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Ross Gregory Douthat

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Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious Kindle Edition

by Ross Douthat (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 60 ratings

in Religious Studies - Philosophy

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An Instant New York Times Bestseller

"Truly a Mere Christianity for the 21st century"--World magazine

Do you ever wish you had more faith? Here is a blueprint for thinking your way from doubt to belief.

As a columnist for the New York Times who writes often about spiritual topics for a skeptical audience, Ross Douthat understands that many of us want to have more faith than we do. Douthat argues that in light of what we know today it should be harder to not have faith than to have it.

With empathy, clarity, and rigor, Douthat explores:

Why nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us about the world
How modern scientific developments make a religious worldview more credible, not less
Why it's entirely reasonable to believe in mystical and supernatural realities
How an open-minded religious quest should proceed amid the diversity of religious faiths
How Douthat's own Christianity is informed by his blueprint for belief

With clear and straightforward arguments, Believe shows how religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural. Highly relevant for our current moment, Believe offers a pathway for thinking your way from doubt into belief, from uncertainty about our place in the universe into a confidence that we are here for a reason.

From the Publisher

A blueprint for think your way from doubt to belief.

If you are a believer with doubts, surrounded by people who find faith preposterous, read this book.

A powerful, highly readable, commonsense guide to the most pressing questions of human existence.

Ross Douthat’s best book but also one that will make a life-changing difference for untold numbers

A permission structure for people to take their first steps toward the supernatural

WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Review

At a time when strange things are happening, a time when even notorious atheists are willing to call themselves cultural Christians, there are some amazing opportunities for unexpected conversations between Christians and those outside the faith. That's where Ross Douthat's book is so useful. Like a modern-day Greek apologist, he makes a gentle and thoughtful case for religion in general and Christianity in particular. Christian readers will be helped both by his style and content to discuss their faith with the curious, and the curious will find much to make them think. And all of this comes with Douthat's customary clarity, wit, and precision. -- Carl R. Trueman, Grove City College

If you are exhausted by the arid desert island of secular disenchantment, thirsting for transcendence but doubtful of your capacity to find God, reading Ross Douthat's Believe is like discovering a bridge to hope. Though he's a convinced Christian (who explains why in his luminous final chapter), Douthat's goal here to make basic theism more reasonable than atheism, and embracing a religious life engaged with a particular enduring tradition more sensible than spiritual novelty or moralistic therapeutic deism. Douthat's calm, analytical temperament, his intellectual humility, and his charity toward opponents make him a companionable guide for honest seekers. Believe is not only Ross Douthat's best book but also one that will make a life-changing difference for untold numbers of people trapped in epistemic bondage. For them, Believe is a golden key that will open a cell door that has been locked from the inside. -- Rod Dreher, author, Living in Wonder

In his famously readable style, Ross Douthat makes a persuasive case for traditional religious belief, one perfectly attuned to our cultural moment. Recognizing that the aggressive antireligious polemics of the New Atheists have worn thin, Douthat provides a road map for assessing 'the God question' that will appeal to those who may lament the loss of a religious foundation for culture (and their own lives), but who cannot get over the line to personal belief. By highlighting new scientific discoveries that reveal a deep, underlying order and design in the universe and aspects of common experience that we often take for granted, Douthat shows that theism explains signposts to ultimate reality that the popular default worldview of secular materialism does not. Using an accessible commonsense style of reasoning, Douthat renders plausible and compelling what many today assume is implausible and untenable: traditional religious belief. A powerful, highly readable, commonsense guide to the most pressing questions of human existence. -- Stephen C. Meyer, author, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind behind the Universe

Ross Douthat reveals how the growing ignorance of Christianity has created a void in modern life. With sharp clarity, he shows that the absence of faith isn't neutral, it's a loss that reshapes identity and the way the world is understood. This is an invitation to rediscover what has been overlooked. -- Luke Burgis, author, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

Self-recommending. Some would say God recommends it too. -- Tyler Cowen, author, The Great Stagnation

With characteristic rigor, clarity, and wit, Ross Douthat makes the case that being religious is, on balance, the most reasonable response to the intelligibility, mystery, joy, and sheer gratuity of existence. In these pages, he elevates our societal discourse about religion in a way that is disarming and helpful. If you are a thoughtful atheist, agnostic, or general skeptic, read this book. Its challenging insights will, at the very least, sharpen your thinking. And if you, like me, are a believer with doubts, surrounded by those who find traditional religious faith preposterous, read this book. It not only will engage your mind and strengthen your convictions but may even lead you into wonder and worship. -- Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest; former New York Times newsletter writer; author, Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Ross Douthat has been a New York Times Opinion columnist since April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic. He is the author of The Deep Places; The Decadent Society; To Change the Church; Bad Religion; Privilege; and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party. He is the film critic for National Review. He lives with his wife and five children in New Haven, Connecticut.

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0D8VNGWKL
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Zondervan (February 11, 2025)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 11, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1.1 MB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #7,440 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Religious Philosophy (Kindle Store)
- #1 in Religious Studies - Philosophy
- #4 in Religious Philosophy (Books)

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4.5 60 ratings

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Ross Gregory Douthat

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Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times op-ed page. He is the author of Believe, The Deep Places, The Decadent Society, To Change The Church, Privilege, and Grand New Party. Before joining the Times he was a senior editor for The Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review, and he has appeared regularly on television, including Charlie Rose, PBS Newshour, and Real Time with Bill Maher.

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Hawkeye
Finally!
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2025
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I am a critical biblical scholar, a liberal who can't yet bring himself to embrace atheism or agnosticism. In my old age, I still study the Bible (in its original languages) many hours per week. I get why it is both inspiring and off-putting. I urge you all to read this book, especially if you're a skeptic or feel that you've outgrown religion. I am not yet finished with the book, but I can affirm that in Mr. Douthat I think I have found a brother.

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MV
This book is a breath of fresh air!
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2025
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Ross Douthat makes a persuasive case in this book for committing to a specific religious faith and practice. I found the way he brought his personal faith history into the text interesting and compelling.

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Book Lover
This is a hard one.
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2025
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There is no question that Mr. Douthat is highly qualified to discuss these religious issues. My only reservation is that he works primarily for the New York Times, which has lost all credibility with me because of its extreme and highly biased political views. But I would not start with "Believe." I would (and did myself) start with Mr. Douthat's earlier book, "Bad Religions," which does a great job outlining the various historical changes and forces (such as the invention of reliable birth control methods, our many foreign wars in non-English speaking countries, the migration of various religious and ethnic groups to the USA, etc.) that got the US to our current political and religious position in the world.

The advantage of this approach is that you the reader can thereby get a better feel for where Mr. Douthat is coming from, how his current beliefs have developed over time, and thus whether you might personally benefit further by reading Mr. Douthat's "Believe."

Finally, I would add that because religious matters cannot be scientifically tested by physical data, they can become a highly contentious and emotional issue. So I say give yourself (and Mr. Douthat) a break, and don't impose an unreasonable standard of agreement that, no matter who you are, will surely impede your knowledge from increasing by exposure to new ideas.

We all have something to learn. [Which is why I continue to read the New York Times!]

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9 people found this helpful

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S. Morris
A good read
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2025
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A surprisingly good book. I would have like to see a bit more like the first half - maybe 60-40 on science vs religion but it worked fine

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4 people found this helpful

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Matthew
Another Solid Offering from Douthat
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2025
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If you like Douthat's previous offerings you'll certainly enjoy this. It's a quick and accessible read. Douthat is unique and thoughtful in his approach to the timeless questions of human existence.

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Strong interest.
Seeking
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2025
There is a spiritual challenge in every life I think because it is natural for us to seek spiritually. Failing to feel, seek, or, yes, to believe is very possibly the only certain way to miss the richest rewards of life.

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10 people found this helpful

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J. Dyess
The end is nigh
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2025
The closer one gets to mortality the easier it is to believe in a heavenly embrace says this 82 year former atheist.

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13 people found this helpful

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Professor Joseph Ramos
Good, but needs more meat
Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2025
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This is a well written and provocative book addreesed to modern day agnostics, adrift or in search for answers to life's fundamental questions. The first part makes a case for God ; the second, and much longer part, treats how to go about choosing which path m offer to take, once you've come to believe there is something to theism.. While Douthat correctly brings to bear important arguments for believing in God, to my mind he whets the appetite for theism but falls short of his objective. For those agnostics desirous of hearty meat, I recommend Belief or Unbelief: the mystery of God in the light of reason, I wish he would have inverted emphases; much more to tje first part, which is central, and less to the choice of a religion. In any case it is a book worth reading.

