New York Times Op-Ed:  My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025):

I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.

But do I have a favorite argument within this larger run of converging claims? I was thinking about this while reading the effort by the prolific and precocious (he’s apparently still an undergraduate) essayist who writes under the name Bentham’s Bulldog to rank or grade a long list of arguments for God’s existence.

I’m not sure I could manage such a ranking. (To be honest, there are some arguments on his list that I can’t claim to fully understand.) But I do generally think that the arguments related to the experiential — supernatural, mystical occurrences and miracles — are underrated, especially among professional arguers, relative to more philosophically driven claims.

However, the supernaturalist case inevitably relies on anecdata and subjective reports in a way that other arguments do not. For those allergic to such claims, a different underrated argument that I’d be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above — the line of evidence from the fine-tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness.

The fine-tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely, if you will, in an extremely narrow range — with odds on the order of one in a bazillion (that’s a technical number, don’t question it), not one in a hundred — that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. To quote Bentham’s Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong prima facie case for some originating intelligence: “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.” (The book I recommend for a longer discussion of these questions is the physicist Stephen Barr’s “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith,” which is a couple of decades old but has a cool, judicious spirit that stands out from the crowd.) …

[T]he intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather it’s more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt — not only that God exists in some distant, unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Other New York Times op-eds by Ross Douthat:

• Religion Has Been in Decline. This Christmas Seems Different. (Dec. 25, 2024)
• Is the World Ready For A Religious Comeback? (Oct. 27, 2024)
• 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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