In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Ross joined Tyler to discuss what getting routed by Christopher Hitchens taught him about religious debate, why the simulation hypothesis resembles ancient Gnostic religion, what Mexican folk Catholicism reveals about spiritual intermediaries, his evolving views on papal authority in the Francis era, what UFO sightings might tell us about supernatural reality, why he’s less apocalyptic than Peter Thiel about the Antichrist, and why he’s publishing a fantasy novel on Substack before AI potentially transforms creative writing.

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Recorded January 16th, 2025.

Read the full transcript

Thank you to a listener who sponsored this transcript in memory of their grandfather, Daniel Grace, who “lived and encouraged a life of patient learning and listening.”

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am here live and in person with Ross Douthat. Ross is arguably the best columnist in the world. He has many excellent books, and he has a new book, which I’m a big fan of, called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Perhaps today, my soul is on the line.

ROSS DOUTHAT: I know. It’s very high stakes. This is the highest-stakes conversation we’ve ever had. If I fail, my punishment will be —

COWEN: How about your soul?

DOUTHAT: No, yes, there’re eternal stakes. Once, when I was a much younger man, I was dragooned into debating Christopher Hitchens on a beach in Nantucket. I was substituting for Andrew Sullivan.

COWEN: Who won?

DOUTHAT: Hitchens. It was an absolute rout. That’s too strong. It was a rout. He was at the peak of his powers, and maybe I had not yet come into my full powers. I don’t know, I can tell myself that. Afterwards, I was convinced that I had added a hundred years in purgatory to my allotment for those failures. So, we’ll see how this goes.

COWEN: In your theology, does converting me win you points? It’s not really a Catholic view, is it?

DOUTHAT: No. No, it’s not. Probably no toaster oven, but you don’t want to—

COWEN: It’s not going to lose you points.

DOUTHAT: It’s not going to lose me points. Let’s put it that way, yes. Maybe indulgence-style, it might compensate for some failings in other areas. There’re probably people who have been alienated from the truth about existence because they disliked something I said or did. Every day is a new chance to make up for those failings.

On what it means to be religious

COWEN: I have a basic question about, what does it mean to be religious? Let’s say I believe in the simulation hypothesis, which comes from Nick Bostrom. Robin Hanson has cited it. The notion that, if we can make a lot of simulations, there’s a pretty good chance we are ourselves living in one. How does believing in the simulation argument differ from being religious? Outside the sphere of normal life, how do we distinguish what we might call a god from what we might call — I don’t know — whoever created the simulation?

DOUTHAT: I think, functionally, the simulation hypothesis is doing some of the work of a polytheistic or Gnostic religion, where whoever is running the simulation, the version of advanced consciousness that is capable of effectively creating and sustaining our world and presumably however many trillions of others they have running inside their simulator — that entity is not the creator god of classical theism.

It’s not the God of Christianity, but I think it’s reasonable to describe, again, this hypothetical simulation runner as a small-g god, certainly. You could regard it as the way that Gnostics regarded the demiurge, the intermediate spiritual power that created this world and was responsible for all its misery and woe. The Gnostics would say, “Therefore, you need to get past that demiurge and escape to the higher level where the true God waits, who actually created the whole thing, the whole shebang.” Maybe they would say, “He didn’t create the whole shebang.” I don’t want to overstate my familiarity with the intricacies of Gnosticism.

Or you could be a kind of polytheist. There are forms of polytheism that are arguably compatible with an ultimate monotheism. You could say, “Okay, there may be an absolute god beyond the simulators.” I would say, if you could convince me of the simulation hypothesis, I would still say there probably has to be a god beyond the simulators.

But the simulators themselves are in the position of gods to us. I guess where I would say that view crosses over from analysis to religion is the point at which you start trying to figure out what is your relationship to the simulators. Should you have one? I think you probably should. If you actually believe you’re in a simulation, you should try and figure out, what do the simulators want from you? Do they have your best interests at heart?

If you think they do, then you should be trying to bring yourself into alignment, if you will, with whatever they have in mind. If you think they don’t, then I would suggest trying to send up prayers to whatever powers might be out there that could rescue you from the simulators’ hands. Either way, I think the simulation hypothesis is, in effect, an acknowledgment that there’s no escape from religious questions. I think the failure of the hypothesizers, maybe, is not fully taking seriously the implication that we might be the playthings of secondary gods.

COWEN: You sound surprisingly close to the demiurge hypothesis. Clearly, you believe creation is possible, and you don’t dismiss Bayesian reasoning. How much weight you give it is an open question. Why not think there are multiple layers of God? What we think of as God is just part of the chain. In Bayesian terms, if a god created us, well, some being could have created that god. Why aren’t you led to that as a view with pretty high probability?

DOUTHAT: I’m led to the view with pretty high probability that there are intermediate powers between us and whatever you want to call God.

COWEN: But the more you make the chain complicated, it can stretch in both directions.

DOUTHAT: Well, it can stretch in the direction you’re saying, where we would eventually become gods ourselves.

COWEN: The Christian God is a demiurge. There’s some higher god who created that and maybe many other gods. It seems once you even consider the logic of the simulation hypothesis, you become fairly agnostic about the true nature of the ultimate god.

DOUTHAT: Right. I think the weakness of the simulation hypothesis is that we don’t have any actual evidence for it. It’s incredibly speculative, and it assumes a capacity of what you might call subcreation that is completely speculative and not in evidence. I wouldn’t dismiss the simulation hypothesis any more than I would dismiss the various multiversal hypotheses that have ended up substituting in at least some intelligent people’s minds for what I think of as the rather more obvious likelihood that the old-fashioned religious worldview is correct.

I don’t dismiss them out of hand, but I think you are in the position of multiplying hypotheses, multiplying speculations. In the life that we have, a certain parsimony is probably wiser. We have access to one pretty big, complicated, interesting, varied world. That world appears, I would say, to have been fashioned for a reason. That reason appears to include us. There appears, from spiritual experiences, to be intermediate powers and then probably some sort of higher power.

I think working with all of that, rather than adding on six levels of speculation about further chains that we can’t see, is probably the better part of valor.

COWEN: But surely, it’s odd to, say, not dismiss the Trinity, not dismiss the intermediate elf beings, and then invoke Occam’s razor, right? You could just be a Muslim. There’s one God indivisible. That’s that. Or be a Unitarian.

