In the latest chapter of his book, Ross Douthat twists and turns to justify suffering as a good thing, because it comes from his god. He runs away from a confrontation with the brutal cruelty of the Christian deity, making excuses without any reasonable throughline.
It's another episode of Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This podcast reads and examines, with a critical perspective, which means that we're not taking it for granted that the author is just right about everything. We're actually thinking about what's being said. We're examining the book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. This is a book that's written by right wing Christian Nationalist extremist political commentator Ross Douthat.
At every step along the way so far, Ross Douthat has failed to provide a rational kind of justification for his religious beliefs in particular and for religion in general.
Now, we're going ahead to chapter 6, which has the title Three Stumbling Blocks. These are three stumbling blocks specifically for Christianity.
It's a weird order for this to be covered in chapter 6 because Ross Douthat places his most concentrated argument for Christianity in his final chapter, but this comes first.
That tells you everything you need to know about this book. The book is actually an argument for Christianity all the way through. In this chapter, Ross Douthat is attempting to make a demonstration that he is actually considering a few arguments against Christianity. That's why we have the title Three Stumbling blocks for this chapter.
The 1st stumbling block that he's going to decimate, he's going to show why it's not an impediment at all, is this: Why Does God Allow So Many Wicked Things To Happen?
That's the title, word for word: Why Does God Allow So Many Wicked Things To Happen? That phrasing of the title shows you what Ross Douthat is up to here.
Ross Douthat is offering this objection to Christianity only in its most mild version. Actual objections to Christianity include a much stronger version, which is Why does God do so many wicked things to people?
If there is a Christian God, why would anyone want to worship that God?
Let's just put reality off to the side. Ross Douthat has already failed completely to provide any rational basis for belief in the reality of any God, much less the Christian God. Nonetheless, Douthat is now arguing that his Christian God is actually moral, even though this is a God that has all the power in the universe to make things right, and fails to do it.
More than that, we have in the Christian text itself, throughout Old Testament and New Testament, many examples of the Christian God, doing things that are absolutely cruel, violent, and small-minded in its violence. This Christian God, at the end of the Christian New Testament, promises to do even worse, to kill off huge portions of humanity, the vast majority of humans on the planet, in really nasty ways, torturing them first, just so that this god can then rule over the earth.
It's weird. It's violent. It’s a terrible moral example.
Ross Douthat won't confront that objection to Christianity. Honestly, I mean, how could he?
Instead, he's only dealing with this weaker question of like, why does God simply allow wicked things to happen? Why doesn't the Christian God stop other people from doing wicked things?
At this point, Douthat brings up Christopher Hitchens, because, you know, another thing Douthat loves to do. He loves to restrict his ideas of atheism to what he calls the New Atheists, who are actually just a few recent atheists. There's no difference between New Atheism and plain old atheism anyway.
Douthat is bringing up an argument that's been made by many people well before “New Atheists” came on the scene maybe 20 years ago. That argument is that if he Christian God is all powerful and bad things are happening, then therefore, the Christian God could stop those bad things, but chooses not to, therefore, this Christian God is either not all powerful or not all good.
Of course, the most rational explanation is that the Christian god doesn't exist at all, simply because it's a ludicrous idea that there is a magical being who is invisible, who never shows up, but we're supposed to believe in anyway.
Obviously, there's a lot of nastiness in the world. Why, if there's an all powerful and benevolent divinity who could undo at all, has this god chosen to keep all of humanity in pain?
On page 155, Ross Douthat begins to attempt to respond to this long-lasting criticism of Christianity by talking about what the philosophical basis for making moral judgments.
Ross Douthat questions the idea that human beings have the ability to judge what's good and evil. He says that this objection, “assumes that we can identify good and evil as meaningful categories at all, as exposed to just flags of convenience for things to instinctively favor and dislike.”
Ross Douthat is arguing that if you only have human judgment about what is morally right or wrong, then it's just arbitrary, and human moral judgment is only a matter personal preferences and style. Douthat believes that humans somehow lack an ability to dictate what is absolutely true in morality in an absolute sense.
He wants there to be a morality that is true on the level of gravity being true, that on Earth, at least, when we're on this planet, there is an up and a down that is defined by our distance from the center of the planet.
(Our planet, by the way, is one that Christianity and its entire religion failed to comprehend the mere existence of as a planet, but we'll put that aside.)
Let's respond to this idea that people don't have the ability to establish right and wrong in an absolute way that's anything like this sense of what Ross Douthat would call the laws of physics.
