Chapter 3 of Ross Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious is full of factual errors and dishonest partial quotes of the sort that break trust with intelligent readers. Ross Douthat couldn’t even get the year of one of his favorite Catholic miracles right, and didn’t bother to do simple research into a well-known electrical problem that provides a rational, completely materialist explanation for spontaneously smoking bicycle lights. So far, Ross Douthat’s book is proving the incompatibility of religious belief and rationality.
Podcast Transcript:
Welcome to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast in which I read through a book by right wing Christian pundit, Ross Douthat. His book is Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
I'm now going to focus mostly on page 84, which is still in chapter 3, The title of chapter 3 is the myth of disenchantment.
However, I'm gonna reference really quickly, because it fits within the theme of this episode, something that I said, a few podcast episodes back.
You see, I got something a little bit wrong. I didn't bother to check. I’m admitting that now.
I should have checked what Ross Douthat wrote in his book, because he wrote that the Miracle Of The Sun, a supposed miracle which actually the evidence is very shoddy for, and was contradicted by thousands of witnesses, actually, this really non-miraculous miracle that Douthat believes is absolutely true, took place in 1917, not 1918.
I’m finding this out because on page 85, Douthat refers to this supposed miracle, saying that, “official knowledge rules out legends or delusions, despite their evidentiary basis, like the miracle of the sun, in the disenchanted year of 1917.” The evidentiary basis of that Miracle Of The Sun is rotten, but yes, it did happen in 1917. Only, back earlier, going back a few pages toward the beginning of this chapter, Ross Douthat says it happened in 1918.
It's a simple error, but it's a sort of simple error that you think would be caught by a guy who he has enough money to hire a good copy editor. But, you know, Ross Douthat is kind of sloppy in this book. You'll see a lot of things like that going on, a lot of sloppy reasoning as well as just sloppy, incorrect facts.
A more conceptual sloppiness takes place on page 84, in which Ross Douthat is quoting an account by an anthropologist, whose name is Tanya Luhrmann. Tanya Luhrmann, you will learn if you look for other sources besides Douthat, has been funded extensively by the Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation is a pro-religion foundation that is seeking to, how can we put this? Well, their euphemism is that they want to bring science and religion closer together, which it means you would have to make science religious because science and religion are not compatible. They're just totally different ways of thinking. The Templeton Foundation is historically a pro-religion foundation.
Tanya Luhrmann wrote an article in the New York Times, which is probably one of the reasons that Ross Douthat is citing it, because New York Times writers tend to be heavily influenced by other New York Times writers. That's just how things go.
Anyway, Tanya Luhrmann wrote an article that has a theme in common with Ross Douthat. That theme was that, gosh, sometimes really strange, unexpected things happen. What are you gonna do?
Here's what she said in that article. I'm not going to read the whole story to you because it's kind of long, but essentially she was on an anthropological journey, which is, by the way, not science. It's social studies. I don't like using the term “social science” because social sciences are rarely truly scientific. Certainly cultural anthropology is not. It is a qualitative mode of investigation that describes things that go on, but it doesn't really perform science anyway.
That's fine. I love cultural anthropology. It's fascinating stuff, but it's not science.
So, Tanya Luhrmann was doing this project where she was going out to lots of religious communities and reading their books and seeing what kinds of cultural patterns she could find. She was on a train and she was reading a religious book.
“The book's language was dense and abstract, and my mind kept slipping as I struggled to grasp what he was talking about. The text spoke of the Holy Spirit and Tibetan masters and an ancient system of Judaic mysticism called Kabbalah. The author wrote that these were all just names for forces that flowed from a higher spiritual reality into this one through the vehicle of the trained mind, and as I strained to imagine what the author thought it would be like to be that vehicle. I began to feel power in my veins, to really feel it, not to imagine it. I grew hot. I became completely alert, more awake than I usually am, and I felt so alive. It seemed that power coursed through me like water through a chute. I wanted to sing, and then wisps of smoke came out of my backpack, in which I had tossed my bicycle lights, one of them was melting.”
That's Tanya Luhrmann's story. Ross Douthat cites this story in terms of a category of mystical experience, that he describes as follows: “A mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality.”
Ross Douthat is saying that what happened to Tanya Luhrmann, with her bicycle light melting and smoking in her backpack, was an example of “the kind of mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality.”
Wow, that's amazing. I mean, a mystical experience that affects reality by causing her bicycle light to melt and smoke. What are the chances of that?
Well, actually the chances of that are, you know, pretty common. If you do a simple search online, you will come up with a lot of stories about bicycle lights spontaneously melting, and smoking. One story is about a bike light exploding and causing a fire that guts an apartment. Another story says the plastic lens on my MagicShine RN 1500 is melting. Yeah, that MagicShine is a bicycle light. Another story from adventure writer asks, “Why would a tail light bulb melt?” Also along these lines, I found a good question down at Cafe Husky: “Anyone have a melting headlight like this?” At UK, Monster Owners Club Forum, someone notes, “I have just noticed that my brake light lens is melting.”
This happens an awful lot, actually. If we take a look at a post from a Reddit user who owns bikelightdatabase.com, somebody who has investigated a lot of time researching bicycle lights, says, “I’ve been warning people away from the super cheap generic Chinese lights for years, but some people still insist they're a good value. I'd heard anecdotes about battery packs smoking. Although never a full on house fire like this, but now it finally happened.”
Then somebody responds to that Reddit post saying, “While many major brands of all sorts of electronic devices have had many of these same issues with their lithium ion batteries, while the cheaper brands and off brands tend to have more problems, buying big name brands doesn't make you immune from them.”
You get the idea here? Bicycle lights, and tail lights that use similar technologies, for mopeds and things like that commonly engage in spontaneous smoking and melting and even catching on fire. It's because of the lithium ion batteries and their interface with the electronics of the bicycle light. So it's not really a strange event.
Ross Douthat doesn't include any of that context in his book. He doesn't include any research into what might be some perfectly rational explanations for a bicycle light beginning to smoke and beginning to melt inside someone's backpack.
If you talk to bicyclists, you'll find that this is a quite expected thing that can happen, and they talk with each other about how to avoid this kind of problem. Ross Douthat doesn't provide that rational explanation. He just decides that it's the mystical experience, breaking through and affecting physical reality.
What is the implication of what Tanya Luhrmann wrote? The implication is that she started thinking about, just thinking about what it might be like to be a vehicle for a higher spirituality, to be that kind of trained mind, and then she started feeling power in her veins.
She says she started to “feel it, not imagine it”, but okay, let's think about this now. What is the difference between feeling something in your body and imagining it in the sense of power in your veins? What does power in your veins feel like, and how is that different from imagination? How do you know if you're imagining that or not?
She writes that she started to get hot, but then, of course, she was sitting right next to the batteries that were getting quite hot as well.
Look, right there in the beginning of the paragraph I just cited, and you’ll see that Tanya Luhrmann's experience couldn't possibly be what the mystical gurus who were writing the book that she was reading were talking about. She says that the author wrote that “these were just names for forces that flowed from a higher spiritual, spiritual reality into this one through the of the trained mind.” She writes, “I struggled to grasp what he was talking about.”
Right there, we see that Tanya Luhrmann is not a highly trained mind in this sort of thing. Yet, the author of the book she was reading is saying, well, this kind of spiritual experience can only happen to those people who have a trained mind.
Tanya Luhrmann was not a trained mind. She was reading this book for the first time. So, how could she possibly have been channeling these magical higher spiritual kind of powers? It's actually against the very religious woo woo doctrine that she's reading about.
Ross Douthat doesn't talk about that. He doesn't talk about the blatant contradictions within Tanya Luhrmann’s account.
There's another thing, Ross Douthat doesn't talk about how in the very same article written by Tanya Luhrmann that includes the excerpt that we just discussed. Luhrmann also wrote this: “I walked off that train with a new respect for why people believed in magic, not a new understanding of reality.”
What she's saying is that this experience helped her to understand why some people might believe in magical powers, but she wasn't convinced that those magical powers are actually real.
Why did Ross Douthat leave that part out? It doesn't support his argument, but anyone can go and look it up. Ross Douthat doesn't do the research that he ought to, to just check on the rational explanations for events. He also interferes with our own ability to understand the context of these stories that he has cited in chapter 3.
In fact, do you remember the article by Michael Sherman about his own supposed mystical experience with that radio that he repaired, and then the radio somehow worked? In that article, Shermer made a comment that's kind of similar to Lerman's. Here's what he said “such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive, or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.”
That's Michael Sherman talking about his own story. Guess what? Ross Douthat doesn't include that part of Shermer’s story in his book. He makes it sound as if Michael Sherman is absolutely convinced he's had a supernatural experience.
Here's the point I'm trying to make: In chapter three, Ross Douthat is trying to accomplish something that's really, really difficult, which is to prove that not just that supernatural things are real, but that believing in them is rational, that it's logical, that it's based on the facts of physical reality. Yet, we see, in multiple points in this chapter, that Roth Douthat is getting his facts wrong.
Ross Douthat failed to do the factual research that he needed to do to establish that there's not actually a rational materialist explanation for the stories that he reported on. He was dishonestly engaging in partial, selective quoting of other people’s material in a way that distorted the material that he cited.
It sounds like Ross Douthat thinks that he can get away with being sloppy. Maybe that's because this book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is not actually intended to convince any actual skeptic, any actual atheist, any non-believer to embrace religion. It looks more and more as we go forward, that this book is simply meant to be sold to people who are comfortable with sloppy thinking, with people who don't have the intellectual rigor to just go ahead and check on the sources that are in the book.
Go ahead and check it with me. I encourage you to read along and check the stories that Ross Douthat is sharing here because they just don't hold up to the simplest scrutiny.
Roth Douthat’s is not rational writing. It's really sloppy, and that's why not everyone believes Ross Douthat.