Speaker 1: Life audio.
Speaker 2: What do you even mean by taking religion seriously?
Speaker 1: Because I didn't take it seriously for a long time.
Speaker 1: I was always open to there's a mystery about the
Speaker 1: universe that was always out there.
Speaker 2: This is really important for people to hear because it's
Speaker 2: not always this aggressive atheist agnostic professor. It's just kind
Speaker 2: of subtle dismissal of religion that if you want to
Speaker 2: fit in, you just don't believe.
Speaker 1: Finally, in the mid nineteen nineties, I was getting moved
Speaker 1: away from my simple lack of attention to religion.
Speaker 2: Why would a Harvard and MIT trained policy analyst who
Speaker 2: was thoroughly socialized to be secular write a book describing
Speaker 2: his journey from happy agnostic to Christian. Our guest today
Speaker 2: is Charles Murray, author of the new book Taking Religion Seriously. Charles,
Speaker 2: thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 1: It's my pleasure.
Speaker 2: Well, let's just start right with the title of your book.
Speaker 2: What do you even mean by taking religion seriously?
Speaker 1: Because I didn't take it seriously for a long time,
Speaker 1: And by taking it seriously, I mean and I'm speaking
Speaker 1: to unbelievers. As I say in the introduction, there are
Speaker 1: tens of millions of people like me who are well educated,
Speaker 1: were professionally successful, and religionist has not been an important
Speaker 1: part of our life, and a lot of us have
Speaker 1: sort of assumed from the time we were in college
Speaker 1: that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. In my case,
Speaker 1: I went from Newton, Iowa, where I was raised a Presbyterian.
Speaker 1: My family would go to church every week, and I'd
Speaker 1: go with them, but I was not deeply committed. And
Speaker 1: I get to Harvard and I like to fit in,
Speaker 1: and I learned that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore.
Speaker 1: And I bought into that just the same way I
Speaker 1: think an awful lot of other people people did, and
Speaker 1: we've never really given it much thought. And I'm saying
Speaker 1: to them, look, I'm not trying to proselytize, not trying
Speaker 1: to get you to do anything in particular except realize,
Speaker 1: you've got to look at this stuff. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of material here you need to confront.
Speaker 2: Tell me a little bit more about that socialization process.
Speaker 2: She talked about having a faith it didn't take seriously,
Speaker 2: but maybe bleeded in God on some level. Were people
Speaker 2: trying to talk you out of your faith? Like, how
Speaker 2: did you come to the point that you were a
Speaker 2: materialist or close to being a materialist.
Speaker 1: That's the interesting thing that nobody worked hard to convert me.
Speaker 1: I took no courses on Thomas Aquinas's mistakes, okay, And
Speaker 1: in fact, basically the subject of religion just never came up,
Speaker 1: and if it did, it was usually of dismissively or
Speaker 1: sometimes the subject of humor. I didn't have any friends
Speaker 1: who were noticeably religious. It was just in the air,
Speaker 1: the zeitgeist, and I bought into that this.
Speaker 2: Is really important for people to hear because it's not
Speaker 2: always this aggressive atheist agnostic professor. It's just kind of
Speaker 2: subtle dismissal of religion that if you want to fit in,
Speaker 2: you just don't believe. And so a lot of it,
Speaker 2: arguably they describe it happened more under the surface than
Speaker 2: it did above the surface. So or go ahead, were
Speaker 2: you going to jump in?
Speaker 1: Well, I just wanted to point out two things. Also,
Speaker 1: you go to college like that, and you have a
Speaker 1: few things that militate against religious belief. One of them,
Speaker 1: of course, is the argument, look, we are human beings
Speaker 1: who are more advanced animals than others. We've all reached
Speaker 1: this through the same process of evolution, and whereas we
Speaker 1: have consciousness and other animals don't, there's no reason to
Speaker 1: think that there's anything that goes on after the brain
Speaker 1: stops functioning. And another thing is you learn about a
Speaker 1: universe that has a billion galaxies, not a billion stars,
Speaker 1: but a million galaxies and tens of millions of light
Speaker 1: years across, and the whole idea of a personal god
Speaker 1: just says, of course, not that that's not in the
Speaker 1: rem of possibility.
Speaker 2: So tell me a little about what you mean by
Speaker 2: happy agnostic. And I love this because I just interviewed
Speaker 2: somebody who describes herself as a little bit more of
Speaker 2: an aggressive atheist, and it seems to me you're not
Speaker 2: on some spiritual journey trying to disprove religion. You're just
Speaker 2: kind of live in your life, and yet these questions emerge.
Speaker 2: So talk a little about why you describe yourself as
Speaker 2: a happy agnostic and what that meant.
Speaker 1: Well, it was a particular period of my life. I
Speaker 1: can pinpoint of nineteen eighty five. July nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: My wife and I have been married for two years.
Speaker 1: She's my soulmate. I've never been happy beer and we
Speaker 1: just have a new daughter, and I just had a
Speaker 1: successful book, an unexpectedly successful book, at the opening of
Speaker 1: my public career, and life was complete. And it was
Speaker 1: at that point, a couple of months after the birth
Speaker 1: of our daughter, Anna, that my wife came to me
Speaker 1: and was talking about the love that she felt for Anna,
Speaker 1: and she said, I love her far more than evolution requires,
Speaker 1: which is a great it's a great line. It is yeah,
Speaker 1: in several ways. One is I'm Harvard and mit, she's
Speaker 1: Oxford and Yale. Okay, this is what this is the
Speaker 1: way you put it, love her more than evolution requires.
Speaker 1: And what she was saying was that something else was
Speaker 1: going on, and she felt that she was a conduit
Speaker 1: for some larger love. And you know, an awful lot
Speaker 1: of people in my position dismiss openly spiritual believers because
Speaker 1: we say, well, they're kidding themselves, they're deluding themselves. Maybe
Speaker 1: they aren't that smart. I could say none of those
Speaker 1: things about my wife, so I did not have the
Speaker 1: option of dismissing her experience. And you were quite correct
Speaker 1: the way you described me. I was never a militant atheist.
Speaker 1: In fact, I use the word agnostic advisedly because I
Speaker 1: go along with the proposition that of all the religious positions,
Speaker 1: simple atheism is at least plausible. So I was always open.
Speaker 1: There's something, there's a mystery about the universe that was
Speaker 1: always out there. But that was nineteen eighty five that
Speaker 1: my wife she migrated to Quakerism. And whereas a lot
Speaker 1: of Quakers are socially active and not all that spiritual,
Speaker 1: she's a spiritually active Quaker. And I watched her for
Speaker 1: ten years moving along her discoveries. The way she put
Speaker 1: it is that it was like being in a room
Speaker 1: with a light on a rheostat, and as time went on,
Speaker 1: the light got brighter and brighter in terms of her
Speaker 1: own developing faith. And finally, by the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: I was getting moved away from my simple, my simple
Speaker 1: lack of attention to religion.
Speaker 2: So if I'm hearing correctly, at the birth of your child,
Speaker 2: this just stirs something up in her, this deeper love
Speaker 2: that she doesn't think can be reduced to this evolutionary
Speaker 2: kind of survival mode of mother's biologically caring for the child.
