Why Charles Murray Is Taking Religion Seriously

Taking Religion Seriously is Charles Murray's most recent book. Although the world-famous political scientist has published books outside of his usual genre such as his eminently enjoyable 2014 book The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead, his latest work represents something quite unique. As he acknowledges early on, like many outwardly successful people living in the modern West, he lived most of his life not as an explicit atheist or even as an agnostic but as someone who felt little need even to pause to consider religion. As he writes, "I had distracted myself with Western modernity. I am using Western modernity as shorthand for all the ways in which life in the last hundred years has shielded many of us from the agonizing losses, pains, and sorrows that were part of human life since the dawn of humankind."

It was through gradually beginning to attend Quaker meetings with his wife, Catherine, that Murray began to think to himself: Perhaps these religiously minded people have something valuable to teach. From there, Murray began an intensive reading regimen engaging with authors both supportive and critical of his newfound appreciation for, first, theism and, later, Christianity. Taking Religion Seriously is hardly polemical and instead aims to chronicle how he, a skeptically minded modern person, has been engaging with these questions. Murray has taken a particular interest in both near-death experiences and terminal lucidity, the latter of which prompted a back-and-forth with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker.

In this conversation with Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince, Murray discusses the problem of evil; how certain critics of religion have arguably constructed a false dichotomy between religion and science; the Big Bang as evidence of creation; and the rediscovery of religion arguably underway in many parts of the West today.

To introduce our readers to your gradual journey into, as the title says, Taking Religion Seriously, perhaps you could begin by discussing your wife's Quaker faith and how you began gradually attending the Quaker meetings with her little by little. I remember at one point you cite a journal entry in 1993, where you write, "To meeting, now and forever."

Yes—though I did it at that time not because I was a believer in much of anything, except one thing, which is that I thought it was really good for children to grow up in a religious tradition. And we had at that time two small children. I had just finished the draft of The Bell Curve. And so, I no longer had the excuse to stay home, and I started going.

To go back to the beginning, though, it all started with Catherine, my wife, in 1985. Catherine is like me: agnostic and fell away from our Protestant upbringing when we went to college. And as she put it, "We learned that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore."

That was the zeitgeist at most universities. It certainly was where I was, which was Harvard. After she had Anna, our first child, she came to me a couple of months later and said, "I love Anna far more than evolution requires."

What she was saying was that, yes, I know women had better love their kids otherwise they aren't going to pass on their genes, and evolution works that way. She felt she was the conduit for some larger love. And it pointed vaguely toward God. And that got her started.

She ended up with Quakerism for the very simple reason that she could not go to a standard Protestant congregation and recite the Apostles' Creed with them in good conscience because she didn't believe that. And you don't have to believe that with Quakers. Technically, you don't have to believe in God to be a Quaker, but most do.

Here's what happened: I no longer had the excuse of saying to myself that people with deep religious insights are kidding themselves, which is kind of what I thought. Catherine is brilliant, intellectually. She doesn't delude herself. She is very self-aware. And I had to accept, after a couple of years, that she was getting spiritual nurturing and nourishment that I envied. I wanted to participate, and I wanted to follow along. It wasn't just a few years. We're talking about eight or nine years before I came to that point.

But I can't do it because, in my view, spiritual perception is a trait—in the same sense that the ability to enter into great music fully is a trait. Some people can do it; some people can't. I am convinced some people have access to spiritual insight that others don't have, and I am somewhere in the very low end of that trait.

I started taking religion seriously by doing a lot of reading, but I was very empirical. I was moved and nudged toward belief not by leaps of faith but by encountering empirical information, which made me rethink my positions.

There were a lot of things I found interesting in your book, but one was when you recount coming home from college and confidently declaring to your father that you no longer believe in these [religious] things. Imagine your surprise when he says, "Well, I don't either, but I think it's good for life, for discipline." It's like what you were saying about the idea of raising a child in a religion—that it promotes good habits.

It really goes to show that your parents can surprise you because I had never suspected that in all the time I had known my dad. I buy into that as a perfectly valid reason for engaging in a religious tradition, and I am a firm believer in the importance of religion to a free society. I agree with the Founders 100% on that. The Founders were unanimous—including Thomas Jefferson, who of course was barely religious. He was a Deist. But Jefferson too went to church when he was President. And he said that you cannot have a free society unless people govern themselves, literally, individually. And religion is an indispensable force.

But that wasn't what I was after. What I was after was truth values of religion and not its social utility.

