For decades, Charles Murray assumed what many educated people quietly assume—that religion belonged to an earlier age and that science had rendered belief in God unnecessary. He wasn't hostile to faith. He simply left it behind.

But over time, questions he had never fully examined began pressing in. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe appear so finely tuned for life? Can consciousness really be reduced to the brain? And what should we make of the historical claims surrounding Jesus?

In this conversation, author and social scientist Charles Murray shares the long, intellectual journey that led him to reconsider the reality of God and the claims of Christianity.

Resources Mentioned:

• Book:  Taking Religion Seriously
•  Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees
•  Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• Jesus and the Eye Witnesses by Richard Bauckham

Listen to more stories from skeptics and atheists who investigated Christianity.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and eX-skeptic.

Transcript

Charles Murray
I don’t believe in several trillion, one in several trillion chances. If I’ve got to believe that it’s that or that there was something intentional about the creation of the universe, I don’t think that the most parsimonious explanation is it’s a one in a trillion chance. I think the more plausible explanation is that the universe is intentional. So that was a big step.

Jana Harmon
Hello and welcome to eX-skeptic where we explore unlikely stories of belief. I’m your host, Jana Harmon, and on this podcast we listen to the journeys of those who once dismissed, doubted, or resisted belief in God, yet found themselves compelled to reconsider the biggest questions of life, meaning, and reality. My guest today is Charles Murray, a widely known author, social scientist, and public intellectual whose career has been shaped by evidence analysis and serious inquiry. For much of his life, religion was not something he actively fought against as so much as something he simply left behind. Like many educated people in modern secular culture, he came to assume that belief in God simply belonged to an earlier less enlightened age. But over time, that assumption began to crack. In this conversation, Charles reflects on the long and gradual path that led him to take religion seriously, not through sentimentality or social pressure, but through sustained intellectual reflection. Questions about the origins of the universe, the nature of consciousness, the reality of love, the limits of materialism and the historical claims surrounding Jesus all began to press in on him in ways he could no longer ignore. This is not a neat before-and-after story. It’s not a story that fits comfortably into many familiar categories. It’s the story of someone who became convinced that reality points beyond itself, that disbelief is not as intellectually secure as many assume, and that religion and Christianity deserve far more consideration than our culture often gives it. So today we’re not simply talking about conclusions, we’re talking about a process, about what it looks like for a thoughtful person to re-examine long-held assumptions and remain open to wherever the evidence seems to lead. Here is my conversation with Charles Murray. Welcome to eX-skeptic, Charles. It’s so great to have you with me today.

Charles Murray
It’s my pleasure.

Jana Harmon
Wonderful. As we’re getting started, you bring a lot of gravitas to the table. You are a well-known serious author, thinker, scholar. You’ve written an amazing book recently called Taking Religion Seriously about your intellectual journey to belief in God, and we’re going to talk about that today. But before we do that, could you give us a sense of, goodness, the well-rounded and really admirable background that you bring to the table.

Charles Murray
Well, without going into a full bio, I’m, in the first place, what you call gravitas is easily confused with old age. And, you know, I’ve had a lot of time to accumulate stuff. I was in Harvard originally in 1961-65, which will give you an idea of just how long ago we’re talking about. I spent the ’60s mostly in Thailand, first with Peace Corps and then with work for government contractors. Spent the ’70s after graduate school evaluating the social programs for a nonpartisan research company for the federal government, you know, were the programs working? And then around 1980, ’81, I got frustrated with that because nobody ever read the research reports of the programs of whether they worked or not, and no decisions were ever made on the basis of whether anything was working, and most of them weren’t working. So I left the job I had and ended up writing a book called Losing Ground, which came out in 1984. And I have been writing books on social policy ever since, including a couple that have been quite controversial. Well, Losing Ground was quite controversial in the 1980s. The Bell Curve in the 1990s was explosively controversial. And I have persistently written on different topics over the years, but I have to say I think that very few of my friends and colleagues would have ever expected me to write a book about Taking Religion Seriously. So the most recent book is very much outside my lane.

Jana Harmon
Can you give us in a nutshell a bit about what Taking Religion Seriously is about and why you wrote it?