DOUTHAT: But your Occam’s razor has to incorporate the religious phenomena as we experience them, or I would say that it has to. First of all, I do think that the parsimony of the hardcore deist or Unitarian or anti-supernaturalist Muslim — the kind who don’t have any traffic with jinn and things of that nature — that kind of parsimony is plausible enough. It’s certainly more plausible than hard materialism.

If given the option, I would choose that over the worldview of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, but I don’t think it adequately encompasses the terrain of actual religious and spiritual experiences that people have. That, I think, is a crucial reason for the persistence of religion even in an allegedly disenchanted age. It’s obviously the point of origin for most of the world’s religions. Most of the world’s major religions make some kind of accommodation — even when they are monotheistic — to the idea of intermediate powers.

I think it’s useful to think about counterfactuals. If we lived in a world where every religious experience was the kind of religious experience where you just had a sense of oneness and deep connection with a singular being who seemed responsible for existence — people have such experiences. If that were the only kind of experience you had, that anyone had, or that 99 percent of religious experiences fit that pattern, then yes, parsimony, I think, would suggest whatever might be out there, there’s not just probably one God, but that God is probably the only higher power concerned with us with whom we might be in relationship.

In the event, though, there’s a much wider range of spiritual experiences. There does seem to be a realm of powers that, again, you could classify them with the small-g god. You could classify them as Christians would, usually, in angelic and demonic terms. Yes, I think both the variation and the consistency in religious experience — there’s a lot of variation, but then there’s a certain consistency of the kinds of variations across cultures. You want something that I think explains that, and the theory that explains that is that there is some sort of hierarchy. We’re not just alone with the one true God.

COWEN: This gets us to the part of your book where you discuss me. I’m never quite sure how one settles on a particular religious belief. If I go to Sri Lanka, the children of Hindus tend to be Hindu. The children of Buddhists tend to be Buddhists, Muslims, some Christians even.

DOUTHAT: That is the way of things.

COWEN: That makes me very suspicious about our particularist intuitions. If you just showed up and said, “Tyler, I will save your soul. You should be a deist,” we’d have a very different conversation. But when someone puts forward a very specific claim, I just don’t trust their specific intuitions. They seem so tied to society, conformist pressures, family, what they learned as a kid.

I just think we should look at all of Sri Lanka and figure, “Hey, these people ended up where they did because of how they grew up.” That’s fine. It’s maybe good for social cohesion, but then move on to just thinking about it more abstractly. Why is that wrong?

DOUTHAT: Well, right. This is where I’ve been saying to some of my religious friends that this is my most liberal book in a certain way, in that I go a certain distance with that argument. I do think that the diversity of religious traditions strongly suggests that some form of connection to God is available in a lot of different places. This is the official teaching of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. It’s not some radical, controversial opinion, but it is on the liberal side of potential theological interpretations.

Absent any other indication of what kind of religion you should be, what sort of religious perspective you should have, a default to the one that works in your culture is, I think, by no means, crazy.

I guess my question for you — as you know, since you read my responses — is, what to you makes religion distinct from other forms of knowledge, belief, and belonging? Because everything that you just said about religious belief obviously applies to politics.

COWEN: But much less.

DOUTHAT: Much less?

COWEN: Much less to politics. Religion seems far more heritable.

DOUTHAT: Does it?

COWEN: But even if it were the same, I would sooner conclude we should be more agnostic about many things than conclude we should be less agnostic about religion.

DOUTHAT: Certainly, but you are a professional arguer. You take strong views on all kinds of questions. You are a trained economist who takes all kinds of strongly held views on economics that are hotly contested by, maybe not equally intelligent, but almost as intelligent rivals who have different views.

You could say, well, once you reach the heights of economic theory, at that point, you’re dealing with people who . . . No one has inherited Keynesianism from their parents, and so on. You should be able to trust the choices that you versus Paul Krugman and so on have made. Well, maybe, but there are all kinds of other ways in which your economic views are conditioned. They’re presumably conditioned by —

COWEN: I’m just consistent.

DOUTHAT: Right, but it just seems to me that there’s a tendency to place religion in this special category and say, “Okay, it’s inherited. It’s culturally contingent. Therefore, it’s silly to have arguments about this belief versus that belief.” But people change religions all the time, right? New religions come into being because of conversion. People change their minds because of argument.

It’s not like we don’t have tons of examples of this. I feel like it should be possible to balance a certain respect for the reality that there’s religious diversity for a reason. There are hard questions that you’re not going to argue your way to a singular answer, but also say the argument is worth having, and maybe you or I can make progress on some of our own views on those questions, right?

COWEN: But your response saying, “Well, everyone else, including Tyler Cowen, has these weird inconsistencies.” While I agree, I don’t see how that gets you to religious faith. It might get you to some kind of Bayesian deism.

DOUTHAT: Sorry, which inconsistency? Everyone has a weird inconsistency.

COWEN: Well, everyone is influenced by the views of their parents on all kinds of things. The soap I use actually is still the same soap my grandmother used when I was a kid. That’s probably related, right? It’s arguably irrational. No doubt, it’s true. But saying that happens everywhere — I don’t see how it gets you to religious faith. I just think at best, it gets you to some kind of probabilistic deism.

DOUTHAT: Well, I guess the argument in the book is that you can get beyond probabilistic deism into what I would characterize as maybe probabilistic supernaturalism. I don’t know exactly the right term. I use the term religion, as you said at the outset, as obviously a contested term. People argue about what constitutes a religion, but I think you can get somewhat probabilistically to the view that not just that deism is true but that there is a fundamental order to the cosmos in which human beings have an important or significant role to play.

There are divine or supernatural impingements on our reality that seem significant in various ways. You probably have a soul that is related to your body but distinct in some way. There’s probably life after death. I would say — and people can read the book and agree or disagree — but I think that there’s a preponderance of evidence in favor of most of those claims.

Now, I agree that even going that far, quite a bit past deism, doesn’t get you to a particular religious decision. There, I have some explanations at the end of the book about why I’m a Christian and why I think the choice to believe in, let’s just say, the significance of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection seems like a rational sequel to those initially rational ideas.

But I think there’s absolutely a reason why religious believers talk in terms of relationship. On the one hand, you’re seeking not just a theory of God but a relationship with him, or them if you prefer, but also in terms of divine grace. The relationship runs both ways. To some degree, it has to be up to the higher order of existence what your relationship to that order might be. But what I’m trying to suggest is, I think there’s a broader and thicker foundation for seeking that relationship than many intelligent people right now seem to think.