Actually, this is a valid point. We do not have the ability to establish right and wrong in the sense of absolute certain objective truth. That's just how things are.
What we can do is come up with philosophies and systems of thinking about what we would call right and wrong or good and bad.
“Evil” is a weird word, if you think about it, because evil is an idea that something is inherently wicked, in the way that an apple is inherently red (or green, actually, if you look at green apples).
It's a weird idea.
Good and bad or right and wrong actually are subjective. Ross Douthat has a resistance to this idea because he's been brought up in a religion that teaches him that good and evil exists in the way that red and blue exist, like black and white exist, as if they are just parts of the universe, and they've been created by this magical creature that they call God.
There's no evidence that that's actually happened. There's no evidence that there are immutable universal laws of morality.
If you believe that morality is a True thing that has to exist in the world, well, I guess that's going to be a letdown for you, that you can't just have absolutely universal laws, that everybody has to obey and that apply to absolutely everybody in all circumstances, but there is no divine lawgiver. There is no evidence of any divine laws. There never has been any evidence that there ever have been any stone tablets inscribed by God himself with the words of laws that must be followed by absolutely everybody.
Ross Douthat needs grow up a little bit. Cosmic laws delivered by magical creatures are not a solid basis of ethics.
Ethics are about trying to establish through careful thought and reflection and empathy an understanding of what seems to be fair, what seems to be just, what seems to promote the well-being of the most people possible, understanding that not everyone wants the same thing.
Some people want to do violence, and is it restricting a person's freedom to stop them from doing violence? Sure it is. So, yeah, there is some relativity to it. There is some subjectivity to it.
Humans are subjects. Humans have subjectivity. Our minds are not machines, and there is no chemical code of good and evil in the world. So, get used to it.
We have to come together as a society and to ask: What are we, as a group of people, willing to do, to try to support the well-being, the basic, fulfilled, meaningful, healthy, pain-free life, to the extent that's possible (because pain is a part of life)?Suffering is a part of life, not because that's right or wrong, but simply because it's a fact. We observe it, but let's try to make things better for the most people possible.
We come together with philosophies about that suffering, taking different premises of what should be true, and what values should be placed at the center. They're always arguing with each other, and they always will because it's not like there's a scientific rightness or wrongness to any one of them.
Ross Douthat can't cope with that. I guess that's his problem. He hasn't grappled with the reality of the world.
What he’s trying to say that bother me is that we don't have the right to challenge what God has decided. He's presuming that there's a God. He's presuming that God's will is good, and then presuming that people are not good enough to to challenge that.
If you take on that perspective, that we don't have the right to challenge the will of God, then really, what's the point of even making a rational or logical argument? There isn't any.
Ross Douthat’s position boils down to a single command: You must obey the will of God. Ross Douthat believes there is a magical creature who has the right to command you, and you should do what that magical creature says. That's it.
You don't have the right to think about this for yourself.
If you don't have the right to think about morality and belief for yourself, why did Ross Douthat even write this book?
I think that Ross Douthat wrote this book because he knows that actually, simply saying, “Just follow God and shut up” is not a very convincing argument, and it's not working.
Think about that for a moment. Is the common failure to convince non believers of the existence of God itself evidence for the existence of God or evidence that God doesn't exist? God's own rules and commands are not compelling. People defy them all the time. If they were persuasive, more people would be Christians.
If arguments for Christianity were sensible, were reasonable, they would be self-evident. No one would disagree with them.
So, let’s ask this: Why is God such an inartful, outdated debater, persuader, communicator? There's something very odd about that.
The very fact that we have to argue about religion, that someone like Ross Douthat has to be the voice of God, writing this book at all, is an indication of the weakness of the case for Christianity. Why should Ross Douthat’s book have to exist? Why doesn't God just come down and persuade us all himself?
It could happen. This is an all powerful God, supposedly. So why is this God choosing not to do that?
It's a weird kind of idea that God wants to be hidden and wants not to persuade people, but has made this magical book and this magical story, and we're all supposed to believe in the magic of people walking on water and resurrecting the dead and performing magic acts, and throughout this book, this god is appearing all over the place, but we’re also supposed to believe that he just doesn't do that anymore.
Why? What changed? It's all really, really, really weird.
Weirder still is the justification of Jesus. Jesus somehow is supposed to make all of this makes sense.
Here's what Ross Douthat says about that on page 155.
