Published at The Orthosphere on 16th of May, 2026.
A friend sent me the text of Robert P. Baird’s hostile review, in the New York Review of Books, of Ross Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Lest anyone mistake the intent, the article is titled God of the Gaps. I responded as (slightly edited) follows. Quoted blocks are from the review, except where otherwise indicated.
I was surprised at the venom in Baird’s dismissive introduction of Douthat, a venom drawn down by Douthat’s conservatism. What place such criticism has in a review of this particular book escapes me. Maybe it is just an indication of the vindictiveness of the political divide in the USA. Orthodox (lower case) Christians are, by definition, conservative, and I imagine that such considerations will tend to dispose NYRB readers against the book.
Believe is a work of a familiar sort, then: an attempt by a religious writer to sway his faithless contemporaries…Douthat says he wants to lay a general foundation for religious interest and belief, to persuade skeptical readers that it’s worth becoming a seeker in the first place, and to provide guideposts and suggestions for people whose journeys begin in different places or take them in different directions…
What Douthat does want to do is argue with atheism, especially with the lingering legacy of New Atheism, the Anglo-American media phenomenon from the early Aughts that sought to disqualify religious belief tout court.
I haven’t read the book, but this seems fair enough. Having so described Douthat’s parameters, however, it is unreasonable of Baird to criticise the book for not being what it does not set out to be, but such is a substantial part of his criticism.
Other criticism is more to the point.
Douthat is able to focus…by means of a familiar double negative: not the case for religion so much as the case against the case against any kind of faith.
This is part of Baird’s criticism of Douthat’s non-denominational, so to speak, approach. But he immediately offers this.
Here it’s probably worth noting that I share Douthat’s rejection of the nihilism demanded by the scientific view.
That double negative is what Douthat is interested in. Baird begins his article with a compact expression of just that nihilism which he here claims is “demanded” by “the scientific view.” What does he mean by “the scientific view?” Nihilism is demanded only by commitment to physicalism, or, put another way, scientific materialism. This ideology is the backbone of Baird’s criticism.
Even so, some of Douthat’s arguments, as criticised by Baird, rely on findings of and controversies within the science of the past hundred years or so.
Belief is not undermined so much by a lively awareness of current debates in theoretical physics, cosmology, evolution and microbiology, as by the vibe—particularly the sense that “science” has proven that we are all the product of a random process of evolution whereby all life arose out of whatever non-organic bits and pieces happened to be lying around.
There are more sophisticated temptations to nihilism in the denial of conscious decision making, either by claiming we are neurological automata, or by insisting that we take every possible pathway simultaneously, but in parallel and non-communicating universes. But only very clever people disappear into those black holes.
Baird ventures to correct Douthat’s misunderstandings.
Part of the trouble is Douthat’s tendentious misunderstandings of basic science. He appears to think, for instance, that when physicists talk about the observer effect in quantum physics, they mean that human consciousness is “the only thing that transforms quantum contingency into definite reality, wave into particle, probability into certainty.” But this is not what most physicists mean at all. As Werner Heisenberg noted, “The introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature.” A quantum observation is a type of physical interaction; it has nothing to do, contra Douthat, with any “mysterious but essential role” for specifically human observation.
He does say “most physicists,” and that is probably true. But this debate over the meaning of “the measurement problem” is alive and well.
In a long article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jay Faye discusses the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, including the Measurement Problem. As I understand it, this refers to the fact that, in quantum mechanical theory,
… [t]he basic assumption behind quantum fundamentalism is that the structure of the … wave function corresponds to how the world is structured. For instance, according to the wave function description every quantum system may be in a superposition of different states because a combination of state vectors is also a state vector. Now … it follows that [the] entangled state [of the quantum object and the measuring apparatus] would likewise be represented by a state vector [of multiple simultaneous states]. Then the challenge is, of course, how we can explain why the pointer of a measuring instrument enters a definite position (and not a superposition) … whenever the apparatus interacts with the object. In a nutshell this is the measurement problem. [SEP]
Superposition refers to the statistical cloud of possible states of, for example, a photon or an electron. It is indeterminate in quantum mechanics. Yet when measured, it takes on a particular value.