On consciousness and the soul

COWEN: Does it worry you that when many people take psychedelics, they feel spirituality, religion, the presence of God, the supernatural? It’s obviously a natural cause.

DOUTHAT: Why? Why is it obviously a natural cause?

COWEN: Well, it could be that God is intervening every time someone takes LSD and giving you visions, but it just seems it’s the operation of the drug and that there can be quite naturalistic reasons why people feel religion, the presence of God, the supernatural, and it’s not, in a way, that mysterious or linked to an actual deity.

DOUTHAT: I don’t think that that’s true. What is the naturalistic explanation? I think it’s quite clear that taking a psychedelic drug does something to the normal operation of your brain that changes your conscious experience of reality. I don’t think we have any kind of demonstrable proof of why the particular ingredients in ayahuasca yield consistent seeming encounters with a particular kind of being.

COWEN: I would be shocked if neuroscience didn’t figure that out, right? I don’t pretend.

DOUTHAT: You would be?

COWEN: Absolutely.

DOUTHAT: It seems to me that neuroscience needs to have some theory of how normal human consciousness operates before it can have a coherent theory of how abnormal human consciousness operates. Look, if the religious world picture is correct, again, broadly speaking, then whatever the self is, whatever the soul is, it obviously exists in some sort of dynamic relationship to its body, its brain, its chemistry, its bloodstream, all of that, right?

But the fact that you’re more likely to have a supernatural experience when you shake up that material substrate, I don’t think, tells you anything about the actual nature of what you’re encountering. If you think of, first of all, hermits in the desert who go out into the desert and mortify their flesh, or Native Americans on a spirit quest, and so on — these are traditional religious practices that, even absent psychedelic drugs, have always taken as a given that the default experience of the world is natural and material. If you want to have a supernatural experience, you need to shake up the natural substrate a little bit.

I don’t think that ingesting drugs that shake up how your brain works is necessarily any different. Again, I understand that this seems like an outlandish conception. I think in the end, it is the religious conception. The religious conception is that your mind’s coexistence with your brain effectively reduces your mind’s capacities to enable it to operate normally in physical reality, and that shaking up the brain — there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t open the mind’s capacities a little bit more.

COWEN: Monkeys can’t do this in your view, but do monkeys have a soul? Tree shrews?

DOUTHAT: I think we should be somewhat agnostic about —

COWEN: Trilobites don’t have a soul.

DOUTHAT: Trilobites. Well, I mean —

COWEN: There’s some day of transition. That to me seems very weird. For a long time, everything operates according to quantum mechanics and Einstein and Newton. Then one day, there’s a monkey or a tree shrew. That animal eats a magic banana and is somehow infused with free will or a soul or the ability to contemplate the deity, but it’s still subject to all the same physical laws. It would be very odd to me. It’s like Descartes’s interaction problem, how one day is different from the next. Look, what does the day look like when the trilobite becomes the God-perceiving human? What’s the critical event in the middle?

DOUTHAT: I don’t know what the critical event is in the middle. I don’t think we have any kind of access to that.

COWEN: Even in principle, like if someone believed in a fairy world that we can’t access, you could be skeptical.

DOUTHAT: You mean a multiverse or simulation hypothesis?

COWEN: Say like a multiverse. Something like that, yes.

DOUTHAT: Something like that. Right.

COWEN: There’s no interaction problem to explain. Whereas, when someone thinks that a godlike being is interfering all the time with the principles of quantum mechanics — it’s not impossible. It just seems, to me, very strange.

DOUTHAT: Don’t the principles of quantum mechanics under one perfectly reasonable interpretation suggest that for physical reality to exist at all, some sort of consciousness has to be constantly performing an act of perception to collapse possibilities into reality? It seems to me that —

COWEN: No, it’s not how I interpret quantum mechanics.

DOUTHAT: How do you interpret quantum mechanics? We can go deep.

COWEN: I don’t think we understand what measurement means in the theory, but it doesn’t have to be a subjectively conscious mind. We don’t all have to be Bishop Berkeley — that you need God to prevent everything from popping out of existence because God is perceiving it all, all the time.

DOUTHAT: Right, but don’t you think that’s a somewhat commonsensical — however anti-materialist — interpretation of what seems to be going on at the deepest level of reality?

COWEN: I don’t know what it means — the deepest level of reality. I don’t know that —

DOUTHAT: I won’t say the deepest level. At the quantum level of reality, it seems, as far as we can see with our perception, that in order to go from contingency to reality, you need an observer. You need measurement. How do you get measurement without consciousness? What does measurement even mean absent consciousness?

COWEN: Electrons bump into each other, something. You don’t need consciousness. If you had a measuring stick in there, that would collapse —

DOUTHAT: Who puts the measuring stick in there?

COWEN: Humans, but when they’re not watching, the wave function still collapses, right?

DOUTHAT: But does it?

COWEN: The measuring stick says it does.

DOUTHAT: We made the measuring stick.

COWEN: We’re not watching. You don’t need subjective consciousness. You need some process of resolution.

DOUTHAT: I deny that you can have a measuring stick without a process of consciousness. The measuring stick without a process of consciousness is itself just a ruler. Absent your consciousness, a ruler is a collection of atoms and molecules cut out of a tree with some markings on it. In order for the ruler to be an instrument of measurement, you, Tyler Cowen, have to be perceiving it and be conscious of it.

COWEN: I think the ruler suffices.

DOUTHAT: No, you can’t say the ruler suffices. Look, I want to go back to your prior question, which, I think, is a fundamentally difficult question. We do not know what constitutes the transition from non-conscious life to conscious life. Now, we also don’t know exactly what constitutes the transition from non-life to life. We have some difficulties figuring that out as well. We were having a conversation about difficulties in the Christian interpretation of the human person.

I think the interaction between what we know at the moment or understand at the moment about evolution in human origins and the traditional Christian account of the fall, that there are some real points of tension in there that Christianity has not figured out a perfectly satisfying resolution of. That would be a different kind of book than this one. There is an interesting argument there, but it’s an interesting argument precisely because it takes place in a larger context, where we have good reasons to take the supernaturalism of the human mind very, very seriously.

