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The largest single faith group is Catholics, who make up about 22 percent of the population. Their numbers have held steady, mostly because an influx of immigrants

more than one-third of those ages 18 to 22 are religiously unaffiliated.

The “Nones,” as they are called, now make up the nation’s second-largest religious grouping

“The significant majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to be left-leaning, tend to support the Democratic Party, support gay marriage and environmental causes,”

it is not clear that Americans are necessarily moving toward the European model. The Pew report found that even among Americans who claimed no religion, few qualified as purely secular. Two-thirds say they still believe in God, and one-fifth say they pray every day. Only 12 percent of the religiously unaffiliated group said they were atheists and 17 percent agnostic.

what the Greeks saw as experiences of divine actions in their lives. ”The greatest evidence for the existence of gods is that piety works . . . the converse is that impiety leads to disaster,

There were also rituals, associated with the many cults of specific gods, that for some worshippers “created a sense of contact with the divine. One knows that the gods exist because one feels their presence during the drama of the mysteries or the elation of the choral dance.

as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned. 

how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do?  What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life?

shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?

We may well think that our world contains little or no evidence of the supernatural.  But that is no reason to think the same was true of the Greek world.

I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded.  There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks.  We have no reason to make this assumption.

My own view of these things is that we simply do not know enough to judge the ultimate truth of the claims of theology. (I’m with Hamlet, who remarked to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) Perhaps we will one day; perhaps not. Meanwhile, given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.

In his view that faith was “not a possession but a hope,” Hamilton was tapping into an ancient tradition. As the author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews wrote, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”—in this sense, religious faith is way of interpreting experience that allows for the possibility of the redemptive. Faith in this sense assumes that scripture and tradition are the works of human hands and hearts, efforts undertaken to explain the seemingly inexplicable. Faith in this sense is inextricably tied to doubt; it is an attempt, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to squint and struggle to “see through a glass darkly,” as Paul wrote in Corinthians. Faith without such doubt has never been part of the Christian tradition; it is telling, I think, that one of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence—he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers.

“What he’s shown is that you do learn a great deal more by looking at the behavior that underlies the aggregates,”

Professor Deaton said he hoped “carefulness in measurement” would be his legacy. He said his mentor, Richard Stone, a Cambridge professor who won the Nobel in economics in 1984, had ingrained in him the importance of good data. “I’ve always wanted to be like him,” Professor Deaton said. “I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.”

His work also is marked by an insistence that theories must explain these more complicated sets of facts. “A good theoretical account must explain all of the evidence that we see,” Professor Deaton wrote in a 2011 essay on his life in economics. “If it doesn’t work everywhere, we have no idea what we are talking about, and all is chaos.”

“There’s a fair amount of policy agnosticism that comes from this — it emphasizes more the heterogeneity of outcomes,” Professor Rodrik said of Professor Deaton. “He’s somebody with quite a sharp tongue, and he’s often had as his target people who make very strong statements about this policy or that policy.”

Proponents of foreign aid programs are a frequent target. Professor Deaton has argued that such investments often undermine local governance and the development of institutions necessary to sustain development.

“Life is better now than at almost any time in history,” he wrote in the opening lines of his 2013 book “The Great Escape,” a popular account of his work. “More people are richer and fewer people live in dire poverty. Lives are longer and parents no longer routinely watch a quarter of their children die.”

He counts climate change and increased economic inequality in developed nations as threats to this progress.

He has noted in other work that inequality occurs naturally because of divergent luck, but he has said that the growing gaps in recent years pose a new economic and political challenge.

“I think inequality has gone past the point where it’s helping us all get rich, and it’s really becoming a serious threat,” he said

Indeed, his writing often exhibits a tension between the contemporary, culturally engaged, tolerant intellectual and the moral rectitudinarian. Even his moralizing has two sides: that of the peace-loving Catholic, nourished by the mysterium tremendum of the Mass, and that of the crusader, certain that abortion is murder and masturbation is a vice.

in Douthat’s cultural criticism, one senses a preference for lost communities—the Old West, prewar England, isolated villages—but never a heavy-handed, New Criterion-style disgust for mass culture.

“I would say he differs from mainstream American conservatism in not having a ‘la-di-da’ attitude toward the continued existence of serious social problems in the United States,” liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias said in an email.

In the end, he admits the intellectual life of the GOP is pretty bleak. “We haven’t seen very many Republican politicians who are interested in moving beyond slogans.”

It is this faith in people that trumps his sense of sin just when we need it most—to call to account a dissembler like Palin or a warmonger like Cheney. In fact, Douthat can be almost Unitarian in his agnosticism. Sometimes that’s a virtue: He quit blogging for a time after concluding he was unqualified to comment on the Iraq War.