I'm so glad you mentioned that because, turning to the truth values, you discuss the Big Bang, which is an explanation for the beginning of the universe that many put forward as an alternative to creation. But you interestingly write, "I was struck by the unlikelihood of twentieth century science producing a creation story so close to the poetic description of Genesis."

"Let there be light."

The world was without form and [in] darkness. Well, the universe was without form, and it was darkness. It was a singularity. This is not a controversial religious statement. That's the consensus among physicists. And, all at once, in a few trillionths of a second, you're looking at temperatures of trillions of degrees and an incredible burst of energy that creates space from nothing.

Now, I understand quantum mechanics can "explain" that or so some people argue, and there are books written to that effect. To me, the more plausible argument is that if you're truly talking about a singularity, there are no forces to reckon with, quantum or otherwise. The singularity—by definition—has no dimensions. And that points to me to something created this.

I started out going no further than that.

I am fully aware of the infinite regress. Well, if something created that, what created that something? Turtles all the way down, if you know the joke. And, I said, "Never mind that." The universe did not come into being all by itself. There had to be an unmoved mover. So that was sort of the first tiny step off dead center.

One of the reasons I wanted to read this book and talk to you about it is because that mirrored my own experience. I remember being a freshman at Duke and people coming up to me, especially very religiously inclined people, and saying, "Do you accept all this?" And I was willing—at the time— to say kind of what you said: "I think there was some sort of catalyst that started this." But I'm very interested—and I hope you can talk more about it—how you make that journey from this logical position of an unmoved mover, something from nothing, to, by the later chapters of your book, arguing in favor of some of the historical veracity of the Gospels and the proximity of their writing to the life of Jesus.

That's a big stretch!

I think a lot of people are very willing to come with you to this point, especially now, in this era of some religious reawakening. They're willing to say, "Okay, I can buy a creator causing the Big Bang, but I don't know about this whole Gospels thing."

Well, it was kind of a series of body blows to my confidence that there could be no such thing as a personal God. The first body blow was the physics of the Big Bang. Condensing a complicated story into a few sentences: There is a consensus among physicists that the Big Bang was fine-tuned to create a universe of stars and galaxies that, in turn, could lead to the creation of life, whereas the much more probable outcomes were a universe of massive black holes or a universe of radiation and no mass at all.

There had to be a lot of settings in the physics of the Big Bang to create this universe. And then there are the odds against us having this universe; Roger Penrose, the Nobel laureate in physics, not religious himself, calculated them as trillions to one.

Physicists then came up with the multiverse: that there are actually millions of universes. I don't find that very parsimonious. I don't find that very plausible. Neither do I find one in a trillion's chance plausible. I think the more parsimonious—the more plausible conclusion—is that there was an intentionality to the universe.

Then, the second thing I had to come to grips with was the evidence that consciousness does not reside exclusively in the brain. There are the near-death experiences, a subset of which I think are very strong evidence for consciousness after you're clinically dead.

There is the terminal lucidity literature about people with advanced dementia, whose networks have been destroyed for conscious thought, suddenly becoming not only conscious but with memories and recognition and their old personality characteristics for a couple of hours just before they die.

So these things make you say, if consciousness can exist independently of the brain, that is a body blow to strict materialism. I was softened up when it came to a lot of the assumptions that I, as a good child of the Enlightenment, always thought were inarguable. They are arguable. And then I hit C.S. Lewis.

That was my next question actually.

Before I do that, I just want to briefly mention that one thing I appreciated about your book is that you set the tone early on that it wasn't going to be a polemic. You were going to talk about your journey, and readers could borrow what's useful from it. And then, of course, there are the reading lists you recommend. For instance, on near-death experience, you had books both pro and con your position.

Yes.

You've engaged also pretty heavily with some of the critical perspectives of the views you've come to adopt.

Yes. And I also say explicitly early on—and people like me should take this on board—if you're going to start looking at these issues, you just got to accept you're an amateur.

I am not a physicist. I am not a neuroscientist. I am not a biblical scholar, so I'm in the position of having to do my homework as best I can and make judgments as best I can. But I certainly am in no position to pontificate to anyone about "I figured it out, and now you can follow along." No. I'm really saying to readers: This stuff is fascinating. It's important also for the longer-term goals I had, but I'm talking about intellectually challenging, fascinating stuff.

And that is just as true of Christianity, as it is of consciousness and cosmology. There is literature out there that became dominant in a lot of divinity schools—and still is—which says that you can't trust the New Testament at all. It suggests that the Gospels were never actually written; they were accumulations of traditions across the Roman Empire and across time; and we have no idea whether they bear any relationship to anything that Jesus of Nazareth said.

