Over the past few weeks, I’ve been recording conversations about my new book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” and one of the striking things — not unexpected, but still interesting — is how different people react to different arguments for being religious or believing in God.
You’ll get one very smart interlocutor for whom it seems perfectly reasonable to consider religious possibilities in light of the evidence for order and design at the deepest level of the universe, but who just can’t swallow the idea that there might be supernatural realities — visions, encounters, literal miracles — that inherently evade the capacities of modern science to measure and dissect. Then you’ll get another person for whom it’s the reverse, for whom the primary case for religion is experiential, while attempts to discover God in, say, the cosmological constant leave them cold.
My own view is more promiscuous: I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.
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