Charles Murray - Taking Religion Seriously

31:43I think you use in your book, like the heat needed, you talk about the Kelvins, like the exponential amount of heat via the Kelvin system that you would need. And I think you point out that it's fairly unimaginable. It's like fantasy, almost a belief. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah. You're alluding here to the multiverse theory, which was advanced after the Big Bang was verified, and they were stuck with saying that the universe originated out of nothing. And since then, the physicists have been trying to concoct a physics that would produce multiple universes. Okay. The same size as ours. Sure. And they use quantum mechanics to do this.

32:30I am not qualified to critique their use of quantum mechanics. It's way out of my pay grade. But here's the bottom line. Somehow, they've got to say quantum burps or quantum anomalies can generate that kind of energy out of nothing. Come on. Well, you added to that by saying that in this theory, it would be that effectively stardust has created us as matter and beings at some point. Well, actually, no, the stardust thing is – that's another story. Okay. We were created. The process of the stars evolving, burning for millions of years, then becoming black holes, and then blowing up, created the, filled out the table of elements.

33:34Mm-hmm. That's why we have 92 or whatever it is naturally occurring elements is these repeated processes of stars evolving and having different generations. And they then burst these materials out into the cosmos. Well, eventually, it's those materials that make up our bodies. And that's the sense in which you and I are composed basically of stardust. Because it was that process that enabled planets to exist. And the fact that the planet exists is what allows foliage to exist and all the rest of the life of the rest of it. So, yeah, we are stardust in a very, very long process. But what they're saying with the multiverse theory is somewhat different.

34:32They aren't talking about the evolution of the universe. They are talking about the creation of universes. Lots and lots of them. Because the chances that we would live in a universe that would permit the development of life are less than one in a trillion. And that's not a religious statement. That's the statement calculated by Roger Penrose, a Nobel laureate. Well, you brought me to something that is part of the next question that we're going to ask, which is I talk to people all the time about from 1968 when Star Trek came out to today, there has been unbelievable advancements in computers and computer science.

35:19and we have in comparison made very little headway into space so therefore you know so that in your book you talk about kind of the perfection of this life uh or this world or this world and and you know am i wrong to think that that that gee that all these you know listening to musk and Bezos and what they want to do in outer space and all that, to me, it almost feels like God has a bit of a wall there for them to— Well, and you explain also like the anti-gravity. Things stay together because of anti-gravity. Well, there's—now here you're pushing me to the limits of my knowledge and maybe a couple of steps beyond.

36:05One of the things that has been discovered recently is that there is a mysterious force in the universe that seems to be holding back the galaxies from expanding outward as fast as they should. Who knows what that is? I think that a couple of things are technically possible that would get around that wall. I would say that the identification of the phenomenon of entanglement, where two particles, if the state of one particle changes, the state of the other particle changes instantaneously, apparently faster than the speed of light, at a great distance, that sort of suggests the possibility that maybe the speed of light is not the limiting factor that we thought it was.

36:54And there's a very long way to go. But is it possible, given our current theory of physics, that there might be ways eventually of bridging these gigantic gaps. I don't consider that beyond the realm of possibility. I also don't consider that to be competitive with religion. I think that's two separate worlds. Sure. Explain what your view of terminal lucidity on the spiritual nature of humans is. oh that's uh bill that's part of a discussion i have about how consciousness is undergoing a tough time these days i mean material the materialist view of consciousness and it's there are several bodies of data that call it into question one of them is the large body of data on near-death experiences which i think most people have heard about you know the cardiac arrest, no respiration, no heartbeat, and yet people have vivid memories of what happened to them thereafter.

37:58That's a very large body of evidence. That suggests something's going on independently of materialism. You have a large body of evidence of children having memories of past lives that are verified as to be actually things that happened to people who are now dead, suggestive of reincarnation without quite proving it. And then there's this thing called terminal lucidity, which most people haven't heard about. And that is, it happens often enough that if you work at a hospice for several years, you probably have run across it a couple of times. You have somebody who has advanced dementia, which means they haven't spoken, they don't recognize their families, they don't recognize friends, they don't have memories.

38:51Their brains are no longer functional. The damage that has been done to those brains is such that the networks for speech and organized mental activity have been broken, destroyed. And about a day before death, in a case of terminal lucidity, that person is back sometimes 10 minutes sometimes an hour they are back in terms of remembering who they are remembering their spouse and children having other kinds of memories having their own personality characteristics they're the same people they were before and then they're gone again and die within a few hours. And what's that all about? Because you have had an exhibit of this person's capability that requires the brain.