It’s a mystery not just because the Christians don’t have a full account of it, because the materialists don’t have an account of it at all, because there is no satisfying materialist account at the moment of what consciousness is, why we experience it the way we do, and so on. Nor is there a satisfying account — now, I’m going to circle us back to the measurement problem — of why our consciousness is capable of all this successful measurement at all. The difficulty for the materialist isn’t just that you have this fine-tuned universe that, in its basic structure, seems to have been jerry-rigged for our emergence.

It’s not just that problem, which the materialist tries to solve by positing an infinity of invisible worlds that are supposed to be more compelling than fairyland. Not sure why. The further problem — it goes down to us, but then it goes back up because human consciousness has turned out to be really good at not just figuring out how to survive on the African savannah, but figuring out how to plumb the deepest secrets of the physical laws of the universe.

We’ve figured out something about quantum mechanics, something about this deep structure of the universe that is very peculiar in a narrative where it’s trilobite brains giving way to monkey brains. Put it this way: If it seems incredibly unlikely that the universe should be fine-tuned in a way that allows for the development of conscious life, it seems to me even more unlikely that that conscious life would then work its way back up to understand the secrets of the universe in full.

COWEN: I think I’m closer to the Colin McGinn view that we’re just not smart enough to understand consciousness. It’s a puzzle. It should make us more agnostic about many things, but it’s not an excuse to go multiply all these other entities.

DOUTHAT: The entity involved — no one is multiplying entities when it comes to explaining consciousness. They are simply describing the entity that is Tyler Cowen and that is Ross Douthat, that you have immediate access to, more immediate access than to anything else in the world.

COWEN: I think most of my decisions are made without my awareness. What I feel is my consciousness is some kind of blip or epiphenomenon. Skating on the surface of that, there’s a lot of evidence.

DOUTHAT: This is where I don’t really believe you. I think, certainly, that if you’re driving through Arlington, Virginia, there is a set of unconscious things that your body does out of habit as you drive around that you are not self-consciously doing. Certainly, there’re lots of things. You are a mind in some kind of dynamic relationship to a brain and body. There’re plenty of things going on that your consciousness is not responsible for. But you write books, do you not? You host podcasts, do you not?

COWEN: Some part of me does, yes. Most of it happens beneath the surface, and I’m not aware of the decisions I’m making. There’s an ex post reconstruction of it that makes me feel like I’m in control, but I don’t think I am very much, if at all.

DOUTHAT: Don’t you think you’ve maybe just imbibed a bit too much of the materialist spirit of the age?

COWEN: I don’t even call it materialist.

DOUTHAT: I want to give you credit. I think you write your own books. I think Tyler Cowen, with some assistance, obviously, from angels on one shoulder, demons on the other, maybe some fairies thrown in. I want to give you credit for actual existence.

COWEN: The aggregate Tyler Cowen gets the credit.

DOUTHAT: I don’t think that this theory of the mind as aggregation actually does justice to the direct experience of being a human being.

On the religious implications of alien life

COWEN: If there are many alien beings on other planets — as I would say now seems likely, whether or not they’ve ever come here — does that make Jesus Christ less important?

DOUTHAT: Why does it seem likely?

COWEN: We keep on discovering more planets that appear possibly habitable. We don’t know what’s on them, but it’s certainly more likely than if we were not discovering any such planets, so we should be raising our probability. It’s a big place out there. I would be shocked if there was not other meaningful life in the universe.

DOUTHAT: I would also be somewhat surprised. I do think that the Fermi question still seems to hold, even given lots of life-friendly or seemingly life-friendly planets. The silence of the cosmos seems quite odd if, at the very least, there are lots of starfaring species out there capable of sending messages into the deep. You might think that we are among the first, in which case, we seem fairly special, or you might think that there are just very, very few, in which case, I think, we seem fairly special again. I think it’s unlikely —

COWEN: They destroyed themselves would be my guess.

DOUTHAT: They destroyed themselves and left no signals tracing their way through space?

COWEN: The speed of light is a tough one. Maybe we’re somewhat early. I agree it’s a puzzle. I don’t find it insuperable.

DOUTHAT: Just to go back to your question, I think that the question for the Christian, given the existence of other beings with our kind of consciousness in the galaxy, would be, what is their apparent relationship to God?

This is where the Christian doctrine of the fall is useful. The presumption would have to be that either there was some role for Jesus in their existence, and maybe we’re the vehicle for that. There are fun science-fiction novels where the Jesuits send missionaries to other planets. I think you could imagine a scenario where the Catholic Church would very quickly try and recruit some missionaries to evangelize an alien species.

Or you could have the scenario that you get in Christian science-fiction novelists. You get a little bit of it in Madeleine L’Engle. You get it in C.S. Lewis’s The Space Trilogy, where there are other species in the universe that are made in the image of God, maybe, and they have not fallen, and we have. We are alienated from God in some profound way that other species might not be.

Those, I think, would be the two reasonable moves that a Christian might make, confronted with some form of extraterrestrial life. I do think, though, again, that the silence that we are faced with suggests that something more is going on than just, life is commonplace, it’s all over, and we haven’t run into it yet. I think it either has to be quite rare or to be . . . in both the Lewis and the L’Engle novels, there’s a kind of supernatural blockade on planet Earth because we fell, right?

People who believe, I guess, UAPs, as we’re now supposed to call the UFOs, people who believe that those are actual visitors from other worlds — they have to believe in a non-supernatural version of that. They have to believe that there’s some management of Earth’s knowledge of the galaxy going on to explain why there are all these crafts zipping around but we’ve never heard a radio signal from deep space. You could imagine a more supernaturalist version of that hypothesis, I suppose.

COWEN: If you’re weighing those probabilities that UAPs are alien drone probes —

DOUTHAT: Oh boy.

COWEN: — versus angels and demons, what do you bring to bear on trying to figure that out?

DOUTHAT: [laughs]

COWEN: Because even I would say this: UAPs have increased my probability that there’s a God because there are not many explanations for them. There’s China. There’s Russia. There’s craft of our own. There’s alien drone probes. There’s what you could call broadly supernatural. So, there’re five explanations.

DOUTHAT: Yes.

COWEN: That’s one of the five? So, it’s upped my p.

DOUTHAT: The moves that people make is to say that they’re interdimensional, that this is the —

COWEN: I don’t know what that means, though.

DOUTHAT: I also don’t know. I don’t know how you distinguish that from essentially supernaturalist explanations. If you had asked me, five to ten years ago, my basic view about UFOs, I didn’t have strong views about them, but I would’ve said that most of what I’d read in the literature about personal encounters with supposed extraterrestrials seemed to line up reasonably well with pre-modern accounts of encounters with angels, demons, and maybe especially fairies.

This is an argument that the ufologist, Jacques Vallee, made early in the UFO many decades ago, that if you compare an account of an alien abduction to an Irishman’s tale of being abducted by the Unseelie Court, there’re a lot of interesting similarities.

There are two conclusions you could draw from that. You could say, well, there’s this union unconscious that human beings have that grants us these weird dream-like experiences, and in modern times, we attribute them to aliens, and we used to attribute them to fairies. Or you could be more of a supernaturalist and say there are beings out there who like to — pardon my language — fuck with us. They do it in different ways in different times and places. That seems to me to be the straightforward reading of the data on individual encounters, abductions, encounters, that stuff.

I honestly don’t know what to make of the craft-zipping-around stuff. That’s part of why it’s interesting. I have difficulty fitting it into a non-supernaturalist paradigm. I think you can. You can say the best argument would be, these are extraterrestrial drones sent from deep space or from some observation base deep under the oceans if we’re going to get really kooky. This is what you’d expect from an advanced civilization many light years away. They can’t travel to every planet that has life on it, so they have some drones keeping an eye on things. I guess you could make that argument.

If you make that argument, then you have to separate that from all the kind of paranormal UFO abduction stuff and say, “Well, these are just separate things. One belongs to the realm of religious, supernatural, Jungian experience, and one is literal aliens visiting us.”

I find that’s unsatisfying. I feel if they aren’t Chinese drones, [laughs] if they aren’t native earth tech . . . I don’t know if it’s probabilistic reasoning or not. My mind wants there to be a connection between weird abduction stories and Navy pilot sightings. I guess it’s a case where I find the subject quite interesting, but I don’t want to make any kind of commitment because I think we just conspicuously lack evidence.

I think there’s a contingent of Christian and religious interpreters of this stuff who say, “Look, it’s probably demonic.” It’s basically how the old gods of paganism, who are really demons, get back in. Instead of pretending to be angels of light, they pretend to be ETs of light, and so on. If you had my friend Rod Dreher on, who writes a lot about mystical issues and has lately started writing about UAPs — he’s very interested in that argument.

I think, were that the case, it would be quite striking and strange that there would be actual craft of some kind involved. Certainly, a kind of departure from what we know about supernatural interventions otherwise, an escalation that would be strange. Also, if I were, let’s say, a Syrian demi-demon trying to get worshipers back after all these thousands of years, I don’t understand the end game, [laughs] of sending a bunch of crafts zipping around to freak out Navy pilots. I don’t know what’s the plan there.

I’m trying to be resolutely open-minded.

COWEN: In general, you weigh personal testimony higher than I do. Let me see if you can talk me into it a bit. Something is recorded in data sensors and confirmed across multiple sensors. Maybe I don’t know what it is, but I’ll believe there’s something there. But if people say X, Y, and Z — there’re all sorts of religions neither you nor I would sign onto, and plenty of humans who will assert, insist that there’s direct evidence for that particular religion.

The story of Joseph Smith, the plates from LDS would be one example, but there’re plenty of religions that don’t even exist anymore, where there’re very particular stories that people have attested to. We really do dismiss them in the numbers of the tens of millions or maybe even billions. So, if we’re willing to dismiss all those stories, isn’t David Hume right? We should not dismiss the stories, but they’re not going to budge us out of a more commonsensical worldview.

DOUTHAT: Yes. I don’t dismiss all of those stories. I guess that’s part of my strong departure from Humean assumptions. I think that certainly there are fakes and frauds and charlatans in religion, and there are people who are just sincerely mistaken, who think that they had a religious experience when really, they have a diagnosis or they should get a diagnosis of some form of mental illness or insanity.

At the same time, I think that the wide range of attested spiritual, just frankly bizarre experiences that human beings have — of which, UFO encounters are a subset — that, again, has familiar antecedents going back millennia — I think we should take those seriously and have a theory of what they are that is more complex than fraud meets insanity meets delusion.

Part of this is just knowing people who’ve had those kinds of experiences, reading a lot about those kinds of experiences — not just in my own tradition, but in other religious traditions. I think that they correspond to something real, even if the interpretation that people give to them is wrong or deluded or misguided. I don’t think that Joseph Smith was in fact chosen by God to restore the lost truths about Jesus Christ, polygamy, and the ancient civilizations of the New World. I don’t think that’s true.

Do I think that Joseph Smith didn’t have some weird supernatural encounter? I’m less confident about saying that. The same would go . . . I don’t think that Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets. Do I think that Muhammad either hallucinated or made it all up? Again, I’m certainly much less confident than you would be in saying that. I do not —

COWEN: It’s almost an Islamic doctrine you’re holding. There are these various tiers of prophets, and they’re imperfectly right, but they’re getting at the divine.

On experiences with the supernatural

DOUTHAT: Yes. I think any coherent theory of supernatural experience — given what you can encounter just by reading William James — has to say either there’re infinite realms of deception out there . . . This is something that some religious believers would say. There’s one subset of totally authentic, trustworthy religious experiences, and then there’s a vast realm where it’s all demonic deception.

Or you have to say that there’s just a range of ways in which people encounter God and the supernatural that do get filtered through cultural assumptions and through — I don’t want to say imperfect prophets — let’s just say imperfect human beings. And that helps yield the diversity of religions in the world today.

But you can also see patterns in those things like near-death experiences. The range — there is cross-cultural variation in near-death experiences. If you have a near-death experience as a Tibetan Buddhist, you are more likely to see the Buddha. If you have a near-death experience as a Catholic, you’re more likely to maybe see an archangel or a Catholic saint or something. But at the same time, there are some pretty clear commonalities to suggest that people in Tibet and people in Indiana are having the same kind of experience when they die and are resuscitated and report the lights, the tunnel, all the strange things associated with those experiences.

Yes, there’s a challenge here, obviously, for any kind of dogmatic religion. You do have to figure out, “Okay, why is there this consistency but also this variation?” But there’s also a challenge for the Humeans to say, “Well, we’re just writing off this fairly consistent cross-cultural realm of human experience because it’s all supposed to be myth and hallucination?” The people who have these experiences are not generally the kinds of people who you would describe as prone to hallucination and insanity. There are of course cases, but that’s not the norm.

