Taking Religion Seriously -- Review of Charles Murray's Book

 

Taking Religion Seriously isn’t a book you would expect from a political scientist most well known for Losing Ground and The Bell Curve.  It’s not, however, surprising that a man eighty-two years of age should ponder the topics addressed in this brief work that can be read in a few hours.  Broadly speaking those topics are God, morality, and Christianity.

Though Murray claims no special expertise on those matters, it’s obvious he’s devoted considerable time to exploring the subject matter--a largely intellectual journey that began three decades earlier with his wife’s pursuit of a religious community congruent with her profound experience of motherly love.  The latter search found a suitable destination with the Quakers.  Charles’ more intellectual investigations are summarized in this book which offers tentative conclusions plus a plethora of books suggested for further investigation. 

Part One of the book, “Taking God Seriously,” begins with the aforementioned spiritual awakening experienced by his wife, Catherine, whose “love for her [newborn] daughter surpassed anything she had ever known.”  It was, in her words, “far more than evolution required.”  Murray then focuses on his own spiritual limitations, discussing youthful Peace Corps experiences in Thailand and his largely unsuccessful attempts at meditation.  Those experiences, however, led him to see that people have “perceptual deficits” as well as talents that facilitate the ability to appreciate music, art, and spirituality.  This lack of spiritual perceptiveness, he notes, is facilitated by “Western modernity” which shelters most of us from the tragic aspects of life like the death of children that until recently plagued all people.    

Murray’s “secular catechism” in chapter three provides a succinct summary of the beliefs one is likely to inherit via cultural osmosis or higher education.  Those materialistic assumptions dismiss religion and reduce humans to highly evolved animals living on a “nondescript planet on the edge of a nondescript galaxy in a universe with a billion galaxies.”  Murray points out how unreflective that creed is, ignoring   fundamental mysteries like the amazing relationship of mathematics to the physical world and even failing to seriously ask why the universe itself exists.   

Those observations lead to thoughts about the Big Bang and its relevance for the idea of God, observations whose detailed mathematical elements can be skimmed over by non-physicists and reduced to one conclusion: the odds of there being a universe at all are vanishingly slim. This analysis is essentially the cosmological argument for the existence of God employing unimaginable exponents like 10 to the 10^th power raised to the 123^rd power—a number that has more zeroes “than there are elementary particles in the entire universe.”  The jury is out on the precision of that number, as it is on an alternative theory Murray acknowledges but can’t embrace--the existence of “multiverses” that account for such long odds.   

Part One ends with unexpected data offered to challenge the prevailing materialistic assumption that the mind and consciousness are essentially related to the brain. That evidence includes near death and paranormal experiences.  Murray is well aware of the unreliability of many of these reports but points out that scientific analysis of some of these incidents is beginning to occur. He’s also unwilling to dismiss out of hand evidence not amenable to rigorous scientific methods.     

In Part Two Murray turns his attention to Christianity and begins by discussing its essential contribution to the cultural efflorescence of Europe from the 15^th to the 19^th centuries.  A major component of that development rested on Western science’s implicit faith in the universe’s rationality. That faith, as the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed, was itself rooted in the medieval “insistence on the rationality of God.”  Murray further notes that the modern decline of Western art and literature coincides with the decline of Christianity in the culture.  Quoting from his own book, Human Accomplishment, “Is it not implausible that those individuals who accomplished things so beyond the rest of us just happened to be uniformly stupid about the great questions.”  Bach, Murray argues, “made a prima facie case that his way of looking at the universe needs to be taken seriously.”  The same argument goes for other artists who held truth, beauty, and the good as their primary motivation rather than the expression of their own feelings.

C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and morality are the focus of subsequent chapters.  Murray proposes, with Lewis, that at least certain moral concepts appear in all cultures and that this fact suggests a transcendent source beyond evolutionary explanations.  He then discusses what for me was the most interesting material in the book, namely observations about the dating and historical reliability of the gospels.  (That’s saying a lot, since I graduated in 1975 from Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.)  Murray does a good job of questioning the generally accepted revisionist views on those questions and provides cogent reasons for believing earlier dates are plausible and for thinking the gospel accounts of Jesus are largely accurate. Those reasons include, among others, the tradition of oral transmission in Judaism as well as detailed analyses of Jewish names and geographical references. 

 Murray’s foray into Christian belief ends with surprising observations about the resurrection, ideas that are seldom put forward as cogently by anyone with his intellectual pedigree. The final topic of that analysis concerns somewhat tangential but intriguing facts about the Shroud of Turin. Currently those facts seem to debunk a prior medieval dating and to support an unexplained origin of the image in an area and time consistent with the crucifixion of Jesus.  Obviously that preliminary evidence doesn’t prove anything about a resurrection, but it does show my casual dismissal of “just another medieval relic hoax” was premature.

In sum, Taking Religion Seriously provides significant food for thought as well as numerous sources to further investigate the truly fundamental issues it raises:  God, morality, and Christianity.   

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle