New York Times Op-Ed: The Resilience of Religious Doubt, by Ross Douthat:

Charles Murray’s new book, “Taking Religion Seriously,” in which he elaborates his reasons for trading atheism for a heterodox form of Christian faith, is a bit of a curious reading experience for me. This year I published a book arguing that it should be possible to reason one’s way from skepticism to belief and trying to unspool some threads of argument that the doubter might follow across the threshold of religious faith.

What I proposed, Murray’s book explicitly embodies. It’s an intellectual memoir in which the author, over many years of reading and arguing, thinks his way into religion. …

[R]ather than just discuss the convergences between our arguments (which you can find elaborated and sometimes critiqued in the evangelical writer Bethel McGrew’s joint review), I thought it might be more fruitful to talk about how reading Murray’s book and agreeing with so much of it also made me ponder the inevitable resilience of skepticism.

Christmas is a good time for that contemplation, insofar as Christmas itself is an argument for religious belief. Here is this profound and magical-seeming event, the obscure birth of an infant in the provinces of a powerful and cruel empire that radically redirects 2,000 years (and counting) of human history, that introduces a story and a value system into the world that’s so powerful that even nonbelievers can’t shake its influence, that once a year makes almost everyone stop and listen for angelic choirs, hearkening to the numinous, seeking to encounter once more what W.H. Auden called “the actual Vision” …

And yet it’s also an event that, according to Christianity’s believers, happened only once, and when it happened, by God’s apparent design, only a very few were chosen to see the fullness of the miracle — Mary and Joseph, a scattering of shepherds, a few perspicacious Zoroastrian priest-astrologers. And that’s if you accept the historicity of the infancy narratives, which even some believers (including Murray, even as he’s come around to accepting the historical credibility of the Gospels as a whole) regard as possibly pious fabrications.

So there will always be the understandable question: Couldn’t God have made it a bit easier? … What applies to an extreme religious event like Christmas also applies to a lot of supernatural evidence. To the extent that the religious data seems convincing, to the extent that this world seems far more intentional than accidental, it’s still usually possible to imagine a scenario in which the data was more convincing still — where God’s existence was 10 percent clearer or 30 percent more certain, where skepticism had slightly fewer refuges and the religious argument was more assured of carrying the day. …

[T]he reasonable religious conclusion has to be that skepticism no less than suffering belongs to the divine plan, that whatever calibration made this universe very good to create also requires space for some of its denizens to believe that nobody created it.

Which means that neither Charles Murray nor I should become too smug in our shared insights or too disappointed when readers find those supposed insights unconvincing. The settling of these debates, no less than the announcement of a birth 2,000 years ago, is reserved to higher powers than our own.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Charles Murray, Taking Religion Seriously (Oct. 26, 2025)
• Reviews Of Ross Douthat’s Believe: ‘A Mere Christianity For The 21st Century’ (May 25, 2025)

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