On the Humean point — if you go back and read Hume, he doesn’t exactly say this, but you really have the strong impression that Hume thinks that once you get rid of established religious authorities and the universal teachings of antique stories from the Bible, that a big swath of supernatural stuff will just go away. Now, he says humans still —

COWEN: And that’s wrong, right?

DOUTHAT: Right. Humans still have this propensity toward the marvelous — I think that’s the phrase he uses. I don’t think he’d be surprised by some persistence, but I think the original Humean theory is, most people believe in the supernatural because someone has taught them about it at church. There are these legends handed down from misty antiquity. I think we just know that that’s not true. That’s not what’s going on.

That’s, I think, one of the multiple places where atheist skeptics and materialists have some prior updating to do about what we’ve learned over the last 200 years about what life is like under allegedly disenchanted conditions.

COWEN: Doesn’t it worry you that for all of these instances of the supernatural, there’s never enough evidence accumulated to convince actual scientists? No one has captured an elf, as far as I know. You could switch the topic to some other instance of the supernatural, but there’s plenty of testimony of elves.

DOUTHAT: Yes. I worry though a little about . . . The assumption of supernatural experience, I would say, is . . . Let’s say there’re two ways in which it could manifest itself, just to massively simplify it. You could say it manifests itself through some kind of reaching in, where a higher power — God, angel, demon, whatever — is operating in human reality. Or you could say it relates to some native gift, the idea that some people have psychic powers, and so on.

In the first case, you are pretty clearly dealing with wills and intentions and intentionality and choices that are essentially the equivalent of human will and intentionality and choices and so on. Saying, “Well, we should be able to consistently predict when someone will be possessed by a demon or something and under the right laboratory conditions.” It’s like saying, “Well, we should consistently predict when two people are going to fall in love under the right laboratory conditions.”

Again, the hardest core materialist might say eventually we should. We should be able to get it, to see what’s happening in their brains when these two people are going to fall in love. But in practical terms, science hits a limit when certain kinds of human agency enter the picture. I don’t see why it wouldn’t hit a similar limit. I don’t see why you would imagine that you could devise a laboratory system for reliably conjuring the supernatural.

On the second case —

COWEN: You don’t have to conjure it, but there’s no way to measure it reliably?

DOUTHAT: What do you mean by —

COWEN: Just whatever it would take. The editors of Science and Nature, whoever they may be — I suspect they don’t believe in what you believe in. Whatever it would take to convince them. We have no tools that will bring them along. It’s at some odd margin of being quite non-legible. It’s that way on purpose to test us? Or it just turned out that way? It seems like a weird —

DOUTHAT: I think it has to be that way on purpose in order for the basic coherence of physical existence to obtain. . . I think, actually, the scientist’s point originally that you can’t do science if you can always assert that an angel is responsible for moving a planet around — I think that is a decent enough explanation of why you wouldn’t expect constant predictable operation of supernatural forces in the world.

I think that there are also reasons to think, for instance, with psychic phenomena . . . Thanks in part to the CIA’s interest in it, this has been subject to a lot of quasi-scientific scrutiny over long periods of time. You can find people who have done studies that technically stand up to the rigors of scientific expectations that seem to prove the existence of some kind of psi, some kind of paranormal ability. But then you enter into the replication crisis [laughs] and you have competing studies and recreations of those studies.

I don’t want to rule out, in fact, the possibility that, if more scientists set aside their materialist presumptions, you wouldn’t be able to get better data. But I think it would have to be data about characteristics of human beings rather than characteristics of angels and demons. I think the latter is inherently inaccessible to the tools that we use for modern science. Whereas I do think it’s reasonable to say if people are psychic, maybe we should be able to design a set of experiments that offers clearer indications in that direction.

I quote Freeman Dyson in the book as a maverick polymath, scientific genius, and he was a believer in psychic phenomena. His argument was basically that if you read about the cases where people have these kinds of experiences, they’re similar to cases of bursts of artistic creativity or things, again, that are very hard to predict and measure scientifically.

They happen under periods of great physical or personal duress. They happen around the death of a loved one. They happen in inherently eccentric circumstances that seem to — again, if these capacities existed — be the things that generated those capacities, which again, creates some problems for laboratory measurement, I would say.

COWEN: But this gets back to my interaction set of worries. People report seeing and hearing angels and demons, right? But there’s not an MP3 file or a photo where you would [say], “Oh, here we go.” That’s very odd to me. It’s not logically impossible. It just seems highly unlikely. None of them seem to have held up.

DOUTHAT: What kind of evidence would convince you? Catholics always go for this one —

COWEN: I can hear Winston Churchill on YouTube, right?

DOUTHAT: There’s the miracle of the sun at Fatima in the early part of the 20th century that did happen in front of a large number of witnesses. There are powerful newspaper accounts, including, I think, in The New York Times. There’s a reason that it’s been hotly debated ever since, but whatever it was, it was something that clearly — had there been video cameras there — something would’ve been perceived. There’s a similar case in Egypt involving an apparition of the Virgin Mary where there’s footage and so on.

What would be, I guess, convincing to you? If I presented you tomorrow with a video of the Archangel Michael walking through the halls of George Mason, wielding a sword, you would assume that it was AI-generated at this point, right?

COWEN: I would bring it to someone, and I could find out.

DOUTHAT: But at some point soon, you won’t be able to find out —

COWEN: Sure, but I still could —

DOUTHAT: — if you’re right about the progress of AI.

COWEN: That there’s not one to date makes me much more skeptical.

DOUTHAT: Right. You want God to —

COWEN: The testimony, but in reproducible form that can be verified. It just seems odd that it never turns out that way.

DOUTHAT: Did you read Carlos Eire’s book, They Flew?

COWEN: No.

DOUTHAT: It’s worth reading, I would say. It’s a book about levitation in the 1500s and 1600s, Reformation and Counter-Reformation era. Levitation by various saints and yes, I’d be curious what you think about that book. There were no cameras, obviously, in the early 1600s. Eire’s argument is that, by any normal evidentiary standard in terms of collective witnesses and consistencies of witnesses and so on, these stories of levitation would seem to pass muster.

You have to be operating there in the realm, not just of personal delusion, but of mass delusion. In the contemporary world, yes, there hasn’t been a claim of levitation in the Catholic church since, I believe, a nun who was involved with the French resistance in the 1930s and ’40s, and there was photography then. It’s fair to say, “Shouldn’t we have a photograph?” However, if I presented you with a photograph from the 1940s of a levitating nun, I don’t think you’d be convinced of it.