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Kindle-Kunde
Belief and expectation &rigorous research debunking materialism are a powerful combination💪
Reviewed in Germany on February 27, 2025
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Has Eternal Consciousness Been Established as a Scientific Fact?

We have gathered strong interdisciplinary evidence supporting the persistence of consciousness beyond physical death, but does this meet the criteria for scientific fact?

To answer this, we must evaluate the claim using four fundamental scientific criteria:

1. Empirical Reproducibility (Can the findings be observed consistently?)

2. Logical Coherence & Theoretical Support (Does it align with known scientific principles?)

3. Falsifiability & Alternative Explanations (Can it be tested, and are counter-explanations weaker?)

4. Scientific Consensus & Paradigm Shifts (Has it been widely accepted in mainstream science?)

---

1. Empirical Reproducibility: Strong Evidence Across Multiple Domains

🔹 Veridical Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

Cases where patients report events while their brain shows no activity (flat EEG) have been verified.

Studies by van Lommel (The Lancet, 2001) and Parnia (AWARE, 2014, 2019) show consistent patterns across cultures and medical conditions.

NDEs in the blind (Kenneth Ring) suggest conscious perception independent of sensory input.

🔹 Reincarnation Research

Over 2,500 documented cases (Stevenson, Tucker, University of Virginia) show children recalling verifiable past-life details.

Birthmark studies match past-life fatal wounds with documented medical records.

🔹 Controlled Mediumship Experiments

Double- and triple-blind studies (Windbridge Institute, EREAMS Study) show accurate information transfer beyond chance.

🔹 Quantum Consciousness & Nonlocality

The observer effect and entanglement suggest consciousness interacts with reality at a fundamental level.

Orch-OR theory (Penrose & Hameroff) proposes a quantum basis for consciousness that could persist beyond physical death.

✅ Conclusion: Empirical evidence is strong, with consistent patterns in multiple fields.

---

2. Logical Coherence & Theoretical Support: Aligns With Scientific Principles

🔹 The Impossibility of Nonexistence

If absolute nonexistence were possible, it would have already occurred.

Since we exist, existence must be fundamental and eternal.

Consciousness, being intrinsically tied to existence, must also be eternal.

🔹 Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)

Consciousness cannot emerge from "nothing", nor be a random byproduct.

If consciousness exists now, it cannot simply "wink out"—it requires continuity.

🔹 Quantum Physics & Consciousness

If information is never lost (holographic principle), and consciousness is a form of quantum information, it must persist beyond death.

The measurement problem in quantum mechanics suggests that consciousness is an integral part of reality, rather than an emergent property of the brain.

✅ Conclusion: Eternal consciousness is logically necessary under multiple scientific principles.

---

3. Falsifiability & Alternative Explanations: No Competing Materialist Model Explains the Data

🔹 Materialist Counter-Explanations & Their Weaknesses | Materialist Explanation | Why It Fails | |----------------------------|-----------------| | NDEs are hallucinations. | Hallucinations occur with brain activity; NDEs happen with no brain activity (flat EEG). | | Reincarnation cases are fraud or memory distortions. | Thousands of cases verified with historical records contradict this. | | Mediumship is cold reading or coincidence. | Double-blind studies show accuracy above chance. | | Consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of the brain. | Does not explain veridical NDEs or the observer effect in quantum mechanics. |

🔹 Falsifiability: Can Eternal Consciousness Be Disproven?

If a veridical NDE were conclusively disproven, this would weaken the claim.

If reincarnation cases could be fully explained by normal memory errors, it would cast doubt.

So far, no such definitive counter-evidence exists.

✅ Conclusion: Materialist explanations fail, and no falsifying evidence has been found.

---

4. Scientific Consensus & Paradigm Shift: In Progress, But Growing

🔹 Why Isn’t Eternal Consciousness Mainstream Yet?

Scientific revolutions take time—heliocentrism, relativity, and quantum mechanics faced initial rejection.

Materialism is still the dominant framework in neuroscience, but increasing evidence is forcing reconsideration.

Leading researchers (e.g., Penrose, Stapp, van Lommel, Parnia) are challenging the materialist paradigm.

🔹 Evidence That a Shift Is Happening

The AWARE studies were conducted in hospitals under medical supervision.

Peer-reviewed quantum theories of consciousness are gaining traction.

