I’ve written before about the recent decline of Christian apologetics (e.g. Addressing the New Christian Apologetics and Ben Shapiro’s Worst Argument for God and Another Two ‘Best’ Arguments for God?)—a trend that is illustrated by the enthusiastic revival of such antiquated and bumbling arguments as Undesigned Coincidences and Thomism: The Bogus Science. Ross Douthat of The New York Times has now given us another example in his opinion column, “My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God.” Which not only previews his book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, but also illustrates the trickle-down effect of this bad apologetics trend: terrible arguments at the top become terrible arguments among the public. This is, somehow, the best he’s got (yet it’s worse than even Justin Brierley’s Epistemic Failure). A prominent New York Times writer has no business regurgitating crappy coffee-table arguments; he’s supposed to be reading and interviewing the best. He’s supposed to know what he’s doing. But he doesn’t.

So, here we go.

Formalized Gullability

Ross Douthat (DOW-thut) exhibits something even worse than Brierley: Formalized Gullibility as a Modern Christian Methodology. He actually believes “visions, encounters, literal miracles” are real (we’ve debunked all that decades ago). Gullibility is his defining method. He is not critical (entirely ignoring The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking) nor rational (not even exploring the actual debate over Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism?). His book’s chapter on mind-brain physicalism exemplifies this formalized gullibility. It is profoundly shallow, missing almost all the relevant scientific evidence as well as the entire contemporary philosophy of mind, and consequently makes numerous factual and logical mistakes. He is not even minimally educated in the subject, yet pronounces conclusions with final and absolute confidence.

Which is not unusual (it is rather par for the course among even expert Christian apologists, as my blog adduces countless examples). But what is more of note is the gullibility he exhibits: Douthat describes Christians “telling” him things about the science and philosophy of mind and he just believes them. He doesn’t check to see if, say, they are not telling him everything or are distorting even what they do tell him (they are doing both). He never reports a conversation with an informed critic—like, say, Sam Harris or Christof Koch. Instead (in his book) he gives us an inaccurate summary of Dennett, and doesn’t think to even ask any experts on Dennett if he got that right, much less what he or they would say about any of Douthat’s arguments (Christians do this a lot, which is another example of their decline: see Was Daniel Dennett Wrong in Creative Ways?).

So Douthat doesn’t even do what a journalist is supposed to do (if they are a professional and not a hack): ask for a comment from the other side of every assertion or argument. And this is what typifies 21st century Christian apologetics: it has declined to the dismal childish condition of Islamic apologetics, which is saying something. Now Christians can just say any crazy thing, science and logic be damned (see my recent experience with The Andrew Loke Fiasco). And everyone just believes them. No one “checks.” This also has led to the new rise of secular religions (like Jordan Petersonism and Red Pillery, even MAGA and QAnon). Christianity is just an older edition of the same failure mode.

Others have noticed (see critical reviews at The Atlantic and Aporia, for example). And none of this is new. Douthat leans on four arguments, each of which has not only been refuted (and for ages now), but also reflects common errors of human reasoning that we designed logic and science specifically to overcome and not keep being fooled by. He tries the fine tuning argument (I have a whole category on that but you can start here), the argument from consciousness (likewise, though his ignorance of neuroscience and phenomenology is so wide you might need more than that to get why he is wrong), the argument from supernatural experiences (oh dear) and miracles (oh…oh dear), and, yes, Pascal’s Wager (also known as “fuck fuck fuck I’m going to die I’d better believe I’ll live forever ergo Catholicism but definitely not Islam”). Are we really doing this again? Okay. Sigh. See Pascal’s Wager and the Ad Baculum Fallacy.

I won’t bother with these, beyond his summary of the first two for his Times article, as those comprise what he himself says is his “best” argument (and that surely must be the best summary of it).

What Even Can Be Tuned?

Douthat quotes Bentham’s Bulldog saying “If there is no God, then the constants, laws and initial conditions could be anything, so it’s absurdly unlikely that they’d fall in the ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life.” I won’t assume he is being fair to Bentham (who might say more or something better than this); I’ll just critique this statement as presented by Doutthat. As such, the statement is false. It is not true that these things “can be anything.” There are constraints on some. And others have probability distributions favoring the lack of intelligent design. I won’t go through every example, but consider two as illustrations (for more follow the breadcrumbs in Three Common Confusions of Creationists and The Argument from Uniformities and Barnes Still Not Listening).

• Take the gravitational force. When expressed in natural units (the smallest unit of space and time that we observe to be physically meaningful), the “gravitational constant” resolves as “1” and thus disappears from every equation. The force is thus simply equal to masses over distance. It would take intelligent intervention to change that. In other words, the strength of the gravitational force simply is what we would expect if there were no intelligent intervention in deciding it. So it is incorrect to say “the gravitational force could be anything.” Without intelligence, it couldn’t be anything but what it is (once it exists at all). Which is the opposite of it “being anything.” There is no magical dial somewhere that when you turn it makes gravity stronger or weaker. Gravity simply is as strong as the masses generating it, and indeed when you add up the energic value of the masses, it’s exactly the energic value of the gravity they project (since in natural units the values of mass and energy are identical, and thus (m1)(m2)/d^2 becomes, simply (e1)(e2)/d^2, and thus gravity is simply a 1:1 geometric distribution of an object’s energy, a fact that inspires zero-energy universe models).
• Which is what you would expect if no one is deciding what the strength of gravity would be. So it would actually be very improbable for gravity to have any other strength than that. No God needed. Almost all physics has already been explained this way; and the rest is trending the same direction. See Victor Stenger’s The Comprehensible Cosmos for a survey of examples. But, as an example, we have not “yet” derived the same explanation for the strength of the electromagnetic force—but how do you think that’s going to end up? Is it going to be a magical dial, or another outcome of inevitable geometry?
• Conversely, take the initial distribution of energy immediately after the Big Bang. This appears by all observations to be random. Hence, like a randomly distributed gas in a tank, its contents are distributed smoothly at the largest scale without any distinct structure, and only by evolutionary forces randomized into fractals at smaller scales over time (discussion, discussion, discussion). This is why we don’t need the laws of thermodynamics to be finely tuned: they are the inevitable outcome of there being no tuning at all, just the effect of random distribution over time (hence All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable, so they can’t just “be anything”). The initial conditions of the Big Bang fit this same pattern. They are therefore the most likely distribution you will get if you are selecting them at random (i.e. countless distributions are possible, but most of them would evince essentially the same pattern as ours).
• Which is the opposite of intelligent design. By contrast, intelligent design could (and thus we would sooner expect it would) start from the first moment with remarkable nonrandom structure, exactly as the authors of Genesis imagined. Instead we observe random distribution evolving into structure over long spans of time by inevitable (not intelligent) processes (see How the New Wong-Hazen Proposal Refutes Theism). People confuse here “entropy” with order in the sense of structure. The universe only started at low entropy because all of its energy was confined to a very small space (like a super hot, concentrated plasma); but that energy did not have any organized structure beyond that. It was randomly distributed. That doesn’t look like intelligence. It is what we’d most probably end up with without intelligence. So the probability distribution is not “just anything” having an equal chance; it’s “almost every thing” looking just like our thing, hence a highly probable result even when random. Thus a random distribution would favor what we observe, not an intelligent distribution.

There are countless more “fundamental constants” to discuss (from the cosmological constant to the rest mass of the charm quark). But most constants (like the boiling point of water or Avogadro’s Constant) have ended up not “fundamental,” but determined by yet more fundamental facts—often facts that don’t reduce to a “constant” at all (like the strength of gravity reducing to simply the quantity of the masses involved and the geometry of spacetime). So for every “fundamental” constant that remains we have a strong prior probability of expecting it will end up the same way. There probably are no fundamental constants. Or if there are, they will be extremely few and fundamental (like the number of dimensions). And we don’t know yet what determines those, so we cannot say “they could be anything.” Maybe they can’t. Or maybe a random distribution always favors the one we observe turned out (like our dimensional space being a common rather than a rare outcome of random selection).

And this is all before we even consider multiverse hypotheses—so keep in mind, nothing I’ve said so far calls upon any such hypothesis. And yet, we have at least Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God. But I’ll get to that later. The point here is that the fine tuning argument begins with a set of assumptions that aren’t supported but in fact contradicted by the evidence. Constants do not appear to be the sorts of things that can just “be anything.” Some may be inevitable outcomes of mindless processes, or when randomly selected have curved distributions (bell or otherwise) and thus fall in common rather than rare points in those distributions. We don’t know. We don’t even know how to do the math even if we did know. But what we do know is that the universe looks exactly like it should if it was randomly selected, not intelligently selected (see On the Bayesian Reversal of the Fine Tuning Argument and Barnes Still Not Listening on the Bayesian Analysis of Fine Tuning Arguments). So the fine tuning argument actually struggles at its very first premise. It really is just another argument from ignorance.

