One of the blurbs on the back of the cover jacket describes Charles Murray as, “Arguably, the most consequential social scientist alive.” Yes, indeed, and so I was delighted to hear of this book and to get an advance copy of it. It is similar to another book published earlier this year, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Both are measured and personal apologetics by conservative East Coast public intellectuals describing, first, the increasing evidence that God exists (that is, that the materialist worldview just doesn’t work) and, second, that Jesus of Nazareth is divine (that is, that the historicity of the New Testament, especially the Gospels, is solid). (Murray mentions the Douthat book in a footnote (163), but just to note that he had not read it in the course of writing his own book.) I should also note at the outset that Murray discusses his book on a video you can view here.
Before summarizing Murray’s already compact book (185 pages), I should mention one feature of it that alone makes it worth buying and reading: It is replete with valuable sidebars of reading lists on the various subtopics with which the book deals. Early on, the author promises that if nothing else he will provide such suggested reading, and he delivers. His top “gateway books” to Christianity, by the way and in addition to Mere Christianity, are (74) a couple each by Timothy Keller and Philip Yancey; also cited are John Polkinghorne’s The Faith of a Physicist and Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Wisdom Jesus. Another especially valuable sidebar lists “Sources for the Historicity of the Gospels” (93).
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Part I, “Taking God Seriously”
The author openly acknowledges that his book is personal but is also very much an investigative, evidential journey — not an emotional or spiritual experiential one (19). The book is accordingly measured and unproselytizing — I would say to a fault (see 30, 63, 147). The author describes how he is nudged to begin the first part of his journey — the existence of some sort of God — by “the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena” (22).
The book proceeds then to a chapter on “The Brute Facts of the Big Bang,” which includes a discussion of fine-tuning and a Samuel Johnsonian rejection of the multiverse theory (43-44). That chapter concludes (44), “For me, the inescapable conclusion is that a God created a universe that would enable life to exist.” Chapter 5, “Challenges to Materialism,” includes paranormal phenomena, especially near-death experiences (50-54) and terminal lucidity (54-57, meaning the documented phenomenon of people who have long been unable to think and speak coherently then suddenly and briefly just before death regaining their minds). This chapter, and part I of the book, concludes: “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul” (59).
Part II, “Taking Christianity Seriously”
Chapter 6, “Strange New Respect,” discusses the importance of Christianity to intellectual development in the West generally and to science in particular. Chapter 7, “Enter C.S. Lewis,” is the jumping off point for chapter 8 (and chapters 9 and 10, actually), “The Moral Law,” which draws heavily on Lewis’s Mere Christianity and ends, “Which leads inexorably to my next task: to decide what I make of Jesus of Nazareth” (84).
Chapter 9, “Who Wrote the Gospels and When,” marshals evidence for traditional authorship and early authorship. Regarding the latter, the author has a good discussion titled “No Mention Anywhere in the New Testament That the Second Temple Was Destroyed” (104-05); the other headings in that section on “The Case for Earlier Dates” (103-05) are “The Jewishness of the Gospels,” “Internal Evidence for Pre-70 Origins of the Gospels,” and “The Curious Ending of Acts.”
At the end of the introduction to chapter 10, “The Historicity of the Gospels,” the author says (113) it will cover five topics: the accuracy of the Gospels regarding facts that can be checked (the focus is on geography and Palestinian Jewish names), “undesigned coincidences” suggesting that different accounts of events in Gospels dovetail, reasons for thinking Jesus’ teachings were transmitted accurately by his disciples, what to make of miracles in general, and what to make of the Resurrection specifically (including a discussion of the problems with scenarios that try to explain it away (131-33)). The chapter ends with a careful discussion of the evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin (133-40). On the chapter’s last page (140), there are two key quotes: first, from physicist and later Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, that the only plausible explanation of the facts we know surrounding the Resurrection is that Jesus “is alive today, glorified and exalted but still continuously related in a mysterious but real way with the historical figure who lived and died in first-century Palestine”) and, second, the author concluding by saying that he grew up in the Christian faith, fell away, and now “has returned to it.”
Chapter 11, the final chapter, is titled, “What’s the Point?” The first section (“God of the Gaps Revisited,” 141-48) reviews the evidence for supernaturalism — especially quantum mechanics’ mysteries and the universe’s fine-tuning, and human consciousness/terminal lucidity — while the second section (“The Backdrop to the Moral Law,” 148-51) cites at the outset C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and then argues and concludes that “the evanescence of moral principles in the present age suggest[s] a special need to seek moral bedrock” (151). The last section of the chapter (and the book, 151-58) is titled “Surprised by Belief” (another nod to C.S. Lewis) and lists some specific ways the author’s outlook on life has been improved by his faith — e.g., “God’s grace has become real to me” (153) and he’s grateful “to believe that I live in a universe made meaningful by love and grace” (158, penultimate sentence).
