BONUS: Why Skeptics are Taking Religion Seriously (with Charles Murray)

Episode Transcript

Sean McDowell: [upbeat music] Think Biblically listeners, welcome to a special bonus episode. We're taking this month off from the weekly cultural update, and I was joined on YouTube by Charles Murray, who's a New York Times bestselling author, and he's trained at MIT, trained at Harvard. Very influential writer over the past few decades, and he released a book called Taking Religion Seriously. And it's kind of this lifelong journey of somebody who is a materialist to somebody who describes himself as being close to a traditional Christian. So we walk through his journey, we walk through the evidences that convinced him, where he's at spiritually now. And can I just tell you, it was one of the most interesting conversations. When we were done off the air, he said, "Thanks for asking those questions. I've never been asked that before, and never really shared this anywhere else." So for those of you who enjoy the Think Biblically podcast, I think you're gonna really find this conversation fascinating, 'cause it's right in line with the heart of what we're doing here. So enjoy this conversation with Charles Murray. Our guest today is Charles Murray, author of the new book, Taking Religion Seriously. Charles, thanks so much for coming on.

Charles Murray: It's my pleasure.

Sean McDowell: Well, let's just start right with the title of your book. What do you even mean by taking religion seriously?

Charles Murray: Because I didn't take it seriously for a long time.

Sean McDowell: Mm-hmm.

Charles Murray: And by taking it seriously, I mean, and I'm speaking to unbelievers. As I say in the introduction, there are tens of millions of people like me, who are well-educated, we're professionally successful, and religion just has not been an important part of our life. And a lot of us have sort of assumed from the time we were in college that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. In my case, I went from Newton, Iowa, where I was raised a Presbyterian, my family would go to church every week and I'd go with them, but I was not deeply committed. And, I get to Harvard, and I like to fit in and I learned that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore, and I bought into that just the same way I think an awful lot of other people did. And we've never really given it much thought. And I'm saying to them, "Look, I'm not trying to proselytize, not trying to get you to do anything in particular except realize you've gotta look at this stuff. There's a lot of material here you need to confront."

Sean McDowell: Tell me a little bit more about that socialization process. You talked about having a faith you didn't take seriously, but maybe believed in God on some level. Were people trying to talk you out of your faith? Like, how did you come to the point that you were a materialist or close to being a materialist?

Charles Murray: That's the interesting thing, that nobody worked hard to convert me. I took no courses on Thomas Aquinas' mistakes, okay? [laughs]

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: And and in fact, the, basically the subject of religion just never came up, and if it did, it was usually of dismissively or sometimes the subject of humor. I didn't have any friends- ... Who were noticeably religious. It was just in the air, the zeitgeist, and I bought into that.

Sean McDowell: This is really important for people to hear, 'cause it's not always this aggressive atheist, agnostic professor. It's just kind of subtle dismissal of religion that if you wanna fit in, you just don't believe. And so a lot of it, arguably the way you describe it, happened more under the surface than it did above the surface. So, or go ahead. Were you gonna jump in?

Charles Murray: Well, I just wanted to point out two things also. You go to a college like that, and you have a few things that militate against religious belief. One of them of course is the argument, look, we are human beings who are more advanced animals than others. We've all reached this through the same process of evolution, and whereas we have consciousness and other animals don't, there's no reason to think that there's anything that goes on after the brain stops functioning. And another thing is, you learn about a universe that has a billion galaxies, not a billion stars, but a billion galaxies. And, tens of millions of light-years across, and the whole idea of a personal god just says, of course not, that is, that's not in the realm of possibility.

Sean McDowell: So tell me a little about what you mean by happy agnostic. And I love this because I just interviewed somebody who described himself as a little bit more of an aggressive atheist, and it seems to me you're not on some spiritual journey trying to disprove religion.

Charles Murray: No.

Sean McDowell: You're just kinda living your life, and yet these questions emerge. So talk a little about why you describe yourself as a happy agnostic and what that meant.

Charles Murray: Well, it was a particular period of my life. I can pinpoint, 1985. July 1985, my wife and I had been married for two years, she's my soulmate, I've never been happier, and we just have a new daughter. And, I just had a successful book, an unexpectedly successful book at the opening of my public career, and well, life was complete. [laughs] And it was at that point, a couple of months after the birth of our daughter, Anna, that my wife came to me and was talking about the love that she felt for Anna. And she said, "I love her far more than evolution requires."

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: Which is a great, it's a great line. [laughs]

Sean McDowell: It is, yeah.

Charles Murray: And, in in several ways. One is, I'm Harvard and MIT, she's Oxford and Yale, okay?

Sean McDowell: Wow.

Charles Murray: This is the way you put it, [laughs] love her more than evolution requires. And what she was saying was-... That something else was going on, and she felt that she was a conduit for some larger love. And you know, an awful lot of people in my position dismiss openly spiritual believers because we say, "Well, they're kidding themselves. They're deluding themselves. Maybe they aren't that smart." I could say none of those things about my wife. [laughs]

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: And so I did not have the option of dismissing her-

Sean McDowell: Yeah

Charles Murray: ... Experience. And you were quite correct the way you described me. I was never a militant atheist. In fact, I use the word agnostic advisedly because I go along with the proposition, that of all the religious positions, simple atheism is the least plausible. So I was, I was always open to,

Charles Murray: there's something, there's a mystery about the universe. That was always out there. But that was 1985 that my wife, she migrated to Quakerism, and whereas a lot of Quakers are socially active and not all that spiritual, she's a spiritually active, Quaker. And I watched her for 10 years, moving along her discoveries. The way she put it is that it was like being in a room with a light on a rheostat- ... And as time went on, the light got brighter and brighter in terms of her own developing faith. And finally in the, by the mid-1990s, I was getting moved away from my simple

Charles Murray: lack of attention to religion.