Schrödinger, who developed the mathematics of the wave function, proposed the thought experiment with his famous cat to illustrate the absurdity of quantum fundamentalism in the real world. This has been argued about ever since. Faye outlines the position of John von Neumann (and Eugene Wigner).
The Copenhagen interpretation is often taken to subscribe to a solution to the measurement problem that has been offered in terms of John von Neumann’s projection postulate. In 1932, von Neumann suggested that the entangled state of the object and the instrument collapses to a determinate state whenever a measurement takes place. This measurement process (a type 1-process…) could not be described by quantum mechanics; quantum mechanics can only described type-2 processes (i.e., the development of a quantum system in terms of Schrödinger’s equation). … von Neumann then distinguished between (i) the system actually observed; (ii) the measuring instrument; and (iii) the actual observer. He argues that during a measurement the actual observer gets a subjective perception of what is going on that has a non-physical nature, which distinguishes it from the observed object and the measuring instrument. However, he holds on to psycho-physical parallelism as a scientific principle, which he interprets such that there exists a physical correlate to any extra-physical process of the subjective experience. So in every case where we have a subjective perception we must divide the world into the observed system and the observer. But where the division takes place is partly arbitrary. …von Neumann argues that the observer can never be included in a type 2-process description, but the measuring instrument may sometime be part of a type 2-process, although it gives the same result with respect to the observed object (i). An important consequence of von Neumann’s solution to the measurement problem is that a type 1-process takes place only in the presence of the observer’s consciousness. Furthermore, even when von Neumann considers the situation in which the descriptions of (i) and (ii) are combined, he talks about the interaction between the physical system (i) + (ii) and an abstract ego (iii) (Neumann 1932 [1996], Ch VI). Therefore, the mind seems to play an active role in forming a type 1-process, which would be incompatible with psycho-physical parallelism.
Indeed, within philosophy of mind one cannot consistently maintain both psycho-physical parallelism and the existence of an interaction between the brain and the mind. So it is no wonder that Eugene Wigner (1967) followed up on the suggestion of the mind’s interaction by proposing that what causes a collapse of the wave function is the mind of the observer. … The measuring problem led to the famous paradox of Schrödinger’s cat and later to the one of Wigner’s friend. [SEP. My emphases throughout.]
The solution to the problem of psycho-physical parallelism is simply to abandon it. There are empirical observations that render necessary parallelism untenable, and I assume that Douthat touches on them, but Baird does not venture there, perhaps because that’s physicalist heresy.
But Wigner never explained how it was possible for something mental to produce a material effect like the collapse of a quantum system. [SEP]
This is just a particular example of the general problem of explaining (in some sense mechanically, by implication) how the mind can produce physical activity. The “solution” is to pretend it doesn’t happen.
… one cannot consistently maintain both psycho-physical parallelism and the existence of an interaction between the brain and the mind. [SEP]
But the mind does interact with the brain and the rest of the body. This is a fact of experience, in spite of the determined efforts to eliminate mind by defining consciousness as some kind of accidental and irrelevant by-product of neural activity which the body could just as well do without; that is, we could just as well be p-zombies.
The qualia of our senses, inexplicable operations of our mind, are the bedrock of empiricism. And the qualia of our inductive and deductive reasoning are equally part of the phenomenological activity we know as mind. The physicalist project which gradually took control of the Scientific Revolution has degenerated into the reductio ad absurdum of denying the reality of that which brought it into being.
Abandoning psycho-physical parallelism and accepting that mind moves the body, aside from any physicalist explanation, stating that mind can and does function independently of bodily apparatus, and that the apparatus of the body is activated on particular occasions by mind, and that these realities “simply are, for reasons we’ll never grasp” is parallel to an argument that Baird himself employs against Douthat, as we shall see.
The “many physicists” of whom Baird wrote may indeed reject the role of consciousness in resolving indeterminacy, but they still need a way out. For very many, that way out is to say that all possible values of a measurement occur—in parallel universes that branch off from every quantum event. It’s mind-boggling. It is also completely untestable, as, by definition, such universes are undetectable from our own. This is no longer the realm of empirical enquiry; it makes no more truth claims than science fiction or a video game. It is pseudo-science.