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I liked the book very much, but I do want to note two caveats. First, as I suggested earlier, I think that sometimes the author does not proselytize enough. After all, the author concludes that there is a God and that Jesus is divine, and this is a big deal — not only to him, but to anyone, since it ought to determine how we live in this life as well as what will happen to us eternally in the next. So unexcitedly suggesting that, oh, here are some things that I’ve found and that maybe you might be interested in, too, but of course no pressure and you may prefer not to — well, that just seems bizarre, like telling someone in an languid monotone that, oh, your head is on fire and, by the way, here’s a billion dollars. I guess Murray (and Douthat) made the decision that, as a matter of effective salesmanship to nonbelievers, they had to avoid at all costs looking like Christian kooks. Well, who knows — maybe they’re right.
Second, relatedly and as readers of this blogsite might predict, I wonder why more use is not made of Pascal’s Wager (it’s mentioned obliquely on page 155). The book has made the case that it is not just possible but likely that the Christian God exists. What’s more, the author has also related from personal experience that this belief has made his life here on earth not only no worse but actually better. The author has concluded that he has a soul, and this — especially with his discussion of near-death experiences — means the possibility of an afterlife must be accepted. And he has cautioned that we cannot deal with certainties in these matters, but must be satisfied with probabilities (148). So why does he not conclude that a rational person, as he continues his search for truth, should also choose to behave as God would want us to and to cultivate his or her Christian faith? Note that the author concludes the first paragraph of the last chapter with, “I still haven’t spelled out why you should take religion seriously.” Well, then, mightn’t this chapter be a great place to discuss the Wager of that amazing Enlightenment polymath Christian, Blaise Pascal?
Let me also note here two respects in which Murray’s beliefs may be at odds with some conventional Christians: first, while generally defending the historicity of the Gospels, he considers the accounts of Jesus’ birth in Luke and Matthew to be “beautiful fables” (123); and, second, he views Jesus’ relationship with God as being intimate but perhaps incomprehensible to us.
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A few odds and ends from the book:
- Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian physicist and astronomer who in 1927 proposed the initial version of what later became known as the Big Bang Theory, was an ordained Roman Catholic priest (31).
- “By the 1990s, the core proposition of the Big Bang theory — that space, time, and all matter in the universe originated in a singularity — was no longer in serious dispute.” (32)
- Murray (66) gives “credit to Thomist theology on both counts [i.e., helping foster “a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that individuals can act efficaciously to fulfill that purpose”] and extra credit to Protestantism for augmenting the individual’s sense of efficacious autonomy.”
- I noted a funny observation by the author about whom to fault for the rise in bad behavior among artists (70): “I blame it on Beethoven, who was the exemplar of the rebellious, ill-tempered genius who breaks old rules and is contemptuous of his audience’s preferences. He acted as if he were God’s gift to humanity. As it happens, he was. The problem is that subsequent generations of artists who weren’t gifts from God emulated him.”
- Re New Testament revisionists, they are “erudite in the same way that Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault were erudite — meaning (in my view) that they devised convoluted explanations for phenomena that have simpler and more plausible explanations” (91).
- Here’s an interesting quote from Clement of Alexandria (96-97, footnote omitted): “Those great and truly divine men, I mean the apostles of Christ, were purified in their life, and were adorned with every virtue of the soul, but were uncultivated in speech. They were confident indeed in their trust in the divine and wonder-working power which was granted unto them by the Savior, but they did not know how, nor did they attempt to proclaim the doctrines of their teacher in studied and artistic language, but employing only the demonstration of the divine Spirit, which worked with them, and the wonder-working power of Christ, which was displayed through them, they published the knowledge of the kingdom of heaven throughout the whole world, paying little attention to the composition of written works. … Of all the disciples of the Lord, only Matthew and John have left us written memorials, and they, tradition says, were led to write only under the pressure of necessity.”
- A book on near-death experiences “puts the proportion of those who have a ‘hell’ experience at 1-2 percent” (178 n.8).
- Finally, the book is dedicated to Arthur Brooks. It’s not explained why, but Brooks was for a decade the president of the American Enterprise Institute, where Murray has worked for 35 years — and is himself a serious and thoughtful Christian.
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One more thing, not directly related to Charles Murray’s book: As mentioned earlier, I write a lot about Pascal’s Wager (see “Posts related to Pascal’s Wager” on the blogsite map), and here is an obvious point but one which I don’t think I have made as explicitly as I might. I have often written that the Wager should prompt us to cultivate our faith. But in addition to, and as a part of, that I think it obviously suggests that we should also conform our behavior to what God wants. As a Protestant I believe that faith is what matters, but righteous behavior helps cultivate faith, faith and works are intertwined — and, in all events, I think only a foolish Protestant would be so confident of sola fide that he would ignore how he acts.