Sean McDowell: So if I'm, if I'm hearing you correctly, at the birth of your child, this just stirs something up in her, this deeper love that she doesn't think can be reduced to this evolutionary kind of survival mode of mothers biologically caring for their child. Her response is to go to a Quaker church and start kind of growing and adapting spiritually. 10 years pass. What's happening in your mind? Are you intrigued by this? Are you upset by this? Like, what's happening for this decade in your world?

Charles Murray: I watched her lovingly and encouragingly.

Charles Murray: I thought this was a good thing that she was doing.

Sean McDowell: Oh, okay.

Charles Murray: It just didn't... You know, what does it have to do with me? [laughs] And the answer was... And here's where we get down to a,

Charles Murray: something that I've taken away that I've come to believe I did not believe at the time. And that is that receptivity, perceptual ability when it comes to spiritual things, is like any other human trait. It goes from low to high in different human beings. And I like to use the analogy with music. I've had professional musicians who when they hear music, they're hearing something completely different from what I hear. They are getting an emotional impact from it, an intellectual impact from it, a spiritual impact from it oftentimes that I don't get. I loved, I love a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart sonata, but I'm not hearing what they hear. I don't have as much receptivity to music, and some people are simply tone deaf too. Well, I think with spirituality, I'm

Charles Murray: deficient. [laughs]

Sean McDowell: [laughs] Okay.

Charles Murray: If, you know, if you think [laughs] suppose that we, suppose we scored spirituality the same way we score IQ.

Sean McDowell: Fair enough.

Charles Murray: I'd be somewhere around sev- 70 or 75.

Sean McDowell: Okay [laughs]

Charles Murray: And, [laughs] and my wife is way up there. And if that's the case, when you start to take religion seriously, in a way I don't have the same options she did. I can... You know, for example, she is, very active in contemplative prayer, and I was unable to follow her into that. But at the same time, since I wanted, I wanted to take it seriously, I'll keep going back to that phrase-

Sean McDowell: Yeah

Charles Murray: ... I ended up, going a more empirical route, and I was pushed along in that. I did have a sort of road to Damascus moment, but it wasn't spiritual. It was when I read a book called Just Six Numbers, which was by a British astrophysicist, and this was not, had no religious overtones. He was talking about the Big Bang, and he was talking about something that physicists have known since the 1970s, which is that at the moment of the Big Bang when the universe emerged out of nothing, a dimensionless point, and not only space, but probably time was created,

Charles Murray: it's as if there were a whole bunch of settings which if they had not all been perfectly aligned, would have produced a universe in which life was not possible. It would have been a universe that was radiation, but no stars and galaxies, a universe with black holes. And instead we get a universe that creates all the elements, and the elements create planets eventually, and stars which eventually enable life. The chances against that are about a trillion to one, and that calculation actually is by another astrophysicist, a Nobel Prize winner. And I read that and [laughs] I said, "A trillion to one chance against this happening?" I don't believe in trillion to one chances. And I was left with the... Option of believing in the multiverse, which is the theory, and it's purely theory, that there are millions of universes like this. To me, that's just not, that's just, I can't buy into that in any way, shape, or form. And the only plausible alternative is an intention behind the universe. And simply saying that to myself was a big step.

Sean McDowell: As an apologist, hearing somebody have a Damascus road experience that involves reading a science and philosophy book actually makes me really happy to hear that on one level. Before we get to some of the evidence, you cite some other historical and scientific evidence that was pivotal along your journey. Let me take a step back for a minute. So you see your wife over this 10 years kind of growing and expanding. You're trying to be loving to her. It, you ended up reading this book, so you had some intentionality spiritually. What was your goal and what was your mindset to get to that point? And since you didn't go to a Quaker, services that were seemingly more experiential like your wife had, what kind of investigation were you intending to pursue?

Charles Murray: Well, the first point is that I started attending Quaker meeting regularly with her in the mid 1990s. Because by that time, we had a second child, and both of the children were old enough to go to what Quakers call First Day School, Sunday school. And, I felt very strongly then that it's a good... Children should grow up in a religious tradition. I was very much in favor of that, and I should support that. But [laughs] here's the, with the Quaker meeting, I'm bad at meditation.

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: I try, I try, and I just lose my focus. But it is permissible in Quaker meeting, not encouraged, but permissible to read the Bible. So I would take, the, Bible with me, and I would read that maybe half an hour out of the hour of Quaker service every Sunday. Well, over several years, you read a lot of the Bible that way. [laughs]

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Charles Murray: And the New Testament, I read the New Testament, you know, repeatedly, and different portions of it. So I was acquiring that kind of knowledge. I was persuaded even before I read Juszczyk's numbers about the Big Bang. You know, the famous question, why is there something rather than nothing?

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Charles Murray: That, was in my, very much in my mind in the last half of the '90s. The whole point about the simplicity of the relationship between mathematics and the physical world. I kept thinking, "Why should it be that something like, the E equals MC squared," Einstein's famous theory, "why should that be mathematically so simple?" It's as if the mathematics would not be that simple unless somebody had planned it that way. So it was a series of nudges, and,

Charles Murray: two, couple of things happened. In 2005... Well, first I wrote a book called Human Accomplishment. Long book about, the arts and sciences and the great accomplishments in it, and I had a Catholic friend, Michael Novak, who's a famous, Catholic-

Sean McDowell: Yeah

Charles Murray: ... Philosopher, not theologian.