Roger Penrose, a substantial figure in theoretical physics, recently said on this topic, “It’s a good thing to have in a certain stage of your life … believed in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The shorter period, the better. I did go through such a stage myself, believing in the many worlds interpretation.”
The attractive force of multiverses for Penrose is no doubt diminished or eliminated by his conclusion that quantum mechanics is wrong, as he has recently asserted directly, or perhaps it’s the other way round.
Quantum fundamentalism says about reality that it is absurd.
The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is—absurd.
Richard Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
But reality is not absurd. That’s the crux of the measurement problem. It’s useful in this regard to read Schrödinger’s 1944 book, What Is Life? In the first chapter, he asks Why Are Atoms So Small? He uses Kelvin’s example.
Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.
Atoms are constantly and randomly in motion for as long as their temperature is above absolute zero. A sense of what this means inside individual cells can be gained from the now-famous animations from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Schrödinger continues:
Only in the co- operation of an enormously large number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behaviour of these assemblies with an accuracy increasing as the number of atoms involved increases. It is in that way that the events acquire truly orderly features. All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms.
These observations do not solve the problem of the production of orderly structures from absurd components, but provide a strong hint that in the “classical” world, subatomic absurdity is rendered orderly by the scale at which human beings exist and interact with the world.
In the book, Schrödinger, deeply committed as he was to scientific naturalism and evolution, also makes this telling observation, speaking of the brain and “sensorial system.”
[I]t will greatly facilitate our task to choose for investigation the process which is closely accompanied by subjective events, even though we are ignorant of the true nature of this close parallelism. Indeed, in my view, it lies outside the range of natural science and very probably of human understanding altogether.
In addition to the ever-proliferating universes of quantum fundamentalism, string theory, which has absorbed considerable funding for decades now, offers its own version, with 10500, give or take, vacuum states out of which universes with unique properties may be formed. Unfortunately, string theory has been getting some bad press recently.
Indeed, all of theoretical physics has been getting bad press lately, as we will see.
Another part of the trouble is Douthat’s dependence on the argumentum ad ignorantiam… Arguments of this type, known derisively as “the God of the gaps,” look for holes in our scientific understanding of the world and claim those as proof, or at least a heavy suggestion, against the secular hypothesis. Douthat wants us to see mysticism, near-death experiences, our own consciousness, and even the physical constants that make life possible in the universe as evidence that a superreal Something Else must be going on.
I can’t object to this entirely. I have some sympathy, for instance, for the idea that our existence is not a freak cosmic accident.
This is the second hint that Baird floats above all of this.
… I acknowledge this somewhat uncomfortable personal fact … to make it clear that … some part of me would have been happy to see Douthat’s book succeed. … Alas, it’s not to be. … after reading Believe, the bleak view of the universe seemed more, not less, likely to be true.
I guess we’ll have to wait for Baird’s book.
Physicalism is the bedrock philosophical commitment underlying the derision with which the god of the gaps is invoked against, for example, Douthat. But the god of the gaps argument cuts both ways. Physicalists are committed to the view that every aspect of the universe can be understood in terms of other physical systems and their interactions, eventually determinable by empirical means. No matter how inadequate, fanciful or unfalsifiable any physicalist explanations of some set of phenomena may be, faith sustains belief in the physicalist god of the gaps.
At one point Douthat suggests that the physical laws that govern the universe ought to be seen as evidence of a divine mind.
Those physical constants that make life possible are indeed remarkable. Such observations have given rise to various iterations of the anthropic principle. The following quotes are from the Britannica article “anthropic principle.”
… it appears that many features of the universe that are necessary for the evolution and persistence of life are the results of unusual coincidences between different values of the constants of nature—quantities such as the mass of the electron, the strength of gravity, or the lifetime of the neutron … [I]f these quantities were slightly altered, then no form of complexity or life could exist in the universe.
[For example …] Carbon is formed by nuclear reactions in stellar interiors that combine three nuclei of helium to make a nucleus of carbon. This three-body reaction is very improbable. … Hoyle predicted that the carbon nucleus must possess an intrinsic energy level at a value almost equal to that of the sum of the three helium energies at the temperature of their combination. Under these circumstances the nuclear reaction proceeds with especial rapidity: it is said to be “resonant.” Soon afterward, physicists found an energy level of carbon in precisely the place predicted by Hoyle. Subsequently, it was found that the next nuclear reaction in the chain, the combination of carbon with another helium nucleus to make oxygen, just fails to be resonant by a very narrow margin. If it had also been resonant, then all the carbon needed to promote biochemistry would have been rapidly burned to oxygen. These coincidences in the relative positions of energy levels in carbon and oxygen nuclei are ultimately determined by complicated combinations of the values of fundamental constants of nature. Were their values slightly different from those observed, then the building blocks of life—elements heavier than helium—would not easily form and persist; life might even be impossible.
When stars exhaust their primary sources of nuclear fuel…they explode and disperse these elements into space, where they ultimately are incorporated into dust, planets, and people. This process is long and slow: it takes several billion years. … Since the universe is expanding, it must by necessity be billions of light-years in size if it is to support any complex biochemical life. … The anthropic principle implies that life could not exist in a universe that was significantly smaller than the observed universe.
… if the universe had expanded much faster than the critical rate, then particles of matter would have moved apart from one another so rapidly in the past that no galaxies and stars could have formed. Conversely, if the universe had expanded much more slowly than the critical rate, it would have imploded before stars, and hence the building blocks of life, could form. In either situation, the universe would probably not have given rise to living observers.
It’s an impressive story. Baird dodges it like so.
The fact that science can’t explain where physical laws come from is an epistemological nullity; it can’t be tweaked to reveal some esoteric alternative. Maybe physical laws do come from God or the gods. Or maybe they’re the local manifestation of the multiverse. Or maybe they simply are, for reasons we’ll never grasp. The possibilities are endless, and nothing allows us to prove which option is superior.
(Note the parallel, alluded to earlier.)
This is disingenuous. No, it’s not an epistemological nullity; it’s a fact, and an explanatory nullity for physicalism; physicalism has no answer, only speculations. The question of why the world, the kosmos, exists at all is a staple of human enquiry. Christianity, and other religions, answer the question with “God.” Physicalism is required to provide a more compelling alternative. Proponents don’t get to call this explanatory nullity an epistemological quirk when they necessarily come up empty-handed from their own ideologically constrained enquiries. Far from being endless, the possibilities are limited, even if one falls back on the good ol’ multiverse, which amounts to a single option. The inability to give an answer to this question is a critical flaw for physicalism.
“God” is a comprehensive answer, but one comes to that conclusion not only because of the isolated consideration of a single question, but because it is consistent with the conclusions of many other lines of enquiry, with one’s cultural environment, with the history of one’s religion, the testimony both of the saints and of casual conversations, and personal encounters with the numinous, to name some factors.
A few times in Believe he dutifully concedes the power of the so-called law of truly large numbers, which says that on a big enough scale even extremely improbable events ought to be expected …
It’s true that if you tallied the likelihood of all the billions of events that led up to the evolution of human beings on Earth, you would end up with a probability that, on any human scale, looked indistinguishable from impossibility. But the long process that led to our species did not take place on a human scale. It happened over billions of years, in a universe with something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets—a universe old enough and big enough, in other words, to offer statistical room for a lot of approximately impossible events to take place.
What is this law of truly large numbers?
In 1977, Hubert Yockey published A calculation of the probability of spontaneous biogenesis by information theory. It wasn’t encouraging. This is from the abstract.
The number of cytochrome c sequences is about 3·8 × 1061. The probability of selecting one such sequence at random is about 2·1 ×10−65. The primitive milieu will contain a racemic mixture of the biological amino acids and also many analogues and non-biological amino acids. Taking into account only the effect of the racemic mixture the longest genome which could be expected with 95 % confidence in 109 years [a billion years—maximum time for the appearance of the first cells on earth] corresponds to only 49 amino acid residues. This is much too short to code a living system so evolution to higher forms could not get started. … It is concluded that belief in currently accepted scenarios of spontaneous biogenesis is based on faith, contrary to conventional wisdom.
I don’t have the full paper, but this 2025 article on the Christian site ST Network discusses the Yockey analysis.
Hubert Yockey, a physicist and computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated how long it would take for a specific protein to appear by chance on a planet where life had not yet evolved. To do this, he assumed that this event could occur anywhere and at any time within a prebiotic ocean containing amino acids—the so-called “primordial soup” scenario. His calculations showed that it would take at least 10²³ years for chance to produce that single first protein on the entire planet. … Yockey concludes that the entire universe (not just Earth!) is 1,010,000,000,000 too small for the spontaneous emergence of a single primitive cell.
Robert Endres of Imperial College recently published a paper called The unreasonable likelihood of being: Origin of life, terraforming, and AI. He doesn’t give any overall probabilities, even as he seems optimistic in discussing individual considerations. Not so much, however, in the discussion. (1 Gy is a billion years in the past.)
[T]he deeper challenge is mechanistic: even if the information rate is feasible, the route remains opaque. Where did the directionality…come from? What structures or environmental constraints enabled long-term memory or error suppression without evolved proofreading? The puzzle deepens as timelines shift: from 3.465 Gy microfossils in Western Australia to a LUCA [last universal common ancestor] possibly living around 4.2 Gy ago, close to the formation of liquid water at 4.404 Gy. … Substantial evolutionary development … likely occurred between the first protocell and LUCA.
Which returns us, cautiously but irresistibly, to the question: Was Earth terraformed, or did order coalesce from chaos under the silent governance of physics? … [A]biotic evolution, however slow and strange, remains a viable (if mind-bending) explanation. Invoking terraforming adds explanatory complexity without constraint. And while we cannot prove that abiogenesis is inevitable, it remains consistent with thermodynamics.
… [W]e may never recover the precise historical sequence by which life first emerged. What we can hope for, however, is a set of physically and chemically plausible routes: an understanding of how matter of this kind could have become alive, even if we never know exactly how it did. We end with a note of caution. There is a real possibility that, in seeking to understand life’s origin, we become a living parable of Gödel’s incompleteness and Turing’s undecidability—systems entangled in their own logic, unable to fully explain themselves.
Clearly, the “mind-bending” explanation is not satisfactory enough for Prof. Endres, else why the attraction of panspermia (terraforming), as espoused by, for example, Crick and Orgel?
Excuse my clumsy maths, but calculating total improbability over many independent tests looks something like this. What is the probability that, in six successive throws of a die, no 6 will be thrown? The probability of not throwing a six on a single throw is 5/6. Therefore, the probability of not throwing a 6 on six successive throws is (5/6)6—approximately 0.335, or just over a third.
On Yockey’s estimates, and taking 1022 from the near the high end of the (very rough) estimates of possible life-supporting planets in the known universe (1018—1023 per Grok; Baird uses 1024) , we get:
Probability of selecting one cytochrome c sequence: 2.1 ×10−65
Probability of NOT selecting: 1 – ( 2.1 × 10−65 ) = 0.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999979
Probability of NOT selecting in 1022 planets: ( 1 – ( 2.1 × 10−65 ) )^1022 = 0.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999979
Probability of selecting one cytochrome c sequence on 1022 planets = 1 – probability of NOT selecting in 1022 planets ≃ 2.1 × 10−43
In other words, there is no law of very large numbers that can blithely be assumed to neutralise the improbability of any improbable event. There are only particular probabilities which can be guesstimated and calculated. In this case, the probability, according to Yockey’s estimates, of one cytochrome c sequence forming at random across the entire universe is <0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000021>. Does this “offer statistical room for a lot of approximately impossible events”?
After this statistical obfuscation (which to be fair, is endemic among popularisers of physicalism), Baird makes a startling admission. “Reason can tolerate the belief that God had a hand in evolution …” Reason does not tolerate anything that is not reasonable. It’s not a question of what reason tolerates, but what reason must allow.