Speaker 2: Her response is to go to a Quaker church and
Speaker 2: start kind of growing and adapting spiritually. Ten years past,
Speaker 2: what's happening in your mind? Are you intrigued by this?
Speaker 2: Are you upset by this? Like what's happening for this
Speaker 2: decade in your world?
Speaker 1: I watched her lovingly and encouragingly of I thought this
Speaker 1: was a good thing that she was doing. It, just
Speaker 1: didn't you know, what does it have to do with me?
Speaker 1: And the answer was, and here's where we get down
Speaker 1: to a something that I've taken away that I've come
Speaker 1: to believe I did not believe at the time. That
Speaker 1: is that receptivity perceptual ability when it comes to spiritual
Speaker 1: things is like any other human trait. It goes from
Speaker 1: low to high in different human beings. And I like
Speaker 1: to use the analogy with music. I've had professional musicians
Speaker 1: who when they hear music, they're hearing something completely different
Speaker 1: from what I hear. They are getting an emotional impact,
Speaker 1: from an intellectual impact, from a spiritual impact from it.
Speaker 1: Oftentimes that I don't get. I loved I love a
Speaker 1: Beethoven symphony or a Mozart sonata, but I'm not hearing
Speaker 1: what they hear. I don't have as much RECEPTIVI music,
Speaker 1: and some people are simply tone deaf too well. I
Speaker 1: think with spirituality, I'm deficient. If you know, if you
Speaker 1: think suppose that we suppose we score spirituality the same
Speaker 1: way we score IQ, I'd be somewhere around seventy or
Speaker 1: seventy five, and my wife is way up there. And
Speaker 1: if that's the case, when you start to take religion
Speaker 1: seriously in a way, I don't have the same option
Speaker 1: she did. I can you know, for example, she is
Speaker 1: very active and contemporary, and I was unable to follow
Speaker 1: into that. But at the same time, since I wanted
Speaker 1: to take it seriously, I'll keep going back to that phrase.
Speaker 1: I ended up going a more empirical route, and I
Speaker 1: was pushed along in that. I did have a sort
Speaker 1: of road to Damascus moment, but it wasn't spiritual. It
Speaker 1: was when I read a book called Just Six Numbers,
Speaker 1: which was by a British astrophysicist, and this was not
Speaker 1: had no religious overtones. He was talking about the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: and he was talking about something that physicists have known
Speaker 1: since the nineteen seventies, which is that at the moment
Speaker 1: of the Big Bang, when the universe emerged out of nothing,
Speaker 1: a dimensionless point and not only space where probably time
Speaker 1: was created, it's as if there were a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of settings which, if they had not all been perfectly aligned,
Speaker 1: would have produced a universe in which life was not possible.
Speaker 1: It would have been a universe that was radiation but
Speaker 1: no stars and galaxies, a universe with black holes. And
Speaker 1: instead we get a universe that creates all the elements,
Speaker 1: and the elements create planets eventually and stars, which eventually
Speaker 1: enable life. The chances against that are about a trillion
Speaker 1: to one, and that calculation actually is by another astrophysicist,
Speaker 1: a Nobel Prize winner, and I read that, I said
Speaker 1: a trillion to one chance against this happening. I don't
Speaker 1: believe in trillion to one chances, and I was left
Speaker 1: with the option of believing in the multiverse, which is
Speaker 1: the theory, and it's purely theory that there are millions
Speaker 1: of universes like this. To me just not that's just
Speaker 1: I can't buy into that in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1: And the only plausible opportunity is that there is an
Speaker 1: intention behind the universe. And simply saying that to myself
Speaker 1: was a big step.
Speaker 2: As an apologist. Hearing somebody have a Damascus Road experience
Speaker 2: that involves reading a science and philosophy. Book actually makes
Speaker 2: me really happy to hear that. On one level, Before
Speaker 2: we get to some of the evidence, you cite some
Speaker 2: other historical and scientific evidence that was pivotal along your journey.
Speaker 2: Let me take a step back for a minute. So
Speaker 2: you see your wife over this ten years kind of
Speaker 2: growing and expanding. You're trying to be loving to her.
Speaker 2: You ended up reading this book, so you had some
Speaker 2: intentionality spiritually. What was your goal and what was your
Speaker 2: mindset to get to that point? And since you didn't
Speaker 2: go to a Quaker services that were seen more experiential
Speaker 2: like your wife had, what kind of investigation were you
Speaker 2: intending to pursue.
Speaker 1: Well, the first point is that I started attending Quaker
Speaker 1: meeting regularly with her in the mid nineteen nineties because
Speaker 1: by that time we had a second child and both
Speaker 1: of the children were old enough to go to what
Speaker 1: Quakers call first day school Sunday School. And I felt
Speaker 1: very strongly then that it's a good children should grow
Speaker 1: up in a religious tradition. I was very much in
Speaker 1: favor that I should support that. But here's the it.
Speaker 1: With a Quaker meeting, I'm bad at meditation. I try,
Speaker 1: I try, and I just lose my focus. But it
Speaker 1: is permissible a Quaker meeting, not encouraged, but permissible to
Speaker 1: read the Bible. So I would take the Bible with
Speaker 1: me and I would read that maybe half an hour
Speaker 1: out of the hour of the Quaker service Sunday. Well,
Speaker 1: over several years you read a lot of the Bible
Speaker 1: that way, and the New Testament. I read the New Testament,
Speaker 1: you know, repeatedly, and different portions of it. So I
Speaker 1: was acquiring that kind of knowledge. I was persuaded even
Speaker 1: before I read just six numbers about the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: you know, the famous question why is there something rather
Speaker 1: than nothing? That was that was very much in my
Speaker 1: mind in the last half of the nineties, the whole
Speaker 1: point about the simplicity of the relationship between mathematics and
Speaker 1: the physical world. I kept thinking, why should it be
Speaker 1: that something like the eee equals mc square of Einstein's
Speaker 1: famous theory, Why should that be mathematically so simple. It's
Speaker 1: as if the mathematics would not be that simple unless
Speaker 1: assembly had planned it that way. So there was a
Speaker 1: series of nudges, and of a couple of things happened
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five. Well, first I wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Human Accomplishment, long book about the arts and
Speaker 1: sciences and the great accomplishments in it. And I had
Speaker 1: a Catholic friend, Michael Novak, who's a famous Catholic philosopher,
Speaker 1: not theologian, but anyway, he said to me when I
Speaker 1: set out on the book, he said, I think you're
Speaker 1: going to find as you go into this that Christianity
Speaker 1: played a huge role in Western civilization, developing the arts
Speaker 1: and sciences. And I liked Michael a Latin, and admired him,
Speaker 1: but I said to myself, well, you know, the Greeks
Speaker 1: were kind of their first in terms of Plato and
Speaker 1: Aristotle and logic. But I didn't argue with him. And
Speaker 1: then as I worked in the book, I was increasingly
Speaker 1: impressed by the fundamental role that Christianity played, not just
Speaker 1: in the arts, where Christianity was very obviously the inspiration
Speaker 1: for an awful lot of the great visual art, a
Speaker 1: lot of the great music, a lot of the great literature,
Speaker 1: but also the sciences. So I came to the end
Speaker 1: of writing Human Accomplishment in a Round two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: and I was already bothered by the degree to which
Speaker 1: Christianity had had this powerful impact and on the last
Speaker 1: page of the book, I said, you know, you have
Speaker 1: to realize how many of these great creators of art
Speaker 1: and literature were devout Christians. And I had a sentence
Speaker 1: that said, Johan's Austin Bach doesn't have to explain himself.