Yet humans evolved very poor natural reasoning faculties (see The Argument from Reason and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience). This makes them prone to making bad decisions about probability and causality particularly in domains they lack personal experience in (like cosmology). Delusional and untrained persons thus fall for the fine tuning argument because they are relying on shallow intuitions and not careful analysis. They are leaving out crucial information (like all the evidence the universe was randomly and not intelligently selected), filling in ignorance with made-up just-so beliefs (like “the constants can be anything”), and not checking for fallacies in their reasoning (like assuming order entails design), nor reliably checking if they are wrong before concluding they are right.

We Didn’t Just Make That Up (But You Did)

Case in point: Douthat actually thinks cosmological scientists are solving fine-tuning by just “postulating a bazillion universes that we unfortunately can’t see or taste or touch” to explain why ours is capable (barely) of producing life. That’s a Christian coffee-table myth. Which tells us Douthat did no research on this whatsoever. He literally just believed what some Christian told him. He didn’t check with any actual scientists to find out what’s really the case here. Had he done that (as any competent thinker would), he’d have learned some things that he’d have realized he had to mention or take into account here (and thus in his book).

First, most scientific facts are not literally known by “sight, taste, or touch.” We cannot see, taste, or touch quarks or genes. But we can empirically prove they exist. The same is true for multiverses: we do not need to “see” them (much less taste or touch them). We merely need to “see” evidence of their existence—which means any fact that is more probable if they exist than if they don’t. That fact need not be the other universes themselves. Which is a basic principle of scientific reasoning. And I’ve said it before: Christians are Christians because they are bad at this. Douthat is giving us an example of a universal quality of his entire religion. People who are good at this realize these are bad arguments. Eventually they realize there are no good ones. And that’s why they aren’t Christians (hence Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? always answers with the latter).

Second, modern multiverse theory is not “a mere postulate.” It actually follows with logical necessity from powerfully successful cosmological theories now.

It is true that “multiverse” would compete about evenly with “God” as an explanation of “fine tuning” if it were a mere postulate. As then God is an amazing coincidence and the multiverse is an amazing coincidence, and so we would be positing two extremely improbable things, and there is no way to discern which of them is more likely (apart from all the other evidence telling us it isn’t God). I discuss this in A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument: even if a multiverse were “just luck” (just like any other “it was just luck” explanation), that we just happened to have a God (much less this specific weird God—which is a really, really weird God if you are a Catholic) is also just luck. And getting a God could well be even more lucky than accidental fine tuning without a multiverse (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism); much more so, with. And in any event, no evidence establishes it to be any less lucky. So even at best it’s a wash.

But that isn’t even where we are at now. If Douthat had spoken to any actual scientist who was an expert in modern multiverse theory (like Borde, Guth, Vilenkin, Carroll, Krauss—really, almost any cosmological scientist today) he would have learned that the multiverse is not a postulate. It falls out inevitably from leading theories of the Big Bang. For example, the most widely supported theory of the Big Bang is eternal or chaotic inflation, which entails a multiverse (and the next most supported theories, like brane cosmology or conformal cosmology or evolutionary black hole cosmology or other kinds of quantum cosmology, entail the same thing). That is, it is not possible for eternal inflation to be true and there not be countless other universes. You would need an intelligence to prevent that outcome.

And yet eternal or chaotic inflation predicts numerous remarkable empirical observations that theism does not (examples, examples, examples, examples). Inflation theory is therefore pretty well confirmed (to the extent that it has a lot of strong empirical confirmation, even if it is not yet decisively proved—something no theistic cosmological model can claim). But since it entails a multiverse must exist, all the evidence confirming eternal inflation is thereby confirming a multiverse. And that isn’t the only well-performing model that does. Consequently, most cosmological scientists regard multiverse theories as scientifically likely. Not a mere postulate.

Multiverse theory is therefore a better performing theory than God. As I already noted, there are at least Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God. So if you are going to “guess” at what causes the totality of our observations (not just some cherry-picked piece of that picture, as all fine tuning arguments fallaciously do), multiverse theory is more likely than God—not just “as likely” as God. It is no longer just a postulated way of getting lucky to compete with the theist’s postulated way of getting a lucky God. It is a proposal that has more explanatory power, fits more facts and precedents, and enjoys more empirical confirmation. And Douthat discusses literally none of this. His account of cosmology is thus useless—other than as a record of how a methodological commitment to ignorance leads to dumb conclusions. He doesn’t even know what he is supposed to be arguing against. Much less any of the relevant determining science or philosophy.