Sean McDowell: Mm-hmm

Charles Murray: ... But anyway, he said to me when I set out on the book, he said, "I think you're going to find as you go into this that Christianity played a huge role in Western civilization-" "... Developing the arts and sciences." And I liked Michael a lot and admired him, but I said to myself, "Well, you know, the Greeks were kind of there first in terms of Plato and Aristotle and, logic and other..." But I didn't argue with him. And then as I worked on the book, I was increasingly impressed by the fundamental role that Christianity played, not just in the arts, where Christianity was very obviously the inspiration for an awful lot of the great visual art, a lot of the great music, a lot of the great literature, but also the sciences. So I came to the end of writing Human Accomplishment in about around 2004, and I was already

Charles Murray: bothered by the degree to which Christianity had had this powerful impact. And I, on the last page of the book, I said, "You know,

Charles Murray: you have to realize that how many of these great creators of art and literature were devout Christians."

Sean McDowell: They were.

Charles Murray: And I had a sentence that said, "Johann Sebastian Bach doesn't have to explain himself. He does not have to defend his way of looking at the world. His music does it for him." And so I was opened up by that point. Then I read CS, then I read C.S. Lewis, and I was sort of tipped over the edge into a whole new set of things.

Sean McDowell: Okay, so we're gonna come back to that. That C.S. Lewis moment seems really significant, but I'm trying to get in your mindset here. This kind of starts in 1985, and then you're kind of tipped towards Christianity, like two decades later in 2005. And during this time, you're writing books on other stuff, being a policy analyst. Is this kind of a hobby for you? Is it in the back of your mind that's just kind of gnawing you? Like, what was your mindset and intentionality in discovering the truth about these questions during that two decades?

Charles Murray: I had a sense that my wife was acquiring stuff in her life that I envied, and so I had a not very well-articulated desire to participate in that. And,

Charles Murray: also even before I read the Big Bang, material, I would run into things like, near-death experiences, which, I had done a lot of reading in that. And I'd done a lot of reading for a long time, and I took a lot of those accounts seriously, but then it grows inside me that, you know, if these near-death experiences are real, it means consciousness can exist outside the brain. And so that was hovering in the background. It, it's,

Charles Murray: One of the reasons I wrote the book the way I did was to avoid making it sound systematic.

Sean McDowell: Oh, okay.

Charles Murray: I, and then, and I, and I avoid the word journey. I don't think I use the word journey, and the reason is I had no sense of being in any kind of straight line. I had a much more diffuse sense of as time went on, there were new things intruding on my understanding of the world, and I was still trying to fit them together.

Sean McDowell: So there's really no sense of urgency. It was just kind of curiosity and something just kind of gnawing at you a little bit that she knew something, experienced something you were missing out on. Is that a fair way to look at it?

Charles Murray: That's a fair way to look at it with plus one addition, and this is something I'm trying to communicate to my readers who are not religious. This stuff is fascinating, [laughs] you know?

Sean McDowell: [laughs] I agree.

Charles Murray: When you, when you, when you, get into all sorts of the issues I've just talked about with consciousness and the scientific findings on consciousness, that's fascinating. And, when you get into apologetics, as I did later, into the study of the New Testament and the historicity of it and the dating of the Gospels and all that, it's just plain intellectually really riveting.

Sean McDowell: You don't have to convince me about that. You are preaching to the choir.

Charles Murray: [laughs]

Sean McDowell: That is music to my ears. I love it. I'm probably gonna clip that one and just use it, 'cause that's so true to me. Okay. So one last question before we get to you kind of reading into Mere Christianity. The nudges and issues you'd wrestled with, the first one you describe is mathematics, that why can we capture things like laws equal, E equals MC squared in such a simple way, and why is order built into the universe? The origin of the universe began to bug you. Like, why is there something rather than nothing? This points towards a cause outside of the universe. And then the fine-tuning of the universe also points towards kind of a mind that best explains with intentionality the order of the universe set for life. And then consciousness seems to bug you. This is, wait a minute, I can't reduce human beings down just to matter. There seems to be mind or a soul, and with near-death experiences, that can at least minimally survive the brain. Does that capture kind of where you were intellectually before Mere Christianity?

Charles Murray: That's very well put. You encapsulate the whole thing. Good. Yeah.

Sean McDowell: Awesome. Just trying to, trying to track.

Charles Murray: Yeah.

Sean McDowell: That's really good.

Charles Murray: That's it.

Sean McDowell: Okay. So why did you read Mere Christianity? Who gave you that book? When'd you have that idea, and then what was the next step that book took you along in your intellectual non-journey? [laughs]

Charles Murray: It was, Pete Wehner. Pete Wehner also is a policy analyst, but he also writes on religion. He's a evangelical Christian. And he was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush. So in 2005, he invited me to go to lunch at the White House Mess, the little cafe in the White House, which is really cool to go to, because you're in the White House and you've never been there before.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Charles Murray: And and I knew he was an evangelical Christian, and I asked him during lunch, I said, "How did you come to your faith?" And he said, "By convincement, mostly. I was just convinced it was true." And he mentioned C.S. Lewis and Mere Christianity as a turning point. And I left the lunch and bought the book and read it over the next few days, and I was [laughs] really impressed. Remember what I, earlier I said about, deciding when I went to college that people were right in saying smart people don't believe that stuff anymore?

Sean McDowell: Uh-huh.

Charles Murray: You don't read Mere Christianity and say smart people don't believe that stuff anymore because-

Sean McDowell: Agreed

Charles Murray: ... If there is a voice that just radiates intelligence,

Charles Murray: it's C.S. Lewis. And a lot of people who are, who are watching have read C.S. Lewis themselves. They know this. But if they haven't, when I said he radiates intelligence, he does it with this conversational, casual, informal style that is totally engrossing. And he has the wonderful characteristic of you're reading him, and you're sort of mentally arguing with him, and then after you've said, "Oh, well, this is why I don't agree with him," the next paragraph says, "Perhaps you're thinking that."

Sean McDowell: [laughs] He does.