Speaker 1: He does not have to defend his way of looking
Speaker 1: at the world. His music does it for him. And
Speaker 1: so I was opened up by that point. Then I
Speaker 1: read Cus, then I read C. S. Lewis, and I
Speaker 1: was sort of tipped over the edge into a whole
Speaker 1: new set of things.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we're going to come back to that. That
Speaker 2: CS Lewis moment seems really significant. But I'm trying to
Speaker 2: get in your mindset year. This kind of starts in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five, and then you're kind of tipped towards Christianity,
Speaker 2: like two decades later in two thousand and five. And
Speaker 2: during this time you're writing books on other stuff, being
Speaker 2: a policy analyst. Is this kind of a hobby for you?
Speaker 2: Is it in the back of your mind that's just
Speaker 2: kind of gnawing you, Like, what was your mindset and
Speaker 2: intentionality in discovering the truth about these questions during that
Speaker 2: two decades.
Speaker 1: I had a sense that my wife was acquiring stuff
Speaker 1: in her life that I envied, and so I had
Speaker 1: a not very well articulated desire to participate in that.
Speaker 1: And also, even before I read the Big Bang material,
Speaker 1: I would run into things like near death experiences, which
Speaker 1: I had done a lot of reading in that, and
Speaker 1: I'd done a lot of reading for a long time,
Speaker 1: and I took a lot of those accounts seriously. But
Speaker 1: then it sort of grows inside me that, you know,
Speaker 1: if these near death experiences are real, it means consciousness
Speaker 1: can exist outside the brain. And so that was hovering
Speaker 1: in the background. One of the reasons I've wrote the
Speaker 1: book the way I did was to avoid making it
Speaker 1: sound systematic. And I avoid the word journey. I don't
Speaker 1: use I don't think I use the word journey. And
Speaker 1: the reason is I had no sense of being in
Speaker 1: any kind of straight line. I had a much more
Speaker 1: diffuse sense of As time went on, there were new
Speaker 1: things intruding on my understanding of the world, and I
Speaker 1: was still trying to fit them together.
Speaker 2: So there's really no sense of urgency. It was just
Speaker 2: kind of curiosity and something just kind of gnawing at
Speaker 2: you a little bit that she knew, something experienced, something
Speaker 2: you were missing out on. Is that a fair way
Speaker 2: to look at it.
Speaker 1: That's a fair way to look at it with plus
Speaker 1: one edition. And this is something I'm trying to communicate
Speaker 1: to my readers who are not religious. This stuff is
Speaker 1: fascinating you. When you get into all sorts of the
Speaker 1: issues I've just talked about with consciousness and the scientific
Speaker 1: findings unconsciousness, that's fascinating. And when you get into apologetics,
Speaker 1: as I did later, into the study of the New
Speaker 1: Testament and the historicity of it and the dating of
Speaker 1: the Gospels and all that, it's just plain, intellectually really riveting.
Speaker 2: You don't have to convince me about that. You are
Speaker 2: preaching to the choir. That is music to my ears.
Speaker 2: I love it. I'm probably gonna clip that one and
Speaker 2: just use it because that's so true to me. Okay,
Speaker 2: So one last question before we get to you kind
Speaker 2: of reading into mere Christianity. The nudges an issue you
Speaker 2: had wrestled with the first one you describe as mathematics,
Speaker 2: that why can we capture things like laws E equals
Speaker 2: mc squared in such a simple way? And why is
Speaker 2: order built into the universe? The origin of the universe
Speaker 2: began to bug you, like, why is there something rather
Speaker 2: than nothing? This points towards a cause outside of the universe.
Speaker 2: And then the fine tuning of the universe also points
Speaker 2: towards kind of a mind that best explains with intentionality
Speaker 2: the order of the universe set for life. And then
Speaker 2: consciousness seems to bug you. This is wait a minute,
Speaker 2: I can't reduce human beings down just to matter. There
Speaker 2: seems to be mind or a soul and with near
Speaker 2: death experiences that can at least minimally survive the brain.
Speaker 2: Does that capture kind of where you were intellectually before
Speaker 2: Mere Christianity?
Speaker 1: That's very well put you encapsulate the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Good, Yeah, awesome, just trying to track. That's really good. Okay,
Speaker 2: So why did you read Mere Christianity? Who gave you
Speaker 2: that book? What do you have that idea? And then
Speaker 2: what was the next step that book took you along
Speaker 2: in your intellectual non journey?
Speaker 1: It was Pete Pete Water. Pete Waiter also is a
Speaker 1: policy atalyst, but he also writes religion. He's a evangelical
Speaker 1: Christian and he was formerly a speech writer for George W.
Speaker 2: Bush.
Speaker 1: So he invited me to go to lunch at the
Speaker 1: White House mess the little cafe in the White House,
Speaker 1: which is really cool to go to because you're in
Speaker 1: the White House and you've never been there before. And
Speaker 1: I knew he was an evangelical Christian, and I asked
Speaker 1: him during lunch. I said, how did you come to
Speaker 1: your faith? And he said by convincement mostly, I was
Speaker 1: just convinced it was true. And he mentioned to see S.
Speaker 1: Lewis and Mere Christianity as a turning point. And I
Speaker 1: left the lunch and bought the book and read it
Speaker 1: over the next few days, and I was really impressed.
Speaker 1: Remember what I earlier I said about deciding when I
Speaker 1: went to college that people were right and saying smart
Speaker 1: people don't believe that stuff anymore. You don't read Mere
Speaker 1: Christianity and say smart people don't beleave that stuff anymore.
Speaker 1: Because if there's a voice that just radiates intelligence, it's C. S. Lewis.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people who are who are watching
Speaker 1: have have read C. S. Lewis themselves. They know this,
Speaker 1: but if they haven't, when I said he radiates intelligence,
Speaker 1: he does it with his conversational, casual, informal style that
Speaker 1: is totally engrossing, and he has the wonderful characteristic of
Speaker 1: your reading him, and you're sort of mentally arguing with him.
Speaker 1: And then after you've said, oh, well, this is why
Speaker 1: I don't agree with them, the next paragraph says, perhaps
Speaker 1: you're thinking that he does, and he answers your objection.
Speaker 1: And so that had a huge effect on me, and
Speaker 1: I was by this time there were lots of redigious
Speaker 1: books coming into the house because of Catherine, she reads
Speaker 1: full humorously. But one that I saw independently of her,
Speaker 1: I guess was Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I'm sure you're
Speaker 1: familiar with it. It's Richard Baucom, British theologian, and he
Speaker 1: starts out the book saying, well, I know this is
Speaker 1: a minority view, but this book the thesis is that
Speaker 1: the New Testament Gospels are deliberately trying to convey how
Speaker 1: much of their material is coming from eyewitnesses, and that
Speaker 1: he is making the case for the traditional interpretation of
Speaker 1: the Gospels that, for example, it was tradition that Mark
Speaker 1: had taken down Peter's reminiscences in effect, and he's saying,
Speaker 1: there's really good evidence that that's exactly what Mark does,
Speaker 1: and so forth, and that did something really important for me,
Speaker 1: because I had already read into the revisionists. I'd read
Speaker 1: some of bart Eraman, I'd read some of the other things,
Speaker 1: which says, oh, the Gospels weren't really written. They accumulated
Speaker 1: traditions over decades in different parts of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: It's like the telephone game, and so we really can't
Speaker 1: even be sure that what Jesus is purported to have
Speaker 1: said there's any resemblance to anything he did say. I
Speaker 1: knew about the Jesus Seminar, and I kind of thought
Speaker 1: that they've won. I'd assume that, yeah, you know that
Speaker 1: more or less the New Testament had been discredited, and
Speaker 1: all at once, here's Malcolm writing a very error type book,
Speaker 1: and it seems to me he's making a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: And then I start from there and I end up
Speaker 1: reading a variety of other defenses of the tradition, and
Speaker 1: some of which were written before Malcolm. I hadn't known
Speaker 1: that these existed. And is I did that? I kept
Speaker 1: saying to myself, I'm more impressed by the empirical evidence
Speaker 1: by the defenders than I am by the revisionists.
Speaker 2: So when I teach classes, on apologetics, I often walk through,
Speaker 2: like the scientific evidence that points towards a mind that
Speaker 2: began the universe that's intelligent, timeless, changeless, purposeful. Will walk
Speaker 2: through the fine tuning, which I think advances that a
Speaker 2: little bit further, talk about things like the origin of
Speaker 2: life and the information to sell which is not something
Speaker 2: you go into, which is fine, talk about consciousness in
Speaker 2: the way that you do that there's life apart from
Speaker 2: the body. But the big piece when I talk about
Speaker 2: mere Christianity is that in the scientific evidence, there's a
Speaker 2: mind that made us, but we can't ascertain anything moral
Speaker 2: about this mind. Lewis's argument, even independent from the Bible,
Speaker 2: is like, there's the moral law and we know it
Speaker 2: and we expect it and we act as if it's real,
Speaker 2: which moves us along the pendulum from this mind that
Speaker 2: began the universe to this seemingly personal agent behind this
Speaker 2: moral law. Do you agree with that thinking? Is that
Speaker 2: a part of your process or am I kind of
Speaker 2: reading stuff in post facto that maybe wasn't there?
Speaker 1: No, No, I've that's the first five chapters of mere Christianity.
Speaker 1: Doesn't say a word about Christianity. It's all about the
Speaker 1: existence of the moral law. And then at the end
Speaker 1: of it he hits you with the bludgeon. He says, well,
Speaker 1: if you have a God that is trying to communicate
Speaker 1: with human beings, how can he exhibit himself? And the
Speaker 1: answer is he can exhibit himself by pushing us towards
Speaker 1: certain ways of behaving. And at the core of that
Speaker 1: is a kind of love agape. And so what we
Speaker 1: see in what he's been describing with the basis for
Speaker 1: the moral law is the nature of God, and the
Speaker 1: nature of God corresponds very closely to the Christian nature
Speaker 1: of God. God is love, and it provides a moral
Speaker 1: basis for behavior and for a lot of people. Francis
Speaker 1: Collins is another example. For Francis Collins, it's that passage
Speaker 1: that sort of brought him up short and was a
Speaker 1: transforming experience, and it was close to that for me.
Speaker 1: It was certainly very influential.
Speaker 2: So the next step, of course, in mere Christianity and
Speaker 2: in your journey, and I think logically, is if we
Speaker 2: have this mind that is behind the universe, and this
Speaker 2: mind has put a moral law into the universe and
Speaker 2: also on our hearts to behave in a moral fashion
Speaker 2: has this mind or God revealed himself now on the
Speaker 2: last page of your book. This is actually one of
Speaker 2: my favorite inserts from your books. So we're somewhat skipping ahead,
Speaker 2: but you write this, you said during one such wakefulness
Speaker 2: a few months before writing these words, I was thinking
Speaker 2: about what it would be like to meet great religious
Speaker 2: figures from the past, such as Gautama, Buddha, Louzy, Moses,
Speaker 2: and Jesus. It'd be fascinating, of course, to see what
Speaker 2: they were like in person, and I would naturally treat
Speaker 2: all of them with the utmost respect. Unbidden, it came
Speaker 2: to me that I would treat Jesus differently, with reverence.
Speaker 2: So what motivated you to then say, okay, maybe this
Speaker 2: God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus.
Speaker 1: Well, we did skip ahead, which was fine. We did,
Speaker 1: but which is fine. But what I want to emphasize
Speaker 1: to people are watching is I was surprised by this
Speaker 1: instinctive feeling I treat him with reverence. Surprised in the
Speaker 1: sense that I had reached a belief without internally processing
Speaker 1: the degree to which I had had reached that belief.
Speaker 1: I remember Catherine saying to me one time early on
Speaker 1: in this whole process. She sort of laughed and said,
Speaker 1: you know, you believe in God, don't you. You do realize that,
Speaker 1: don't you. And I said, well, but she was putting
Speaker 1: out something that she had perceived that I had not
Speaker 1: fully perceived myself, And that was true a lot of this,
Speaker 1: And in a way, I think that should be encouraging
Speaker 1: for unbelievers, because you know, if you say to yourself
Speaker 1: that you've got to have a born again moment, a
Speaker 1: revelation of I think you're likely to be disappointed. That
Speaker 1: happens to some people. I think those are authentic experiences
Speaker 1: some people. But it's not the only way. It's not
Speaker 1: the only way that a person can migrate to a
Speaker 1: new set of beliefs, and it is not all rational
Speaker 1: and intellectual. I did not say to myself, well, I
Speaker 1: think the odds are now eighty nine point four percent.
Speaker 1: Such and such as the case, and so I'm going
Speaker 1: to believe it was a combination of rational appraisal of
Speaker 1: a lot of empirical information along with a harder to
Speaker 1: describe gradual spiritual process. But they did not feel spiritual
Speaker 1: at the time in an emotional way.
Speaker 2: So in the book, one of the things you talk
Speaker 2: about the famously C. S. Lewis kind of Lord, liar lunatic?
Speaker 2: Is that one of the art arguments because you'd been
Speaker 2: reading the Gospel for a while going to the Quaker services,
Speaker 2: so you're familiar with the stories and who Jesus claimed
Speaker 2: to be. Is that one of the pieces at this
Speaker 2: time in your life where you're like, oh, my goodness,
Speaker 2: I have to draw some conclusion about who Jesus is personally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because my reaction to the trilemma liar, lunatic or
Speaker 1: Lord was they say, well, aren't the only options? And
Speaker 1: I was thinking of the revisionists at this point that no,
Speaker 1: it was that what we're getting in the New Testament
Speaker 1: there's no relationship to anything that actually happened historically. Well,
Speaker 1: if I'm going to say that, then it's kind of
Speaker 1: incumbent on me to investigate the historicity of all this.