The bottom line is that multiverse theory emerges as a guaranteed outcome of a lot of empirically tested science. We didn’t just “make that up.” But do you know what was “just made up”? God. Humans just made that up. It’s a just-so story, invented by ancient savages, that has never once survived any empirical test, and struggles even to be coherently formulated. So when faced with “was it a fantastical superghost or a multiverse,” multiverse wins on every rational test. Even if that were the only two options (it’s not, but I already covered that). Because “an inevitably endless cosmic nucleation” is doing much better evidentially (it makes many bizarre predictions that have come true, unlike theism) and explanatorily (in terms of coherence, simplicity, and precedent, unlike theism). It might even be logically necessary in the absence of any God (The Problem with Nothing and What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State?).

It’s Actually a Lot Harder Than That

Douthat expresses unarticulated doubts about multiverse theory that tell us (1) he knows nothing about it (he thinks there is no empirical argument for it, for example, which means he doesn’t know the real reason trained philosophers and scientists believe it, and thus he doesn’t know what he is supposed to be considering before drawing a conclusion about this—again, formalized gullibility is his method instead of informed critical reasoning) and (2) he can’t even think coherently about his own argument (he expresses unarticulated doubts that a confirmed multiverse would undermine his conclusion that God exists—after just insisting he concludes God exists because nothing else can explain fine tuning but multiverse theory). Scientifically illiterate. Analytically irrational. These are the defining attributes of Christian believers now.

But he moves on by reluctantly granting that multiverse theory explains fine tuning, thus eliminating his entire argument for believing in God up to this point. So he breaks the emergency class and segues into a “backup” argument for God, should his first one (you know) fail:

Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart. This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious.

Only the scientifically illiterate could ever say this.

A scientifically informed person knows (1) our natural reason is actually very badly designed, routinely failing to plumb the secrets of the universe (for literally hundreds of thousands of years), and had to be retooled by us (not God) to even be able to do any of the things Douthat’s talking about (which is why we only started being able to do that in the last 1% or so of human history), (2) we actually struggle to understand the “rules and systems” of the cosmos (the contradictions between relativity and quantum mechanics have stymied us in our quest to understand why the world is so fucking weird, and our best hypotheses to solve that, like M-theory, are so complicated we can’t even yet build computers that can plumb the necessary math, much less do it ourselves), and (3) none of this is mysterious. It’s exactly what we expect any minimally capable problem solver to be able to do, which evolution fully explains the natural development and selection of, and we can expect to find this in any universe where that can happen (see Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience and All Godless Universes Are Mathematical; but for my previous address to all these kinds of arguments, providing the information these uninformed believers keep leaving out, see The Myth That Science Needs Christianity).

Hence I included this in my formal paper on the evidence for design (in The End of Christianity and as quoted on this point in Plantinga’s Tiger and Other Stupid Shit) and found that our observed condition is 100% expected on godless evolution (poor reasoning abilities just barely good enough to invent capable ones) but not at all expected on theism. Understanding this universe is actually unexpectedly hard if theism is true. We should have much better minds than we do. An Elon Musk should be a physical impossibility. Instead, “this universe” is not as intelligible as Douthat imagines. But I suspect this is because he doesn’t study any of this. So he doesn’t know that relativity and quantum mechanics, and M-theory, and even quantum chromodynamics or classical statistical mechanics, is gobsmackingly difficult shit. And super weird (Why did God need twelve different quarks interacting with eight different gluons just to make a single atom? Why did he even need atoms?). So he just marvels that “someone, somewhere” can understand any of it, “ergo God be praised!” Which is not a rational line of thought. Yet this is the best he has.

Douthat then punts to the confused argument of C.S. Lewis (which the more competent philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe so thoroughly shredded in a debate, legend has it, that he was reduced to tears over it). This is another indication of an ignorant and gullible mind, but I’ve already pointed that out in Ben Shapiro’s Worst Argument for God. Determinism places no limits on a computer’s ability to creatively search a possibility-space or reliably learn objective facts. Because, being objective facts, they are always around to bump into; while random walks are easily produced by deterministic algorithms—indeed, even more easily in analog neural systems that can naturally take advantage of superposing models and vector completion (hence Quantum Consciousness Is Bullshit (But Quantum Cognition Is Not)).

If you don’t know how things work, you can gullibly believe any random bullshit that aligns with what you want to hear. And that is what has happened to Douthat here. The scandal is that he doesn’t see it. He delusionally thinks his method of formalized gullibility not only works, but is baller. And that’s the problem with Christians, plaguing and ruining the world to this day. We need people to be more competent than this. Especially in a world with complex economies, global climate change, and nuclear missiles.

Douthat then punts to one of the dumbest and most science-illiterate arguments gaining popularity among Christians today (thus again demonstrating the recent decline of Christian apologetics—it’s getting dumber, not smarter): the Argument from Psychophysical Harmony. Which doesn’t understand a single thing about how either the brain or the mind works (see The Argument from Reason and Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination). That entire argument is based on not knowing basic things about human cognition already well-understood by the cognitive sciences, and thus it gullibly bumbles into belief in God through literal ignorance—and not mere ignorance, but inexcusable ignorance (because this is stuff they could actually know, even just by walking across the hall and talking to a cognitive scientist). “How does computation work?” We don’t care. “How does language work?” We don’t care. “How does referential modeling work?” We don’t care. “How do qualia actually work?” We don’t care. We just think it’s amazing and inexplicable—because we are formally committed to not finding out what humanity already knows about all this. “Therefore, God.” This is some Ken Ham shit right here.

End of Story

And that’s it. That’s all he’s got.

In his book Douthat adds an “argument from fear” (that every sensible person already knows is the worst reason to believe anything) and a lot of really embarrassing gullibility about miracle claims and repackaged spiritualism, even demonology (yes, in his book, he argues demons are real and is actually afraid of them: p. 190), but these all illustrate the same general failure. Which I realize is the same failure I just analyzed in Elon Musk:

Notice the difference in behaviors … one option is to just blurt out and run with what you think, with no care for whether it is correct, but only the arrogant assumption that it must be; another option is to ask and inquire, to find out before declaring a conclusion; and the more that things still don’t make sense, the more you keep asking and inquiring until they do. The next step would then be to burn-test your conclusions: try earnestly to prove them wrong, and only believe them when you earnestly fail to. That’s step two, and thus level two good thinking. [And mastering all the techniques for doing that is level three.] But Musk isn’t even hitting step one. No one qualifies as a genius who isn’t hitting level 3. And no one qualifies as even competent who isn’t hitting level 2. And Musk isn’t even hitting level 1.

Douthat isn’t either. Although this is manifesting in a different way, the cause is the same: an utter lack of genuine curiosity. Douthat just lurches around for anything that sounds good to him and gullibly believes it. He never checks to see if it’s correct or if there is more to the story he should grasp first. And he never burn-tests his results—as in, he never tries in earnest to disprove everything he is saying before believing it. That would require some basic skills (which a journalist is supposed to have, so Douthat gets no excuse here) but also a basic desire—to actually do this.

For example, it never even occurred to him to ask, “Do scientists really just ‘postulate’ a multiverse?” or “How do the best informed atheists respond to the fine tuning argument?” or “How do scientists actually explain human reason?” or “How do atheists respond to the argument from reason?” (or psychophysical harmony or religious experience or anything else). And he certainly never asks questions in the way humans learned to retrain themselves to do because their brains were not designed to do it naturally—like, “If we have two competing hypotheses, God arbitrarily turning some magic dials to fix the constants or the geometry of a multiverse fixing the constants, what else would we expect to observe differently between those two theories—and what do we actually see?” And he should not trust himself to come up with a complete answer—competent journalists always seek (and fairly report) informed alternative opinions, especially from experts, for a reason. So Douthat should consult reliable opposition, professional scientists and philosophers who are atheists, and see what they say about this, report it honestly, and test it out, empirically and analytically—and then compare the results of doing this with the results of doing the same with theists. Who is getting facts wrong? Who is leaving crucial facts out? Who is relying on fallacies of logic? Eventually the picture will be clear.

To even ask these questions (much less be motivated enough to actually find out the answers) requires the epistemic virtue of curiosity. And Douthat simply doesn’t have any. And I think now that that simply describes Christians. This is why there even are Christians: they are all the incurious people, who just believe whatever they are motivated to believe, and then rationalize it after the fact because they observe that society expects them to. Because that looks like “having good reasons to believe a thing,” which we all know we are “supposed” to have, but that most of us don’t really want to put in any of the actual work on actually having. And this may well explain literally everything that’s wrong with the world today.