39:46In the same way, the circulation of blood requires the heart. And yet we have consciousness existing. And to me, that's serious proof. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance. If you're an investor who plays the long game and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

40:26Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead Funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. Beethoven acted as if he were God's gift to humanity. I'm quoting your work, obviously. As it happens, he was. The problem is that subsequent generation of artists who weren't gifts from God emulated him. um i love this because it's just true um he's remarkable in the sense of human history to your point something incredible in the you know chronological uh timeline of humanity and yet every human in modernity that's followed with skills and gifts at some level have thought they're beethoven yeah i've i've came up with that just because uh we saw the arts fall off the edge of a cliff starting in the late 19th century.

41:29I'm just thinking about Beethoven's music. Yes, he was irascible. He was very egotistical and all that. But look at his ode of joy. Look at the Ninth Symphony. Look at all the ways in which he is celebrating the true, the beautiful, and the good in his music and celebrating God for that matter. And then, And so he had that personality, but boy, was he doing great stuff. Sure. Okay, you take away an environment in which the true and the beautiful and the good, all of which are Christian values, are no longer defining what artists are supposed to do. Sure. And what does it turn out that artists do?

42:15They decide, well, I'm a genius and I'm going to challenge the audience. I'm going to challenge the audience and if the audience doesn't appreciate it that's not my fault it's their fault they are worthy of my art this is an incredibly solipsistic selfish way to look at it and it also produces really bad art you explain it it's a very nihilistic view presently for artistry versus more of an artisanal view in the 19th century yeah it's uh the novels are lifeless. The pictures are not beautiful. The music is not listenable. I mean, there's very simple ways of thinking about it too, which is it's really bad stuff in terms of what is supposed to be the high culture.

43:07Oddly enough, in the 20th century, popular culture was much more vibrant than high culture. Sure. Charles, I don't know if you've watched the Billy Joel documentary, but you both his parents were concert pianists and this guy has got god-given just unbelievable god-given talent uh and you you can just you watch the documentary and you can just see god's hand all over him but yet you know he he's a train wreck but but his life has been he's nihilistic to your point. He's nihilistic, constant train wreck. His dad, divorced, was the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, and his brother, half-brother, then became the head of the Vienna Philharmonic, which explains why the song Vienna waits for you.

43:56But anyway, just an incredible picture of what God does in a life, all that talent. In an evolutionary framework, wouldn't morality lead us to weak impulses well it would depend on what the impulses were uh if we're talking about the impulse toward sex uh i don't think that's going i think that evolution is going to produce very strong uh effects on that sure for something like altruism i think evolution is very selective about what is good at generating. It can generate altruism between kin, because if you're blood-related and you are helping out your kin, in some sense you are increasing the likelihood that your genes get passed on, which is kind of the key test of evolution.

44:49And you can also generate some kinds of reciprocal behavior that are altruistic. You know, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. Sure. But evolutionary theory has a very hard time saying, where does this impulse to help people, which put me in danger, with no evolutionary reward, where does that come from? But we see it all the time. People who sacrifice themselves for other people, sometimes people they don't know, out of a kind of love. evolution has a hard time explaining that. Sure. Don't we all hear the tune of goodness, whether we want to recognize it or not? That's the position that I have increasingly been drawn to take.

45:42Again, my mentor in this originally was C.A.S. Lewis, that there is a standard of decent behavior out there that we are aware that we are either following or not following, even when we're violating it. So that when we run away from battle, or that when we double cross a friend who has helped us, we have a very hard time not recognizing part of our souls that we have done bad. I want to pivot a little bit because you get to some of the, I'll call it, you know, it's like the million dollar word that you often hear is the historicity portion of your book. You talk about the writing of Papias to explain kind of the truth of Christ.

46:32Can you explain what's intriguing about some of these early authors, their timeline, the accuracy and significance of who they were interacting with to get this information? Well, I was aware in the 1990s of the Jesus Seminar and of a whole lot of other revisionist Christians who had decided that we knew very little about the historical Jesus, that it's very unlikely that the words in the New Testament actually reflect anything he said because the text had been fiddled with by all sorts of people for a long time. And the Gospels themselves are sort of arbitrarily chosen, and we really don't know who wrote the Gospels.

47:13And anyway, they were all composed after 70 CE. And when I started to read into what we know, I was much more impressed by people who took a more traditional position. Sure. And they would talk about the historical tradition that the author of Matthew was the disciple Matthew. The author of John was the disciple John. Luke was this physician who traveled with Paul. And Mark was the man who was transcribing the memories of Peter. And so I got curious, thinking, I'd like to read what these historical traditions were. Where did they come from? And it turns out that we have writings from Papias, which are among the earliest, who was actually new personally people in the first and second generation after Christ.

