Why Smart People Don’t Take Religion Seriously (And Why I Was Wrong)

that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. In my case, I went from Newton, Iowa, where I was raised a Presbyterian. My family would go to church every week, and I'd go with them, but I was not deeply committed. And I get to Harvard and I like to fit in, and I learned that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. And I bought into that just the same way I think an awful lot of other people people did, and

we've never really given it much thought. And I'm saying to them, look, I'm not trying to proselytize, not trying to get you to do anything in particular except realize, you've got to look at this stuff. There's a lot of material here you need to confront.

stops functioning. And another thing is you learn about a universe that has a billion galaxies, not a billion stars, but a million galaxies and tens of millions of light years across, and the whole idea of a personal god just says, of course, not that that's not in the rem of possibility.

my public career, and life was complete. And it was at that point, a couple of months after the birth of our daughter, Anna, that my wife came to me and was talking about the love that she felt for Anna, and she said, I love her far more than evolution requires, which is a great it's a great line. It is yeah, in several ways. One is I'm Harvard and mit, she's Oxford and Yale. Okay, this is what this is the way you put it, love her more than evolution requires.

And what she was saying was that something else was going on, and she felt that she was a conduit for some larger love. And you know, an awful lot of people in my position dismiss openly spiritual believers because we say, well, they're kidding themselves, they're deluding themselves. Maybe they aren't that smart. I could say none of those things about my wife, so I did not have the option of dismissing her experience. And you were quite correct

the way you described me. I was never a militant atheist. In fact, I use the word agnostic advisedly because I go along with the proposition that of all the religious positions, simple atheism is at least plausible. So I was always open. There's something, there's a mystery about the universe that was always out there. But that was nineteen eighty five that my wife she migrated to Quakerism. And whereas a lot of Quakers are socially active and not all that spiritual,

she's a spiritually active Quaker. And I watched her for ten years moving along her discoveries. The way she put it is that it was like being in a room with a light on a rheostat, and as time went on, the light got brighter and brighter in terms of her own developing faith. And finally, by the mid nineteen nineties, I was getting moved away from my simple, my simple lack of attention to religion.

to use the analogy with music. I've had professional musicians who when they hear music, they're hearing something completely different from what I hear. They are getting an emotional impact, from an intellectual impact, from a spiritual impact from it. Oftentimes that I don't get. I loved I love a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart sonata, but I'm not hearing what they hear. I don't have as much RECEPTIVI music, and some people are simply tone deaf too well. I

think with spirituality, I'm deficient. If you know, if you think suppose that we suppose we score spirituality the same way we score IQ, I'd be somewhere around seventy or seventy five, and my wife is way up there. And if that's the case, when you start to take religion seriously in a way, I don't have the same option she did. I can you know, for example, she is very active and contemporary, and I was unable to follow

into that. But at the same time, since I wanted to take it seriously, I'll keep going back to that phrase. I ended up going a more empirical route, and I was pushed along in that. I did have a sort of road to Damascus moment, but it wasn't spiritual. It was when I read a book called Just Six Numbers, which was by a British astrophysicist, and this was not

had no religious overtones. He was talking about the Big Bang, and he was talking about something that physicists have known since the nineteen seventies, which is that at the moment of the Big Bang, when the universe emerged out of nothing, a dimensionless point and not only space where probably time was created, it's as if there were a whole bunch of settings which, if they had not all been perfectly aligned, would have produced a universe in which life was not possible.

It would have been a universe that was radiation but no stars and galaxies, a universe with black holes. And instead we get a universe that creates all the elements, and the elements create planets eventually and stars, which eventually enable life. The chances against that are about a trillion to one, and that calculation actually is by another astrophysicist, a Nobel Prize winner, and I read that, I said

a trillion to one chance against this happening. I don't believe in trillion to one chances, and I was left with the option of believing in the multiverse, which is the theory, and it's purely theory that there are millions of universes like this. To me just not that's just I can't buy into that in any way, shape or form. And the only plausible opportunity is that there is an intention behind the universe. And simply saying that to myself was a big step.

You ended up reading this book, so you had some intentionality spiritually. What was your goal and what was your mindset to get to that point? And since you didn't go to a Quaker services that were seen more experiential like your wife had, what kind of investigation were you intending to pursue.

I try, and I just lose my focus. But it is permissible a Quaker meeting, not encouraged, but permissible to read the Bible. So I would take the Bible with me and I would read that maybe half an hour out of the hour of the Quaker service Sunday. Well, over several years you read a lot of the Bible that way, and the New Testament. I read the New Testament, you know, repeatedly, and different portions of it. So I

was acquiring that kind of knowledge. I was persuaded even before I read just six numbers about the Big Bang, you know, the famous question why is there something rather than nothing? That was that was very much in my mind in the last half of the nineties, the whole point about the simplicity of the relationship between mathematics and the physical world. I kept thinking, why should it be that something like the eee equals mc square of Einstein's

famous theory, Why should that be mathematically so simple. It's as if the mathematics would not be that simple unless assembly had planned it that way. So there was a series of nudges, and of a couple of things happened in two thousand and five. Well, first I wrote a book called Human Accomplishment, long book about the arts and

sciences and the great accomplishments in it. And I had a Catholic friend, Michael Novak, who's a famous Catholic philosopher, not theologian, but anyway, he said to me when I set out on the book, he said, I think you're going to find as you go into this that Christianity played a huge role in Western civilization, developing the arts and sciences. And I liked Michael a Latin, and admired him, but I said to myself, well, you know, the Greeks were kind of their first in terms of Plato and

Aristotle and logic. But I didn't argue with him. And then as I worked in the book, I was increasingly impressed by the fundamental role that Christianity played, not just in the arts, where Christianity was very obviously the inspiration for an awful lot of the great visual art, a lot of the great music, a lot of the great literature,

but also the sciences. So I came to the end of writing Human Accomplishment in a Round two thousand and four, and I was already bothered by the degree to which Christianity had had this powerful impact and on the last page of the book, I said, you know, you have to realize how many of these great creators of art and literature were devout Christians. And I had a sentence that said, Johan's Austin Bach doesn't have to explain himself. He does not have to defend his way of looking

at the world. His music does it for him. And so I was opened up by that point. Then I read Cus, then I read C. S. Lewis, and I was sort of tipped over the edge into a whole new set of things.

Is it in the back of your mind that's just kind of gnawing you, Like, what was your mindset and intentionality in discovering the truth about these questions during that two decades.

and I took a lot of those accounts seriously. But then it sort of grows inside me that, you know, if these near death experiences are real, it means consciousness can exist outside the brain. And so that was hovering in the background. One of the reasons I've wrote the book the way I did was to avoid making it sound systematic. And I avoid the word journey. I don't use I don't think I use the word journey. And the reason is I had no sense of being in

any kind of straight line. I had a much more diffuse sense of As time went on, there were new things intruding on my understanding of the world, and I was still trying to fit them together.

findings unconsciousness, that's fascinating. And when you get into apologetics, as I did later, into the study of the New Testament and the historicity of it and the dating of the Gospels and all that, it's just plain, intellectually really riveting.

order built into the universe? The origin of the universe began to bug you, like, why is there something rather than nothing? This points towards a cause outside of the universe. And then the fine tuning of the universe also points towards kind of a mind that best explains with intentionality the order of the universe set for life. And then consciousness seems to bug you. This is wait a minute,

I can't reduce human beings down just to matter. There seems to be mind or a soul and with near death experiences that can at least minimally survive the brain. Does that capture kind of where you were intellectually before Mere Christianity?

Lewis and Mere Christianity as a turning point. And I left the lunch and bought the book and read it over the next few days, and I was really impressed. Remember what I earlier I said about deciding when I went to college that people were right and saying smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. You don't read Mere Christianity and say smart people don't beleave that stuff anymore. Because if there's a voice that just radiates intelligence, it's C. S. Lewis.

And a lot of people who are who are watching have have read C. S. Lewis themselves. They know this, but if they haven't, when I said he radiates intelligence, he does it with his conversational, casual, informal style that is totally engrossing, and he has the wonderful characteristic of your reading him, and you're sort of mentally arguing with him.

