Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is John Herschauer, Associate Editor of City Journal.

Today I am joined by Ross Delfit. Ross has a very challenging job. He writes a regular opinion column for the New York

Times as a Catholic conservative and does so with grace and wit. Before joining the Times in

2009, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review and is a

multi-published author with seven books that touched variously on religion and public life,

including one, grand new party co-authored with Manhattan Institute President Rihon

Salam. Today, Ross is here to discuss his new book, Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross, thanks for joining

the show. Thanks so much for having me, John. I had mentioned in our email exchange that if all

goes well, we might dock a decade or so off of our stints in burglary. I can't promise anything,

but even if we shave 15 minutes, I think it will have been worth. A decade out of a million

is honestly, we're not going to notice it either way. But that's no reason not to try. That's right. So I make the Catholic joke, but this book is really about the case for religious faith in general. You argue that belief in God, or at least in some sort of creative power, is more rational than unbelief and that science gives us reason to think not only

that the universe was created, but that it was created with humanity in mind. What are some

of those scientific reasons for belief and how do they reveal our place in the story of creation?

Essentially the argument I make has a, it argues that there's a kind of integration between what you see at the highest level of the universe in terms of overall architecture and design the fundamental forces that give shape to the universe as we experience it.

And then also what you experience, as it were from below, right, from the experience of being a conscious human being in the world.

Modern physics has revealed is that it's not just that the universe appears to be orderly and lawbound and predictable and mathematically beautiful in some sort of general kind of way. It's also that the

universe very specifically seems to be calibrated in an incredibly narrow range of possible ranges

that a universe could have in order to give rise to that basic order and then stars, planets, life, us, right?

So this is what gets called in these debates, fine-tuning, which is not something, I think,

overall, that most scientists 100 years ago would have expected to discover about the cosmos.

It would have seemed much more plausible that the cosmos just sort of

operated on general principles and that there was incredible, either that the cosmos was sort of

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