Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

The following is excerpted from Pages 107 to 109 of Ross Douthat’s newly-released book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2025).

Late, very late, at a Christmas party in mid-2000s Washington, DC, I found myself trapped in a small kitchen with Christopher Hitchens, the scourge of faith who loved to argue with the pious, so much so that they often assumed that he was just one brilliant thrust or successful parry away from throwing in with God.

On this occasion I was much too tired or too intoxicated to do my part for the cause of Hitchens’ soul. But my attempts at extrication were unsuccessful, because Hitchens was building to a question he clearly considered urgent, if not devastating.

“Suppose,” he said to me, index finger extended, an upright platter rising like a halo from the shelf behind his head—“Suppose that Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s suppose He did.”

“Well, then what exactly would that really prove?”

I don’t remember how I responded in the moment; the question was more memorably unexpected than any possible riposte. But I thought of Hitchens’ words many years later while pilfering some of the neuroscientist Erik Hoel’s arguments for the second chapter of this book. After elaborating all the limits of contemporary neuroscience, all the ways in which it fails to offer a basic theory of the thing it’s trying to investigate, Hoel acknowledges the possibility that the religious critics of materialism have a point, and that a satisfactory theory of mind will never be extracted from “the extrinsic machinations of the world.” In which case, he writes, there will always be a “slight crack in the door that refuses to close all the way,” a slight hope that maybe the death of the physical brain isn’t the end of consciousness—a hope, in other words, in the possibility that life continues after death.

And yet, he goes on, what can that kind of “incompleteness” in science’s materialist ambitions possibly demonstrate about the cosmos or our place in it? Nothing: The slight crack in the door is just a thin line of light, and the shadows are too deep: “Scientific incompleteness would recommend no particular religion, no specific revelation other than uncertainty. It would mean that this world is like a great ancient aurochs, its breath steaming in the cold, its eyes a mirror of dark glass, its face bovine and unreadable. Decipher the expression if you will.”

As with Hitchens in the pantry, the concession that there might actually be mind behind matter, even life awaiting beyond death, yields a conclusion of futility: what would that really prove?

A third example of the mentality I’m describing: In the final season of The Sopranos, a season that begins with Tony Soprano having an extended near-death experience, Paulie Gualtiere, one of Tony’s capos and the show’s most superstitious character, confesses to his boss that he once had a vision of the Virgin Mary in the Jersey mob’s strip club, the Bada Bing. Tony doesn’t tell Paulie that it was just a hallucination or that the Queen of Heaven wasn’t really there; he just stresses—mobster to mobster, murderer to murderer—that Paulie shouldn’t let it get in the way of his everyday obligations.

“I’m not saying there’s nothing out there,” he says. “But you gotta live your life.”

In their different ways Hitchens, Hoel, and Tony are all expressing a commonplace response to the arguments I’ve marshaled in this book so far: not so much a defiance of religious possibilities as a kind of helplessness in the face of the universe’s mystery, and a default to simply doing nothing in response.

In this spirit, one can imagine a reader conceding a great deal to my sketch of the human situation—acknowledging the appearances of order and design, the deep mystery of consciousness, the peculiarly privileged-seeming position of human beings in the cosmos, the resilience of mystical experiences and seemingly supernatural happenings—and still circling back around to Hitchens’ so-what-does-it-prove, to Hoel’s vision of the cosmos as an inscrutable mystery beast, to Tony telling his friend not to lose sleep over the unknowable.

This is why I’m trying to emphasize the convergence of different forms of evidence, not a single line of argument alone. For my own part I think that the default to helplessness is mistaken no matter what. Just taken individually, the possibility that someone might rise from the grave, or that our minds might survive our bodily deaths, or that the Something Out There might yield supernatural visions even to a New Jersey mobster, should each demand a serious response from any rational creature. If Jesus possibly rose from the dead, you don’t need to automatically become a Christian (maybe the Christians interpreted it all wrong), but as a mortal being yourself you should probably be interested in His story. If the door to immortality—real immortality, not the Silicon Valley aspiration to somehow undo cellular aging or merge our minds with AI—is possibly cracked open, you should probably think about making some kind of preparation for whatever might be waiting on the other side. If a vision of transcendent goodness and mercy appears to you, a sinner, and you don’t understand what it means, the most obvious interpretation is that you gotta change your life.

But you don’t have to agree with me, because the world doesn’t ask you to make a leap toward faith or belief based on just a single prompting—one potential resurrection, one apparent limit on scientific certainty, one strip-club supernatural vision. Rather it offers multiple prompts, multiple indicators, converging and overlapping and all pointing the human intellect in a similar direction—with strong indications of cosmic order and design and a strong possibility of human significance within that order and good reasons to think that we can reach up toward the supernatural even as the supernatural reaches out or down to us.

The point is that there’s an array of flashing lights, not just a one-off illumination inside the shadows of the Bada Bing. If mind might well precede matter, and the laws of the universe indicate that some intelligence created and sustains existence, and human reason seems to have a privileged ability to unlock existence’s mysterious underlying order, and the seemingly supernatural intrudes upon the natural as often in the modern world as in the past—well, then, you, as a man or a woman trying to chart the best course through a finite lifespan, with difficult moral choices at every turn and death awaiting sooner rather than later, have every reason to take pretty strong interest in the story you’ve found yourself inside, what part you might be asked to play in it, and how, for you and everyone, it might ultimately end.

And as it happens there exists in our world civilization, as in every prior human civilization worthy of the name, a vast body of personal writing and reporting and theorizing and argument on exactly these pretty-damn-important matters. There exists a substantial set of practices and rituals and wisdom literatures that are supposed to align human consciousness with cosmic purpose, that claim to help unite the individual human story with the larger drama, and to make sure that your soul is both prepared for that potentially cracked door at the conclusion of your life and protected from forces that might not want you to successfully pass through.

All of this religion offers—right now, today, as you read these words. Once you concede that the universe might be a bit more than just a collision of atoms doing meaningless expansions and contractions, you are not standing alone next to an enigmatic aurochs, staring with bafflement into its inhuman eyes. No, you are standing in the same place that generations of human beings have found themselves before: at the beginning of a journey, a quest, a pilgrim’s progress, that you have good reason to believe is going somewhere quite important, somewhere of ultimate significance. And the choice this book is concerned with, the choice to become religious or not, is fundamentally a choice between looking around at the piled-up knapsacks and guidebooks that prior pilgrims have carried and used and written, and deciding to see what they might have to offer—or just wandering onward, willfully blind without a compass or a map.

Image by Marty’s Art and licensed via Adobe Stock.