Charles Murray
Yeah, I’d be happy to because it was pure accident. I was being interviewed by some colleagues of mine for sort of an overview of my career. And it was a long interview, went on for a couple of hours. And at the end of it, toward the end, we got to talking about religion and I described what had been my kind of meandering evolution that had gone on for a period of 20, 25 years. And at the end of the interview, after the camera was turned off, my friend Nuck Eberstadt, who was conducting the interview, said, “Well, that ought to be your next book.” Well, that had never occurred to me. But once he suggested it, I realized I’m very typical of millions of well-educated, people who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s and subsequently, in that we have lived our lives with religion just not being an interesting or important part of it. We have not been aggressive atheists. We have instead, well, I’ll just tell you my own experience. I’m 18 years old. I grew up in Newton, Iowa. I go off to Harvard, bright lights in the big cities from Newton, Iowa. And I learned right away that smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore, if we’re talking about religion. And it wasn’t preached to me that smart people don’t believe that stuff. It was just in the air. None of my professors spoke about religion with any interest, or if they did, they spoke disdainfully. And just mainly it was, oh, we all know by this time with all the progress science has made that there’s no real good reason to be religious, that atheism or agnosticism should be the default. Well, that was me. It was very unreflective. I had not taken a catechism of secular humanism and exposed it to empirical tests. I hadn’t exposed a variety of things to empirical tests. And it was my wife’s example that let me realize maybe I ought to start reconsidering whether I needed to think about these issues more than I had in the past. And ultimately this, and that started in about 1985 and so we are not talking about a road to Damascus conversion. We’re talking about a very, very long process.

Jana Harmon
Yeah and oftentimes shifting, making a paradigm shift like that, moving from a place of presumed disbelief, essentially, to the possibility of belief, that’s— you’re talking about turning over a lot of stones to reconsider your position. So why don’t we start back at the very beginning of your story? Was religion a part of your home growing up? Did you have any touchpoints there?

Charles Murray
I was raised a Presbyterian. First Presbyterian Church of Newton, Iowa, we attended. Coincidentally, my wife, who will play a role in this conversation since she played such a pivotal role in my own evolution, she went to the Methodist Church which was next door. And I was a believer in a kind of casual way. I was never passionate religious, but by the time when I graduated from high school, I’d been interested in religion. I still considered myself a Christian. And the break with it was not at all sudden or dramatic. I just drifted away after I went to college.

Jana Harmon
I guess the narrative that you were hearing, that science and smart people reigned, I guess, over religion, that if you were one of an intellectual, which I, I would imagine with someone of your brilliance and mind and intellect, perceived yourself as part of that group at Harvard, you were an MIT PhD. You know, that was the ethos in which you swam.

Charles Murray
Yeah and, you know, everybody naturally wants to fit in. And when I, as an 18-year-old, went off to Harvard, yeah, you’re right. I wanted to fit in. I didn’t consciously think of it that way, but that’s part of what was going on, and it accounts for my lack of passion or drama in moving away from religion because the atmosphere on campus, and by the way, my wife found this too. She was at William Mary and Oxford and Yale. It just was so seamless in the universities, elite universities especially, I think, like that, that religion just wasn’t a big deal anymore. It had been disproved. We could leave it behind without loss. And I think this is why I’m so typical because as these years, and I’m talking about the first, let’s see now, if I go to Harvard in 1961, so I’m talking about the next 24 years, I just didn’t think much about religion. It was not a big deal and that’s the best way to put it. I was not fighting against religion. I was not resisting it. I was not hostile to it. It was just kind of irrelevant to living my life.

Jana Harmon
Did you, in leaving your kind of your Christianity behind, did you believe that the natural world was all that existed, or did you consider that there were some kind of spiritual reality beyond the natural world?

Charles Murray
Well, there, Jana, I’ve sort of been self-contradictory because on the one hand, I did think that the materialist view of consciousness was right, that it’s all in the brain. And when the brain stops, then consciousness stops. So I did believe that. On the other hand, I was fascinated even during those years by a lot of the research that had been done on ESP and other kinds of psychic phenomena. I was interested in the near-death experience literature. And you say, well, how could you be really interested in that stuff and still be an unself-critical materialist? And the answer is I was I was not confronting the degree to which these topics such as extrasensory perception, psychic phenomena, near-death experiences contradicted the simple materialist position. I finally came around to recognize that tension.

Jana Harmon
Yeah, I think that’s kind of an easy thing to do, isn’t it? Sometimes we embrace certain aspects of our beliefs, but we don’t really think critically about their logical endpoints. Like, if you were a materialist, yes, there’s the issue of consciousness. There’s also an issue of free will, for example.

Charles Murray
Oh yeah.

Jana Harmon
Did you believe that you were someone who was just determined, going through the motions? Or did you feel or sense that you were making real choices? Or did you even think about it?

