New York Times Op-Ed:   Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?, by Ross Douthat:

The world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground — especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia — as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief. 

It’s one thing to get nonbelievers to offer kind words for “cultural” Christianity or endorse the sociological utility of churchgoing. The challenge is to go further, to persuade anxious moderns that religion is more than merely pragmatically useful, more than just a wistful hope — that a religious framework actually makes much more sense of reality than the allegedly hardheaded materialist alternative.

I have skin in this game, since I will be offering my own attempt at persuasion next year. But the past few months have brought three religious books that enter this debate — covering the philosophical, the scientific and the experiential cases for a religious perspective on the world.

The philosophical case comes from the polymathic philosopher-theologian David Bentley Hart, who has probably forgotten more about obscure Hindu sutras than I know about my own family. His new book is “All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life,” the culmination of decades of argument against the new atheists and all reductive accounts of human consciousness. …

Spencer Klavan’s “Light of the Mind, Light of the World” … is an argument that the development of modern science supplies laboratory evidence for the primacy of mind. This is not just the familiar case that the fine-tuning of the universe is proof that some Divine Intelligence set the whole thing up. It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like billiard balls, has been overthrown by the quantum revolution — which demonstrated, to the bafflement of many scientists, that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there is to measure and observe. …

Rod Dreher’s “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age” … [is] partly a how-to guide for seekers after the more mystical relationship to reality that most human societies have enjoyed but ours has unwisely amputated. But it’s also a collection of anecdata about the persistence of enchantment even under allegedly disenchanted conditions, the supernatural happenings that flower constantly in our notionally secularized world.

This means that of the three, the Dreher book is the most fun, it tells the best stories, and it covers aspects of human life that are more fundamental to religion’s resilience than any argument or theory — above all, the fact that even in societies that exclude any hint of supernaturalism from their systems of official knowledge, strange experiences just keep on breaking in.

But from the perspective of the keepers of official knowledge, the supernatural is often the place where I’m interested gives way to I just can’t. A God of the philosophers or physicists is one thing, but a God of exorcists, miracle workers and near-death experiences is just a bit too disreputable — at least until you have such an experience yourself.

From the religious perspective, of course — Hart’s and Klavan’s no less than Dreher’s — it’s all the same God. So the test for all their arguments is whether a world that’s unhappy in its unbelief can be pushed all the way to this conclusion — or whether contemporary disillusionment with secularism is enough to draw people to the threshold of religion, but something more than argument is required to pull them through.

Other New York Times op-eds by Ross Douthat:

• The Impact Of A Masculine Religious Revival On The Church And Society (Oct. 6, 2024)
• Harrison Butker’s Very American Catholic Traditionalism (May 26, 2024)
• Can Conservative And Liberal Catholics Coexist? (May 12, 2024)
• What Will American Religion Look Like On Easter 2050? (Mar. 31, 2024)
• There's No Better Time To Be A Catholic Than Christmas 2023 (Dec. 25, 2023)
• Conservative Church Critics Of Pope Francis Get Fired, While Progressive Critics Get Sternly Worded Letters (Dec. 3, 2023)
• Where Should Agnostics Go On Sundays? (Sept. 2, 2023)
• Does God Control History? (Aug. 20, 2023)
• What Has Trump Cost American Christianity? (May 28, 2023)
• Pope Francis’ Decade Of Division (Mar. 19, 2023)
• The Rationality And Danger Of Spiritual Experimentation (Feb. 5, 2023)
• The Americanization Of Religion (Jan. 29, 2023)
• In The Modern Era, The Idea Of God Is More Plausible Than Ever (Aug. 22, 2021)
• The Overstated Collapse Of American Christianity (Nov. 9, 2019)

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