Charles Murray: And he answers your objection. And so that had a huge, effect on me. And I was, by this time, there were lots of religious books coming into the house because of Katherine. She reads full humanistically. But one that I saw independently of her, I guess, was-Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Sean McDowell: Yeah

Charles Murray: I'm sure you're familiar with it.

Sean McDowell: Yep.

Charles Murray: It's Richard Bauckham, British theologian, and he starts out the book saying, "Well, I know this is a minority view, but this book, the thesis is that the New Testament Gospels are deliberately trying to convey how much of their material is coming from eyewitnesses," and that he is making the case for the traditional interpretation of the Gospels. That, for example, it was tradition that Mark had taken down Peter's reminiscences, in effect.

Sean McDowell: Mm-hmm.

Charles Murray: And he's saying there's really good evidence that that's exactly what Mark does, and so forth. And that did something really important for me, because I had already read into the revisionists. I'd read some of Bart Ehrman, I'd read some of the other things, which says, "Oh, the Gospels weren't really written. They accumulated traditions over decades in different parts of the Roman Empire. It's like the telephone game. And so we really can't even be sure that what Jesus is purported to have said bears any resemblance to anything he did say." I knew about the Jesus Seminar, and I kinda thought that they'd won.

Sean McDowell: Oh

Charles Murray: ... I I'd assumed that-

Sean McDowell: Yeah

Charles Murray: ... You know, that that more or less the New Testament had been discredited. And all at once, here's Bauckham writing a very erudite book, and it seems to me he's making a lot of sense. And then I start from there, and I end up reading a variety of other, defenses of the tradition, some of which were written before Bauckham. I hadn't known that these existed. And as I did that, I kept saying to myself, "I'm more impressed by the empirical evidence by the, by the defenders than I am by the revisionists."

Sean McDowell: So when I teach, classes on apologetics, I often walk through, like, the scientific evidence that points towards a mind that began the universe that's intelligent, timeless, changeless, purposeful. We'll walk through the fine-tuning, which I think advances that a little bit further. Talk about things like the origin of life and the information in a cell, which is not something you go into, which is fine. Talk about consciousness and the way that you knew that there's life apart from the body. But the big piece when I talk about Mere Christianity is that in the scientific evidence, there's a mind that made us, but we can't ascertain anything moral about this mind. Lewis's argument, even independent from the Bible, is like there's this moral law, and we know it, and we expect it, and we act as if it's real, which moves us along the pendulum from this mind that began the universe to this seemingly personal agent behind this moral law. Do you agree with that thinking, and was that a part of your process, or am I kinda reading stuff in post facto that maybe wasn't there?

Charles Murray: No. No. I've... That's the first five chapters of, [laughs] of Mere Christianity. Doesn't say a word about Christianity. [laughs]

Sean McDowell: That's right.

Charles Murray: It it's all about the existence of the moral law, and then at the end of it, he hits you with the bludgeon. [laughs] He says, "Well,

Charles Murray: if you, if you have a God that is trying to communicate with human beings, how can he exhibit himself?" And the answer is, he can exhibit himself by pushing us toward certain ways of behaving, and at the core of that is a kind of love, agape.

Sean McDowell: Mm-hmm.

Charles Murray: And so what we see in what he's been describing with the basis for the moral law is the nature of God, and the nature of God corresponds very closely to the Christian nature of God. God is love, and, provides a moral basis for behavior. And for a lot of people, Francis Collins is another example.

Sean McDowell: That's right.

Charles Murray: For Francis Collins, it's that passage that sort of brought him up short and was a transforming experience, and it was close to that for me. It was certainly very influential.

Sean McDowell: So the next step, of course, in Mere Christianity and in your journey and I think logically, is if we have this mind that is behind the universe, and this mind has put a moral law into the universe and also on our hearts to behave in a moral fashion, has this mind or God revealed himself? Now, on the last page of your book, this is actually one of my favorite inserts from your book, so we're somewhat skipping ahead.

Charles Murray: Sure.

Sean McDowell: But you write this. You said, "During one such wakefulness a few months before writing these words, I was thinking about what it would be like to meet great religious figures from the past, such as Gautama Buddha, Laozi, Moses, and Jesus. It'd be fascinating, of course, to see what they were like in person, and I would naturally treat all of them with the utmost respect. Unbidden, it came to me that I would treat Jesus differently, with reverence." So what motivated you to then say, "Okay, maybe this God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus"?

Charles Murray: Well, we did skip ahead, which was fine

Sean McDowell: We did [laughs]

Charles Murray: But which is fine. But what I want to emphasize, to people who are watching is I was surprised- ... By this instinctive feeling of I treat him with reverence. Surprised in the sense that I'd had reached a belief without internally processing the degree to which I had reached that belief. I remember Catherine saying to me one time early on in this whole process, she sort of laughed and said, "You know, you know you believe in God, don't you? You do realize that, don't you?" And I said, "Well."

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: But she was... And she was pointing out something that she had perceived that I had not fully perceived myself, and that was true in a lot of this. And in a way, I think that should be encouraging for unbelievers because- ... You know, if you say to yourself that you've got to have a, born again moment, a a revelation of... I think you're likely to be disappointed. That happens to some people. I think those are authentic experiences for some people, but it's not the only way. It, it's not the only way that a person can migrate to a new set of beliefs. And it is not all rational and intellectual. I did not say to myself, "Well, I think the odds are now 89.4% that such and such is the case, and so I'm going to believe." It was, it was a combination of

Charles Murray: a lot of empirical information, along with a harder-to-describe gradual spiritual process. But didn't, but that did not feel spiritual at the time in an emotional way.

Sean McDowell: So in the book, one of the things you talk about, the famously C.S. Lewis kind of Lord, Liar, Lunatic, is that one of the arguments? Because you had been reading the gospel for a while-

Charles Murray: [coughs]

Sean McDowell: ... Going to the Quaker services. So you're familiar with the stories and who Jesus claimed to be. Is that one of the pieces at this time in your life where you're like, "Oh my goodness, I have to draw some conclusion about who Jesus is personally"?