And then after you've said, oh, well, this is why I don't agree with them, the next paragraph says, perhaps you're thinking that he does, and he answers your objection. And so that had a huge effect on me, and I was by this time there were lots of redigious books coming into the house because of Catherine, she reads full humorously. But one that I saw independently of her, I guess was Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I'm sure you're

familiar with it. It's Richard Baucom, British theologian, and he starts out the book saying, well, I know this is a minority view, but this book the thesis is that the New Testament Gospels are deliberately trying to convey how much of their material is coming from eyewitnesses, and that he is making the case for the traditional interpretation of the Gospels that, for example, it was tradition that Mark had taken down Peter's reminiscences in effect, and he's saying,

there's really good evidence that that's exactly what Mark does, and so forth, and that did something really important for me, because I had already read into the revisionists. I'd read some of bart Eraman, I'd read some of the other things, which says, oh, the Gospels weren't really written. They accumulated traditions over decades in different parts of the Roman Empire. It's like the telephone game, and so we really can't even be sure that what Jesus is purported to have

said there's any resemblance to anything he did say. I knew about the Jesus Seminar, and I kind of thought that they've won. I'd assume that, yeah, you know that more or less the New Testament had been discredited, and all at once, here's Malcolm writing a very error type book, and it seems to me he's making a lot of sense. And then I start from there and I end up reading a variety of other defenses of the tradition, and some of which were written before Malcolm. I hadn't known

that these existed. And is I did that? I kept saying to myself, I'm more impressed by the empirical evidence by the defenders than I am by the revisionists.

the body. But the big piece when I talk about mere Christianity is that in the scientific evidence, there's a mind that made us, but we can't ascertain anything moral about this mind. Lewis's argument, even independent from the Bible, is like, there's the moral law and we know it and we expect it and we act as if it's real, which moves us along the pendulum from this mind that began the universe to this seemingly personal agent behind this

moral law. Do you agree with that thinking? Is that a part of your process or am I kind of reading stuff in post facto that maybe wasn't there?

is a kind of love agape. And so what we see in what he's been describing with the basis for the moral law is the nature of God, and the nature of God corresponds very closely to the Christian nature of God. God is love, and it provides a moral basis for behavior and for a lot of people. Francis Collins is another example. For Francis Collins, it's that passage that sort of brought him up short and was a transforming experience, and it was close to that for me. It was certainly very influential.

my favorite inserts from your books. So we're somewhat skipping ahead, but you write this, you said during one such wakefulness a few months before writing these words, I was thinking about what it would be like to meet great religious figures from the past, such as Gautama, Buddha, Louzy, Moses, and Jesus. It'd be fascinating, of course, to see what they were like in person, and I would naturally treat

all of them with the utmost respect. Unbidden, it came to me that I would treat Jesus differently, with reverence. So what motivated you to then say, okay, maybe this God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus.

don't you. And I said, well, but she was putting out something that she had perceived that I had not fully perceived myself, And that was true a lot of this, And in a way, I think that should be encouraging for unbelievers, because you know, if you say to yourself that you've got to have a born again moment, a revelation of I think you're likely to be disappointed. That happens to some people. I think those are authentic experiences

some people. But it's not the only way. It's not the only way that a person can migrate to a new set of beliefs, and it is not all rational and intellectual. I did not say to myself, well, I think the odds are now eighty nine point four percent. Such and such as the case, and so I'm going to believe it was a combination of rational appraisal of a lot of empirical information along with a harder to

describe gradual spiritual process. But they did not feel spiritual at the time in an emotional way.

And I had at the same time a curiosity about these traditions, so that I would read that there was an early tradition about Mark recording Peter's reminiscences, There is an early tradition of this, an early tradition of that, but the people never actually said where the tradition came from.

And so one of the things that is I started reading that I found the most fascinating and also the most impressing were the very early Patristic writings of Papias and of if I'm pronouncing that right, and Clement and Iranius and others where and there were a couple of books I read which had extended quotations from them, and

I read those. I think specially of of Clement writing about how it is that you only had two Gospels written by apostles, and the way he describes that just sounds like a historian describing something that was well known at that time and that he's relating it to us, and it sounded plausible. And I also assumed that Clement had access to a lot of written material that we don't have access to anymore because it's been lost, and this sounded like a serious recounting of This is why

John wrote John, this is why Mark. This is how Mark took down the reminiscence of Peter. It was percuisive. And then I also came to the question of dating the Gospels. It would never prettically bothered me that they were dated at seventy to ninety AD, because I figured they could still be quite accurate that long after the crucifixion. But it shorter is better. And I think the evidence that Acts was finished by the early sixties is persuasive. And if Acts was written by the early sixties, that

pushes everything else back. And so you're looking at the Gospels certainly in the fifties and maybe in the forties, and you put that alongside the Pauline letters. And so as I explored this, I came to believe that Lewis's trilemma was better than I had initially realized. That it was not the case that Jesus as having a special relationship with God, son of God. That was not a late invention, that was I came to say, the revision

us are wrong about that. I'm not a biblical scholar, but that was my conclusion on the basis of my reading. And he did claim that. And so now we have to say, can we reconcile him to both be a great moral teacher and also being a lunatic when it comes to talking about his relationship with Got And that's hard to do too.

is because I really love getting into new topics. And so as I was doing this, I had a feeling of, Oh, here's this whole literature out here that I didn't know existed, and it's really interesting and I'm going to keep reading it. And was I aware that something important was this was a really important topic? Yes, I was. But my basic process was the same as I used for writing Human Accomplishment or the Bell Curve or Coming Apart. It was an intellectual curiosity that yielded fruit.

a book on human accomplishment or the Bell curve. This really matters for my soul and I've got to land this plane with more at stake than anything else I've written on.

good theological reasons for saying that. It just okay, more backdrop here, uh, I assume that any God worth the name is as unknowable to me as I am to my dog. Okay, and the the I use that analogy because I have a border Collie dog and that dog is really smart, okay border colleagues. He that border colleague knows who I am and knows a lot about me, knows what I want him to do more or less, which usually he doesn't do. But that dog has no idea what I'm doing when I sit in front of

my computer. He has no idea of the Enermy and I believe that it's it's wrong to anthropomorphize God. So I start out with that as a very strong belief that I still have. If that's the case, then it is going to be very hard for human beings to accurately convey certain things. I don't know if you're familiar with John Polkinghorn is that name? Yeah? Yeah, Okay. He's a British theologian. He was a theoretical physicist at Oxford or Cambridge for several years before he became ordained in

the Anglican Church. And he has a very good book where he goes through the Nicene Creed one phrase at a time, and he has kind of an exegesis on that phrase as he sees it from his perspective, and when he comes to the question of Jesus as the Son of God, and he considers himself a full fledged Christian in every way, but he talks about this difficulty of using language and he says, well, it's this is the word heuristics, which I'm never quite sure what that means,

but the degree to which we are allowed a certain latitude in trying to use language to understand things. And I think with Jesus as the Son of God, that's

a classic case. And I use I report the analogy that I did not learned during my adult exploration, but I learned when I was taking Confirmation classes in the Presbyterian Church when I was twelve years old, and the Reverend Lowell McConnell of the Presbyterian Church in Newton, Iowa, I was talking to us about this and he said, well, suppose you go to the ocean and you fill up

a jar with seawater. Is that the ocean? And we all say no, and he says no, but it's as much of the ocean as you can get in a jar. And I know this is not I've had some good Christians who have been very upset with me with making this comparison. They say, no, Jesus was more than as much a God as you can get into the human jar. But for me that is a good way of expressing a mystery, because I think any conception of Jesus as the son of God is essentially extremely hard for human beings to grasp.

the illustration of the dog that's in here. I thought about asking and my son, who's thirteen, I like to ask him provocative questions, and I'll say things I might ask him this, are we closer to a dog and our ability to think in reason or closer to God? And of course, initially I want to say, far closer to a dog than God, who's infinite, and dogs and

