NY Times: The Best Argument Against Having Faith In God

New York Times Op-Ed:  The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025):

Since last week’s newsletter offered a favorite argument for the existence of God, it’s only fair to balance the scales by considering a strong argument against religious faith, against the existence of some divine purpose behind life, the universe and everything.

The most prominent argument that tries to actually establish God’s nonexistence is the case for naturalism, the argument that our world is fundamentally reducible to its material components and untouched in its origins by any kind of conscious intention or design. But unfortunately, no version of the case for naturalism or reductionism is especially strong.

Of course I would say that, being religious, but there was a time when I had a bit more faith that there were some good reasons to side with the materialists even if they were mistaken in the end. I’ve been reading in this area for years, though, and whether in the work of a religious critic of naturalism like David Bentley Hart or a nonbeliever like Thomas Nagel, I think the anti-reductionist argument just clearly wins out — a victory that does not necessarily establish God’s existence but removes a notable argument against theism from the field. ...

So instead of talking about an argument for disbelief that I struggle to take seriously, I’m going to talk about an argument that clearly persuades a lot of people not to have religious faith and does have a form of empirical evidence on its side. That’s the argument from evil, the case that there simply can’t be a creator — or at least not a beneficent one — because the world is too laden with suffering and woe. ...

To the extent that you find the problem of evil persuasive as a critique of a God who might, nevertheless, still exist, you would do well to notice that important parts of that critique are already contained within the Abrahamic tradition. Some of the strongest complaints against the apparent injustices of the world are found not in any atheistic tract, but in the Hebrew Bible. From Abraham to Job to the Book of Ecclesiastes — and thence, in the New Testament, to Jesus (God himself, to Christians) dying on the cross — the question of why God permits so much suffering is integral to Jewish and Christian Scripture, to the point where it appears that if the Judeo-Christian God exists, he expects his followers to wrestle with the question. Which means that you don’t need to leave all your intuitive reactions to the harrowing aspects of existence at the doorway of religious faith; there is plenty of room for complaint and doubt and argument inside. ...

If the intuition against a benevolent God rests on the sense that we are surfeited with suffering, the skeptic has to concede that we are surfeited in other ways as well. Is it possible to imagine a world with less pain than ours? Yes, but it’s also very easy to imagine a world that lacks anything like what we know as pleasure — a world where human beings have the same basic impulses but experience them merely as compulsions, a world in which we are driven to eat or drink or have sexual intercourse, to hunt and forage and build shelter, without ever experiencing the kind of basic (but really extraordinary) delights that attend a good meal or a good movie, let alone the higher forms of eros, rapture, ecstasy.

Indeed, it is precisely these heights of human experience that can make the depths feel so exceptionally desolating. This does not prove that you can’t have one without the other, that there is a necessary relationship between the extremes of conscious experience.

But it makes the problem of good — real good, deep good, the Good, not just fleeting spasms and sensations — at least as notable a difficulty for the believer in a totally indifferent universe as the problem of evil is supposed to be for the religious believer.

Which suggests that even if that evil makes it hard for you to believe in a God of perfect power, you still shouldn’t give up hope that something very good indeed has a role in the order of the world.

Other New York Times op-eds by Ross Douthat:

• My Favorite Argument For The Existence Of God (Feb. 9, 2025)
• 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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