Speaker 1: And I had at the same time a curiosity about
Speaker 1: these traditions, so that I would read that there was
Speaker 1: an early tradition about Mark recording Peter's reminiscences, There is
Speaker 1: an early tradition of this, an early tradition of that,
Speaker 1: but the people never actually said where the tradition came from.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that is I started
Speaker 1: reading that I found the most fascinating and also the
Speaker 1: most impressing were the very early Patristic writings of Papias
Speaker 1: and of if I'm pronouncing that right, and Clement and
Speaker 1: Iranius and others where and there were a couple of
Speaker 1: books I read which had extended quotations from them, and
Speaker 1: I read those. I think specially of of Clement writing
Speaker 1: about how it is that you only had two Gospels
Speaker 1: written by apostles, and the way he describes that just
Speaker 1: sounds like a historian describing something that was well known
Speaker 1: at that time and that he's relating it to us,
Speaker 1: and it sounded plausible. And I also assumed that Clement
Speaker 1: had access to a lot of written material that we
Speaker 1: don't have access to anymore because it's been lost, and
Speaker 1: this sounded like a serious recounting of This is why
Speaker 1: John wrote John, this is why Mark. This is how
Speaker 1: Mark took down the reminiscence of Peter. It was percuisive.
Speaker 1: And then I also came to the question of dating
Speaker 1: the Gospels. It would never prettically bothered me that they
Speaker 1: were dated at seventy to ninety AD, because I figured
Speaker 1: they could still be quite accurate that long after the crucifixion.
Speaker 1: But it shorter is better. And I think the evidence
Speaker 1: that Acts was finished by the early sixties is persuasive.
Speaker 1: And if Acts was written by the early sixties, that
Speaker 1: pushes everything else back. And so you're looking at the
Speaker 1: Gospels certainly in the fifties and maybe in the forties,
Speaker 1: and you put that alongside the Pauline letters. And so
Speaker 1: as I explored this, I came to believe that Lewis's
Speaker 1: trilemma was better than I had initially realized. That it
Speaker 1: was not the case that Jesus as having a special
Speaker 1: relationship with God, son of God. That was not a
Speaker 1: late invention, that was I came to say, the revision
Speaker 1: us are wrong about that. I'm not a biblical scholar,
Speaker 1: but that was my conclusion on the basis of my reading.
Speaker 1: And he did claim that. And so now we have
Speaker 1: to say, can we reconcile him to both be a
Speaker 1: great moral teacher and also being a lunatic when it
Speaker 1: comes to talking about his relationship with Got And that's
Speaker 1: hard to do too.
Speaker 2: Now I think this is post two thousand and five
Speaker 2: for you so two part question, when are you kind
Speaker 2: of reading Bacham and mere Christianity? And are you reading
Speaker 2: it like hoping it's true or just interested or like
Speaker 2: I hope it's not true. What was kind of your mindset?
Speaker 2: And when did you read those kind of works.
Speaker 1: You're asking in questions that I've never had to answer before.
Speaker 1: That is interesting. Good. Uh, yeah, you know. I think
Speaker 1: the best way to say it is that one of
Speaker 1: my virtues is I'm really curious. And I've written lots
Speaker 1: of books on lots of different subjects, and I haven't
Speaker 1: really repeated myself much. I've headed off all the time
Speaker 1: into brand new areas. And the reason I do that
Speaker 1: is because I really love getting into new topics. And
Speaker 1: so as I was doing this, I had a feeling of, Oh,
Speaker 1: here's this whole literature out here that I didn't know existed,
Speaker 1: and it's really interesting and I'm going to keep reading it.
Speaker 1: And was I aware that something important was this was
Speaker 1: a really important topic? Yes, I was. But my basic
Speaker 1: process was the same as I used for writing Human
Speaker 1: Accomplishment or the Bell Curve or Coming Apart. It was
Speaker 1: an intellectual curiosity that yielded fruit.
Speaker 2: M That makes total sense. I guess partly I'm curious
Speaker 2: because when we start getting to the person Jesus, it
Speaker 2: gets a little more personal. It's not just an academic issue.
Speaker 2: But he demands belief. He says, eternal life rests on
Speaker 2: what you do with me, and I'm the only way
Speaker 2: to the Father. So is there a point where you
Speaker 2: started to realize, Oh, my goodness, I'm not just writing
Speaker 2: a book on human accomplishment or the Bell curve. This
Speaker 2: really matters for my soul and I've got to land
Speaker 2: this plane with more at stake than anything else I've
Speaker 2: written on.
Speaker 1: Well, here's where let's have full disclosure. I am not
Speaker 1: an orthodox Christian. Okay. So, and by the way, I
Speaker 1: don't consider that my sequence of steps all is over yet.
Speaker 1: I am hoping and expecting that there will be further
Speaker 1: development as time goes on. But I am not a
Speaker 1: I'm not an evangelical Christian. And so if it comes
Speaker 1: to well salvation only is through me, I still I
Speaker 1: still back off from that it and I don't have
Speaker 1: good theological reasons for saying that. It just okay, more
Speaker 1: backdrop here, uh, I assume that any God worth the
Speaker 1: name is as unknowable to me as I am to
Speaker 1: my dog. Okay, and the the I use that analogy
Speaker 1: because I have a border Collie dog and that dog
Speaker 1: is really smart, okay border colleagues. He that border colleague
Speaker 1: knows who I am and knows a lot about me,
Speaker 1: knows what I want him to do more or less,
Speaker 1: which usually he doesn't do. But that dog has no
Speaker 1: idea what I'm doing when I sit in front of
Speaker 1: my computer. He has no idea of the Enermy and
Speaker 1: I believe that it's it's wrong to anthropomorphize God. So
Speaker 1: I start out with that as a very strong belief
Speaker 1: that I still have. If that's the case, then it
Speaker 1: is going to be very hard for human beings to
Speaker 1: accurately convey certain things. I don't know if you're familiar
Speaker 1: with John Polkinghorn is that name? Yeah? Yeah, Okay. He's
Speaker 1: a British theologian. He was a theoretical physicist at Oxford
Speaker 1: or Cambridge for several years before he became ordained in
Speaker 1: the Anglican Church. And he has a very good book
Speaker 1: where he goes through the Nicene Creed one phrase at
Speaker 1: a time, and he has kind of an exegesis on
Speaker 1: that phrase as he sees it from his perspective, and
Speaker 1: when he comes to the question of Jesus as the
Speaker 1: Son of God, and he considers himself a full fledged
Speaker 1: Christian in every way, but he talks about this difficulty
Speaker 1: of using language and he says, well, it's this is
Speaker 1: the word heuristics, which I'm never quite sure what that means,
Speaker 1: but the degree to which we are allowed a certain
Speaker 1: latitude in trying to use language to understand things. And
Speaker 1: I think with Jesus as the Son of God, that's
Speaker 1: a classic case. And I use I report the analogy
Speaker 1: that I did not learned during my adult exploration, but
Speaker 1: I learned when I was taking Confirmation classes in the
Speaker 1: Presbyterian Church when I was twelve years old, and the
Speaker 1: Reverend Lowell McConnell of the Presbyterian Church in Newton, Iowa,
Speaker 1: I was talking to us about this and he said, well,
Speaker 1: suppose you go to the ocean and you fill up
Speaker 1: a jar with seawater. Is that the ocean? And we
Speaker 1: all say no, and he says no, but it's as
Speaker 1: much of the ocean as you can get in a jar.