I are both finite. But of course we're made in God's image with a capacity to reason and think and reflect upon things that dogs don't, So we have that in common with God, so to speak at the root of the Christian faith, of course, is like, yeah, we cannot get to God on our own. But that like John one one in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, and the word was God takes on human flesh to kind of bridge that gap, so to speak, so we can at least understand God insofar

as it goes and relate to him personally. That kind of came to my mind when you were you were making that point. If I can ask, what, what would be the barrier holding you back as far as you're comfortable sharing of not saying I'm not I'm not quite an orthodox Christian? Is it that what you just said about the language not describing God? What are those big boulders that are keeping you back?

which is the physical resurrection. M and so part of me wants to fudge that one too, And this one in Polkhorn has phrased that that he is that the the evidence from the First Easter says that there was some extremely profound experience that the disciples had and it's really hard to push it too far from that. And but in some real concrete sense, the Jesus of the first century is still alive in the Church of today and has a continue is historical presence. And so you

have that, I said, the fudge factor. And here's where I think, probably I'm getting too involved in empiricism, But you have to come to grips with the shroud of Turin, which is pretty mysterious piece of cloth. And I say to myself, the only thing holding me back there is a little bit more confidence in the dating. So they have a method of dating which has put it at two thousand years old. And of course there was a

notorious carbon dating which was badly screwed up. And I'm saying, you know, if they can reinforce that dating at two thousand years old, I just have no more excuses left of not believing in the physical resurrection. And I'm of two minds about that. One is that I think I would be logically forced to that conclusion, and the other one is I can still still feel myself resisting it because of probably personality characteristics over which I have little control.

I give the example in the book of that kind of resistance when one time in the nineties I was meeting and something had been bothering me a lot, and so I decided I was going to pray, and I was going to do I'd never tried to pray before, and I was going to and I did. I did my level best to pray, and a couple of days later, I realized that whatever it was that was bothering me and I can't remember what it was, had gone away.

Scared me to death. The reason it's scared me to death was not because prayer failed, but because it worked. And so in the one hand, you say, maybe I ought to be doing this all the time, and on the other hand there is there are things holding me back. But here I think you just have to say, look, human beings are strange creatures. And my wife would be

the first to confirm that I'm strange too. I use I use the I think I do use the phrase I'm an eccentric Christian or at some point during the book, and I guess that where I am right now is that I have limitations in terms of faith that I have not been able to overcome and God will understand. That's that's sort of a I do believe. Of all the things that I think I have taken on board most deeply, the concept of God is love is one

of the most important. I think that's one of the most meaningful statements you can that is full of implications if you have an universe that a God which is love. So I see myself as believing in some really big things associated with Christianity, finding myself in difficulty making further leaps, and not too troubled by it because of the sense

that I'm trying hard. I'm trying sincerely, and as I said before, the God that I am comfortable with right now is a very forgiving God plus being all plus being all wise.

There's a level of a leap that's there, but it seems reasonable and seems in fitting with the character of that God and what we know about him from general revelation but also within the scriptures. Does that ring true to you or you like, I don't know that I can quite get there.

going on. I realize that I have a much different feeling about forgiveness of sins then I had twenty five years ago, thirty years ago. I remember of one time feeling very guilty about something I shouldn't have done that I did do in my twenties and saying to myself, I don't want to be forgiven for this. I shouldn't be forgiven. I should feel bad about it, I should always feel bad about it. And I didn't murder anybody

or anything like that. It was, but it was. It was a case of recently, or maybe several years ago, suddenly realizing that that had been a very silly way to look at it, and also very ecocentric. I mean, who am I to decide whether I should be forgiven for something I've done. My job is to be repentant, to be truly repentent, not making it up, not faking it, but truly repentant. And it's up to God whether I'm forgiven.

And I had a sense of believing in God's grace, which is a more traditional language for saying God will understand. And so that's that's that's another piece of the painting. That's filled in that wasn't filled in maybe ten years ago, but got filled in sometime in the in the intervening time. No, I'm maybe two, so I don't have forever. But but that's continuing to go on.

