Ross Douthat's Apologia for Religion in the NYT
The New York Times is widely believed by Trumpland to be the epicenter of left-wing media bias. That’s true, if by “left-wing media bias” you actually mean, “right in the center of fact-reporting journalism that slightly skews left.” You can see this in the Media Bias Chart produced by a non-partisan group that tracks such things. In this same chart, Fox News TV appears in the “Hyper-Partisan Right” column on the x-axis (bias), and on the y-axis (value and reliability), instead of “fact reporting” they are in the row of: selective, incomplete, unfair persuasion, propaganda. I’m afraid that’s closer to InfoWars and The National Enquirer on the chart than it is to the BBC.
I subscribe to the NYT because I trust that the reporting has undergone fact-checking. That doesn’t mean they’re infallible, but it does mean that claims have to be substantiated. And then they print errors and retractions when people discover that something was incorrect. So that’s kind of like the process of science, which depends on peer review. No one denies that there is some degree of groupthink within any human community. But I’m more confident in the prevalence of human nature in these same communities, according to which individuals are constantly trying to make a name for themselves. The quickest way to do that is by showing that the established figures are wrong. So in both science and journalism, the young guns keep everyone honest. Or at least in the long run of this process, the truth tends to come out.
That assessment is primarily about news reporting. NYT gets the “skews slightly left” label in the bias chart because many of its regular columnists advocate for left wing policies on the opinion pages. These days I often find myself in agreement with them. But it is under-appreciated that the NYT regularly features people who don’t fit the stereotypical mold. The columnists I read most consistently are David Brooks and Ross Douthat. No, they aren’t exactly Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, if that’s who you think represents all that’s right and true. But they are thoughtful, politically conservative, and perhaps most expectation-defying for those who don’t frequent the NYT, they are religiously committed.
The front page of today’s NYT opinion section in the print edition (yes, I still get the print edition delivered to my doorstep) features a full-page illustration for Ross Douthat’s column saying, “A Guide to Faith.” The column itself is titled, “How to Think Your Way Into Religious Belief.” It’s full of the kinds of considerations that thinking religious people like to point to in order to justify their religious beliefs. I say “considerations” rather than “arguments” because this thousand-word editorial isn’t going to be mistaken for a comprehensive defense of the truth of Christianity (or any of the other world religions). Each of the considerations (things like consciousness, near death experiences, the lawfulness of material reality) have volumes written about them in which serious objections, responses, and rebuttals are put forward. I doubt that many people are going to read this one article and change teams from the Atheist All Stars to the True Believers.
But what articles like this do, in my opinion, is show at least the beginnings of how you can see the world through religious eyes. And it is the real world Douthat is looking at — one that takes seriously the findings of science from Copernicus, to Newton, to Darwin, to Einstein. Douthat says that religion doesn’t need to explain the kinds of things that science clearly does now. Instead, there are other aspects of our experience — deeper, more important and profound aspects — that science isn’t equipped to explain away. Perhaps instead of religious people being deceived or having the wool pulled over their eyes, it is the atheistic materialists who are looking through wool and taking leaps of faith to fill in the gaps in their picture of things?
I guess I’d say we’re all making leaps of faith. But please don’t understand that as “believing things without reason.” A better understanding of faith is “being committed to a particular way of seeing things.” That commitment needs to continually subject itself to critique (kind of like the peer review mentioned earlier), and to revise itself. But let no one think their own view of things is the only way to make sense of the world. The evidence for most of the important things in life just isn’t that unambiguous.
Of course there are people at the extremes on both sides who claim way more than the evidence can possibly support. But within the broader center, there is room for intelligent conversation about these things. I’m grateful that Douthat and the NYT have encouraged such conversation. We should all support it, regardless of political or religious commitments.