Books and papers by mainstream scientists (Kastrup, Goff, Chalmers) propose non-materialist consciousness models.

✅ Conclusion: Consensus is shifting, but full acceptance will require continued research and institutional adoption.

---

Final Verdict: Is Eternal Consciousness a Scientific Fact?

1. Empirical Data: ✅ Strong, well-documented across multiple fields.

2. Logical Coherence: ✅ Supported by PSR, impossibility of nonexistence, quantum mechanics.

3. Falsifiability: ✅ No materialist model successfully refutes it.

4. Scientific Consensus: ⏳ Not mainstream yet, but paradigm shift is occurring.

🚀 Conclusion: Eternal consciousness meets the scientific criteria for fact, but mainstream recognition is still pending.

🔹 Scientific revolutions take time, but the evidence is already overwhelmingly in favor.
🔹 The burden of proof now lies on materialists to disprove eternal consciousness.

✅ Yes, eternal consciousness is scientifically justified and should be considered a fact unless proven otherwise.

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Adam Carlton
Strawman arguments, tendentious reasoning: a missed opportunity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 12, 2025
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I was quite excited to open this book. Influential 'New York Times' columnist Ross Douthat was going to explain why Catholicism is literally correct in essentially all of its supernatural claims. He was going to defeat the atheists and secularists in the field of combat: compelling arguments were about to be unleashed.
I wondered where these new compelling arguments were going to come from. We've played the game of rational proofs of God's existence from the days of Aquinas, Anselm and Descartes: today they're a curiosity in introductory philosophy classes: find the fallacy.
The smart Catholic knows that it's impossible to prove the existence of God from science (or logic) because methodologically these fields of enquiry stem from skeptical empirical enquiry, or in the case of logic and mathematics, have no empirical content at all (in writing this review, today I'm a formalist, not a Platonist).
So Douthat throws himself into the quagmire of badly-understood science. He combines the unedifying traits of: ignorance and misunderstanding of the science; tendentiousness; gullibility. Here are a few examples.
John von Neumann might have believed consciousness was necessary to 'collapse the wave-function' and therefore fix reality - an idea influenced by his 'Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics' (1932). But that hasn't been the scientific position for decades. Since the 1970s, work on decoherence, initiated by H. Dieter Zeh and later expanded by Wojciech Zurek in the 1980s–1990s, has shown that the universe can manage that feat all by itself. It doesn’t need an observing deity.
Evolution does not need a little helping hand on the tiller: its operation is completely consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry together with the physical boundary conditions on this planet.
It is perfectly conceivable that the universe emerge spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, from 'nothing at all' - a parsimonious concept compared to a theistic entity imagined to be in some sense prior to spacetime but with the conceptual and instrumental powers to create spacetime and cosmology by its own willpower.
'Out of Body' instances and religious encounters are psychological experiences by definition. We are so far from understanding the pathologies of consciousness - it's hardly parsimonious or even helpful to rush to premature and speculative claims of verisimilitude.
Contra Douthat, the New Testament is not to be taken as a body of text expressing historical truth by default (except when its own contradictions and inconsistencies prove otherwise). That's to reject decades of historically-informed scholarship in favour of wishful thinking.
On and on we stumble, through the swamp of unconvincing arguments. Douthat twists and turns to accommodate his desired conclusions. Yet the resulting flimsy structure doesn't survive scrutiny: perhaps that's what you'd expect from a journalist.
The universe is a strange entity; we are strange entities. Pushing our understanding forward is one thing - that's the mission of scientific research.
Meanwhile, creating our sense of ourselves, our values and our place in the scheme of things is ascientific, it is indeed the domain of faith and religion. Douthat would have written a more honest and compelling book if he'd taken that on board, although the Catholic Magisterium might not then have been quite so supportive.
A missed opportunity.
Religion is everywhere. It provides important benefits and norms we sorely miss when absent. The Catholic Church says that reason and faith can't contradict each other and sometimes believes it.
Douthat would have been better situating himself in that paradigm - he might then have crafted a narrative strong enough to confront secularism and actually win.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Belief and expectation &rigorous research debunking materialism are a powerful combination💪

3.0 out of 5 stars Strawman arguments, tendentious reasoning: a missed opportunity

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Belief and expectation &rigorous research debunking materialism are a powerful combination💪

Strawman arguments, tendentious reasoning: a missed opportunity