Two Book Reviews: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious & Witness to Belief: Conversations on Faith and Meaning

Issue 140 Book Review

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Two Book Reviews:

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2025), and Witness to Belief: Conversations on Faith and Meaning by Russell J. Levenson, Jr. (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2025)

Reviewed by Fisher Humphreys

Christianity, like other religions, provides its adherents with a community, a set of worship practices, a moral code and a set of beliefs. Some Christians today think the beliefs are superfluous and that what matters are the community, its moral values and its worship of God. They call us to live the Christian life but not concern ourselves with believing the Christian beliefs. The authors of these books don’t see it that way. They think that beliefs are important. I agree.

Christian beliefs may be said to fall into two broad categories. Some are this-worldly. They are interpretations of the world around us. An example is the belief that all persons have been created in the image of God. Other Christian beliefs are supernatural or other-worldly. The principal example is the belief that there is a God who transcends this world and is the Creator of this world. The primary other-worldly Christian belief is belief in God. That is the subject of these books.

When Christianity was born, the questions that were asked about its other-worldly beliefs concerned their content. Is there one God or are there many gods? Did God create the world out of nothing or simply shape pre-existing material into a world? Is God silent, or does God communicate with human beings? Is God friendly to human beings? Those questions are still with us.

But modernity has added a new question: Is there a God at all, or is God a projection we humans make in order to help societies hold together or to help individuals cope with the emotional challenges of life, or perhaps a personification of our highest values?

The authors of these two books set out to help readers answer this question. They do so in two entirely different ways. Douthat does it by an extended argument for belief in God. Levenson does it by interviewing a dozen widely-known contemporary Christians about their belief in God.

Douthat, who is a traditional Roman Catholic and a columnist for the New York Times, sets out to prove that everyone should believe in the supernatural. His argument includes four components. The first is that the universe as a whole is “structured, ordered, seemingly artistically created and mathematically designed.” He shows how modern science has reenforced rather than undermined this understanding of the universe. He says that while it’s true that science brackets out the supernatural in its quest to acquire a fuller understanding of how the universe operates, that doesn’t mean science has shown that the supernatural doesn’t exist.

Human Consciousness

Third, modern people continue to experience the world as enchanted. They have visions, see ghosts, sense the numinous in nature, try to make contact with deceased friends, think they have been healed by prayer, report strange experiences on the threshold of death, and have mystical experiences of God, all at about the same rate as people in the past. Douthat urges his readers to take these things seriously. It isn’t the universe that is concealing God, he says. It’s “Official Knowledge” that is doing that, and it’s doing it because it has adopted the false assumption that science has shown that God doesn’t exist.

The fourth component of Douthat’s argument is that people ought to make a decision about God and act on their decision. Here Douthat sounds like an evangelist giving an invitation: “Life is short and death is certain, and what account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along? That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?”

Douthat’s argument is formidable and his book is well-written. I think there is a place for argument here (not everyone agrees), so I have added his book in the list of books I can recommend to unbelievers who are searching for sources to help them believe. Other books on that list are The Reality of God by Louis Cassels, The Untamed God by George W. Cornell, On Being a Christian by Hans Küng, and of course Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

Douthat’s book is structured as an argument, and stories of people who believe are scattered throughout it. Levenson’s book is the inverse of that: It is structured as a witness given by people who believe, and some of them give arguments for why they believe.

Fisher Humphreys is Professor of Divinity, Emeritus, of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.