Speaker 1: And I know this is not I've had some good
Speaker 1: Christians who have been very upset with me with making
Speaker 1: this comparison. They say, no, Jesus was more than as
Speaker 1: much a God as you can get into the human jar.
Speaker 1: But for me that is a good way of expressing
Speaker 1: a mystery, because I think any conception of Jesus as
Speaker 1: the son of God is essentially extremely hard for human
Speaker 1: beings to grasp.
Speaker 2: Thank you for your disclosure about where you stand and
Speaker 2: not identifying as an Orthodox Christian. I was not totally
Speaker 2: sure reading this because you use the term Christian. You
Speaker 2: talk about forgiveness being a part of this, so it
Speaker 2: wasn't exactly sure where you land and that you're still
Speaker 2: on the journey of this. You got me thinking with
Speaker 2: the illustration of the dog that's in here. I thought
Speaker 2: about asking and my son, who's thirteen, I like to
Speaker 2: ask him provocative questions, and I'll say things I might
Speaker 2: ask him this, are we closer to a dog and
Speaker 2: our ability to think in reason or closer to God?
Speaker 2: And of course, initially I want to say, far closer
Speaker 2: to a dog than God, who's infinite, and dogs and
Speaker 2: I are both finite. But of course we're made in
Speaker 2: God's image with a capacity to reason and think and
Speaker 2: reflect upon things that dogs don't, So we have that
Speaker 2: in common with God, so to speak at the root
Speaker 2: of the Christian faith, of course, is like, yeah, we
Speaker 2: cannot get to God on our own. But that like
Speaker 2: John one one in the beginning was the word, the
Speaker 2: word was with God, and the word was God takes
Speaker 2: on human flesh to kind of bridge that gap, so
Speaker 2: to speak, so we can at least understand God insofar
Speaker 2: as it goes and relate to him personally. That kind
Speaker 2: of came to my mind when you were you were
Speaker 2: making that point. If I can ask, what, what would
Speaker 2: be the barrier holding you back as far as you're
Speaker 2: comfortable sharing of not saying I'm not I'm not quite
Speaker 2: an orthodox Christian? Is it that what you just said
Speaker 2: about the language not describing God? What are those big
Speaker 2: boulders that are keeping you back?
Speaker 1: Confidence in my ability to comprehend certain things pretty much
Speaker 1: I'm repeating what I said a minute ago, okay. And
Speaker 1: confidence in in the ability of the people who experience that,
Speaker 1: the disciples, to convey to us the uh I'm treading
Speaker 1: on all sorts of uncertainties, okay. And and if you
Speaker 1: if you talk about the big barriers, one of them
Speaker 1: is of a central claim of Christianity, which is of
Speaker 1: course one of the most problematic for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: which is the physical resurrection. M and so part of
Speaker 1: me wants to fudge that one too, And this one
Speaker 1: in Polkhorn has phrased that that he is that the
Speaker 1: the evidence from the First Easter says that there was
Speaker 1: some extremely profound experience that the disciples had and it's
Speaker 1: really hard to push it too far from that. And
Speaker 1: but in some real concrete sense, the Jesus of the
Speaker 1: first century is still alive in the Church of today
Speaker 1: and has a continue is historical presence. And so you
Speaker 1: have that, I said, the fudge factor. And here's where
Speaker 1: I think, probably I'm getting too involved in empiricism, But
Speaker 1: you have to come to grips with the shroud of Turin,
Speaker 1: which is pretty mysterious piece of cloth. And I say
Speaker 1: to myself, the only thing holding me back there is
Speaker 1: a little bit more confidence in the dating. So they
Speaker 1: have a method of dating which has put it at
Speaker 1: two thousand years old. And of course there was a
Speaker 1: notorious carbon dating which was badly screwed up. And I'm saying,
Speaker 1: you know, if they can reinforce that dating at two
Speaker 1: thousand years old, I just have no more excuses left
Speaker 1: of not believing in the physical resurrection. And I'm of
Speaker 1: two minds about that. One is that I think I
Speaker 1: would be logically forced to that conclusion, and the other
Speaker 1: one is I can still still feel myself resisting it
Speaker 1: because of probably personality characteristics over which I have little control.
Speaker 1: I give the example in the book of that kind
Speaker 1: of resistance when one time in the nineties I was
Speaker 1: meeting and something had been bothering me a lot, and
Speaker 1: so I decided I was going to pray, and I
Speaker 1: was going to do I'd never tried to pray before,
Speaker 1: and I was going to and I did. I did
Speaker 1: my level best to pray, and a couple of days later,
Speaker 1: I realized that whatever it was that was bothering me
Speaker 1: and I can't remember what it was, had gone away.
Speaker 1: Scared me to death. The reason it's scared me to
Speaker 1: death was not because prayer failed, but because it worked.
Speaker 1: And so in the one hand, you say, maybe I
Speaker 1: ought to be doing this all the time, and on
Speaker 1: the other hand there is there are things holding me back.
Speaker 1: But here I think you just have to say, look,
Speaker 1: human beings are strange creatures. And my wife would be
Speaker 1: the first to confirm that I'm strange too. I use
Speaker 1: I use the I think I do use the phrase
Speaker 1: I'm an eccentric Christian or at some point during the book,
Speaker 1: and I guess that where I am right now is
Speaker 1: that I have limitations in terms of faith that I
Speaker 1: have not been able to overcome and God will understand.
Speaker 1: That's that's sort of a I do believe. Of all
Speaker 1: the things that I think I have taken on board
Speaker 1: most deeply, the concept of God is love is one
Speaker 1: of the most important. I think that's one of the
Speaker 1: most meaningful statements you can that is full of implications
Speaker 1: if you have an universe that a God which is love.
Speaker 1: So I see myself as believing in some really big
Speaker 1: things associated with Christianity, finding myself in difficulty making further leaps,
Speaker 1: and not too troubled by it because of the sense
Speaker 1: that I'm trying hard. I'm trying sincerely, and as I
Speaker 1: said before, the God that I am comfortable with right
Speaker 1: now is a very forgiving God plus being all plus
Speaker 1: being all wise.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate your candor on this, you know, as
Speaker 2: far as the first way you framed it up. Some
Speaker 2: of my thinking is you're right in the level of like,
Speaker 2: I can't get to the depths of God through my
Speaker 2: own reasoning. But if a God exists that's described in
Speaker 2: the Bible that broadly speaking, we both believe in revealed
Speaker 2: himself in the person of Jesus, commissioned the disciples, as
Speaker 2: the scriptures say, to write in a way that we
Speaker 2: can understand this God and his desire for our life.
Speaker 2: There's a level of a leap that's there, but it
Speaker 2: seems reasonable and seems in fitting with the character of
Speaker 2: that God and what we know about him from general
Speaker 2: revelation but also within the scriptures. Does that ring true
Speaker 2: to you or you like, I don't know that I
Speaker 2: can quite get there.
