Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…But surely, it’s odd to, say, not dismiss the Trinity, not dismiss the intermediate elf beings, and then invoke Occam’s razor, right? You could just be a Muslim. There’s one God indivisible. That’s that. Or be a Unitarian. But your Occam’s razor has to incorporate the religious phenomena as we experience them, or I would say that it has to. First of all, I do think that the parsimony of the hardcore deist or Unitarian or anti-supernaturalist Muslim — the kind who don’t have any traffic with jinn and things of that nature — that kind of parsimony is plausible enough. It’s certainly more plausible than hard materialism. If given the option, I would choose that over the worldview of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, but I don’t think it adequately encompasses the terrain of actual religious and spiritual experiences that people have. That, I think, is a crucial reason for the persistence of religion even in an allegedly disenchanted age. It’s obviously the point of origin for most of the world’s religions. Most of the world’s major religions make some kind of accommodation — even when they are monotheistic — to the idea of intermediate powers. I think it’s useful to think about counterfactuals. If we lived in a world where every religious experience was the kind of religious experience where you just had a sense of oneness and deep connection with a singular being who seemed responsible for existence — people have such experiences. If that were the only kind of experience you had, that anyone had, or that 99 percent of religious experiences fit that pattern, then yes, parsimony, I think, would suggest whatever might be out there, there’s not just probably one God, but that God is probably the only higher power concerned with us with whom we might be in relationship. In the event, though, there’s a much wider range of spiritual experiences. There does seem to be a realm of powers that, again, you could classify them with the small-g god. You could classify them as Christians would, usually, in angelic and demonic terms. Yes, I think both the variation and the consistency in religious experience — there’s a lot of variation, but then there’s a certain consistency of the kinds of variations across cultures. You want something that I think explains that, and the theory that explains that is that there is some sort of hierarchy. We’re not just alone with the one true God. This gets us to the part of your book where you discuss me. I’m never quite sure how one settles on a particular religious belief. If I go to Sri Lanka, the children of Hindus tend to be Hindu. The children of Buddhists tend to be Buddhists, Muslims, some Christians even.…

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