


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.
Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.
Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.
But do I have a favorite argument within this larger run of converging claims? I was thinking about this while reading the effort by the prolific and precocious (he’s apparently still an undergraduate) essayist who writes under the name Bentham’s Bulldog to rank or grade a long list of arguments for God’s existence.