Speaker 1: You've described a framework within which I'm still working, and
Speaker 1: so I think that as if you're trying to put
Speaker 1: it all together, that it's like a canvas that I
Speaker 1: have partly filled in that I'm trying to continue to
Speaker 1: fill in that's not there yet, but the process is
Speaker 1: enormously rewarding. Another message I'm trying to give to non believers,
Speaker 1: and that I am at peace with that, And I'll
Speaker 1: just tack onto that another case of where I realized,
Speaker 1: without thinking, without knowing what was the process that was
Speaker 1: going on. I realize that I have a much different
Speaker 1: feeling about forgiveness of sins then I had twenty five
Speaker 1: years ago, thirty years ago. I remember of one time
Speaker 1: feeling very guilty about something I shouldn't have done that
Speaker 1: I did do in my twenties and saying to myself,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be forgiven for this. I shouldn't
Speaker 1: be forgiven. I should feel bad about it, I should
Speaker 1: always feel bad about it. And I didn't murder anybody
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It was, but it was. It
Speaker 1: was a case of recently, or maybe several years ago,
Speaker 1: suddenly realizing that that had been a very silly way
Speaker 1: to look at it, and also very ecocentric. I mean,
Speaker 1: who am I to decide whether I should be forgiven
Speaker 1: for something I've done. My job is to be repentant,
Speaker 1: to be truly repentent, not making it up, not faking it,
Speaker 1: but truly repentant. And it's up to God whether I'm forgiven.
Speaker 1: And I had a sense of believing in God's grace,
Speaker 1: which is a more traditional language for saying God will understand.
Speaker 1: And so that's that's that's another piece of the painting.
Speaker 1: That's filled in that wasn't filled in maybe ten years ago,
Speaker 1: but got filled in sometime in the in the intervening time. No,
Speaker 1: I'm maybe two, so I don't have forever. But but
Speaker 1: that's continuing to go on.
Speaker 2: You now, as you mentioned born again experience earlier, I
Speaker 2: was thinking of John chapter three where Jesus says to Nicodemus,
Speaker 2: you must be born again, and Nicodemus doesn't understand what
Speaker 2: he's talking about, like, what do you mean born by water,
Speaker 2: born by spirit? Jesus tries the second time to explain
Speaker 2: from him, and then finally at the end he's like,
Speaker 2: you know what, you just need to believe in me
Speaker 2: as the son of God for forgiveness of your sins.
Speaker 2: Those who believe are saved, those who don't are condemned.
Speaker 2: It's like he says, this born again experience, the best
Speaker 2: way to put it is believing in Jesus for forgiveness
Speaker 2: of your sins. And of course I'm collapsing that down.
Speaker 2: That would probably be an Orthodox way of understanding what
Speaker 2: the gospel is. I couldn't tell. At the end of
Speaker 2: your book, when you talk about forgiveness of sins, I'm like,
Speaker 2: is he there with that? Kind of grace or is
Speaker 2: that still a part of the narrative. You're like, I'm
Speaker 2: working out if I need that forgiveness from God and
Speaker 2: his grace in my life.
Speaker 1: In that fashion, you have accurately understood the ambiguity that
Speaker 1: still persists.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: You know, I've reminded of another conversation I had with
Speaker 1: Michael Novak, Catholic, and I was talking to him once
Speaker 1: about religion, and this is a long time ago, and
Speaker 1: I said to me about, you know, I'm very impressed
Speaker 1: by a lot of things about Catholicism and so forth,
Speaker 1: but why do you persist in having his dogma transubstantiation
Speaker 1: in the course, because I said, that's just simply an
Speaker 1: unbelievable doctrine. And Michael said to me, because I think
Speaker 1: probably if you put Michael into a lighted Texter that
Speaker 1: probably he probably would have had a very powerful and
Speaker 1: eloquent theological description of how he still accepts transubstantiation. But
Speaker 1: I don't think he does literally. Okay, but here's what
Speaker 1: he said to me. He said, God's God needs a
Speaker 1: church that can speak to everyone. And what I interpret
Speaker 1: him as saying there is that the transubstantiation for a
Speaker 1: lot of people is something which helps them to get
Speaker 1: to the larger truths of Catholicism. And in a similar
Speaker 1: kind of way, I think that their aspects of Christian Christianity,
Speaker 1: where they serve a function of leading people to the
Speaker 1: underlying truths, but in different ways. And if you want
Speaker 1: to think of it this way, transubstantiation may be a
Speaker 1: powerful way for God to speak to some very simple
Speaker 1: people who come from cultures where are not sophisticated. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what, It's conceivable that C. S. Lewis and
Speaker 1: Richard Balcom are God's way of speaking to over educated
Speaker 1: agnostics like me, which is that he puts stuff out
Speaker 1: there whereby no transsphentiation isn't going to get me there.
Speaker 1: But if I put somebody really smart, putting some material
Speaker 1: out there that can appeal to this over educated guy,
Speaker 1: maybe I can get to him. And and I am
Speaker 1: being a little bit facetious here, but not very, but
Speaker 1: not very, because there are too many times in my
Speaker 1: life that I've had the eerie sense of things worked
Speaker 1: out in ways that seem mysterious, and it's almost as
Speaker 1: if God willed it, And I say, no, that can't
Speaker 1: really be, can it? And But that's the more pieces
Speaker 1: of the puzzle. So I guess where we're ending up
Speaker 1: is there is truth in packaging on this book, which
Speaker 1: is that what I titled it taking religion Seriously. There
Speaker 1: is sort of an implication there of delving into very
Speaker 1: serious topics that are very difficult, with no promises that
Speaker 1: at the end you'll come out and say, oh I
Speaker 1: got it. And I think I deliver on that ambiguity.
Speaker 2: Very fair. Now we're bumping up against the time you
Speaker 2: committed to Is okay if I ask you two more
Speaker 2: questions at the end? Is that all right? Okay? So
Speaker 2: this I actually was hoping to asked this question anyways.
Speaker 2: I didn't know we were going to land up in
Speaker 2: this conversation where we do, which is fine. I think
Speaker 2: viewers are going to find it fascinating, really appreciate your candor.
Speaker 2: At the very end, this is on page one forty seven,
Speaker 2: so we're within about I don't know, ten pages from
Speaker 2: the end of the book, maybe maybe fifteen pages, and
Speaker 2: you describe to what are kind of like psychological reasons
Speaker 2: if I'm understanding it, that holds you back from some
Speaker 2: of the beliefs, from embracing them more quickly. So she said,
Speaker 2: you're talking about confronting the straightforward implication of the evidence
Speaker 2: that you have a soul is intimidating. So this is
Speaker 2: an an intellectual barrier, and I totally understand it. It's
Speaker 2: like intimidating because what this means for life after death,
Speaker 2: what it means to be human, my accountability, creator, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And then the next line you say, another and more
Speaker 2: prosaic explanation of my resistance is the fear of what
Speaker 2: the other members of my tribe will think. I super
Speaker 2: appreciate your candor on that one. As we get to
Speaker 2: where you're at now, you said it at eighty two,
Speaker 2: Your like, I don't have endless time left. If you're
Speaker 2: gonna say moving forward, how much is intellectual versus how
Speaker 2: much are just kind of these psychological personal reasons that
Speaker 2: might hold you back from embracing orthodox Christianity Or is
Speaker 2: it really hard to just kind of pull that apart
Speaker 2: and make sense of it.