COWEN: Well, I would have people look into it for me.

DOUTHAT: It would be grainy and so on. You want video —

COWEN: The best that can be delivered.

DOUTHAT: You want the best video.

COWEN: Yes.

DOUTHAT: I don’t think, for the more extreme forms of supernaturalism, that’s a completely unfair request, but we’ll see what we get over the next 50 to 100 years. You’ve already updated your priors about UFOs based on video evidence, right?

COWEN: Sure, absolutely.

DOUTHAT: All right.

COWEN: And my priors on God, for that matter.

DOUTHAT: We’ll come back to the video.

COWEN: I’m not inflexible here.

DOUTHAT: I think we can revisit the video evidence question. We only have a rather short number of decades of widely available video technology, which also has happened to be a period of peak arid secularism. I want to say that I think generalizing from that to a universal point that you could never have video evidence may be a little bit of a leap, and we should give it a few more decades, and see what surfaces.

On the Antichrist and spiritual intermediaries

COWEN: What do you think of Peter Thiel’s fascination with the Antichrist?

DOUTHAT: I think Peter is more apocalyptic —

COWEN: Than you are.

DOUTHAT: — than I am, yes.

COWEN: Not enough intermediaries in his story, so all the stakes are on the table at once, so to speak.

DOUTHAT: I think it’s more that the threat of the Antichrist . . . I think he’s going to maybe elaborate his theories of the Antichrist at some point in the future.

COWEN: On video most likely. [laughs]

DOUTHAT: On video, most likely, yes. I think that what we’ve seen so far, I would say, in the 21st century — take the Antichrist to be some comprehensive global rule by a singular power dedicated to a false view of reality. I don’t know if that’s how he’d define it, but let’s say that might be how I define it. I think we’ve tended to see brief flares of forces and powers that resemble that, that then quickly collapse under pressure from competing forces, other forces, and so on.

In 2008, Barack Obama was, for six months, the most popular man in the world, not just in the US. He could have been elected president of the world. You could say, in that moment, you could see how one incredibly charismatic individual could dominate the world in a mass media age. But six months into his presidency, Obama was back to being a normal politician with normal enemies, totally unpopular in various ways, and so on.

Again, to take an example that I know Peter’s been very concerned about, the alignment of big tech companies with control over the internet, with woke ideology and its hostility to free speech and its ideological fantasies. You could say, okay, that’s not an individual, but it’s a system, a system of interlocking directorates, a cathedral — the Yarvin phrase — from which we can’t escape.

But it seems like we can escape from that right now. The true rule of the woke cathedral where no dissent was brooked — what did it last for?

COWEN: Six years?

DOUTHAT: Yes, and Donald Trump was president for a couple of those years.

[laughter]

DOUTHAT: I think to be an Antichrist fearer, you need to fear some power not yet fully in evidence. That power, if you want it to be non-supernatural, could be whatever — the machine-god view of AI. I think if you take a maximalist doomer view of strong AI, then that’s effectively a theory of the Antichrist.

You could go back to our early discussion about the Sumerian gods returning and using the guise of aliens or something to enthrall us all. That could be a theory of the Antichrist. But those are theories of things not in evidence to me in the year of our Lord 2025, so I worry less about the Antichrist today than I did at various points recently.

COWEN: Should Peter just be an Opus Dei Catholic? He’s right-leaning. He doesn’t quite seem a Lutheran to me.

DOUTHAT: Peter should be a Catholic. I don’t know if he should join Opus Dei. I think it’s okay. I’m not in Opus Dei. I think it’s okay to be a normal Catholic.

COWEN: Are they not normal Catholics? I don’t even know.

DOUTHAT: I may have said this to you before, but one of the curious things about being a conservative Catholic who writes for The New York Times, is that people have an idea that you are the most intense Catholic who ever lived or something like that, which of course, ultimately, we should all be seeking — to be saints and so on.

But in practice, I try and go to mass on Sundays. I try to go to confession. I try and lead a serious Catholic life, but I’m not . . . I think it’s possible to have that be your destination rather than saying, “Okay, you need this more intense order, this more intense subculture,” or anything like that. I think it’s sufficient to say, “Peter should convert to Catholicism and attend mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation and go to confession.” I think that’s enough.

COWEN: Catholicism in Mexico is pretty friendly to this idea of intermediaries, but in the United States, it’s pretty suspicious. Does that make you uncomfortable being an American Catholic? There’re other ways you could be a Catholic, but you strike me, actually, as not that much of an American Catholic. I don’t doubt your sincerity in your state of view. The thing is, you seem not to fit.

DOUTHAT: The thing is, I’m interested in the intermediaries as a, I guess you could say, would-be analyst of what is actually going on in reality. I’m interested in what is going on in reality. I think these intermediary spiritual experiences are part of reality, and they’re interesting, and they have a place in any argument for why one should be religious.

In my everyday life, I’m not out there performing exorcisms. I don’t take ayahuasca. I think there’s a prurient interest in intermediary spiritual powers that is forbidden to Christians, certainly to Catholics. You’re not supposed to be trying to contact the spirits of the dead or doing divination or these kinds of things.

I feel like I’m comfortable enough. I think you could say that one, Mexican Catholicism is part of American Catholicism now, to some degree. But I think it’s okay to say Mexican Catholicism maybe captures the totality of existence more completely than suburban American Catholicism without necessarily wanting to spend all of your time in that zone, especially because that zone . . .

The Mexican example is actually a good example of where you would say that temptations come in because Mexico has a whole zone of quasi-Catholic, para-Catholic folk religion, where you’re attending mass, but you’re also making deals with Santa Muerte. You’ll talk to priests who work in that territory who will say that they feel like their parishioners are going to mass one moment and making deals with minor demons the next, and that’s not what you’re supposed to do at all.

COWEN: Does the ex cathedra doctrine make sense to you concerning the pope?

DOUTHAT: I would say I have more questions about the nature and limits of papal authority today than I did 10 or 15 years ago, before the age of Pope Francis. I think it makes sense that, if there is a God, and if the second person of the Trinity came to Earth to suffer and die for your sins and mine, and if there was a church established that was supposed to carry that revelation forward throughout history, that institution would be protected in some way from the most serious forms of error.

In that sense, yes, some version of infallibility makes sense to me. I think the parameters of what could and couldn’t be considered infallible are a little bit shaky at the moment.

