A ‘Christian Atheist’ joins Ross Douthat.

nytimes.com/2026/04/02/opinion/christian-atheist-debate-religion.html

Douthat is a conservative Christian opinion writer for the NYT. His interlocutor in this discussion or debate is Bart Ehrman, professor emeritus of the New Testament. Ehrman is also an agnostic/atheist.

I'd like to highlight the following exchange because I think it reveals a profound epistemological error at the root of much religious belief:

Douthat: Where does the fact that the Gospels contain stories of miracles — including, most notably, the Resurrection, also plenty of secondary miracles, healings and so on — where does that fit into the reasons for historical skepticism? Is it itself just an automatic reason for skepticism that you should discount historical narratives that claim that someone walked on water? Ehrman: I think saying “historical skepticism” is a tautology. History is skeptical. It’s not that you’re doing historical skepticism — you’re doing history.

Douthat reveals perhaps more than he intended about his understanding of historiography or historical method, and by extension, or so I would assume, science and intellectual inquiry in general.

He frequently attaches the word 'skeptical' to the work of Ehrman and other biblical scholars who are nonbelievers, apparently in the belief that there are two underlying approaches to the study of history. Douthat implicitly assumes there's some analog dial that controls the amplitude of doubt you apply to questions of historical truth. Turn the dial down low and it allows confident belief about biblical texts. Turn it up high, or too high in Douthat's estimation, and you end up quarantining texts from being considered true.

But, as Ehrman points out, this view of historical method is false. It's the job of the historian to operate on systematic skepticism, to continually apply doubt in order to preclude premature conclusions, and allow room for evidence-based revision. It means that if evidence doesn't exist for a particular claim it's therefore irrational to simply accept something as true anyway for ideological or other motivated purposes. This doesn't mean that confident or even true conclusions can't be derived from historical study. But it does mean that since the historical record can be incomplete that one's conclusions must exist on a gradient of confidence and probability. So called "skeptical history" is the only method that's reliable. And the fact that this isn't obvious to Douthat is, I'd suggest, a wide window on how the will to believe distorts truth and understanding.