Rational and Religious (with Ross Douthat)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2025

⏱️ 78 minutes

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Summary

How can we explain the world's underlying order? How does consciousness emerge? And why do people from such different cultures have such similar near-death experiences? Listen as Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of the new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, argues that these and other unanswerable questions underscore his argument for the rationality of religious belief. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss Douthat's reasons for embracing faith with confidence, why science only bolsters his belief, and why he thinks that more religion would be a good thing for society.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is March 19th, 2025, and my guest is author and journalist Ross Douthit.
0:42.9	He is an opinion columnist for The New York Times, and our topic for today is his latest book, Believe Why Everyone Should Be religious.
0:52.3	Ross, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:56.0	Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Before we begin, I want to mention this conversation.
0:59.0	May cover some themes inappropriate for young children.
1:02.0	Feel free to screen this if you are a parent.
1:05.0	As most e-con talk listeners know, I'm a religious Jew.
1:09.0	Some listeners when discovering that write me and say they're
1:12.8	surprised because they've always thought I was intelligent. I sometimes respond by saying, well,
1:19.4	you know, a lot of intelligent people in history have been believers, Isaac Newton, C.S. Lewis,
1:25.0	Maimonides. And a typical response I get then is, well, sure, then a smart person could be a believer, but now, I mean, those people wouldn't be religious now. Your book is an attempt to justify belief or the exploration of belief from an intelligent perspective. Give us the thumbnail for the skeptics out there.
1:46.3	How could a thoughtful, intelligent, rational, educated, enlightened person in 2025 actually
1:53.1	believe in an invisible being that you and I would call God?
1:58.7	So the conceit of the book is that most of the reasons that made people, made it seem reasonable to be religious back then, as your correspondence would put it, still obtained today.
2:15.6	And that there is a sort of master narrative of modern secularism or modern atheism that says, look, you know, there were good reasons to believe before Copernicus and Galileo, or there were good reasons to believe before Charles Darwin, or maybe some people would say there were good reasons to believe before neuroscience.
2:36.0	Or, you know, different, different, different sort of scientific revolutions are picked out and identified.
	...

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