48:13And then you have Clementine, the second century, who had access to lots of written materials we no longer have. And they have very explicit descriptions about how it is that Matthew wrote the gospel because he was going to have to go preach elsewhere. And he was preaching in Jerusalem and those parishioners in Jerusalem said, please write it down so we will have this after you leave. It's very specific. And so was the testimony that Mark was writing down what Peter said. Sure. And as I further went into it, I was struck by the evidence that the Gospels were actually written probably in the 40s and 50s.

48:58And that evidence is not conclusive, but it sure seems a lot more plausible to me than the evidence that they weren't written until after 70. and so I came away from all this with a general opinion that the revisionists of the 20th century were sort of like the postmodern literary critics and postmodern novelists. They'd love to come up with complex explanations for things that had simpler solutions. Well, they were the skeptics in a way. Yeah, but also... They love complexity. They love the complicated way of saying that so-and-so didn't write the gospel. You just reminded me of the place in the New Testament where I think it might have been Paul says, you know, there's 500 people alive and wandering around today that saw Christ after he rose from the grave, right?

50:04And there were 500 witnesses. You could go talk to them. at the time he wrote that. And he has that one mention of them. And we can also assume that back in that era, you had lots of other people talking about that. So when he said that, he assumed his readers of his letters would know what he was talking about because it was being talked about elsewhere. There were so many things that were taken for granted back then that can't be taken for granted anymore because we don't have access to the wealth of information that they had access to in the first century. Hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on this show.

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51:18Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead Funds Distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. it. You caused me to come up with a new theory in your book, and I'm going to use what you wrote, and I'm going to add to it and see what you think about it. So you argued that, you know, prior to really the Enlightenment, but, you know, our continued learning of science, if there was a gap in learning, we would just ascribe it to God, right?

51:53So why is there an earthquake? It's God, as an example you use in your book. Now we've learned a lot. We know the purpose of a lot of things scientifically. Okay. Now, if someone said to me, Cole, why is it that in Western culture, children seem to be becoming an extinct good or process or being? My number one evidence is God. In other words, it's our lack of relationship with God that's creating that because man doesn't seem to create the solution for lack of children. Is that a fair way of applying your gap theory? Well, I guess I would express it differently. Okay. I mean, I'm struck by your observation.

52:46I think that secularism is intimately connected with falling fertility rates. Okay. And I don't disagree. I'm with you. But in terms of the God of the gaps, I see it as having reversed the relationship of science to religion. So that you're in 1500 and you have believers in God and you have a whole lot of natural phenomena that are really weird. Thunderstorms and earthquakes and all sorts of things. and God provides an easy explanation for that. Science comes along in the 16th, 17th century and one by one it starts to explain all these gaps scientifically and explain them correctly. Sure. And with each one, you reduce the number of things that you need God to explain.

53:43And that's why the phrase God of the gaps developed that God is that thing which we use to explain what science has not yet explained. So the number of things that science couldn't explain keeps shrinking. And then in the 21st century and the late 20th century, that changes. Science starts discovering phenomena that nobody knew existed before that science cannot explain. So science has a pretty good handle on quantum mathematics. They can calculate effects very precisely, but if they try to describe how it is that a particle can behave as a wave in one instant and as a particle in the other instant, they have no good description for that.

54:34Sure. They don't really understand it. They do not yet understand dark matter, the missing mass of the universe. Possibly they will. But right now they sure don't. and they do not have explanations for terminal lucidity and near-death experiences. So they have discovered brand new phenomena that humans did not know about before but that science does not have an answer for and religion does. Well, to your point, I mean like I think of your – you tell the story of your wife and you guys having your daughter and her relationship with her daughter being something of a love that she had never experienced before.

55:13And so to your point, in a secular world, or I'll call it a kind of modern or postmodern world, children are actually mostly spiritual, like in terms of the experience of the father and mother. It's a very spiritual experience. And if spirituality is denied, you won't have children. I'd have to think about that. Okay. Yeah, I have no problem explaining falling fertility rates. I think there are a variety of things that we can identify that contribute to that. Sure. The experience of people who do have children, I think more often leads them to God than away from it. Oh, I agree. No question. But back to use your father.

