the middle of the night.
The fact that I saw a demon doesn't mean that there really was one.
Let me tell you another story. I have seen dragons. This is this is a true thing. I have seen dragons.
A few years ago during the pandemic, it was a rough time, and I was getting a pandemic divorce at the same time. It was really, really hard. So, my kind brother said to me, “You know what? You really need to deal with this high anxiety, high stress. You need to relax a little bit.” So, he brought me some marijuana gummies.
I didn't feel anything just taking one of them, so I took 5 or 6 of them, and I went out walking into the night. And wow, it really loosened me up, and I could feel the anxiety coming off of me, and I'm walking down the street at night, and my mind starts to see shapes, and I'm like, whoa, something is going on.
All up and down the street at the end of each driveway, the mailboxes turned into these Chinese style dragons with long bodies and, you know, those kind of Chinese dragon faces, and they were all looking at me and I'm like, wow, this is amazing. There are dragons here! At the very same time, I knew, no, there are not dragons here. I just took 5 or 6 marijuana gummies, and I am hallucinating.
This is something that happens quite a bit, actually. We like to think of hallucination as something that is exceptionally rare and unusual, but no, I mean, it happens all the time and not just hallucination, but like in the 1st example of my roommate, the demon.
That was an experience of a delusion, because my mind was not sharp, because I was in an altered state of consciousness that had nothing to do with alcohol or drugs, but boy, people do take alcohol and drugs a lot.
Other people have mental illness, and by the way, other people, they have hallucinations without being mentally ill.
For example, Oliver Sacks has a great book on hallucination. I even think that the title of the book may be Hallucinations. Look it up, Oliver Sacks. He was an actual medical doctor, and he looked at the experience of hallucinations, and he found that they happen a lot, auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations.
Hallucinations happen a lot of the time when people are losing their eyesight, because their brains are used to getting this visual stimulus. So when you're in the process of losing your eyesight, but it's not completely gone, a lot of people, actually a pretty high percentage of people, will see things that aren't there. They'll see objects, they'll see creatures. They'll see little people. They will know at the same time that that is a hallucination.
Sometimes they have a cultural framework in which to put those experiences. Now, we can know that they have this taking place because there can be other people in the room who say, actually, in fact, there is not something there.
The brain is a perceiving object. It doesn't just take data in through the senses in an unfiltered way. It takes data from your sense organs, but then it adds interpretation. There's a huge range of psychological research showing the many interesting, weird ways that this works.
Think about this one thing, for example: If you have a phone and you put it on vibrate for it's an alarm a lot of the time, and then you stop using that phone. A lot of people experience what's called the phantom buzz in the pocket after they get rid of that phone. They feel the buzz of an alert of a notification in their pocket and it's not there.
So, look, can I say with 100% certainty that fairies and genies and gods, and angels, and ghosts, do not exist? No, I can't say that with 100% certainty, but, you know, that's not a reasonable threshold, 100% certainty, to have that absolute knowledge or have to accept that ghosts are real.
What we do have is a much more reasonable explanation, which is that, number one, sometimes people lie because they like to make up stories. We know that that's true. Number two, sometimes, actually quite commonly, people see things that are not there. That doesn't mean that they're not frightened by them. It means they see things that aren't there.
Hallucinations are documented to be real and are a much more reasonable, rational, logical explanation for what's going on when people see magical creatures, but Ross Douthat doesn't see it that way. He hears a story about a person seeing a ghost or a demon or an angel or talking to a god, and he says, “Oh, it must be true. That's the best explanation.”
I'm sorry, but I don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in djinn. I don't believe in dragons and demons. Okay, I believe in Komodo dragons, but those are just big lizards. They're not magical creatures.
Here's where it gets back to, at the top of the page, that 1st quote I read to you, that “positing a realm of supernatural mind above and around the realm of matter also explains this another feature of existence,” which is that people are talking about magical creatures that exist, and there are all these stories about them, so they must be true.