Charles Murray
My position on free will has been that of the professor in my freshman year, a wonderful old man who was retiring in a year or so called Raythel Deimos. He was a famous Plato scholar. And in Philosophy 1 in my freshman year, he spent a couple of lectures talking about the various philosophical approaches to free will. And at the end of all that, he said, “Well, you may be wondering what I think about free will.” And he said, I think that we all act every day as if we had free will, so why not believe it? And that’s where I kind of went with it. And by the way, I will add that free will is something that I think the more we have learned about quantum mechanics and the rest of it, the more plausible free will is. The old, Newtonian clockwork world where if you had all the facts, you could utterly predict the future. That just does not square scientifically with what we know now.

Jana Harmon
And of course, love is a completely different thing on the materialistic view, is a complex chemical reaction. But I know a pivotal part of your story involves your wife, Catherine. And love comes into the picture.

Charles Murray
Absolutely.

Jana Harmon
Yes, and that’s something that has to be explained beyond the purely materialistic paradigm.

Charles Murray
Well, here’s what happened. 1985, Katherine and I had our first child together, a little girl named Anna. And Katherine had been just like me in her religious background. Her experience just paralleled mine so much. And a couple of months after Anna was born, Catherine came to me and said, you know, ‘I love Anna more than evolution requires,’ which is a great line, by the way. She felt like there was something deeper that she was experiencing, that is, if she were a conduit for a much larger kind of love than was required by evolution. And that led her to start exploring ways to get back into a religious tradition. And so Catherine got involved in Quakerism, started attending Quaker meeting regularly, and pursued a variety of very serious, like she took a long course in Bible studies. She was active in contemplative prayer. And so I was watching all this for about 10 years. And here’s my situation. I think a lot of people who are kind of casual agnostics, when they hear about people who are deeply religious, tend to say, well, they’re kidding themselves. They’re deluding themselves. And the problem with being married to Catherine is that she has an extraordinary intellect. That’s not just a proud husband saying it. I’m serious. I’m serious. She has an extraordinary intellect.

Jana Harmon
Yes.

Charles Murray
And, so I couldn’t say to myself, oh, she’s kidding herself. She wasn’t kidding herself. And I was also observing in her that she was taking a lot out of this. She was getting a lot out of it. And so I wanted to try to follow along. And problem is that I do not have, I’m not very good at spiritual perception. I have come to believe that there’s an analogy to be made between spiritual perceptiveness and appreciation of fine music. So that I like music, but professional musicians, when they hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, they are hearing a completely different thing from what I’m hearing in terms of their ability to take it all in. So that goes from low to high. Some people are tone deaf at one extreme and other people are deeply moved emotionally and intellectually by great music. I’m somewhere in the middle on that when it comes to spiritual perceptiveness. I’m somewhere way over toward the dumb side of the spectrum. And I’m just, that’s not one of my strengths. So when I wanted to pursue a spiritual journey, a phrase I don’t really like, but that’s what I was doing. It had to be through other means. And so I ended up exploring it much more from a an empirical side than from a directly spiritual side.

Jana Harmon
If you enjoy these conversations, I’d also like to encourage you to check out our growing series of eX-skeptic Guides. Each booklet centers on a question people often ask about God, faith, or Christianity, bringing together 10 stories of former skeptics along with reflection questions and practical advice from those who made the journey. Whether you’re asking Is it rational to believe in God? Can I believe again? Or what if my spouse doesn’t believe? Or simply walking along someone who is asking these questions, these guides are designed to help you continue exploring. Visit exskeptic.org/store to browse the series and find the guide that’s right for you. We hope you’ll take a look. Well, why don’t you take us a little bit on that journey and It seemed to me in your book, and you laid this out so beautifully, how you began to experience some doubts with regard to the materialistic world and the explanations that were brought forward by a purely scientific or scientism-framed view of the world, that you began to take on these larger questions of why is there something rather than nothing? Why does it appear so fine-tuned for life? And those kinds of things. Can you walk us through your journeying as you entered into this larger question of God?

Charles Murray
Think of it as a set of little nudges. So I was not— it was not systematic at all. But as you just said, a friend of mine, In fact, a very well-known friend of mine named Charles Krauthammer, the late columnist. Just one time, he was a good friend of mine and we were talking one night and he phrased the question, why is there something rather than nothing? And I thought Charles had made that up. He hadn’t. It’s a very famous question philosophically. But the nature of the question really struck me. Why is there something rather than nothing? And, the more you think about that, I think the harder it is to get around it. There is, it’s very difficult to believe that the universe we look at now, occurred without any kind of cause. There has to be a cause for several billion galaxies. That’s finally what I was saying. And that doesn’t make me believe in a personal God. It certainly makes me say, along with many others, that atheism is the least probable of all the possible explanations. Simple atheism, where you just simply say there’s nothing out there, the Richard Dawkins there’s nothing out there at all. That’s very hard to square with the existence of the universe. But the real road to Damascus moment for me, it wasn’t a spiritual road to Damascus, it was an intellectual one, came in the early 2000s when I came across a book called Just Six Numbers. It was written by a British astrophysicist He’s not religious himself, but it was about the weird improbability that we would live in a universe that supports life. And when I say improbability, I don’t mean one chance in a hundred. The physicists who have calculated it think it’s one chance in trillions because it’s as if in the moment of the Big Bang, when the universe starts from this infinitesimally small singularity, it’s as if there were a whole variety of settings of what could happen next. Only one in trillions of which would permit life to exist. It was far more likely that we would live in a universe of radiation and no galaxies. Or that we would live in a universe of black holes, which would not permit the development of planets or the elements and would not permit life. There are variety, and the just 6 numbers refer to 6 of these parameters, which are not theoretically derived. They are just brute facts. These are the way they worked out, and if they had been a tiny bit different, then we would not have a universe that would support life. And it turns out there are a couple of dozen of those parameters that had to be tweaked just right. And I’d read all that and I said, this is not religious people saying this. This is the consensus among physicists that there’s only one in several trillion chance. Well, you know what? I don’t believe in several trillion, one in several trillion chances. If I’ve got to believe that it’s that or that there was something intentional about the creation of the universe, I don’t think that the most parsimonious explanation is it’s a one in a trillion chance. I think the more plausible explanation is that the universe is intentional. So that was a big step.

Jana Harmon
Now, of course, there are a lot of, I guess, agnostic scientists who might say, but the multiverse— but there were an infinite number of universes, and we just happen to be in this Goldilocks, just right universe. How would you respond to someone who brings that forward? I know you you talk about that a bit in your book.

Charles Murray
Well, okay, so I go outside on a summer night with a clear sky, and I’m out in the country so we can see lots and lots of stars. And I look up there and I say, that’s really big, you know? And there are billions of galaxies, not billions of stars, there are billions of galaxies. And I say to myself, Okay, there are a million of these universes out there. Jana, I’m saying to you, that’s not very plausible either. And it’s, in fact, a lot of the motivation for coming up with the multiverse theory was not that there was any evidence at all that it’s true, but that if you don’t come up with multiverse theory, you are in the very uncomfortable position of still insisting there are one in trillions chances. And that bothered the physicists too. And I’m oversimplifying, but I think the multiverse theory is their way of avoiding confronting the much more plausible explanation that there is a supreme being that intentionally created the universe to support life.

Jana Harmon
Yeah, that can be uncomfortable, can’t it? If it’s an uncomfortable implication of the beginning of the universe, for example, that there is something rather than nothing, that it seems to be fine-tuned. And, you have to be willing to, as you were doing, it sounds like, accept that implication that there does seem to be some intentionality behind what we’re seeing, because it’s just too infinitely hard to explain from a purely naturalistic process.

Charles Murray
Yes. Yeah, and then after that, well, no, simultaneously with that, I said earlier that I was interested in near-death experiences. When you have a person who is clinically dead, and by that I mean there’s no heartbeat, there’s no respiration, there’s no brain activity, and that person, when they are brought back to life, remember something that happened while they were dead that can be verified. For example, that during the process of being resuscitated, somebody dropped a defibrillator on the man’s foot. I’m just picking that as an example. You have to ask yourself, how is it he knew that? How did he get visual information with no eyes? How did he get oral information about things that people said with no ears? And it’s very hard to come up with an explanation that does not say consciousness can exist outside the brain.

Jana Harmon
You were also reading some literature with regard to terminal lucidity. Can you talk about that for a moment?