Charles Murray: Yeah, because my reaction to the trilemma, liar, lunatic, or Lord, was the same, well, those aren't the only options. And I was thinking of the revisionists at this point, that, no, it was the what we're getting in the New Testament bears no relationship to anything that actually happened historically. Well, if I'm going to say that, then it's kind of incumbent on me to investigate the historicity of all this. And I had, at the same time, a curiosity about these traditions so that I would read that there was an early tradition about Mark recording Peter's reminiscences. There is an early tradition of this, an early tradition of that. But the people never actually said where the tradition came from. And, so one of the things that as I started reading that I found the most fascinating and also the most impressive were the very early patristic writings, of if I'm pronouncing that right, and Clement and Irenaeus and others where... And there were a couple of books I read which had extended quotations from them. And I read those. I think especially of Clement writing about how it is that, you only had two gospels written by apostles. And the way he describes that just sounds like a historian describing something- ... That was well-known at that time, and that he's relating it to us, and it sounded plausible. And I also assume that Clement had access to a lot of written material that we don't have access to anymore because it's been lost. And this sounded like a serious recounting of this is why John wrote John. This is

Charles Murray: This is how Mark, took down the reminiscence of Peter. It was persuasive. And then I also came to the question of dating the Gospels.

Charles Murray: It never particularly bothered me that they were dated at 70 to 90 AD because I figured they could still be quite accurate that long after the crucifixion. But it, shorter is better, and I think the evidence that Acts was finished by the early '60s is persuasive. And if Acts was written by the early '60s, that pushes everything else back. And so you're looking at, the Gospels certainly in the '50s and maybe in the '40s. And you put that alongside the Pauline letters.

Charles Murray: And so as I explored this, I came to believe that Lewis's trilemma was better than I'd initially realized.

Sean McDowell: Oh.

Charles Murray: That,

Charles Murray: it was not the case that Jesus as having a special relationship with God, Son of God, that was not a late invention. That was... I came to say the revisionists are wrong about that. I'm not a biblical scholar, but that was my conclusion on the basis of my reading, and, he did claim that.And so now we have to say, can we reconcile him both being a great moral teacher and also being a lunatic when it comes to talking about his relationship with God? And that's hard to do, too.

Sean McDowell: Now, I think this is post-2005 for you. So two-part question. When are you kind of reading Bauckham and Mere Christianity, and are you reading it, like, hoping it's true or just interested or, like, I hope it's not true? What was kind of your mindset, and when did you read those kind of works?

Charles Murray: You're asking me questions that I've never had to answer before.

Sean McDowell: Oh. [laughs]

Charles Murray: So this is very, this is interesting. [laughs]

Sean McDowell: Good.

Charles Murray: Yeah.

Charles Murray: You know, I think the best way to say it

Charles Murray: is, that one of my virtues is I'm really curious. And, I've written lots of books on lots of different subjects, and I haven't really repeated myself much. I've headed off all the time into brand-new areas, and the reason I do that is because I really love getting into new topics. And- ... So as I was doing this, I had a feeling of, oh, here's this whole literature out here that I didn't know existed, and it's really interesting, and I'm going to keep reading it. And was I aware that something important was, this was a really important topic? Yes, I was. But my basic process was the same as I used for writing Human Accomplishment-

Sean McDowell: Okay

Charles Murray: ... Or The Bell Curve or Coming Apart. It was an intellectual curiosity that yielded fruit.

Sean McDowell: That makes, that makes total sense. I guess partly I'm curious because when we start getting to the person Jesus, it gets a little more personal. It's not just an academic issue, but he demands-

Charles Murray: Yeah

Sean McDowell: ... Belief. He says, "Eternal life rests on what you do with me, and I'm the only way to the Father." So was there a point where you started to realize, "Oh my goodness, I'm not just writing a book on human accomplishment or the bell curve."

Charles Murray: [laughs]

Sean McDowell: "This really matters for my soul, and I've got to land this plane with more at stake than anything else I've written on."

Charles Murray: Well, here's where I, let's have full disclosure. I am not an Orthodox Christian.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Charles Murray: So,

Charles Murray: And by the way, I don't consider that, my sequence of steps is all, is over yet. I ... Hoping and expecting that there'll be further development as time goes on. But I am not a, I'm not an evangelical Christian, and so if it comes to, well, salvation only is through me, I still, I still back off from that.

Charles Murray: It... And I don't have good theological reasons for saying that. It just... Okay, more backdrop here.

Charles Murray: I assume that any God worth the name is as unknowable to me as I am to my dog.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Charles Murray: Okay? And, the, I use that analogy because I have a border collie dog, and that dog is really smart, [laughs] okay? Border collies. He, that border collie knows who I am and knows a lot about me, knows what I want him to do, more or less, which usually he doesn't do. But that dog has no idea what I'm doing when I sit in front of my computer. He has no idea of the inner me. And I believe that it's wrong to anthropomorphize God. So I start out with that as a very strong belief that I, that I still have. If that's the case, then it is going to be very hard for human beings to accurately convey certain things. I don't know if you're familiar with John Polkinghorne. Does that name-

Sean McDowell: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Charles Murray: Yeah Okay. He's a British theologian. He was a theoretical physicist at Oxford or Cambridge for several years before he became ordained in the Anglican Church. And he has a very good book, where he goes through the Nicene Creed one phrase at a time, and he has kind of an exegesis on that phrase as he sees it from his perspective. And when he comes to the question of Jesus as the Son of God, and he considers himself a full-fledged Christian on, in every way, but he talks about this difficulty of using language. And he says, well, it's, he uses the word heuristics, which I'm never quite sure what that means. But, [laughs] but the the degree to which we are allowed a certain latitude in trying to use language to understand things. And I think with Jesus as the Son of God, that's a classic case. And I use, I report the analogy that I did not learn during my adult exploration, but I learned when I was taking confirmation classes in the Presbyterian Church when I was 12 years old. And the Reverend Lowell McConnell of the Presbyterian Church in Newton, Iowa,

Charles Murray: was talking to us about this, and he said, "Well, suppose you go to the ocean

Charles Murray: and you fill up a jar with seawater. Is that the ocean?" And we all say, "No." And he says, "No, but it's as much of the ocean as you can get in a jar." And I know this is not, I've had some good Christians who have been very upset with me with making this comparison. They say, "No, Jesus was more than as much, God as you can get into the human jar." But for me, that is a good way of expressing a mystery. Um-Because I think any conception of Jesus as the Son of God is essentially extremely hard for human beings to grasp.

Sean McDowell: Thank you for your disclosure about where you stand in not identifying as an Orthodox Christian. I was, I was not totally sure reading this, 'cause you use the term Christian. You talk about forgiveness being a part of this, so I wasn't exactly sure where you land and that you're still on the journey of this. You got me thinking with the illustration of the dog that's in here, I thought about asking my son, who's 13. I like to ask him provocative questions, and I'll say things... I might ask him this. Are we closer to a dog in our ability to think and reason or closer to God? And of course, initially I want to say far closer to a dog than God, who's infinite, and dogs and I are both finite. But of course, we're made in God's image with the capacity to reason and think and reflect upon things that dogs don't, so we have that in common with God, so to speak. At the root of the Christian faith, of course, is like, yeah, we cannot get to God on our own, but that, like John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God," takes on human flesh to kind of bridge that gap, so to speak, so we can at least understand God insofar as it goes and relate to him personally. So that kind of came to my mind when you were, you were making that point. If I can ask, what would be the barrier holding you back as far as your comfortable sharing of not saying, "I'm not, I'm not quite an Orthodox Christian"? Is it that what you just said about the language not describing God? What are those big boulders that are keeping you back?

Charles Murray: Confidence in my ability to comprehend certain things. Pretty much I'm repeating what I said a minute ago.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Charles Murray: And confidence in

Charles Murray: the ability of the people who experience that, the disciples, to convey to us. I mean, I'm treading on

Charles Murray: all sorts of uncertainties.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Charles Murray: And you, if you, if you talk about the big barriers,

Charles Murray: one of them is of a central claim of Christianity, which is, of course, one of the most problematic for a lot of people, which is the physical resurrection. And so part of me wants to fudge that one, too. And this one, N. T. Wright has a phrase that that he is, that the evidence from the first Easter says that there was some extremely profound experience that the disciples had, and it's really hard to push it too far from that and, but in some real concrete sense, the Jesus of the first century is still alive in the church of today and has a continuous historical presence. And so you have that, I said, the fudge factor. And

Charles Murray: and here's where I think probably I'm getting too involved in empiricism. But you have to come to grips with the Shroud of Turin [laughs] which,

Sean McDowell: Sure

Charles Murray: ... Which is a pretty mysterious piece of cloth. And I say to myself, "The only thing holding me back there is a little bit more confidence in the dating." So they have a method of dating which has put it at 2,000 years old, and, of course, there was the notorious carbon dating, which was badly screwed up.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Charles Murray: And I'm saying, "You know, if they can reinforce that dating at 2,000 years old, I just have no more excuses left, [laughs] not believing in the physical resurrection." And I'm of two minds about that. One is that I think I would be logically forced to that conclusion, and the other one is I can still feel myself resisting it because of probably personality characteristics over which I have little control. I I give the example in the book of that kind of resistance when one time in the '90s I was at meeting, and, something had been bothering me a lot. And so I decided I was going to pray, and I was going to do my... I'd never tried to pray before. And I was going to, and I did. I did my level best to pray, and a couple of days later, I realized that whatever it was that was bothering me, and I can't remember what it was, had gone away. And it scared me to death. [laughs] And the reason it scared me to death was- ... Not because prayer failed, but because it worked. [laughs] And so on the one hand, you say, "Maybe I ought to be doing this all the time." and on the other hand, there is, there are things holding you back. But here I think you just have to say, look, human beings are strange creatures, and, my wife would be the first to confirm that I'm strange, too.

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: I use, I use the, I think I do use the phrase I'm an eccentric Christian [laughs] or on,

Sean McDowell: Okay

Charles Murray: ... At some point during the book.Of, and

Charles Murray: I guess that the, where I am right now is that I have limitations in terms of faith that I have not been able to overcome, and God will understand. That's sort of,

Charles Murray: ... I do bel- of all the things that I think I have taken on board most deeply, the concept of God is love is one of the most important. I think that's one of the most meaningful statements you can... That is full of implications, if you have a universe that, a God which is love.

Charles Murray: So I see myself as believing in some really big things associated with Christianity, finding myself in difficulty making further leaps- ... And not too troubled by

Sean McDowell: Huh

Charles Murray: ... Because of the sense that I'm trying hard, I'm trying sincerely, I'm... And as I said before, the God that I am comfortable with right now is a very forgiving God. Plus being all, plus being all-wise.

Sean McDowell: I really appreciate your candor on this. You know, as far as the first way you framed it, some of my thinking is you're right in the level of like I can't get to the depths of God through my own reasoning, but if the God exists that's described in the Bible, that broadly speaking we both believe in, revealed himself in the person of Jesus, commissioned the disciples, as the scriptures say, to write in a way that we can understand this God and his desire for our life, there's a level of a leap that's there, but it seems reasonable and seems in fitting with the character of that God and what we know about him from general revelation, but also within the scriptures. Does that ring true to you, or are you like, "I don't know that I can quite get there"?

Charles Murray: You've described

Charles Murray: a framework within, which I'm still working. And

Charles Murray: so I think that as

Charles Murray: if you're trying to put it all together, [lips smack] that it's like a canvas that I have partly filled in, that I'm trying to continue to fill in, that's not there yet, but the process is enormously rewarding. Another message I'm trying to give to non-believers.

Charles Murray: And that I am at peace with that.

Charles Murray: And I'll just tack onto that another case of where I realized without thinking, without knowing what was the process that was going on. I realized that I have a much different feeling about forgiveness of sins [lips smack] than I had 25 years ago, 30 years ago. I remember, one time feeling very guilty about something I shouldn't have done that I did do in my 20s, and, saying to myself, "I don't want to be forgiven for this. I shouldn't be forgiven." "I should feel bad about it. I should, I should always feel bad about it." And

Charles Murray: I didn't murder anybody or anything like that. [laughs]

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: It was, it was, But it was, it was a case of recently or maybe several years ago, of suddenly realizing that that had been a very silly way to look at it, and also very egocentric. I mean, who am I to decide whether I should be forgiven for something I've done? My job is to be repentant, to be truly repentant, not making it up, not faking it, but truly repentant, and it's up to God whether, I'm forgiven. And I had then a sense of believing in God's grace- ... Which is, a more traditional language for saying God will understand. And, so that's

Charles Murray: that's another piece of the painting that's filled in that wasn't filled in maybe 10 years ago, but got filled in sometime in the, in the intervening time. Now, I'm 82, so I don't have forever. But, [laughs] but it's continuing to go on.

Sean McDowell: You know, as you mentioned a born again experience earlier, I was thinking of John chapter 3, where Jesus says to Nicodemus, "You must be born again." And Nicodemus doesn't understand what he's talking about, like, "What do you mean born by water or born by spirit?" Jesus tries a second time to explain from him, and then finally at the end he's like, "You know what? You just need to believe in me as the Son of God for forgiveness of your sins. Those who believe are saved. Those who don't are condemned." It's like he says this born again experience, the best way to put it is believing in Jesus for forgiveness of your sins, and of course I'm-

Charles Murray: Mm-hmm

Sean McDowell: ... Collapsing that down. That would probably be an orthodox way of understanding what the gospel is. I couldn't tell at the end of your book, when you talk about forgiveness of sins, I'm like, is he there with that kind of grace, or is that still a part of the narrative you're like, "I'm working out if I need that forgiveness from God and His grace in my life in that fashion"?

Charles Murray: You have accurately understood the ambiguity that still persists.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Charles Murray: You know, I'm reminded of another conversation I had with, Michael Novak, the Catholic, and I was talking to him once about religion and this is a long time ago. And I said something to him about, you know, I'm very impressed by a lot of things about Catholicism and so forth, but why do you persist in having as dogma transubstantiation? In the course of our conversa- I said, "That's just simply an unbelievable doctrine." And Michael said to me, because I think probably if you put Michael into a lie detector [laughs] ... He probably, he probably would've had a very powerful and eloquent theological, description of how he still accepts transubstantiation, but I don't think he does literally.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Charles Murray: And, but it, but here's what he said to me. He said, "God's need, God needs a church that can speak to everyone." And what I interpret him as saying there is

Charles Murray: that the doctrine of transubstantiation for a lot of people is something which helps them to get to the larger truths of Catholicism, and in a similar kind of way, I think that the, at, there are aspects of Christian, Christianity where they serve a function of leading people to the underlying truths, but in different ways. And if you wanna think of it this way, transubstantiation may be a powerful way for God to speak to some very simple people, who come from cultures where are not sophisticated. Well, you know what? It's conceivable that, C.S. Lewis and Richard Bauckham are God's way of speaking to over-educated agnostics like me.

Sean McDowell: [laughs]

Charles Murray: [laughs] Which is that he puts stuff out there whereby know transubstantiation isn't gonna get me there, but if I put somebody really smart putting some material out there that can appeal to this over-educated guy, maybe I can get to him. And I am being a little bit facetious here-

Sean McDowell: Sure

Charles Murray: ... But not very, but not very, because there are too many times in my life that I've had the eerie sense of things worked out in ways that seem mysterious, and it's almost as if God willed it, and I say, "No, that can't really be, can it?" And, but that's, the more pieces of the puzzle. So I guess where we're ending up is,

Charles Murray: there is truth in packaging on this book, [laughs] which is that when I titled it Taking Religion Seriously, there is sort of an implication there of delving into very serious topics that are very difficult- ... With no promises that at the end you'll come out and say, "Oh, I got it." And I think I deliver on that ambiguity.

Sean McDowell: Very fair. Now, we're bumping up against the time you committed to, so can I ask you two more questions at the end?

Charles Murray: Sure

Sean McDowell: Is that all right? Okay.

Charles Murray: Sure.

Sean McDowell: So this, I actually was hoping to ask this question anyways. I didn't know we were gonna land up in this conversation [laughs] where we do, which is fine. I think viewers are gonna find it fascinating. Really appreciate your candor. At the very end, this is on page 147, so we're within about, I don't know, 10 pages from the end of the book, maybe 15 pages, and you describe two what are kind of like psychological reasons, if I'm understanding it, that hold you back from some of the beliefs, from embracing them more quickly. So you said, you talk about confronting the straightforward implication of the evidence that you have a soul is intimidating, so the, this isn't an intellectual barrier, and I totally understand it. It's, like, intimidating because what this means for life after death, what it means to be human, my accountability, creator, et cetera. And then the next line you say, "Another and more prosaic explanation of my resistance is the fear of what the other members of my tribe will think." I super appreciate your candor on that one. As we get to where you're at now, you said it, at 82 you're like, "I don't have endless time left." If you're gonna say moving forward, how much is intellectual versus how much are just kind of these psychological personal reasons that might hold you back from embracing Orthodox Christianity, or is it really hard to just kind of pull that apart and make sense of it?

Charles Murray: No, I, actually I can. The, being, worried about what members of my tribe will think is less important to me than it was. And it's partly that's the case because, I have a strong sense that the Enlightenment went too far. I

Charles Murray: am a child of the Enlightenment in the sense that academia is, are all children of the Enlightenment, and reason and logic, and science are the only way to assemble evidence that we can evaluate, and anything that smacks the supernatural is out of bounds. And that is just as dogmatic a belief among, children of the Enlightenment as any religious belief.And so I have been increasingly irritated that members of my tribe for placing too much hubris in the power of human reason and logic. And also, I had an experience after, publishing the book and a couple of the things I've written with reactions from members of my tribe- ... Which have been very dismissive, and they have been dismissive not because they took the material I wrote and said, "Here's points A, B, and C about why Murray is empirically wrong." They didn't do that at all. They just sort of basically said, "Oh, smart people don't believe that stuff anymore." [laughs]

Sean McDowell: Interesting.

Charles Murray: And that's essentially what they were doing.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Charles Murray: So I don't worry about them so much. But your other point about,

Charles Murray: thinking that you have a soul is intimidating.

Charles Murray: The, that's the way I put it. It's also exhilarating. And so it's it's like a too-good-to-be-true kind of thing, but there is pretty good evidence that it is true. And it's taken me time, and will continue to take me time, to fully embrace that, but I think probably I will. Well, I have in one important respect, which is I'm not afraid of dying. And I haven't been for many years now. And,

Charles Murray: it is... I used to... I had moments before, 25 years ago when I would feel existential dread at the fact of oblivion.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Charles Murray: I'm gone, no longer exist, and that went away. And, so at some level I have accepted the possibility I have a soul. Fully embracing that

Charles Murray: is to open up, a rich,

Charles Murray: a richer way of thinking about your future [laughs] than non-believers can possibly enjoy. And so I should have said it's intimidating. Ultimately, I think it's gonna be exhilarating.

Sean McDowell: Very fair. I, My last question is you describe yourself as going from happy agnostic to Christian, but I think more specifically not Orthodox Christian, but say eccentric Christian. Now that you're more in this camp, looking back on the things that you've written on such a diverse, range of topics, are there certain things that you rethink and now view differently because of your Christian faith?

Charles Murray: I have thought about that question, and I'm pretty satisfied- ... That I haven't advocated anything in any of my other books which contradict anything I have said now that are not in the same spirit as that. On the contrary,

Charles Murray: I don't wanna be self-congratulatory here, but I made that statement about Johann Sebastian Bach does not need to justify his way of looking at the world. He, of course, was extremely devout as a Christian, that his music does it for him. So I was respectful long before I associated myself as a believer, and part of being respectful comes out of the enormous respect I had for the Christian teachings, just as teachings- ... And the way people ought to behave. On this... By the same token, I mean, we're coming to the end, and I don't want to introduce new stuff, but it's also, it's also important, and part of C.S. Lewis's point, that the great systems of ethics, and this is true of Confucian, it's true of Taoism, true of Buddhism. They haven't all been exactly the same, but somebody who behaved virtuously in each of those traditions is gonna behave quite similarly, and I think Christianity is perhaps the best exposition of a code of ethics. But- ... Because I have a long time believed in this, those concepts of virtue, I was help, kind of helped to keep me from going astray [laughs] in the way I thought about policy. May I just say, since we are-

Sean McDowell: Please

Charles Murray: ... Coming to the end, that,

Charles Murray: your whole way of asking me questions and talking about this, knowing that I am someone who has quite different- ... Christianity than you have, I've really enjoyed.

Sean McDowell: Oh, good

Charles Murray: ... You have been wholly sympathetic- ... Without pretending that we agree with each other on these things. And I will say you have drawn me out in a way that very few people other have done in the past, and I have more or less enjoyed it. Occasionally, I've gotten a little, antsy about whether I was saying things right, but it's- ... It's been quite an experience.

Sean McDowell: Oh, thank you for saying that. I'm really touched and honored you would say that. Thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I'm not sure where I expected it to go, but this is not where I expected it to go, and really [laughs] appreciate you entertaining just some of my questions and a little bit of pushback here and there. And I would say, before I forget, off the record, none of this stuff, if you wanna just continue the conversation in any way on Zoom or I don't know where you live, you don't have to say it out loud, I would do that in a heartbeat. These conversations are what I enjoy as much as anything, so that opportunity is out there anytime. I would carve it out and enjoy it. And I do wanna, I wanna commend your book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Obviously, as an evangelist and apologist, I would end it a little differently and invite [laughs] people to repent and believe in Jesus.

Charles Murray: [laughs]

Sean McDowell: But that's just where we differ at this stage. But it's easy to read. It's clear. Your premise of taking religion seriously, that's what you say you're arguing for, and you argue for it in a way that I think respects the reader and invites them to reflect in a non-preachy way. I think it's an excellent book. I'm glad you wrote it, and if you write anything else in this lane, definitely send it to me. I'd love to continue that conversation as well. And for people watching, before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. And by the way, a ton of you who watch these videos are not subscribed, so subscribe, hit that notification button. And if you wanna study apologetics, which is really what we talked about today, and Charles Murray talks about in his book, we'd love to have you join us at Biola University online and in person, our master's degree. If you're not ready for master's, we now have a new certificate program with some of the leading lectures, leading lectures from some leading apologists in the world. Big discount below, so make sure you check that out. Charles Murray, thanks for your time and for a wonderful conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

Charles Murray: Thank you. [outro music]