56:02And I think your father is a very interesting way of thinking about like there was a structure. Your father believed in a structure. And to your point, he didn't necessarily need it. He just believed in that structure. And so – but there was – he obviously had children. And so there was like the idea of an order. And the further we get away from that idea of an order or really what you would argue in your book is this moral law that is spiritual. It's our relationship, our spiritual relationship with a creator. The further we get away from that spiritual idea, it draws us away from humanity because our children are nothing more than pro-humanity.

56:45But our children remain at the center of our lives. Correct. I don't know very many parents for whom their children are not the center of their lives. And as far as I know, that applies to secular parents as well as religious parents. I think that it draws you away from understanding the importance that children play in living a full life. I think it pulls young women away from understanding what a deep phenomenon and what a rich phenomenon the act of bringing a child into the world is. and they think they can substitute a career for that. They think they can discover, they could replace that with getting a cute puppy and they can't.

57:37Well, by the way, we're just as critical of young men because ultimately there's a responsibility that comes with a family and that responsibility not taking up might never cause a maturity among men in society. Yeah, well, and also here we're getting into what I'm convinced is the truth, which is that men are socialized by women. Amen. And when you have a young man 20 years old,

58:06if he does not particularly want to find God at that point, he wants to get laid. And if the only one... I'm going to put this... How did you come up with that? That's crazy. I've been trying to tell people... I've been trying to explain this to people. I'm so glad you said that. I'm trying to explain to people... Welcome to OnlyFans and Tinder and everything under the sun, right? You take a 20 to 30-year-old male, and regardless of whether they do it in a healthy relationship and marriage, they are going to be sexually active. And that's – a lot of our problems as a society are rooted in that.

58:41It's just – it's crazy. So earlier, Charles, I want to touch at something because I think this is a really interesting part. Bill's going to ask a question, but I wanted to ask this question about smart people. You touch at this, and I want to ask kind of a philosophical question on the idea of smart people. Is the goal of being part of the tribe of smart people more about finding truth, or is it more about acting or thinking like other smart people? It's more about acting and thinking like other smart people. You're referring to a phrase that my wife originated when she said that I went to college and I learned that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore.

59:17and it's not that she was taught that they don't believe it anymore that was the atmosphere that was the zeitgeist her friends weren't religious her professors weren't religious nobody was religious and when the subject of religion came up it was treated dismissively or as a subject of humor smart people don't believe that stuff anymore and that's very much wanting to be part of the crowd and there was no And that's the process I went through. I didn't reflect upon whether that was intellectually the correct position to take. I just wanted to fit in. Sure. I think that explains a lot. And we would agree.

1:00:02The question is, are you seeking truth or are you seeking to be part of the cool kids? I mean, that's a very simple way of putting it. But I think that's a constant battle in many forms of truth, not just this. Yeah, well, I have had personal experience with that in terms of the topic of IQ, whereby there are things that if you believe certain things about IQ, you definitely are not cool. And so you don't believe those things regardless of what the data may say. Yeah, it's not allowable. That happens all the time. Yeah, yeah. So Charles, we love the book. We didn't talk. There were certain things we didn't have time to talk about.

1:00:45You have some really interesting stuff just about the Gospels in general. You talk about the nickname of James and John, the Sons of Thunder. I love that. I love that. The Shroud of Turin. I highly recommend our listeners to read the book and go into the Shroud of Turin. You got me kind of mentally gigging out as I was reading the book. I want to ask for our listeners, where can people follow you going forward? Obviously, we mentioned you're involved with American Enterprise Institute. dude, do you write often online or do you have a sub stack or is anywhere on social media that people can follow you?

1:01:21If you go to AEI, well, no, if you just search in your browser, AEI Charles Murray, it'll take you to my AEI page, which has all of my recent writings. Okay. And then if you follow me on X, I'm very active on X. And so - You're degenerate as well. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Listen, I never claim moral superiority over anybody. Me too. You had to catch me on a day when I wasn't playing poker, so there you are. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Charles, we really appreciate our time. Your book teaches us all that there is faith required in God and faith required in an ungodly world too. You also explain our innate ability to recognize what is good.

1:02:07This is not explainable by anything else than a moral law at some level, and as Aristotle might have said, an unmoved mover. If you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to a book with legs, give us a review, tell others about the books and great authors like Charles Murray that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast.smeetcap.com. that's podcast at SmeadCap.com you can also send your suggestions to us on X our handle is at SmeadCap thank you for joining us for a book with legs podcast we look forward to the next episode thank you for listening to a book with legs a podcast brought to you by Smead Capital Management the material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice you can learn more about Smead Capital Management and its products at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor.