The Chaos of God Does Not Support Science, Ross Douthat
Full Transcript:
Welcome to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat.
This is a podcast that is examining a book that was written by Ross Dowthett. The book is called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Everyone. Imagine a world in which there isn't a single person left who criticizes, who doubts, who says no, I don't believe religion. Think about the consequences of that socially.
Oh, but that's not the topic of today's episode.
For today's episode, we are on page 22. Page 22 is one of those places in this book where Ross Douthat thinks that he's being really, really clever.
The whole idea of this book is to try to get people to stay in religion, Even though there's tons of nonsense going on, nonsense in the form of corruption and abuse, power plays, nasty politics, but also nonsense in the sense of irrationality, the idea that there are miracles in religion and that anything can happen at any time.
On page 22, is one of those places where Ross Douthat is trying to have it both ways, and he thinks he's really done a very clever logical maneuver here in saying that, gosh, the orderliness of the universe is just more proof that it was created to be orderly.
Now, this is kind of his agenda in this first chapter, which is titled The Fashioned Universe.
It's the whole idea that the universe was crafted just so that people could live in it, and that it's just impossible for the world to exist unless there is a Christian God, and he really goes on into Christianity over and over again. He's not really giving anything but a little token nod to any non-Christian religions.
Let me go ahead and read to you what Ross Douthat has to say here and then we'll discuss. It is on page 22. “The progress of science has been guided throughout by assumptions initially instilled by the religious perspective, which few of the Copernican revolutionaries doubted, that the world at every level should be governed by predictable systems, that its ordering should be consistent across different regions, and at different levels, up and down.”
So first of all, that's not from Christianity, those ideas. They are pre-Christian ideas that were, you know, being discussed in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient India, ancient China, in different forms, probably in other places we just don't have written records of them.
This is not a religious idea.
Let me explain what I mean by that, by relating it back to the previous episode, the one that came out yesterday, which was about page 18, where Ross Douthat was talking about how he believes that demons and angels and fairies and magic spells with witchcraft and gods are all real, that the supernatural is real, that ghosts are real.
Wait a minute. If supernatural creatures and magic are the religious idea, how is it also the religious idea that the world at every level should be governed by predictable systems, that its ordering should be consistent across different regions and at levels up and down?
How is it a predictable organized system in which you have people coming back from the dead as transparent floaty things that go boo in the night? That's not consistent. It's not orderly. It's not at all predictable.
How is it orderly, up and down all the way to have genies who come out as clouds when you rub a lamp, and then they give you three wishes, and it can be anything at all. Anything, like magic spells. How is that predictable?
What about the psychic powers? Ross Douthat talked about that on page 18 too: Psychic powers, premonitions, seeing into the future, reading minds, ESP.
Ross Douthat is really trying to tell you that the world is an orderly place while also trying to tell you that magic is real. The ultimate magic is the magic of God.
I mean, Ross Douthat is talking about predictable orderly systems at different levels up and down. Well, what about at the top?
If you have a god who can do anything who is all powerful, and that is the Christian doctrine, that is the doctrine that uh, Ross doubt that is defending, can do anything, anytime, he can make your skin purple. Bang, just like that. He can turn you inside out. He can make you fly. He could make ten earths, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, just like that. Anything at all can make, oh, water into wine and, you know, fish and loaves and all that, you know, walking on water, raising the dead.
That is not predictable. That is not orderly.
What happened in the Enlightenment in the Renaissance was that people got a hold of some ancient documents that were pre-Christian. They read in those documents were these lovely ideas about order and different ways of looking at the universe that came from outside of Christian Europe.
This whole idea that Ross Douthat has in this chapter that really it was just Christian European civilization that enabled these things in the first place, and that's where science comes from.
He's trying to be clever and trying to say that really, a universe ordered by God with God's laws, well, that's that's clearly predictable, and that that should be very scientific, but it's not.
It's completely arbitrary. According to Christian religion, the Christian God could decide that tomorrow, there's no more gravity, or that you need to breathe bubble gum instead of air.
It's all arbitrary. The most arbitrary thing of all is saying that there is a god.
And saying that that's all that you need to know, because like, whoa, no, wait a minute, if this is predictable and orderly, where did that god come from? Where did this God come from? Who designed the Designer?
What it all comes down to is this: It is outrageous for Ross Douthat to claim that Christianity can be given the credit for orderly thought, predictable science. Order and predictability is actually totally alien to the religious perspective.
The religious perspective that he himself has claimed is there with ghosts and witchcraft and things that are unproven and unprovable.
Religion is not a source of order. It is a source of chaos.
When you have a universe that is owned like a toy, by a Creator God who can just change the rules at any time and perform miracles for reasons that nobody understands and nobody knows, and you have a religious document like the Bible that is not even consistent with itself.
This is not a source of the guiding principles of science, of logic and reason. You can have no order in a system that can be turned upside down, shaken around and have its fundamental principles changed at any moment.
Ross Douthat himself is saying that this happens all the time with magical spells and magical creatures that defy the orderly model of the universe, defy physics and chemistry and biology, and all of the principles that we have actually discovered that we can observe.
The truth is that all of the magic and all of the supernatural hocus pocus, all of the gods, none of them, have ever once been substantiated, by orderly, principled, independent investigations.
It's all just a bunch of stories. A bunch of stories that don't hold water to science, and no, science is not everything that we need in our human lives.
But if we abandon reality to fantasy stories, that we would love to believe are true, then we can fall for anything.
Not everyone believes Ross Douthat, because people want more than just empty belief.
People are tired of just being told stories, and then being asked to make real sacrifices for your imaginary creatures.