Political scientist and author Charles Murray joined the RealClearPolitics podcast on Friday to talk about his new book, “Taking Religion Seriously,” a personal reflection on the nature of God, nature, and existence. Murray is known for his thought-provoking political books, including Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart. “I am typical of tens of millions of people who are well-educated and successful professionally, and religion hasn’t been an important part of our lives,” Murray said. “And that was true of me from the time I went to college to 20 years ago.” “Subsequently, I have had a very haphazard change in my view of God in general and Christianity in particular. And I had to do it not by spiritual revelation but by more indirect means, and I thought this is a story worth telling-just to tell other people it can be done and it’s worthwhile,” he said. “This whole book is brought about because of my wife, who had exactly the same experience going to college that I did: we learned that smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore,” Murray said. “And then we had our first daughter, and my wife said to me, in what’s since become a fairly well-known line: I love her far more than evolution requires.” “Since I can’t enter into the kind of spiritual understandings that my wife can, I can do things like look at the physics of the Big Bang. I can look at the historicity of the Gospels,” he said. “You’ve had revisionists try to tell us you can’t even be sure there was anybody named Jesus, and if he did exist, he hasn’t said anything that’s been transmitted accurately. Well, there is a very substantial body of rigorous work that says otherwise.” On the Big Bang, he said: “Well, you’ve got three choices. You can believe that we’re the product of a one-in-a-trillion chance. You can believe there are multiverses out there, and there are a million universes. Or you can believe that there’s intention. And, as I say, what’s parsimonious? What’s plausible? The third of those alternatives is, to me, much more plausible than the other two.”
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