Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…And that’s wrong, right? Right. Humans still have this propensity toward the marvelous — I think that’s the phrase he uses. I don’t think he’d be surprised by some persistence, but I think the original Humean theory is, most people believe in the supernatural because someone has taught them about it at church. There are these legends handed down from misty antiquity. I think we just know that that’s not true. That’s not what’s going on. That’s, I think, one of the multiple places where atheist skeptics and materialists have some prior updating to do about what we’ve learned over the last 200 years about what life is like under allegedly disenchanted conditions. Doesn’t it worry you that for all of these instances of the supernatural, there’s never enough evidence accumulated to convince actual scientists? No one has captured an elf, as far as I know. You could switch the topic to some other instance of the supernatural, but there’s plenty of testimony of elves.…

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