I read into that literature, and then I started reading into the defense of the traditional interpretation. And standing aside from that, the revisionists sort of sound to me like postmodernist literary critics, which is they look for convoluted explanations for things that have much simpler interpretations. If you're talking about the evidence, the traditional interpretation of how the Gospels came about, as well as their reliability, is pretty darn impressive. Once you say that to yourself, you have to start re-evaluating lots of things.

You mentioned C.S. Lewis, and I think he and Chesterton are two major entry points for people who are maybe by nature empirically minded or skeptical. You bring up perhaps one of the most important lines in C.S. Lewis—one that I brought up to an Episcopalian preacher one time when he was floating this very common argument that you can look at Jesus as a nice guy or a role model but not the son of God. And Lewis famously writes:

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Yeah.

This is a very powerful statement by C.S. Lewis.

Yes, it is. And first, for those who have not read him—and my target audience is people like me, who haven't read him and never engaged with religion seriously because they didn't think they had to—if you want to have an example of a smart guy who still believes that stuff, you cannot read C.S. Lewis without recognizing you're in the presence of a really smart guy. When you think that you have found a hole in his argument, his next paragraph will begin, "Perhaps you're thinking that..." and then he [anticipates your criticism].

So, he's rewarding in that light but also in provoking you to try to refute him. So, the three alternatives he gives you—Liar, Lunatic, or the Son of God—you say to yourself, "Well, but can we be sure that Jesus really did claim that kind of relationship, or was that tacked on?" And if you're going to argue with Lewis, that's what drives you to reach back to the literature on the trustworthiness of the Bible. After you've gone through those struggles, you kind of end up more in Lewis's camp than you thought you were going to at the beginning.

Related to C.S. Lewis, there is one point I had hoped you would address in the book, but maybe I can ask you now. C.S. Lewis—like a lot of people who accept the idea of a creator and then say, "Okay, I think I'm getting on board with Christianity"—one of the main things that tends to trip them up is the problem of evil. C.S. Lewis talks about it in his journal shortly after the death of his wife (published as A Grief Observed), and he has his book The Problem of Pain. I just wonder to what extent is the problem of evil a challenge to the level of Christianity that you've so far adopted? Why would God or Jesus allow the hurricane to go through Jamaica a few weeks ago or the countless tragedies we all face?

I realize that for lots and lots of people, including some of my friends, this is one of the major barriers. It's never bothered me. And I guess the reason is partly my libertarian tendencies, whereby I say a God that permitted no evil has ripped human beings of their agency.

What does it mean to be a human being if you are living in a world in which—in a way—you aren't permitted to screw up, in the sense of being evil? I've just never been able to see how there could be a world in which a God of the New Testament existed but without any evil. I respect other people who found that a barrier; I never did.

Yes, it's like the right to be unhappy that we know from Huxley, where John the Savage says, "This is not Othello’s world." "But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

Or you can go with Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine," which, by the way, we are headed toward creating. This is a machine whereby you can live another life that's indistinguishable to your senses from the one you actually have. And the question is: Would you choose to plug yourself into the Experience Machine? And the answer is: No! I have my life with all of its flaws.

So I think we're on the same page there.

Another key point that you make is the danger in anthropomorphizing God. We think of God of the Sistine Chapel with the long beard and reaching out to Adam. But you have this interesting thought experiment where you said that God is as incomprehensible to you as you are to your dog. How do we guard against this long-standing impulse to think of God as this old man in the sky?

And also guard against dismissing religion on the assumption that everybody else believes in a wise old grandpa in the sky.

First, if you take what's a very common theological belief—that God exists outside of both space and time—and exists outside of time is hard to get your head around right there—but that is a good entry point to reminding yourself how unknowable He is.

A lot of the reasons for saying, "God couldn't do this" or "God couldn't do that" is based on trying to impose upon this thing we call God human limitations. Anthropomorphizing God inevitably does that, and it sets up what I think of as the straw man problem among non-believers when they critique religion. They don't take the strongest possible case and go up against that. They take the caricatures of religion, and they scoff at those.

As somebody who has been engaged in a variety of debates over my career in which I am angry at people making straw men in discussing my position...I'm anthropomorphizing God here, but God should be really pissed off too that so many people refuse to comprehend the real unknowability of any God worthy of the name.

Back briefly to the reading list you provide, the one book that I think I'm next going to pick up is Rodney Stark's For the Glory of God. For readers who aren't yet familiar with it, could you talk about why this book is so interesting? This idea of science emerging from Europe and a false dichotomy between religion and science.