Charles Murray
Sure. Terminal lucidity is not as well known as near-death experiences. But in many ways, it’s equally impossible to make consistent with the materialistic explanation of the way consciousness works. Here’s, what terminal lucidity is. And by the way, if you know people who work in hospices, hospice care, and you talk to them, you’re very likely to have them tell you of similar things that they have personally experienced with their patients. You have a person with advanced dementia, clinically diagnosed advanced dementia, which means that the networks in the brain for forming coherent organized thought have been effectively destroyed. They have not recognized their spouse for years. They have not recognized their children for years. They have not said an intelligible word for years. A day or two before they die, they’re suddenly back. And by back, I don’t mean they mumble a few words that can be interpreted. I mean they engage in conversations. They have memories about— they know who their spouse is, they know who their kids are, they have memories about what happened. They have even memories about what it’s been like while they were away, as it were. Their old parent personality characteristics appear. So what’s that all about? Then this will last maybe 15 minutes, maybe an hour, maybe 2 hours. And then there’s a relapse. And then within a day or so, there’s death. There are lots of extremely well-documented cases, clinically documented by physicians and other scientific personnel. Very hard to reconcile with the materialist view of consciousness. I can’t reconcile them. So that’s another big step, because once you acknowledge that consciousness can exist outside the brain, you are acknowledging that you seem to be talking about the human soul.

Jana Harmon
Yes.

Charles Murray
And so every religious belief regarding the soul is on the table.

Jana Harmon
So that definitely opened the door of beyond a materialistic worldview. Now, you speak also about the brilliant C.S. Lewis having a role in your intellectual journeying. Talk with us about that.

Charles Murray
Oh, I was one of those people of the millions who have read Mere Christianity and have been blown away by it. It is such a luminously intelligent book, and by that I don’t mean it’s a weighty book, not at all. In fact, Mere Christianity started out as radio lectures during World War II that C.S. Lewis gave over the radio, and they have that same sound of a casual, informal disquisition, but it’s brilliantly put together. And his way of writing is such that as he’s talking about Christianity in particular, you will say to yourself, well, here’s what I don’t agree with. And then the next paragraph, C.S. Lewis will be saying, perhaps you’re thinking of that. And then he answers your objection. Yes. And so it’s a great, it’s a wonderful book. I, if you have not read it, whether you are a Christian or not, I enthusiastically recommend it. And so I’ve read C.S. Lewis, and he has a real challenge for you. He says there that with Jesus of Nazareth, you have three choices. He is either a liar, in the claims that he made about his relationship with God. He is a lunatic because, as C.S. Lewis says, if he did not have that relationship with God and he says those things, you’re talking about lunacy on the same level as the man who thinks he is a poached egg, to use C.S. Lewis’s wording. And your third choice is to say, “No, he was telling the truth, that he did have the special relationship with God, the Son of God.” Well, I read that and I say, “I’m not sure that I have to accept that.” And what C.S. Lewis’s challenge did for me is to say, “Okay, it’s not good enough to say I don’t believe this stuff. I’ve got to look into the historicity of the New Testament. I’ve got to look into what we know about, that would suggest that I’m stuck with those three alternatives that Lewis gave me”. Now, that led me down a completely different track, a really fascinating track of lots of specifically Christian literature.

Jana Harmon
And what did you find? Did you find that you ended up agreeing more with the revisionists who were trying to interpret Christ as a later invention, perhaps adding that a fourth category to that trilemma? Maybe he’s legend, you know, maybe he’s not who he says he was. Or did you end up, by doing your research, end up in the more, I guess, traditional view of the scripture, that the early dating, that there were witness eyewitnesses, that they were speaking of things that were historically verifiable at the time of Christ? Where did you end up landing in your investigation?

Charles Murray
Well, it’s a slow process. The first thing that I realized upon getting into this is the incredible amount of scholarship that has gone into religious studies over the last two millennia. If you’ve never looked into it, you have no idea of the depth and the minutia of the examinations. The first big step in all of this was I ran across a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. It was published around 2006. It’s by a British theologian, and he presents what he described as definitely a minority view among modern theological Christian scholarship. He was saying that there is good internal evidence within the Gospels that they were consciously written to emphasize the degree to which what they were describing was the testimony of eyewitnesses. And he has a fascinating set— this is an extremely scholarly book, filled with lots of empirical information, lots of good technical reasons for believing his thesis is correct, and it was absolutely fascinating. And one of the things that I found most fascinating was his discussion of the very early church fathers in the 2nd century and the 1st century, who, well, you know how they will say, if you read it, they will say there is a Christian tradition that John, the Book of John, was written by the Apostle John in his old age, but we don’t take that seriously. We think that John was attached to that for spurious reasons, and he had nothing to do with it. Okay, so I say to myself, well, when they say there is a tradition that John wrote it, what do they mean by that? And I was able to read some of the actual quotations of the writings of the very early people, and so the tradition, as it’s called, are some very persuasive writings that still exist which talk explicitly about not only that John wrote it, but they talk about why John wrote the Gospel. Okay, so that’s not just sort of a vague tradition. Those are in surviving writings of very— well, I’m saying to myself, why should I think the revisionists who come up with very different assessments of the validity of the Gospels And knowing that the revisionists in recent decades do not have access to nearly the sources that the early Christian writers had access to, and given the indications that these were smart people who were writing these early writings, why should I believe the revisionists are right and the original accounts are wrong? And I subsequently then got involved in a variety of other issues, all of which I got a sequence of surprises. And one is that things that would seem implausible to me about the accuracy of the Gospels turn out upon close examination to be pretty plausible after all.

