Epoch Times - Charles Murray: I Thought Religion Was Irrelevant to Me. I Was Wrong.

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Oct. 31, 2025 - Epoch Times

22:47

Charles Murray: I Thought Religion Was Irrelevant to Me. I Was Wrong.

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	We have watched an experiment going on in Europe now for the last several decades of advanced societies that are effectively secular.
	I think the results are very troubling.
	In this episode, I sit down with political scientist Charles Murray, who is perhaps most well known for his watershed works, Coming Apart and The Bell Curve.
	His latest book is titled, Taking Religion Seriously.
	It's not good enough to say the universe exists.
	You've got to ask how it came into being.
	And that pushed me toward thinking about a creator.
	Why is there something rather than nothing?
	He shares his journey from a secular perspective to a deeper understanding of religion and faith and why it matters.
	Is it true that we can be confident that consciousness exists only in the brain?
	And the funny thing is, we actually cannot.
	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
	Charles Murray, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
	My great pleasure.
	Let me start with a quote.
	Millions are like me when it comes to religion.
	Well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant.
	And I'll just add that that's kind of was like me for a lot of my life.
	For them, I think I have a story worth telling.
	What's the story?
	First, let me just characterize a little bit more what that quote summarizes, which is, I'm not talking about people who are ardent atheists.
	I'm not talking about people for whom the college experience probably taught them that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore.
	And it was just in the air.
	I don't know about your experience, but I went to Harvard in the fall of 1961.
	That's a long time ago.
	And when I went there, it isn't that I took courses on religion or that I had professors haranguing me.
	It just was the zeitgeist.
	Smart people don't believe that stuff anymore.
	And so religion just simply wasn't of any particular interest for the next 25 years for me.
	And the story is, well, it's actually pretty interesting, if I can say so myself.
	In 1985, my wife Catherine had our first child together, Anna.
	And after a couple of months, she said to me, you know, I love Anna so much, I have a hard time telling where I stop and she begins.
	And then, either then or a few weeks later, she came up with a line that has since been quoted by Michael Gerson and David Brooks because it's such a beautiful line, namely, I love Anna more than evolution requires, which is what you get with an Oxford and Yale educated woman who says, I understand evolutionary biology.
	I buy into it.
	I know that to pass on genes, women better love their babies.
	But she was saying, no, I'm experiencing something beyond that.
	And that led her to say that she find a faith tradition that she could rejoin.
	She'd been grown up as a Methodist and feel comfortable doing it.
	All of this I watched saying, well, I'm happy for her.
	I hope it works out, but it has nothing to do with me.
	And she found Quakerism met her needs.
	And over the next several years, she became a very active Quaker, not in the social activist sense, but contemplative prayer, meditation, and also digging deeper and deeper into Christian beliefs, focusing not on the miracles of the resurrection or anything, but focusing on the teachings of Jesus Nazareth.
	Again, that was all going on independently of me.
	I stayed home on Sundays and took care of our babies.
	And about the middle of the 1990s, having been exposed to this for so long, I had reached a couple of thoughts that became very important.
	One was that I had to recognize there is such a thing as a quality known as spiritual perception.
	You know, it's easy for most people to accept that some people are tone deaf.
	They hear a Beethoven sonata and it just sounds like discordant noises.
	People who have very high IQs go to a museum and see a great painting and they pass by it in five seconds because they don't really see anything there.
	They aren't moved by it.
	People like us understand that, but when it comes to spiritual perception, I think a lot of us tend to assume, oh, they're kidding themselves.
	They're deluding themselves.
	There isn't really this access to spiritual insights that they have that I don't have.
	I didn't have that option because, as I've suggested, my wife has an extraordinary intellect.
	She is entirely self-possessed and does not delude herself about anything.
	And it was me who had to accept that I couldn't follow her on this trip that she was taking, but I kind of wanted to.
	Then there followed a series of nudges where I had to suddenly call into question my unreflective assumption that religion can't possibly have anything in it.
	I don't want to get into too much detail on those because it would take us too deep into the weeds.
	But such things as, for example, why is there something rather than nothing?
	Which is a phrase that I should have known existed.
	Heidegger said it a long time ago and others had said it in previous centuries.
	But I heard it first from Charles Krauthammer, the late columnist, and I thought it was original with him, but it struck me.
	It said, it's not good enough to say the universe exists.
	You've got to ask how it came into being.
	And that pushed me toward thinking about a creator.
	Not very far toward it, but a little bit toward it.
	And then in 2000, I guess the early 2000s, I read a slim book called Six Numbers, Just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees, who is astronomer royal for the British Royal Society.
	And he's not a religious man, but in the book, he describes the anthropic principle, which some people watching us know that, and others have never heard it before.