“Yes, the truest morality has been fully revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, his teaching and his example and his death. The doctrine of incarnation is an arguable answer to the problem of evil. Here is God himself, answering our laments by coming down to share in all our sufferings, and die in torture alongside us.”
What does that have to do with anything? If there is a god. Who is torturing everybody, and then this God comes down for just like a very short amount of time, maybe 30 years, and has a little bit of a bad time, when really, the bad times have been going on for other people for hundreds of thousands of years, and will continue to go on for thousands of years more up to the present moment, well, so what? God is slumming it for a little bit, and that's supposed to make the problems that this God creates, and the torture that this God creates, and this world of pain and misery, it’s supposed to make all that okay?
It's supposed to make that all the pain okay because God slummed it for a little bit? He came down to our level for a little bit just to say, “Hey, I get it, man. I'm not going to change anything. I'm not going to take away any pain or suffering, misery, but you know, hey, I get it, man. I'm totally relatable.”
It's like the most cosmically insufferable youth pastor BS.
Ross Douthat then begins to twist and turn desperately trying to find some way to explain why the Christian ideology that God is absolutely infinitely powerful and infinitely good makes no sense. He's trying to make it makes sense somehow, and he's even now beginning to say, well, maybe maybe it's not true.
At this point in the chapter, Ross Douthat desperately turns to the idea that maybe you could have a god who is all powerful, but not all good. Or, maybe, you could have some kind of God who made the universe and is all good but just not all powerful.
The problem with that rhetorical escape hatch is that these ideas are not what Christianity preaches is True. Ross Douthat wrote this book to try to justify Christianity, and the Christian doctrine is really clear. The Christian God is simultaneously, infinitely powerful, could do anything, could create a universe without any pain and suffering in which free will also could exist, and God could get everything that he wants, and everyone else could get what they want too. If the Christian God were real, the Christian God could do that, and there would have to be no pain. If you have an infinitely all powerful God, that is possible.
On the other hand, if you have a God who is all powerful and doesn't do that, then that God is a piece of shit and doesn't deserve your worship. Thank goodness that God is not real, because if it was, we would all be living inside of the mind of a maniac.
Finally, Ross Douthat retreats into a corner where I think he understands he's not making sense. So, he comes up with one final, desperate ploy.
Ross Douthat says that it's actually offensive for us to say that that we should object to anything that God wants to do, even if it's painful, even if it's torture, even if it seems like it's the most brutal, nasty things are coming from the Christian God.
It's offensive for you to point that out, Ross Douthat suggests. He says this is on page 158 at the bottom:
“It seems also somewhat offensive for non-believers in a society like ours with life expectancies, lengthened, terrible diseases, conquered, and wealth piled up beyond human imagining, to lecture the inhabitants of the more deprived and painful human past on the naïveté of their greater religious faith.”
First of all, let's talk about that claim of human wealth, beyond imagining. That wealth is held in the hands of just a few people, a small number of people like Jeff Bezos, like Elon Musk, like the executives at Microsoft and Apple. The inequality is astounding.
Christianity is a cult of monarchy and monotheism. It's a worship of kings and the idea of having centralized power.
Ross Douthat, of course, doesn't perceive that problem. He doesn’t see a problem with the inequality being created, that while a huge number of people are struggling to get by, Jeff Bezos is going around the world on his gigantic yacht and having a load of a time withholding billions upon billions of dollars from everybody else. It's just crazy.
Let’s examine the rest of what Ross Douthat just said. Yes, life expectancy is lengthened, although under Donald Trump, life expectancies actually have gone down. Nonetheless, it’s true that life expectancies are longer compared to what they used to be.
Who is responsible for that? Who is responsible for great diseases being conquered? Does it have anything to do with religion Nope. It doesn’t have a single thing to do with religion.
In fact, if you believe that God created this world, God created those diseases. Now, there's no evidence that any god created this world. There's no evidence of any of that. Gods are not real, but if you believe in them, you’ve got to say, well, God created the world, and God created diseases, and God created viruses, and God created infectious bacteria, and GOd created nasty fungal infections too.
You know who defeated those diseases? You know who lengthened the lifespan? Human medical scientists did.
It wasn’t prayer. It wasn’t churches. It was irreligious science that brought about these improvements in the quality of life.
Ross Douthat won't give credit to science. Ross Douthat won’t even agree to the basic biological facts of the human body. He doesn't even agree with, for example, biological evolution.