He continues, “… but only at the price of admitting that He took pains to conceal public evidence of His interventions.” On the contrary, once cleared of statistical and other obfuscations, the Book of Nature, which had always, up to the outbreak of systematic nihilism in the last two or three centuries, been read as authored by God, is, as a few more pages are being turned, revealing more of the mystery of its authorship.
Perhaps the most serious weakness of Believe is its poor handling of religious pluralism, which is in many ways a far more difficult challenge to belief than scientific skepticism. Douthat clearly wants … to … dodge the problem as long as possible; arguing for a … general rejection of secularism … allows him to hold off questions about specific religions until well after the midpoint of the book. But eventually he turns to the hard question …: Believe in what?
Is “religious pluralism … a far more difficult challenge”? Earlier, Baird had criticised Douthat in these terms.
Douthat says he wants to lay a general foundation for religious interest and belief, to persuade skeptical readers that it’s worth becoming a seeker in the first place, and to provide guideposts and suggestions for people whose journeys begin in different places or take them in different directions.
So the answer to the question, “Believe in what?” is, in a word, a Creator God. Douthat is trying to get his readers to a position like that of St Paul’s audience in the Areopagus. “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ … The God who made the world and everything in it … made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth … that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” [Acts 17:16 ff]
Religious pluralism, in the context of a deeply secularised atheistic or agnostic culture, is a desirable outcome, as Douthat has made clear. And in that context, claiming that pluralism is a more difficult challenge than believing in God, as though the former must be addressed before the latter, is disingenuous, to say the least.
Douthat downplays all the fantastically complicated disagreements that have marked religious history for centuries. Instead he narrates a tidy tale of convergence toward a handful of broadly similar, and mostly monotheistic, major faiths. … [H]e allows himself grand and absurd pronouncements like “The more popular, enduring, and successful world religions are more likely than others to be true,” and, “If God cares about anything, He cares about sex.” Claims like these are so theologically preposterous, especially coming from a practicing Catholic, that it’s hard to know quite what to make of them.
It’s actually easy to know what to do with them—take them at face value. Leaving aside the fact that “popular, enduring and successful” pretty much boil down to the same thing over a span long enough to qualify “enduring,” and noting the unstated clause, “Assuming God exists,” isn’t Douthat’s a reasonable statement? Try this: the least popular, enduring and successful world religions are more likely than others to be true. Is that better?
There’s an unstated clause in the other assertion as well. “God exists, and God cares about us human beings.” If this is true, the other statement follows, as every human society has known until this secular, skeptical, nihilistic and demographically suicidal society cut the connection between sex and the having of children. Hasn’t that worked out well? The fact that Baird can ridicule so obvious a statement as being “theologically preposterous” hints at the theological preposterousness of his own views, and illustrates his embrace of the death cult that is contemporary Western society.
[Douthat] writes about religion as though its major purpose were to banish any thought of our insignificance. He wants religion to assure him not only that “our conscious existence has some cosmic importance, some great consequence,” but that the universe was designed with one end in mind: “Toward making us possible, the readers that the book of nature was awaiting all along.”
This, Baird claims, demonstrates Douthat’s “enervating conception of belief.” Enervating? One wonders just what “conception of belief” Baird holds. The point of this usage, I suppose, is to reinforce Baird’s readers in their own courageous confrontation with the meaninglessness that Baird laid out in his introduction. In other words, the deeply enervating nihilism of the “scientific viewpoint.” These examples from Douthat derive either directly from scientific findings, or from the attempts of scientists to claw their way out of the interpretive chaos of a century ago.
That chaos can properly be called a crisis that a century of intensive investigation by an army of impeccably-credentialed scientists, the sheer number of whom would astound Planck, Einstein and Bohr, has not been able to resolve. It is not the only crisis. Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law, Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, and Alexander Unzicker’s The Higgs Fake – How Particle Physicists Fooled the Nobel Committee are critiques of the state of theoretical physics written by physicists and mathematicians.