Jana Harmon
Richard Bauckham, is that the Jesus and the Eyewitnesses book that you’re referring to? Now there, that’s saying something in terms of the, the depth of analysis that you did and really looking at, at things objectively, both the revisionists and the traditionalists, and coming to that conclusion. There’s also, you said you overturned several different stones, one of which was to look at the Shroud of Turin, which I think is also very interesting considering the Christian claim that Jesus died and rose again. And of course, that is the linchpin of the Christian faith. If Jesus didn’t rise, our faith is in vain, Paul says to the Corinthians. So what did you find when you actually looked at the Shroud of Turin? Was that indeed a medieval forgery, or did you find substance to that that would counter that in terms of that it may be a credible artifact of the man on the cross?

Charles Murray
Well, the short story is that I think there’s quite striking evidence that the Shroud of Turin is real. However, I hesitated to put that into the book. The reason that I hesitated to put it in is that it is so baffling, that piece of linen, that a lot of people assume that it is proved to be a medieval fraud by the carbon dating that happened in the 1980s. And so I have a lot of ground to make up to try to present in a fairly short presentation the evidence that no, it’s not a medieval fraud. It’s much stronger evidence that it’s older. And there are characteristics of the Shroud that we simply do not know how they could possibly have been produced. And when I say we, I don’t mean believers. There was a set of physical scientists who were allowed to examine the Shroud back in 1978, ’79, given access by the Catholic Church. They performed a wide variety of highly technical chemical analyses of it. And their short answer in the technical report that they published in a chemistry journal, a very technical chemistry journal, was that they had no hypotheses that could possibly explain. But what they could rule out, it was not painted, it was not applied with a brush. Whatever created the image, It was extraordinarily superficial. I’ll just go a little more detail on this to give people a sense of how weird this piece of cloth is. You have on the cloth that we see very faint outlines, frontal and dorsal, of a human image. Very hard to make it out, but you sort of can. A negative of the photograph of the Shroud of Turin reveals a very detailed picture of somebody who has all the signs of experiencing all the episodes in the New Testament description of the hours leading up to the crucifixion. Evidence of the crown of thorns, evidence of the lashing, evidence of the pierced wrists and the pierced foot. All right, where does all that detailed information that came up in the negative come from? And the answer is that the tinting of the Shroud only goes about 1 or 2 microns deep on the cloth. Micron refers to millionths of a meter. There is no way to color a couple of microns of a fiber and not color anything deeper than that. Just don’t know how to do it. And there’s a lot of other stuff too that makes it plausible that the Shroud of Turin really was in Palestine 2,000 years ago that I won’t go into. I will simply say that you cannot look at all the scientific material in the Shroud of Turin and discard the notion that it is recording, in effect, the resurrection of Christ. Now, I guess I would like to emphasize you don’t have to resort to the Shroud of Turin to have a different view of the resurrection than you have if you have never looked into this before. You know, if you’ve never looked into the details about the resurrection story, it would seem really easy to discredit it. I mean, it’s so implausible to begin with. But you say to yourself, look, why can’t you just say that the disciples made it up? And, or why can’t you say the disciples stole the body away themselves and then pretended that it was resurrected? And I won’t go through a long list of the reasons why this doesn’t work. I will say first, examine closely all of those scenarios are really hard to reconcile. But beyond all the details about why it’s hard to reconcile with the easy answers to the resurrection is that we know something is true. But we don’t need to rely on the details of the New Testament to know this is true. You have the disciples, who are illiterate, with perhaps the exception of Matthew, illiterate Palestinian fishermen and manual workers. Fine people, but we’re not talking about PR men. We aren’t talking about modern sophisticated representatives. You’re talking about followers of a teacher. Who over the course of the week from Palm Sunday to the crucifixion had their world ripped apart. They were, after the crucifixion, one has to say, they had to be some of the most demoralized people ever. Everything had come tumbling down in ashes., and they were also in danger of being persecuted themselves. We know that something happened, which meant that a few weeks later you have these demoralized men preaching confidently without hesitation that Jesus has risen. Doing this at a time at which all the authorities had to do is to go to the tomb, which everybody knew where the tomb was, and open the tomb and show them the, you know, moldering body of Jesus. Something happened. Something absolutely transfixing and energizing happened.

