We are on page 140 out of just a little bit over 200 pages in Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It's a small book.
Ross Douthat couldn't really summon much in the way of ideas for this book, which is surprising, because Christianity, which is what this book is really arguing for, has a history of a couple thousand years. This is the best that Ross Douthat could come up with?
Anyway, we are on page 140 of his book. This podcast, Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat, covers a detailed examination of Douthat’s arguments in favor of religion broadly, and Christianity specifically.
On this page, Ross Douthat is warning against the dangers of nature, and against the world, and how how awful nature is, and how you must not belong to a religion that worships nature, because nature is bad, bad, bad. Ross Douthat seems to thinks that nature is demonic.
Ross Douthat’s own words on this are as follows:
“The peril of polytheism is linked to the source of its appeal by positing supernatural forces that are linked to the natural world rather than fully outside or above it, delivers a kind of intimacy, but also an inherent danger, because one thing that's clear about physical nature is that it's extremely perilous, filled with predators and traps, things that will kill you, without thinking twice in places to get near permanently lost, which is why the darkest forms of polytheism can get very dark indeed, treating the book of nature as a moral template, and worshiping gods of strength and cruelty, as in Aztec, human sacrifice and bloody Viking conquest. If you go looking for the face of God entirely in imminent forms and secondary powers, there's always a danger that you'll end up worshiping a demon.”
This, of course, is what Ross Douthat’s religion teaches him. It teaches him that every potential spirit or god that does not belong to Christianity, that is not the Christian God itself, all of those are just demons that are dangerous and evil and wicked and bad.
Ross Douthat conveniently forgets who invented those demons, and for that matter, who invented the natural world, full of peril and bad things that will kill you, and do mean things to you, in which you can get lost. That would be God, the Christian God. Christians believe that their god made all these supposedly terrible things.
Now, of course, that's not true. There is no God, certainly not as proposed in Christianity.
There is no evidence that any supernatural being created this world. There is no evidence that demons exist, but Ross Douthat believes in the literal reality of demons. He has made it clear already that if you deviate from the true path of religion, you will be set upon by demons. Demons will appear, and they will control you and do wicked, terrible things to you.
Of course, according to his own religion, those demons were created by the Christian God. Ross Douthat forgets that part.
Here's the other thing that Ross Douthat doesn't deal with in this paragraph that I just read to you. He has described the physical nature of the universe as extremely perilous. However, earlier in this book, Douthat wrote that it's remarkable how the universe seems to be attuned to life, and claimed that's evidence that God must exist, that there must be a designer who made it that way.
Once again, we see that Ross Douthat is not capable of holding any thought in his mind consistently for very long at all. That makes him incapable of maintaining a rational argument that lasts for very long.
I mean, one thing I haven't done in this podcast is to identify and explain the structure of what rational thought is, of what logic is and how it works. Pre-Christian philosophers developed these rules of logic and they really aren't very very difficult to understand.
Here is one basic principle of logic: You cannot say that something is both true and untrue. You cannot say that Proposition X is true and then say that Proposition X is not true. If you do that kind of thing, your argument is illogical. Irrational, not reasonable.
That’s a basic rule of logic. It’s a fundamental of reasoned thinking.
It's not very complex, but Ross Douthat, on page 140, is saying that the world, the physical world that we live in, is perilous and it's terrifying. It's awful, even though earlier, he said that the world is welcoming to life in remarkable ways.
So he's saying that Proposition X is both true and untrue, Proposition X being that the world is a lovely place, so wonderful, that only a divinely all-powerful and all good god could have made it. It must have been a designer.
Here's another basic rule of logic: Disproving one proposition, one idea does not mean that another idea is necessarily true.
In logic, they often give an idea the label of a letter, just so that you can keep it straight, so that you can see clearly the structures of an argument.
So here on page 140, we have a couple of different propositions. One is that the physical world and any spirits that might represent that world are dangerous.
We'll call that first claim Proposition A.
There is another proposition in this paragraph, which I'll call proposition Q. Proposition Q is that a spirit, a god that is outside of nature is not dangerous, is not perilous.
Those are 2 propositions, and in logic, just because you disprove proposition A, it doesn't mean that proposition Q is true. It just means proposition A is false.
Do you get that? That's basic logic. Ross Douthat doesn't understand that basic foundational rule in logic.
Think about it in terms of a grocery store. If proposition A = I'm going to buy a watermelon, and proposition Q =I'm going to buy macaroni and cheese, if you go into a grocery store with the object of buying just one piece of food, and you conclude through some process that you’re not buying proposition A, the watermelon, does that mean necessarily that you're going to buy the macaroni and cheese?
No, it doesn't. You could buy a chocolate bar. You could buy a can of soup. You could buy ice cream, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are a huge number of possibilities out there.
Also, it may well be that both the macaroni and cheese and the melon are wrong for you. It could be both of them are tainted with some kind of poison. Just because the watermelon is poisonous doesn't mean that the macaroni and cheese has not been tainted with poison also.
Do you understand that?
At the same time, we have this idea that just because (if we accept Ross Douthat's proposition) that any spirit and any religion that is rooted in nature is evil and demonic, that doesn't mean that a monotheistic religion with a supposedly transcendent god is not wicked and dangerous as well.
Both could be true.
You see, how logic and reason and rationality are just not part of Ross Douthat’s skill set here?
Of course, the most plausible proposition of them all is that really, none of these supernatural things exist, because Ross Douthat hasn't provided any solid evidence that any of these things are true at all.
So, we could have a transcendent god that belongs to a realm outside of the physical world as we know it, a realm that is perilous and dangerous and full of wickedness. The god that lives there could be the worst thing ever. In fact, if that god designed this world full of peril, you would expect the god to be cruel
Would you go into a grocery store where you found out that the lettuce is tainted with deadly bacteria and then go and buy the spinach that's been on the shelf right next to that lettuce? That would be risky. You might start to think the green grocer is just not reliable. Ross Douthat considers none of these things.
In this paragraph from chapter five, there's something really simple and basic, that he doesn't explore. Ross Douthat doesn't prove it. He doesn't provide any evidence that there is an inherent link between nature-based religions or polytheism, and dangerous kinds of religious practices or spirits.
He provides a couple of examples of things that he doesn't like: Pagan Vikings and Aztec human sacrifice. We know, however, that the same god of Christianity that Ross Douthat worships, demanded that his prophet Abraham conduct a human sacrifice, that Abraham climb a mountain with his son, and then tie his son up and slit his throat and burn his body as an offering to the God of the Bible.
Human sacrifice seems to have been a big part of it of the cult of God.
That same God, as a part of the religious worship of him, has demanded that people go out and slaughter children and babies, to commit genocide.
As a character, the Christian god is bad news And aren't we lucky that that Christian god appears not to be real? Oh yes, we are.
If you want to involve us in a church that worships a violent, vengeful kind of god that asks his followers to conduct human sacrifice of their own children, upon his own whim, well, that's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.