Here's the thing. A supernatural mind, the existence of that, does not explain those things.
Let me explain to you what I mean by that. If you say there is a supernatural mind, and then that explains all the things that you don't understand about the world, well, saying that there's a supernatural mind doesn't actually explain anything because you don't know what that supernatural mind is. You don't have any access to it. It's supernatural, which means it's outside of nature.
Get it?
Nature is a system of regular, predictable, sometimes intricate and unexpected, but nonetheless, predictable, logical, rational things happening. It’s like when you throw a ball up into the air and you're on planet Earth, it falls back down, gravity, and if we examine it closely enough, we can understand the ways that it works. In other words, nature is the realm of, not just science, but reason more broadly.
So, something supernatural, something that is outside of reason, something that you cannot explain. If you can't explain it, and then you just give it the name “God”, you're really just saying, “I don't know what's going on, but let's name it ‘God’, or let's call it fairies, or let's call it demons.
By the way, Ross Douthat on this page is also very invested in the ideas that demons are out to get you.
Let me see if I can find this passage here on this page. “Your religious self would understand that the supernatural might be interested in you, that experiences both remarkable and terrifying, are not just available to anyone looking for them, but liable to come crashing through the everyday defenses of even those who aren't.”
Oh, yeah, terrifying.
Ross Douthat goes on to talk about this is really important that the supernatural is not just lovely, lovely God but it's also bad, evil spirits, so we're going to come to get you if you don't do what the God wants, which is kind of a little bit like the evil spirits are just God's henchmen, right? It’s God who has set up this punishment system.
That's very important to Ross Douthat because ultimately what he wants is social control. We'll get on to that, I'm sure, in another page, that we look at in another episode, but for right now, I just want to state this very plainly: There has never been any psychic phenomenon or premonition or supposed miracles from saints or genies or fairies or gods or angels or demons that has been substantiated by actual evidence and rational, independent examination. There have been loads of stories about those told, but not a single one of them has ever been rationally proven to exist in hundreds of years of scientific examination of those kinds of things, of those wild claims.
That should tell you something, if you're paying attention at all, if you actually care about rationality and reason and logic. Ross Douthat claims that he does care about those things, but he is just ignoring that and pretending that it doesn't exist, that none of that scientific inquiry is taking place. That's what he's doing in this chapter. He's saying, well, let's put science aside. Other than science, all of this makes sense if we just don't pay attention to science.
Ross Douthat is saying, just don't pay attention to science for a little bit, and then I'll convince you, it's kind of like saying, let's put rationality and reasonable thought to the side and just go crazy with it. It is the most transparently, poorly written kind of exercise in irrational nonsense that Ross Douthat has produced.
I've got to wonder, who does he think is going to be convinced by this? I am coming to think that the actual purpose of this book is not to speak to people who have actual doubts and who have reasonable minds and stuff, but this book seems to have been written just for believers in Christianity and probably mostly in Catholicism, who, you know, they kind of want to believe in this stuff, but they also understand that, you know, they're having doubts. They're beginning to notice that reality doesn't match with what the Christian churches are telling them with what Christian doctrine is telling them and rost out that doesn't like that because he's into the Christian churches having the power.
Ross Douthat is just trying to get people just to stay. He's giving them a little fig leaf of something, to say “Oh, there's this guy who, oh, he's on 60 minutes. He wrote a book and he says that religion is rational.”
Maybe they never actually read much of the book in detail. Maybe they just leave it on the coffee table as this thing of like, see, Ross Douthat says, we should believe, and it's rational, so yeah, it must be true.
And then people who have religious podcasts or radio shows or, you know, newspapers can, can, can get Ross Douthat on as a guest and say, well, gosh, Ross Douthat do you think that actually religion is perfectly rational?
Then we get this.
There are not fairies out there. There are not genies. There are not demons, and there is absolutely no evidence that there is any god either.
That, Ross Douthat is why not everyone believes.