When theoretical physicists combine with astronomers to develop cosmology, a fantasy universe emerges. “Dark matter,” a form of matter undetectable except in observational distortions assumed to be gravitational effects, came to be regarded as a major component of the universe in the latter part of the last century, until it was substantially superseded in the 1990s by “dark energy,” a type of energy required to explain the accelerating expansion on the universe, although its nature could only be speculated about. Nonetheless, in the current schema, atoms comprise less than 5% of the “stuff” in the universe, while the demoted dark matter still accounts for around 26%, in spite of no-one knowing what it is, and the dark energy newcomer, likewise mysterious, is around 70%.
When the scientific view tells us that the universe is 95% who knows what, is it not reasonable to suppose that the disciplines are in a deep and persistent crisis? Still, promoters associated with CERN are confident that a $40 billion Future Circular Collider will reveal the nature of dark matter, at least. Who could resist such a proposal? Recent studies, confusingly, “showed that not only had dark energy changed over time, but, shockingly, that the acceleration was slowing down.”
But religion—real religion, not Douthat’s complacent abstraction—is weirder, wilder, more violent, and more destabilizing than Believe would have us believe. … Think of Jesus’ teaching that we must love our enemies, hate our families, and sell everything we own. Think of all the many religious teachers who insist that genuine encounters with the divine are humbling, surprising, and very often terrifying. They promise nothing like the smug self-aggrandizement Douthat appears to demand from faith.
I’ve isolated Baird’s comment about Jesus, because I know much more about Christianity than about the other universalist and apocalyptic religion, Islam.
Jesus does not demand that we hate our families, any more than he commands followers to chop off a hand or a foot, or gouge out an eye. Selling all one has and following him is only for the select few, like the apostles or St Anthony or St Francis. In each case, great things followed. But why is Baird so put off by loving one’s enemies? Not enough violence? It is the path to peace, firstly in one’s own spirit, and then more widely. But there is room for blood; for the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. And the Mass is a sacrifice.
Baird wraps up his review this way.
Oddly it’s his own mother who provides the best reminder that a serious engagement with religion often provides the opposite of an ego balm. About halfway through Believe, Douthat quotes her account of a spiritual experience she had in the 1980s:
It just came into me with a roar, and clamped onto me, like a thousand volts, or like one of those machines they use to start someone’s heart on the operating table. It clamped onto both sides of my face, and over my thyroid, and gripped my arms down into my hands that were still hovering over my waist and vibrating. … I had no idea how to respond. I remember the name Lazarus flashing into my mind, and the incredible thought: This is a power that could raise the dead.
This may sound like nothing more than a florid delusion. And maybe that’s all it was. But here at least, as almost nowhere else in the book, we make contact with the alien force of transcendence, and get a sense of why someone might cast aside skepticism in order to believe in something that defies four hundred years of hard-won scientific knowledge.
It’s a nice rhetorical flourish, but it is also a window into parts of Douthat’s argument that Baird has chosen not to mention, or to brush over like so.
He grudgingly allows … that some apparent medical miracles “might just be a vanishingly rare example of spontaneous remission intersecting with the happenstance of a prayer being offered at a particularly timely moment.” It’s clear, however, that he doesn’t really accept this. He thinks there are just too many cases of reported miracles for all of them to be false…
Douthat talks about the religious commitments of his parents in a talk to the Society of Catholic Scientists. In another interview, he has mentioned that, “partly in search of a cure for his mother’s unexplained chronic illness that manifested itself in allergies and sensitivities, the family started attending charismatic services.” This is almost certainly the context of the testimony Baird selects to wrap up his review. So, for one rhetorical purpose, Baird dismisses Douthat’s references to miraculous healings, and for another, recruits Douthat’s mother’s recounting of her charismatic experience, which he, to further his dark and turbulent view of “real religion,” characterises as “contact with the alien force of transcendence.”
In fact, if Baird could be bothered to seek out those who had had such encounters, he would not hear them described as “alien;” quite the reverse. Awe-inspiring, life-changing, yes, but encounters of human spirits with the divine that, so far from seeming alien, were like opening the door to the home one never knew was waiting. He is certainly right, though, that such experiences will “cast aside skepticism,” and that scientific knowledge will have to accommodate such imperious personal knowledge.
Douthat’s Believe