Jana Harmon
Yeah, it is an extraordinary tale. And the question is, is it true? And it sounds like that you have walked us through quite a lot, and I can imagine it has been years and a process of looking in and under, you know, reading and thinking and understanding all the way from those large philosophical questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? And, why is there seeming to be consciousness? And why is the universe fine-tuned? And, and something we haven’t even talked about, why does there seem to be objective morality? You know, these moral laws that we can’t seem to escape. And then, moving into the real historicity of the story in the Gospels and again, you do such a beautiful job of kind of slow walking us through, but in such an accessible and beautiful way, what you found. You’re creating a cumulative case by which you’re putting pieces into a puzzle that in a comprehensive way seem to make sense together. And I’m wondering, after these 20, 25 years and of, of walking through this intellectual journeying, through religion. You took religion seriously, which you didn’t really think you ever would, and you did. And then you took Christianity seriously. So where does— where do you land after learning all of this?

Charles Murray
Fair question. I try to address that in the book directly, too. And I land at a place that I find to be not my preferred place. You see, here’s, when people talk about the gift of faith, that is not just a figure of speech. Whether it’s in my own personality or whether it’s in the environment in which I grew up and so forth, I don’t know what the cause is. But I have a well, partly it’s my profession. I mean, my profession is basically applied statistics and the books that I have written that are the social policy books, which is what my career is all about, are all densely empirical. And if that’s the case, I have spent my life every day, all day, always looking at things from a purely empirical point of view. And it turns out that in your 60s and 70s and 80s, it’s kind of hard to give that up if that’s the way you’ve lived. You ask the fair question, where do I land? Well, there are a variety of things I’ve, where I land confidently that I want to say to people like me who are still not taking religion seriously, here’s some things I think you ought to take on board. One of the things I think my fellow unreflective agnostics ought to say to themselves is maybe the position of science and religion has reversed in the last century. You know, there is a phrase called ‘God of the gaps,’ which came into use the last couple of century, and it refers to belief in God as a way of explaining things that science cannot explain. And 5 centuries ago, science could explain very little. And so thunderstorms could be seen as God’s way of expressing his displeasure, earthquakes and plagues and a whole variety of things were gaps that religion explained. And one after another, those gaps were closed as science explained more and more. And some of the heaviest blows occurred during the 19th century. So Darwin, big deal, you know, the theory of evolution as opposed to the creation story. And for that matter, Freudian psychology, which sort of took the idea of sin and replaced it with an overactive superego, and for that matter, relativity. And there’s a whole variety of ways in which it seemed easier and easier over the course of the 19th century that the gaps were shrinking down to the point that you didn’t need religion anymore. What was different about the 20th century is that all at once science started coming up with new findings that they did not have answers for that religion did, and the most obvious in that case is the Big Bang. I mean, physicists resisted the Big Bang furiously for decades, and they resisted it in large part because it just sounded too close to the story of Genesis with a scientific gloss on it. You know, God said, let there be light, and there was light. Well, that’s pretty much what the Big Bang was, and also the idea that the universe started in a singularity, an infinitely small, infinitely dense point, that’s just bizarre. So science is forced back on that. It does not have anything more plausible than multiverses to explain it, and, religion has a very plausible, coordinated theory that fits the facts. And that’s one way in which the situation of science flipped. And the other one is the one we’ve talked about already, consciousness. That it’s not getting easier for science to explain consciousness as the 20th century went on. It kept getting harder and harder and harder. Another thing that I recommend to unreflective atheists that I took away from all this is you’ve got to make yourself open to the idea of a personal God. Because there is too much evidence out there. It’s unsystematic in many cases. It is, does not lend itself to laboratory verification in other cases. Just too many evidences of supernatural happenings that point toward a personal God. And this is where I think that people, well, one of the things that you do if you’re an applied statistician and you are very devoted to data and empiricism is you’re comfortable thinking in terms of probabilities. Okay? So let’s say we’re talking about the afterlife. Am I absolutely certain that I will have an afterlife after when I die? The answer is no, I’m not. I think there is a very strong possibility that I will. I find that a lot of people who are devout Christians find that very irritating to speak in terms of probabilities instead of certainties. But if that’s the way you’re, if that’s what you think, then you just acknowledge that’s the way you think. But I will also say to to you that if you want some concrete evidence that this is valuable, I will simply point out that I’ve spent the last 20 years heading into old age not being afraid of death. And part of the reason I have not felt that is that if you think you live in an intentional universe, that kind of changes everything in terms of your relationship to the universe. And I have also come to believe in an intellectual sense in what my wife, I think, believes at a much deeper, more meaningful sense. And that is that there is something about this being we call God that is coincident with love. I’m referring to love specifically with the terms of the Greek agape, the selfless unconditional love. But I think that if you’re talking about a word that’s as emotive as love, I think that it would be nice if I could talk about it with more emotion than I am. But I am convinced that this is at the heart of things. And so things like God’s grace had become real to me. The sense that I can be forgiven for acts that I find it hard to forgive myself for has become real to me. I may not have come up with the best of all possible ways to acquire a religious outlook, but it’s a lot better than nothing and a lot better than not taking religion seriously.