If you don't accept the tenets of biological evolution through natural selection, then you don't understand how to control diseases because little pathogens have very short lifespans, and we have observed them evolving. If you don't do that, you can't account for antibiotic resistance, and diseases run rampant. It is only by rejecting the religious perspective that it's been possible to confront disease and to make it less powerful, to give us any tools, to compensate for these threats to human health.
But I also want to point out the absurdity that Ross Douthat comes up with, saying that we ought to be concerned about offending the people who lived in the past, who believed in religion, by saying that we now don't believe in religion. That’s odd thing to worry about, don't you think?
Should we really worry that it is offensive for non-believers, to argue that there is no God, that it offends people who lived in the past who are long dead? This objection from Ross Douthat here only makes sense if you believe that those people are somehow not dead, and they're still hanging around as ghosts, and that Jesus is going to come back, and he's going to make them rise up from the grave and go up to heaven.
You know what? That is exactly what Ross Douthat believes. He believes that dead people are not really dead.
I don't know what to say to that. I mean, death is death. Ross Douthat can't handle that.
I understand why death is scary. I get why death is depressing sometimes. It really gets you down, that we all die, but it's real, and we see it every day on earth. We've never seen anyone rise from the grave. We've never seen anyone come back from the dead. It just doesn't happen.
So, I think we should not be concerned about offending the religious dead with our non-belief. Dead people don't get offended. They don't have any feelings left. They're dead.
On page 159, Ross Douthat performs another contortion in which he's saying that he got Lyme disease once, so he understands what it's like to be sick. He suggests that non-religious people don't understand illness, as if atheists haven't gotten sick and don't understand what sickness is about. Ross Douthat claims that people who get sick, and people who have financial struggles don’t understand how misfortune proves the existence of God.
Ross Douthat has never had financial struggles in his entire life. He was born to a fortunate family. He went to Harvard University. Through his social connections, he got jobs that have given him loads of money.
Ross Douthat is quite wealthy, but now he's saying that because he got Lyme disease, he can speak as a voice for people who don't have financial wherewithal, people who are financially struggling. That's really weird.
Anyway, Ross Douthat is saying that that sick people and people who are financially struggling believe in religion more than the rest of the population. Douthat’s line of reasoning is that these people are suffering financially, and they're suffering with sickness, and they believe in God, the Christian God, so therefore, if that's good enough for them, what do the rest of us have any right to complain about? Therefore, it’s okay for God to torture people.
The fact that somebody else is suffering and chooses not to confront the source of their suffering does not oblige the rest of us to go along with their religious submission to a cruel god. If someone else chooses not to think about where their suffering really comes from, and chooses not to skeptically examine the religion that takes advantage of them in their suffering, blaming them for their own pain, that’s their choice. The bizarre nature of their choice doesn’t teach us anything about the ultimate reality of the Cosmos. The weirdness of some people’s religious obsessions is not evidence that their beliefs are valid.
We also should doubt the accuracy of Ross Douthat’s claim that people with illnesses and financial problems are more likely to believe in God than everybody else. Ross Douthat doesn't provide any citation of any source for this idea of his. He's just saying that, well, he got sick with Lyme disease, and so now he knows that people who are financially struggling and who are sick, tend to believe in the Christian God more than anybody else. The fact that Ross Douthat says it’s true doesn’t make it true.
We should note, however, that this new argument from Ross Douthat contradicts what Douthat claimed back in chapter 3, when he said that religious people often get cured of their illnesses through the power of prayer and the intercession of Christian saints. If Douthat’s claim about faith healing is true, then religious people should be less likely to be seriously ill. Instead, Ross Douthat is claiming that religious people are more likely to be seriously ill than everyone else.
Could it be that religiously devout people are more likely to be gravely ill than secular people because religious people are more likely to engage in fruitless attempts at faith healing instead of seeking scientifically valid medical treatment? I don’t know if that’s true or not, so I’m not going to pretend that I do, but it’s one possible explanation.
So therefore, we shouldn't object to the idea that an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnibenevolent God is not being consistent and is causing suffering in the world?
It's a nonsensical argument, but what he's saying is, once again, if other people believe in something, then you should not object to it because to contradict their religion and their beliefs just seems mean. Ross Douthat is saying that disagreeing with religion should be avoided because it’s impolite to the feelings of dead people.
That isn't a logical argument. It's not a rational argument. It's not reasonable. It's just Ross Douthat flailing for a justification of his religion.
On this question of why God does wicked things and allows wicked things to happen, once again, Ross Douthat completely fails to provide any reasonable response.
That's just one more reason, Ross Douthat, that not everyone believes.