Speaker 1: No, I actually I can. Being worried about what members
Speaker 1: of my tribe will think is less important to me
Speaker 1: than it was. And it's partly that's the case because
Speaker 1: I have a strong sense that the Enlightenment went too
Speaker 1: far I've considered myself. I am a child of the
Speaker 1: Enlightenment in the sense that academia is our all children
Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment, and reason and logic and science are
Speaker 1: the only way to assemble evidence that we can evaluate.
Speaker 1: And anything that smacks the supernatural is out of bouts.
Speaker 1: And that is just as dogmatic a belief among children
Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment as any religious belief. And so I
Speaker 1: have been increasingly irritated that members of my tribe for
Speaker 1: placing too much hubris in the power of human reason
Speaker 1: and logic. And also I had an experience after publishing
Speaker 1: the book and and a couple of the things I've
Speaker 1: written with reactions from members of my tribe which have
Speaker 1: been very dismissive. And they have been dismissive not because
Speaker 1: they took the material I wrote and said here's points A, B,
Speaker 1: and C about why Murray is empirically wrong. They didn't
Speaker 1: do that at all. They just sort of basically said, oh, smart,
Speaker 1: people don't believe that stuff anymore. That's essentially what they
Speaker 1: were doing. So I don't worry. I don't worry about
Speaker 1: them so much. But your other point about the thinking
Speaker 1: that you have a soul is intimidating. Uh, that's the
Speaker 1: way I put it. It's also exhilarating, and so it's
Speaker 1: it's like a too good to be true, but there
Speaker 1: is pretty good evidence that it is true. And it's
Speaker 1: taken me time and will continue to take me time
Speaker 1: to fully embrace that, but I think probably I will.
Speaker 1: But I have in one important respect, which is I'm
Speaker 1: not afraid of dying, and I haven't been for many
Speaker 1: years now, and it is I used to be. I
Speaker 1: had moments before of twenty five years ago when I
Speaker 1: would feel existential dread at the fact of oblivion at
Speaker 1: gone no longer exists, and that went away, and so
Speaker 1: at some level I have accepted the possibility I have
Speaker 1: a soul fully embracing that is to open up a rich,
Speaker 1: a richer way of thinking about your future than non
Speaker 1: believers can possibly enjoy. And so I should have said
Speaker 1: it's intimidating. Ultimately, I think it's going to be accelerating.
Speaker 2: Very very fair. My last question is you describe yourself
Speaker 2: as going from happy Agnostic to Christian, and I think
Speaker 2: more specifically not orthodox Christian, but say eccentric Christian now
Speaker 2: that you're more in this camp, looking back on the
Speaker 2: things that you've written on such a diverse range of topics.
Speaker 2: Are there certain things that you rethink and now view
Speaker 2: differently because of your Christian faith.
Speaker 1: I have thought about that question, and I'm pretty satisfied
Speaker 1: that I haven't advocated anything in any of my other
Speaker 1: books which contradict anything I have said now that are
Speaker 1: not in the same spirit as that. On the contrary,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be self congratulatory here, but I
Speaker 1: made that statement about Johann Sebastian Bach does not need
Speaker 1: to justify his way of looking at the world. He
Speaker 1: of course was extremely devout as a Christian that his
Speaker 1: music does it for him. So I was respectful long
Speaker 1: before I've associated myself as a believer, and part of
Speaker 1: being respectful comes out of the enormous respect I had
Speaker 1: for the Christian teachings, just as teachings and the way
Speaker 1: people ought to behave By the same token, I mean,
Speaker 1: we're coming to the end, and I don't want to
Speaker 1: introduce new stuff. But it's also important and part of C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis's point that the great systems of ethics uh and
Speaker 1: this is true of confusion, It's true of out dows
Speaker 1: and true of Buddhism. They haven't all been exactly the same,
Speaker 1: but somebody who behaved virtuously in each of those traditions
Speaker 1: is going to behave quite similarly. And I think Christianity
Speaker 1: is perhaps the best exposition of a code of ethics.
Speaker 1: But because I have a long time believed in those
Speaker 1: concepts of virtue, I was kind of helped to keep
Speaker 1: me from going astray in the way I thought about policy.
Speaker 1: May I just say, since we are coming to the end,
Speaker 1: that your whole way of asking me questions and talking
Speaker 1: about this, knowing that I am someone who has quite
Speaker 1: different Christianity than you have, I've really enjoyed. You have
Speaker 1: been wholly sympathetic without pretending that we agree with each
Speaker 1: other on these things. And I will say you have
Speaker 1: drawn me out in a way that very few people
Speaker 1: have done in the past, and I have more or
Speaker 1: less enjoyed it. Occasionally I've gotten a little answery about
Speaker 1: whether I was saying things right, but it's been quite
Speaker 1: an experience.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you for saying that. I'm really touched and
Speaker 2: honored you would say that thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure where I expected it to go, but this
Speaker 2: is not where I expected to go, and really appreciate
Speaker 2: you entertaining just some of my questions and a little
Speaker 2: bit of pushback here and there, And I would say
Speaker 2: before I forget off the record, none of this stuff.
Speaker 2: If you want to just continue the conversation in any
Speaker 2: way on zoom or I don't know where you live,
Speaker 2: you don't have to say it out loud. I would
Speaker 2: do that in a heartbeat. These conversations are what I
Speaker 2: enjoy as much as anything, so that opportunity is out
Speaker 2: there anytime, I would carve it out and enjoy it.
Speaker 2: And I do want to. I want to commend your book.
Speaker 2: I thoroughly enjoyed it. Obviously as an evangelist an apologist,
Speaker 2: I would end it a little differently and invite people
Speaker 2: to repent and believe in Jesus. But that's just where
Speaker 2: we differ at this stage. But it's easy to read.
Speaker 2: It's clear your premise of taking religion seriously. That's what
Speaker 2: you say you're arguing for, and you argue for it
Speaker 2: in a way that I think respects the reader and
Speaker 2: invites them to reflect in a non preachy way. I
Speaker 2: think it's an excellent book. I'm glad you wrote it,
Speaker 2: and if you write anything else in this lane, definitely
Speaker 2: send it to me. I'd love to continue that conversation
Speaker 2: as well. And for people, watch them before you click
Speaker 2: away and make sure you hit subscribe. And by the way,
Speaker 2: a ton of you who watch these videos are not subscribed,
Speaker 2: so subscribe, hit that notification button. And if you want
Speaker 2: to study apologetics, which is really what we talked about
Speaker 2: today and Charles Murray talks about in his book, we'd
Speaker 2: love to have you join us at Biola University online
Speaker 2: and in person our master's degree. If you're not ready
Speaker 2: for Masters, we now have a new certificate program with
Speaker 2: some of the leading lectures, leading lecture from leading apologists
Speaker 2: in the world. Big discount below, so make sure you
Speaker 2: check that out. Charles Murray, thanks for your time and
Speaker 2: for a wonderful conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
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