Douthat:How I Lost My Faith In Atheism

Christianity Today Op-Ed: How I Lost My Faith in Atheism, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025):

Believe 2 Late in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus confesses his crisis of Catholic faith to a close friend. The friend asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen responds, “but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

I spent my childhood experiencing some of the more intense, but not necessarily intellectually coherent, forms of American Protestantism—charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism, tongues speaking and revivalism. Then, with my family, I converted to Catholicism as a teenager, when I was just a bit younger than Dedalus’s age in James Joyce’s novel. I read the book soon after my conversion, and while lamenting the main character’s loss of faith, I had a convert’s sympathy for his formulation of the religious options: that the intellectually serious choice was Catholicism or atheism, the Church of Rome or nothing.

Alongside Joyce, I had good intellectual company in this belief, from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America envisioned an eventual religious “division into two parts—some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome”—to Herman Melville, who predicted that “Rome and the atheists” would “fight it out,” with “Protestantism being retained for the base of operations sly by Atheism.”

When you convert at a young age, it’s natural in midlife to think about how your worldview has changed since that conversion—especially when you’re sitting down to write a general case for faith, as I’ve done in my new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. That change has carried me well away from Stephen Dedalus’s young man’s formulation. I am still a believing Catholic, and I would still urge a Protestant friend to swim the Tiber. But I have a clearer sense of why one might reject the stark binary choice between the Catholic church or nonbelief, and why the religious future—as far as we can see it—will remain more complex than just “Rome and the atheists” battling things out.

In part, that reflects a greater understanding of critiques of Catholicism, and a stronger expectation of Protestantism’s resilience. But equally importantly, it reflects the fact that I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism. …

I’m still searching for atheism’s solid reasons. I understand perfectly well how a reasonable person could have doubts about the exact nature of God, his specific intentions or his perfect goodness, or any of the particular claims that Christianity makes about the divine. But the idea that the universe and human existence have no plan or intentionality or purpose behind them, that mind, consciousness, reason, logos are purely epiphenomenal rather than fundamental, that our existence is finally reducible to the accidental, to the undesigned, to the bouncing billiard balls of hard material determinism—I don’t see how anyone can reasonably believe this.

I don’t see how anyone can believe it given everything that we know now, not just about the basic order of the cosmos, but about the exquisite fine-tuning required to give rise to stars, planets, life itself. …

I don’t see how anyone can believe it given the resilient mystery of consciousness and the ways in which it seems to be integrally connected to the basic order of the universe—both in our reason’s ability to explore and comprehend level upon level of the system, heights and depths far beyond anything linked directly to the evolutionary needs of early hominids, and in the mystical-seeming link between observation and reality, the mind’s eye and the material, that quantum physics has revealed.

And I don’t see how anyone can believe it given that religious experience, all the weird stuff of mysticism and miracle, has not only persisted under supposedly disenchanted conditions but even revealed itself in new ways (near-death experiences, for instance) because of the ministrations of modern science. We have done away with the cultural rule of religion, the institutional structures that many Enlightenment-era atheists believed imposed supernatural beliefs on a credulous population. And yet those beliefs have persisted, and in some cases even spread, because it turns out that supernatural-seeming experiences, intimations of transcendence that fall on nonbelievers as well as on the faithful, are just a constitutive part of reality itself.

Other New York Times op-eds by Ross Douthat: