Believe
Why Everyone Should Be Religious
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- ¥750
発行者による作品情報
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
"Truly a Mere Christianity for the 21st century"--World magazine
From the host of the Interesting Times podcast
Do you ever wish you had more faith? Here is a blueprint for thinking your way from doubt to belief.
As a columnist for the New York Times who writes often about spiritual topics for a skeptical audience, Ross Douthat understands that many of us want to have more faith than we do. Douthat argues that in light of what we know today it should be harder to not have faith than to have it.
With empathy, clarity, and rigor, Douthat explores:
Why nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us about the worldHow modern scientific developments make a religious worldview more credible, not lessWhy it's entirely reasonable to believe in mystical and supernatural realitiesHow an open-minded religious quest should proceed amid the diversity of religious faithsHow Douthat's own Christianity is informed by his blueprint for belief
With clear and straightforward arguments, Believe shows how religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural. Highly relevant for our current moment, Believe offers a pathway for thinking your way from doubt into belief, from uncertainty about our place in the universe into a confidence that we are here for a reason.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The choice to practice a faith is "not only socially or psychologically desirable but an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality," according to this stimulating if flawed treatise. Countering the notion of religion as a thoughtless surrender to the supernatural, New York Times opinion columnist Douthat (The Decadent Society) argues for a faith rooted in science, writing that the universe is "made for us" (the big bang theory suggests the existence of an intentional God who created the universe at a specific moment, according to Douthat), that human consciousness is "improbably fine-tuned" to appreciate cosmic intricacies, and that "spiritual and supernatural" phenomena stubbornly persist in an age of supposed disenchantment. Those arguments are unpacked in rich scientific detail, with an especially illuminating discussion of human consciousness as an "irreducible" mystery whose mechanics 500-odd years of scientific research have failed to account for. Later chapters are less persuasive, however, with Douthat attempting to answer the question of how evil can exist in the world given God's goodness and omnipotence largely by positing that divine choices surpass human understanding. Elsewhere, he suggests that believers might seek out "a major world religion" partly because those faiths "triumphed over primeval belief systems for a reason," without noting the role played by military campaigns aimed at exterminating rival faiths. This is unlikely to change minds.