	So real quickly, the anthropic principle is a set of findings in physics, not really in dispute among physicists, which says that in the moments of the Big Bang,
	in the first fractions of seconds of the Big Bang, a whole variety of parameters that were not determined by theory Had to have certain settings, as it were, in order for the universe to exist, in order for there to be galaxies and stars and planets.
	If those settings had been slightly different, you would have had a universe of black holes, you would have had a universe of radiation, no life.
	Well, this sort of sets up a problem because the odds against those settings being just right are literally trillions to one.
	So, what are our options?
	We can say, well, we're alive and we live in a universe which permits life, so why worry about it?
	That's kind of like being in front of a firing squad with a hundred expert marksmen and they all fire and they all miss.
	Yeah, you're still alive.
	Why did it happen?
	It's okay to be curious about it.
	And there, the two options are: it was by chance, and the other option being a higher authority directed that everybody miss.
	That seemed to me a lot more plausible.
	Now, the physicists have another theory, which is called multiverse theory, which says that this isn't the only universe.
	There are millions of universes.
	I have a very hard time with that one.
	Every time I go outside at night and look into a cloudless night sky and say, there are millions of these?
	And no, I can't make myself say that.
	So I came away from that, having much to my surprise said, I think that some mysterious force created an intentional universe that permits life.
	So that was a pivotal event.
	Charles, we're going to take a quick break right now.
	Okay.
	And folks, we're going to be right back.
	And we're back with Charles Murray, author of Taking Religion Seriously.
	fascinates me that we've gone through several generations now where the default, the correct view is supposed to be that this is not a rational part of life.
	And what is the impact of that?
	If you actually do believe that that connection with God is a central element of human existence, which I believe, I believe it because it was sort of because it happened, right?
	But how radically did that transform our societies to start believing that it's profound.
	I don't want to get political about this because taking religion seriously, the book is I rigorously did not make the case for religion in general or Christianity in particular as being socially expedient and useful.
	The book is about me trying to come to my own beliefs about the truth value of religion.
	But the question you have raised is, I'll just say very briefly, we have watched an experiment going on in Europe now for the last several decades of advanced societies that are effectively secular.
	Europe and Canada, I'll just mention that.
	Yes, and Canada.
	Yeah.
	In human history, there has never been an advanced society that was secular the way that Europe is now.
	And I will antagonize some viewers, maybe get supported by others when I say I think the results are very troubling.
	There are all sorts of secular humanists who live lives that are as virtuous as any Christians or Jews.
	But I think that secular humanism has a real problem in that it has no bedrock, it has no bottom.
	And it's very easy to get on slippery slopes when there is not a bedrock underneath it, as I believe there is for the great religious traditions.
	And I think the effects of that slippery slope are visible now.
	Well, I'll just take one example, as we look at a policy that I initially supported, physician-assisted suicide, because it seemed to make sense to me.
	And it still makes sense to me, except that we have seen that slippery slope produce some very disturbing results.
	And I would say that similar policies related to crime and a variety of other institutions suggest that secular societies do not have a lot of staying power.
	I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects for Europe, and increasingly not for the United States, except beyond the evidence of, guess what?
	A whole lot of American intellectuals seem to suddenly have found religion.
	I mean, in some cases, they are people who have long-standing commitments to it, like Ross Dothet and David Brooks and others.
	But there are lots of newcomers to professing, in most cases, Christianity, and still others who are speaking respectfully of religion in ways that they didn't before.
	So it may be there is a revival in the wings here someplace.
	Most stunningly, if I may, Richard Dawkins.
	Yes, he even said something very recently about the cultural value of Christianity, I think.
	And he said, it was something, again, paraphrasing that, you know, if you don't, I mean, it was kind of a grudging, I read it as a kind of a grudging thing that if you don't have it, something worse can come in its place or something like that.
	People can pick up this book with no fears that I'm going to try to tell them, do what I did, because it's the blueprint for how you can change your life through religion.
	No.
	This is going to be watching a guy who has been unable to keep up with his wife, who is making big progress, and is forced to cobble together using the things that I am good at, ways of digging into religion that work for me.
	And that's what I did.
	And that's what I describe.
	And I will add to that that my dear wife, my soulmate, watches me do this affectionately but rolling her eyes because she is engaged in the stuff of Christianity at a very deep level, spiritually.
	And from her perspective, I am being the social scientist zeroing in, trying to find data, trying to find ways of systematically working through these problems.
	And this is, from her perspective, a very roundabout way of doing it.
	And it is.
	But I compare it to me and my ability in math.
	I'm a quantitative social scientist and I know how all the statistical procedures work.
	And to that extent, obviously, I'm not terrible at math, but I'm nowhere close to the ability of mathematicians who can look at the equations and understand what's going on.
	That calls on skills I do not have.
	And so I have workarounds there, that I use concrete examples to make sure I understand what's going on in the inner math.
	And similarly, in this case, I know that I do not have this access to spiritual insights that my wife has.
	And so how is it that I can nonetheless, in some ways, drill down and at least get a simulacrum of those insights for myself?
	It has to be personal because the evolution itself has been so idiosyncratic.
	There is a materialist view of consciousness that I just bought into Lockstock and Beryl because, again, it was in the air.
	Consciousness exists exclusively in the brain, and the brain stops and consciousness stops.
	And since consciousness stops when the brain stops, therefore there's no afterlife, and all the major religions are wrong on this very fundamental question.
	Well, is it true that we can be confident that consciousness exists only in the brain?
	And the funny thing is, we actually cannot.
	Two examples, near-death experiences, which I'm sure most people have heard of.
	I just want to assure people that the evidence on near-death experiences did not consist of a few new aged aging hippies.
	It's thousands of cases very seriously documented by very serious scientists who are looking at this sort of thing with really hard to explain away evidence of people having acquired knowledge when their hearts were stopped and their respiration was gone and their brain waves were quiet and they nonetheless were,
	when they woke up, they remembered conversations and events in the operating room or the emergency room or the scene of the accident that they should have no way of knowing.
	And another phenomenon, which is called terminal lucidity, where people in after years of severe dementia, after years of not recognizing their spouse or children, in a day or two before their death are suddenly back.
	Their personalities are back.
	Their memories are back.
	What's that all about?
	If you have a brain that everything that neuroscience knows is documented to be dysfunctional and incapable of organized thoughts, where are those brief periods of terminal lucidity coming from?
	So does this rise to the level of immediately concluding that we all have immortal souls?
	No, it doesn't.
	Should it make you say science is facing the same kind of anomalies in 2025 that it faced in 1887 with the Michelson-Morley experiment when that experiment proved that the speed of light doesn't behave the way that Newton's laws said it should.
	And it took another 18 years for Albert Einstein to explain it.
	If you are a confident materialist in the current era, it's because you have not been paying sufficient attention to what is being learned.
	Oh, absolutely.
	these whole new kind of, well, let's say complicated areas of inquiry, right?
	You talked about the speed of light and the theory of relativity, you know, going down to the other side, like the way these particles behave.
	None of it, it's sort of, it strains credulity when you hear about what's actually happening, what's being described, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I sort of characterize this as a major shift in the relationship between science and religion.
	So that there was a period from about 1500 to 1900 when science systematically explained a lot of things that had formerly been attributed to a god.
	Earthquakes, you know, thunderstorms, I mean, you name it, natural phenomena.
	But then you also had in the Enlightenment, you had Newton's clockwork universe that did not require a deity to make it function.
	You had then subsequently Darwinian evolution and Freudian psychology and then Einsteinian relativity, all of which, and not to mention geological discoveries that, you know, the Earth is not 5,700 years old.
	And so in each of these cases, you had criticisms of religion as basically being God of the gaps.
	So God continually continued to exist only for those things that science could not yet explain, but science was going to be able to explain the rest of them later.
	And it sure looked that way up through the 19th century.
	In the 20th century, beginning with the astronomical discoveries that led to the verification of the Big Bang, science has been uncovering mysteries that we never knew existed before, quantum mechanics being a huge part of that.
	And religion has had answers, parsimonious answers, to things that have baffled science.
	You know, when the Big Bang theory was first proposed back in the 1920s, it was derided in part because it was so obviously an attempt to put a scientific gloss on Genesis.
	Let there be light.
	Well, guess how it worked out?
	And similarly with other aspects that I just mentioned about consciousness, it is true that since the Enlightenment, intellectuals all over the world have bought into the materialist explanation of consciousness so that I never really considered that there was an alternative.
	Well, actually, Charles, yes, there was.
	Up until the 17th century, everybody thought otherwise.
	Everybody thought that humans had souls.
	And I'm saying, gee, it just may turn out that that's true, too.
	When I've talked to people like me, for whom religion is not important, what I want to say to them is, don't be afraid to start looking into this stuff.
	It's fascinating from a purely intellectual standpoint.
	Well, Charles Murray, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
	I've enjoyed the conversation a great deal.
	Thank you all for joining Charles Murray and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

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