COWEN: So, maybe the pope shouldn’t get to decide when he’s speaking ex cathedra.

DOUTHAT: The pope, yes. This is the thing. Again, the Francis era has raised all of these debates. Just as Protestants run into difficulty arguing about what the authority of scripture actually delivers, Catholics run into difficulty arguing about where the specific lines are of when and when not the pope is speaking infallibly.

I’d say when the pope defines a dogma of the church infallibly, like the dogma of the Immaculate Conception or something like that, I think that has a useful clarity. I think on questions of morality, yes, the historical record gets a little murkier.

On writing fantasy novels

COWEN: What have been the inspirations behind your fantasy novel? Online and free, The Falcon’s Children.

DOUTHAT: Yes, online, serialized on Substack. Free for now, though once I get through two-thirds of it, I think I need to paywall and see how many people are actually interested. [laughs]

COWEN: Hold the throngs back.

DOUTHAT: That’s right. Hold the throngs back. It’s a combination of things. First, I was a Tolkien and sub-Tolkien nerd in high school. One of the lines is that people either become a conservative by reading Atlas Shrugged first or by reading Lord of the Rings first. I was Lord of the Rings.

I always liked fantasy as a genre, just as a reader and something to play around in. I wrote a very bad fantasy novel in high school, and then I started another one in my 20s and abandoned it. Then, when I was ill with Lyme disease for a while, I guess it was four or five years ago, and I did this, I went back to that novel.

One of the things about, at least the kind of illness I had was that it was a very physicalized illness in which my consciousness felt somewhat imprisoned in my body. I was looking for things that my consciousness could do while feeling imprisoned, and trying to write fiction again seemed like one of them. I went back to it and took the stuff I had from my 20s and worked through it again.

Then I have various high-flown theories about why fantasy is an interesting genre that connect to many of the things we’ve been talking about here that fantasy occupies. It’s very interested in the transition from an enchanted world to a disenchanted world. From pre-modernity into modernity.

This is as true of George R. R. Martin’s novels as it is of Tolkien. This is the recurring question that fantasy is navigating. Has magic disappeared? Is magic coming back? Is it about to disappear? These kinds of things. I think that aspect of fantasy is timely for our psychedelic and UFO-haunted moment.

And finally, in terms of actually publishing it, obviously, my intention was to write it and sell the rights to HBO and retire from newspaper-column writing and provide for all of my many children that way. That has not happened, but I decided to put it out there in part . . . You have this — it’s you, right? You have the line about, you should be writing for the AI, right?

COWEN: Of course.

DOUTHAT: If so much of the future is going to be — maybe this isn’t how you’d put it — but so much of the future is going to be AI reading the internet and doing things with the internet, you want to put your work out there.

When you say things like that, I think to myself that that might be true of my columns. Maybe I’m writing my columns for the AI. But I have a different view with fiction and creativity, which is, well, I don’t fully believe that AI is going to be capable of human-level creative writing, but on the off chance that it is, I’d like to get my own writing out there before that moment arrives, right?

COWEN: I’m quite curious —

DOUTHAT: Well, it’s capable of some kind —

COWEN: At shorter lengths, at least.

DOUTHAT: Well, right. But is AI capable of finishing A Song of Ice and Fire to the satisfaction of George R.R. Martin’s fans? Not yet. If it will be, then at some future point, the world will be absolutely flooded with works of art that have no actual human consciousness behind them. I think works of art that have a human consciousness behind them are inherently better, no matter what our descendants might think about the subject. So, I thought since I have this novel written, I should put it into the world. Without an HBO serialization deal, that is what I’m doing.

COWEN: My readers wanted me to ask you, how’s your health going?

DOUTHAT: It’s much, much, much better than how it was when I was at my worst. You reach a certain point with recovery from a chronic illness where you’re always telling people you’re 90 percent or 92 percent without . . . it’s asymptotic to recovery. You’re always approaching 100 percent and never quite getting there, but I feel like I am still making progress towards full health. In practice, what tends to happen is that I feel about 97 percent well until I get some other illness, and then some of my old symptoms come back.

I slipped back. Unfortunately, we have a lot of illnesses that run through our house because we have a lot of kids. I slipped back a fair amount, which is to say, there’s still something in my system that my body has mostly suppressed, but that recurs. Generally, I’m obviously in a much better place than I was at my worst and also in a better place than I was when I finished the book about having Lyme disease.

COWEN: Last two questions. First, your father wrote a poem about you. It’s called “The Hold.” It’s about you as a kid. Do you like it?

DOUTHAT: I love all of my father’s poetry. My father has a new book of poetry coming out, in fact, in just a few months.

COWEN: Before the last question, just to again reiterate: the new Ross Douthat book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Excellent, great, wonderful book. I very much enjoyed reading it. And once I could, I read it right away.

Last question — what will you do next?

DOUTHAT: [laughs] In part, it probably depends on internal questions at The Times and playing around with different day-job possibilities. I think one interesting question raised by the age of the internet is not just whether we’re transitioning to a future where we’re just writing for the AIs, but also the shift from the written word back to oral culture in different ways. We have a podcast at the Times. I prefer the written word to oral culture. I prefer reading greatly to listening to podcasts. I read transcripts of your podcasts —

COWEN: So do I.

DOUTHAT: — rather than listening to them. I’m trying to accept the reality that ours is going to be a more oral culture.

I’m doing my substack of the fantasy novel. I’m reading the chapters. I’m not just publishing them. I’m trying to think about that zone. If I acquired a really large number of readers for the fantasy novel, I would just go ahead and straightforwardly write the sequel.

I think that there’s also a — it might not be a book, but a project to be written that’s a bit different from the telian [from telos], Antichrist view of our future. It’s a bit more optimistic but treats the current moment as a kind of bottleneck in a way.

As you know, I’m somewhat obsessed with demographic decline and collapsing birth rates, and so on. I think it’s interesting to think about 21st-century culture — internet culture in particular — as a culture that’s going to kill off a lot of not just long-standing institutions; maybe entire countries may simply disappear. But other forms and other forces are going to come through the bottleneck and create whatever world exists on the far side. That’s an interesting question too.

I’m also looking forward to having — in the wake of this book — some more straightforward arguments about why my friends should practice a religion.

COWEN: Ross, thank you very much.

DOUTHAT: Thank you, Tyler. It was a pleasure, as always. I’ll work on the video evidence.

COWEN: [laughs]

Photo Credit: Abigail Douthat ©