Casual Conversation April 19th with Charles Murray

Independent scholar Charles Murray will return to be our guest for a Casual Conversation on Sunday, April 19 at 3 pm.  Last time Mr. Murray spoke to us about the possible causes for exceptional accomplishment by Jews.  This time will be more directly about religion: his own investigation of faith and more particularly the Christian faith.   You will find his journey about and into faith chronicled in his new book Taking Religion Seriously (Encounter Books 2025). 

Barton Swain reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal:

[A]theism is too boring to hold the attention of literate people for more than a few years at a time. I am reinforced in this view by the publication of Charles Murray’s “Taking Religion Seriously.” With this short book Mr. Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, joins the roster of formerly agnostic or atheistic intellectuals.

. . .

The book is a highly personal and readable account of a profound change in the author’s outlook: one that grew gradually over the course of decades but has lately blossomed into a kind of faltering, guileless Christian belief.

Whatever else may be said about Mr. Murray, he can’t be accused of dishonesty or cowardice. He has a penchant for saying what many other writers and scholars know but either can’t say or can’t say clearly and without a thousand qualifications. He has often been typecast in liberal organs as an ideologue, but that is exactly wrong: Reading Mr. Murray’s work—this is most plainly true in “Losing Ground” and “Coming Apart”—you often sense that the writer would rather draw different conclusions but, in view of the evidence, can’t.

Our guest starts with the Quaker faith of his wife, with whom he has shared a long marriage.  His wife’s long road to finding spiritual meaning in religion persuaded Mr. Murray to explore religion but not to fill a God-sized hole created by a level of despair that persuades others to seek consolation and meaning in religion.  Mr. Murray’s method was not through an epiphany-like spirituality, but rather through a close examination of facts and theories that draws upon his analytic skills, what he calls “deploy[ing] alternative strategies.”

Mr. Murray begins with science and the Big Bang associating it with the anthropic principle that the universe is so finely balanced to permit life that it has been created to allow us to exist.  (The usual response is that it is the reverse: we are here because we happen to live in a universe that is fit for us, not that the universe was created so that we could live here.  Chicken or egg, we are still here.)  I find that the Big Bang (which may or may not have existed given the alternative explanation of a bounce-back universe) is far more difficult to rebut.  As Mr. Murray explains, there is always in our seeking an answer one more turtle beyond that which we can observe, a prior cause always exists beyond our ken.  Always.  This is the reason why Martin Gardner, in his book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener devotes a chapter to why he is not an atheist.  For Gardner there is always another why, and that would be the case for even the author of Before the Big Bang,  Laura Mersini-Houghton, who brings us to the earliest point yet in our universe’s creation, and why some “bubbles” of quantum energy make it through expansion and others do not.

Included in his book is a discussion of three propositions (psi, NDE, and terminal lucidity—the last having been discussed in our Casual Conversation about hospice care and death) that he believes refute the materialist view of consciousness, his answer to the “hard problem”:  “If I am not just a brain in a body, what am I?  I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”  (As to psi, the Amazing Randi $1 million challenge remains uncollected.  On psi, I am with Houdini and not his erstwhile friend Arthur Conan Doyle.)

The most impressive part of the book relates his research into the dating of the Synoptic Gospels (with the aid of an exami9nation of the Acts of the Apostles) to a time before the destruction of the Second Temple, much closer to the life and death of Jesus.  Here is where Mr. Murray excels and a lifetime of close reading of texts results in an argument that is a pleasure to read.  From this he states: “I am persuaded that the Gospels contain a great deal of material from eyewitnesses who were reporting real events, who might reasonably be expected to have memorized Jesus’s core teachings, and who may be expected to have repeated them accurately.”

Without trying to detail each of Mr. Murray’s propositions in this short but densely packed book, I think it appropriate to state two more facts about Mr. Murray beyond the descriptions of him by the WSJ reviewer.  First, Mr. Murray is an omnivorous reader, and he provides us with a list of books he has consulted that inform his writing, both for and against his positions.  Second, he is modest about what he has achieved for himself in his examination of religion.  For example: “If I am to treat the Gospels as generally trustworthy, why should I reject the Gospels’ four consistent and detailed accounts of the same event?  [He is ambivalently dismissive of Q, favoring eyewitness testimony as an explanation.]  Faith that miracles are not possible?  It is a question that I still have not resolved to my own satisfaction.”  Mr. Murray credits revisionists (the naysayers) for their many specifics of evidence of augmentation and redaction of the Gospels.  (My question: Which?) And he concludes by admitting that has “yet to experience the joys of faith.  . . . [But m]y haphazard pilgrimage has already led me to believe that I live in a universe made meaningful by love and grace.  That’s a lot.”

Mr. Murray has been persuaded to join us by his friend and our classmate, Tax Talmadge and we owe Tex a debt of gratitude.  If you want to join us to discuss with Murray his journey into theology and religion (not always the same), let me know by sending me an email by the close of business on Friday, April 17 at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .  And you really ought to join us: we have discussed Senaca and end-of-life.  But is end-of-life the end?  Be like Charles Murray and Michael Shermer and take on all challenges and challengers: after all, why did you go to an Ivy League school?

Arthur Fergenson

P.S. By the way, I subscribe to the religion-in-the-public-square First Things, and both Skeptical Inquirer and SKEPTIC Magazine. Don’t you?