Jana Harmon
Hearing you speak reminds me of Socrates’ famous phrase, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Sounds like you really have moved from that unreflective kind of secularism to a place where you decided to reflect, you decided to investigate, you decided to look and to see, you know, to really consider deeply these bigger and larger questions. And I love where it has landed you, honestly, and that you’re encouraging others to do the same.

Charles Murray
I hope it has that effect.

Jana Harmon
Yeah, yeah. I think that your writing, your speaking about it, especially in a world oftentimes where, where religion is so dismissed out of hand, where it’s not given serious thought until perhaps maybe it’s too late. But you have actually taken the time to do due diligence to the— I think the most important question of all is, does God exist and what does that mean for us?

Charles Murray
I guess that if I were trying to tell people, the message I would like them to take away is not just what I’ve said about enriching your life, But I also want to say to them, this is fascinating stuff. Of what went into all the reading I did and the rest of it was not a solemn duty that I did. It was engaging in intellectual issues and empirical issues that I didn’t know that there were two sides to the story. And I discovered the two sides to the story. And not only did I discover all these really smart people who believe that stuff, but I also discovered all the reasons that smart people legitimately need to do this. And so it’s not just a spiritual journey. It is also an intellectually exciting and engaging journey.

Jana Harmon
Yes, it is. It certainly is. And again, It’s— you’re swimming in deep waters that, that bring so much meaning and depth and understanding, not only to reality and your understanding of it, but to your own life. And I know that people are going to listen to you, they’re going to be inspired by your journey, and hopefully will, will look into some of this rich, fascinating literature. And it’s more than just literature, it’s just— it’s again, it’s the stuff of life. It’s the stuff that’s real. And I know that so many are going to be really encouraged to not only read your book and look at the sources that you investigated, but also perhaps to go on a journey for themselves. So thank you so much for taking religion seriously, for taking Christianity seriously, for being being really the counter to that negative presumption or stereotype that stupid people can’t believe that stuff. You’re sitting here as someone, again, with such gravitas, but yet you are someone who’s saying, no, take this seriously. It is worth looking into. It’s worth believing. So thank you so much for talking with me today, Charles.

Charles Murray
I’ve enjoyed it. Enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you.

Jana Harmon
That was Charles Murray. What makes Charles’s story so compelling is not that it lands in a simple or tidy place, but that it models something many people never do. He was willing to re-examine the assumptions he had absorbed for decades and to ask whether the secular story of reality was really sufficient. And in doing so, he discovered that belief in God was not something beneath serious serious thought, but something that can lead you into it. For some of you listening, you may resonate with that kind of a journey. Maybe you’re not coming from a place of hostility towards belief, but from a distance and uncertainty, a sense that religion has seemed simply unnecessary, irrelevant, or unpersuasive. Charles’ story is a reminder that these questions are still worth asking, that you are taking taking them seriously may open the door for more than you ever expected. At eX-skeptic, we share unlikely stories of belief because these stories invite all of us to think more deeply about the things that matter the most. So whether you’re curious, questioning, or trying to understand how others have made sense of God, Jesus, and reality, we’re grateful that you’ve joined us. If this conversation resonated with you, subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend. And if you have questions or doubts and would like to talk with a former guest, connect with us at info@exskeptic.org. You can also explore our curated YouTube playlists on big questions like, Is it rational to believe? Is Christianity true? and many others. eX-skeptic is part of the C.S. Lewis Institute podcast network. Our producer is Ashley Kelfer, and thank you for listening.