If you are a person—and there are a whole lot of college and graduate educated people who see the history of Europe as, you had the Renaissance, they drew beautiful pictures, and then you had this church that was kind of getting in the way of science, especially Galileo. And, finally, the Enlightenment comes around and saves the day and enthrones logic and evidence and empiricism in place of superstition.

Rodney Stark, who at the time he wrote the book was an agnostic, is making a historical argument—detailed, thoroughly documented because he knows that he's going to get a lot of pushback—saying: The Roman Catholic Church in some ways underwrote and sponsored the scientific revolution. And he develops that theme. He goes through each of the specific examples, Galileo among them, and the ways in which they have been systematically misrepresented by people who began in the early part of the Enlightenment but are represented today by people like Carl Sagan and [Richard] Dawkins, who have misrepresented the role of the church, which was absolutely crucial in the sciences.

I would add: I think the role of the Church in creating great literature and great music and great art is also profound. And, in evidence of that, I would suggest you compare what passes for high culture in literature, visual arts, and music in the twentieth century with what passed for high culture in the eighteenth and seventeenth and sixteenth centuries. The twentieth century, I think, was pathetic in its production of great art and literature and music. And I ascribe a lot of that to the secularization of the arts. That once you take away the concepts of the True and the Beautiful and the Good, which are absolutely central to Christianity, what artists were left with was their own preferences and their own neuroses. And they do not produce the material for great art.

I'm so glad you mentioned that because I sought to single out a few eminently quotable or memorable passages from your book, and that was another one: this idea of the artist becoming this individual unmoored from everything else. I think you said Beethoven was in fact a genius, but then there were a bunch of other people who thought they were geniuses but were anything but. The uncoupling of art from a craftsman.

Exactly. Beethoven set the model of the rebellious artist who was crotchety and disdainful of his audience and all the rest of that. And it's one of my favorite lines in the book too that...who acted as if he were God's gift to mankind. Well, he was. But these other guys—they were crotchety and disdainful of their audiences and rebellious, but they were not Beethoven.

Now we have someone sort of scream-singing into an open mic night who thinks he's Beethoven.

Yeah.

Last question I wanted to ask you: I never like to force one to put his work into too much of a context as opposed to evaluating it for itself, but I'm wondering how you see your book in this sort of genre or perhaps shift toward a rediscovery of Christianity or religion more broadly. I think of that line from Russell Kirk:

"In a revolutionary epoch, sometimes men taste every novelty, sicken of them all, and return to ancient principles so long disused that they seem refreshingly hearty when they are rediscovered."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently did a piece that she's embracing Christianity. Even Richard Dawkins gave an interview not long ago in which he said though he doesn't accept Christianity as a theological proposition, he wants to live in a Christian society. I saw some recent polling indicating an incremental reawakening among young people toward Christianity.

Is this shift real?

Actually, I will brag a little bit and say that I kind of called this in the early 2000s in a book called Human Accomplishment. And the analogy I used was this: that in a way, the twentieth century was the adolescence of mankind—at least of intellectuals. The Enlightenment produced a lot of body blows to traditional religion, especially Darwin and Freud. And, like adolescents, we in the twentieth century decided that our parents were wrong about everything.

In the twenty-first century, I saw a possibility that we were going to grow out of adolescence. And the example I used was Johann Sebastian Bach. When I said, you look back at what the great artists of the past accomplished and the great scientists of the past accomplished—almost all of them were devout Christians. And you have to say, "Well, all of these brilliant people who created absolutely fabulous art were deluded when it came to the big questions?"

I'm saying Johann Sebastian Bach does not have to justify his view of the universe and his place in it. His music does that. It's up to us to take seriously what we may have cut ourselves off from. I see myself as emblematic of trying to grow out of adolescence: saying our parents were actually right about some things and, [in the process], restoring our access to a very, very rich intellectual tradition of the human condition and the universe and our place in it that I think the children of the Enlightenment cut themselves off from.

In your conclusion, you talked about that even in your lifespan alone there has been a 180 on so many values that used to be just taken as a given.

Yes—and my problem with secular humanism, to introduce a very big topic into the end of the conversation, is I'm not sure it has a moral bottom. That's not to say a lot of secular humanists aren't wonderful people, are virtuous, and behave just great. I have a great deal of doubt about the long-term vitality and stability of secular humanism.

Thank you so much for talking with me.

Great. I enjoyed it.