Talking about religion can feel outdated, close-minded, or just irrelevant. Yet for thousands of years, humans have been a religious species looking beyond ourselves in search of meaning. So should religion still matter today? And is it simply a coping story, or could it point to something real?
In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Ross Douthat, a New York Times opinion columnist and author of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. He’s in dialogue with Damon Linker, a lecturer in political science at Penn and creator of the Notes from the Middleground Substack. In this conversation moderated by Penn Law professor Karen Tani, they share their own Christian and agnostic worldviews and explore their thoughts on truth, religious experience, and committing to a religion in a pluralistic society.
This forum was held at the University of Pennsylvania in November 2025. Thank you to the student planning team for making this event possible.
I'm a Christian because I think the biblical narrative stands out among religious origin stories for being simultaneously more incredible and more credible, an unusual combination of strong supernaturalism with strong historical credibility.
If there is a sin, it is indifference to these questions. Don't not care. It matters whether you think there's a God, and if there is, what's the right way to live in orientation to that God. And although I, at this moment in my life, am skeptical enough to be putting my chips on "probably not," I remain open to being wrong and changing my mind.
I think religious experience is an important and enduring feature of human existence. And it's religious experience that gives us the strongest reason to think, not just that there's some architect, but that the architect is actually interested in some kind of relationship with us.
We live in a universe that looks like it was designed from above but can be mysteriously understood by us, creatures from below. And there are all of these persistent "reachings in," as if someone from above is trying to speak to us. That looks like the universe described by religion and not the universe described by Richard Dawkins.
Once you've decided what's true, then you have to decide how you want to live in light of that truth.
If you conceive of the world as a system, created and set in motion by some kind of conscious intentionality, I don't think there is any conflict between saying, on the one hand, this consciousness created a consistent set of rules that we can understand scientifically, but at the same time, the author of the story has the capacity to reach in and make his presence felt. He is the author of the laws and, therefore, he can decide the exceptions.
It is very likely that some being like the God that is described by many world religions actually exists. This has strong implications for the choices that you make in your life. It does not immediately impel you into one specific religious tradition or one specific worldview, but it provides a strong reason to think that you were created for a reason and will one day be held to account for the things that you do in this created, creaturely existence.
One of my assumptions is that God is not messing with us. He's not creating a game that's impossible to play where the one true revelation is hidden in a small monastic community somewhere in Western Mongolia, and if you don't get there, you're just out of luck. That's not the God that I hope in and believe in.
