Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, by Ross Douthat (Zondervan, 240 pp., $26.99)
Religious belief can feel like the last refuge from pervasive technology. When New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called our society “decadent” in 2020, the threat of such technologies seemed comparatively distant. Innovation appeared stagnant, and our most pressing crises were updated versions of age-old conflicts—battles over “identity,” a scolding progressive moralism, and a plague.
Just five years later, the landscape has shifted. Drone warfare, cyborg defense experiments, and ChatGPT are among the signs of rapid technological acceleration. These developments make religious faith feel more urgent—not as a reactionary impulse, but as a steadying force. “Can religion save us from artificial intelligence?” asked a 2023 Los Angeles Times piece. Perhaps—but that religion would need to be something solid and enduring, not “moralistic therapeutic deism,” tribal wokeism on the left, or neo-paganism on the right.
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Enter Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. His new book doesn’t frame itself as a response to technological advances, but in the wake of his The Decadent Society and developments since, it’s easy to read it that way. To that end, the book makes a familiar but still valuable case against materialism, arguing—as Bishop Robert Barron has done tirelessly, before audiences of religious “nones”—that it is philosophically incoherent. From there, Douthat outlines a blueprint for a return to traditional religion, offering guidance for a society transitioning from a period of dissolute stagnation to one of unsettling technological possibility.
Though religion can serve as a stabilizing force, faith should not be embraced merely for its practicality. The central question is not whether belief in God is useful, but whether it is true. In Believe, Douthat tackles the question directly, arguing that “reason still points godward.”
One of his key arguments is the role of human consciousness in shaping reality. “At the deepest level of existence that we can fathom, the quantum level of reality,” Douthat writes, “the human mind seems to play some decisive role in making physical reality take actual shape.” He emphasizes the mystery of subjective experience—the “irreducible this-ness” of sensations like “the taste of wine, the scent of roses, the orangeness of the color orange.” Even more remarkably, he notes, the human mind is “improbably capable” of understanding the workings of the universe; our consciousness is “a strange key fitted to the order of the cosmos.”
The universe’s fine-tuning also suggests humanity’s central role, Douthat maintains. Rather than diminishing our significance, discoveries from Copernicus to Darwin to modern science reveal a cosmos “precisely balanced, exquisitely poised, in the alignments necessary to generate our specific kind of biologic life.”
Darwinism, of course, challenged traditional religious accounts of humanity’s origins. Early civilizations saw the world’s order as evidence of “some supernatural intentionality or hidden mystical foundation,” Douthat notes. But Darwin’s theory—that modern species emerged through a long process of natural selection—suggested a universe of “purposelessness and accident, materialism and atheism,” making it, as Richard Dawkins exulted, “possible at last to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
This need not be the case, says Douthat. Darwinism, even if true, does not disprove the existence of God. For modern science to refute a religious outlook, it would have to reveal a universe devoid of structure and order—an existence without patterns, laws, or intelligibility. “It has done no such thing,” Douthat asserts. “Indeed, to the contrary, the scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order than what was available to either the senses or the reasoning faculties in the premodern world.”
Darwin’s theories nevertheless fueled mass “Christian unsettlement.” Today, artificial intelligence poses a similar threat to religious belief. If AI can so easily mimic qualities that we consider divine—omniscience and creativity—were we naïve to believe in God in the first place? Was our concept of Him just a projection of human capabilities all along? Indeed, AI’s divine-seeming capacities—not to mention its ability to “interact” with us—open the possibility that it will, in some sense, “replace” God.
Some even seem to welcome this shift. Dan Faggella, founder of Emerj AI Research, believes that artificial intelligence is an evolutionary force that should be allowed to run its course, even if it means humanity loses its supremacy over creation. He playfully refers to advanced AI models as “sand god,” equating AI’s rise with a new form of divinity.
Douthat, by contrast, argues that humans are central, not incidental, to creation. If humanity is uniquely significant—a “key to the lock” of the cosmos—then humans are not mere steppingstones for a self-perpetuating higher intelligence but intrinsic participants in an order designed for them. Any vision of intelligence that ignores the rational structure of the universe and the unique role of human beings within it is, in his view, incoherent.
Ultimately, Believe is lopsided and a little unwieldy. It reads as a hastily written field guide rather than an exhaustive philosophical tome. But by Douthat’s own standards, maybe this is a strength; it reflects urgency, a counterpoint to decadence. And the book is urgent. We live in an era when people once again speak of gods—this time, machine-made ones. That is not proof of religion’s obsolescence but of our enduring need for it.
Photo: Maskot / DigitalVision