Those who believe are saved, those who don't are condemned. It's like he says, this born again experience, the best way to put it is believing in Jesus for forgiveness of your sins. And of course I'm collapsing that down. That would probably be an Orthodox way of understanding what the gospel is. I couldn't tell. At the end of your book, when you talk about forgiveness of sins, I'm like, is he there with that? Kind of grace or is

that still a part of the narrative. You're like, I'm working out if I need that forgiveness from God and his grace in my life.

unbelievable doctrine. And Michael said to me, because I think probably if you put Michael into a lighted Texter that probably he probably would have had a very powerful and eloquent theological description of how he still accepts transubstantiation. But I don't think he does literally. Okay, but here's what he said to me. He said, God's God needs a

church that can speak to everyone. And what I interpret him as saying there is that the transubstantiation for a lot of people is something which helps them to get to the larger truths of Catholicism. And in a similar kind of way, I think that their aspects of Christian Christianity, where they serve a function of leading people to the underlying truths, but in different ways. And if you want to think of it this way, transubstantiation may be a powerful way for God to speak to some very simple

people who come from cultures where are not sophisticated. Well, you know what, It's conceivable that C. S. Lewis and Richard Balcom are God's way of speaking to over educated agnostics like me, which is that he puts stuff out there whereby no transsphentiation isn't going to get me there. But if I put somebody really smart, putting some material out there that can appeal to this over educated guy,

maybe I can get to him. And and I am being a little bit facetious here, but not very, but not very, because there are too many times in my life that I've had the eerie sense of things worked out in ways that seem mysterious, and it's almost as if God willed it, And I say, no, that can't really be, can it? And But that's the more pieces of the puzzle. So I guess where we're ending up is there is truth in packaging on this book, which

is that what I titled it taking religion Seriously. There is sort of an implication there of delving into very serious topics that are very difficult, with no promises that at the end you'll come out and say, oh I got it. And I think I deliver on that ambiguity.

At the very end, this is on page one forty seven, so we're within about I don't know, ten pages from the end of the book, maybe maybe fifteen pages, and you describe to what are kind of like psychological reasons if I'm understanding it, that holds you back from some of the beliefs, from embracing them more quickly. So she said, you're talking about confronting the straightforward implication of the evidence that you have a soul is intimidating. So this is

an an intellectual barrier, and I totally understand it. It's like intimidating because what this means for life after death, what it means to be human, my accountability, creator, et cetera. And then the next line you say, another and more prosaic explanation of my resistance is the fear of what the other members of my tribe will think. I super appreciate your candor on that one. As we get to where you're at now, you said it at eighty two,

Your like, I don't have endless time left. If you're gonna say moving forward, how much is intellectual versus how much are just kind of these psychological personal reasons that might hold you back from embracing orthodox Christianity Or is it really hard to just kind of pull that apart and make sense of it.

And that is just as dogmatic a belief among children of the Enlightenment as any religious belief. And so I have been increasingly irritated that members of my tribe for placing too much hubris in the power of human reason and logic. And also I had an experience after publishing the book and and a couple of the things I've written with reactions from members of my tribe which have

been very dismissive. And they have been dismissive not because they took the material I wrote and said here's points A, B, and C about why Murray is empirically wrong. They didn't do that at all. They just sort of basically said, oh, smart, people don't believe that stuff anymore. That's essentially what they were doing. So I don't worry. I don't worry about them so much. But your other point about the thinking that you have a soul is intimidating. Uh, that's the

way I put it. It's also exhilarating, and so it's it's like a too good to be true, but there is pretty good evidence that it is true. And it's taken me time and will continue to take me time to fully embrace that, but I think probably I will. But I have in one important respect, which is I'm not afraid of dying, and I haven't been for many

years now, and it is I used to be. I had moments before of twenty five years ago when I would feel existential dread at the fact of oblivion at gone no longer exists, and that went away, and so at some level I have accepted the possibility I have a soul fully embracing that is to open up a rich, a richer way of thinking about your future than non believers can possibly enjoy. And so I should have said it's intimidating. Ultimately, I think it's going to be accelerating.

music does it for him. So I was respectful long before I've associated myself as a believer, and part of being respectful comes out of the enormous respect I had for the Christian teachings, just as teachings and the way people ought to behave By the same token, I mean, we're coming to the end, and I don't want to introduce new stuff. But it's also important and part of C. S. Lewis's point that the great systems of ethics uh and this is true of confusion, It's true of out dows

and true of Buddhism. They haven't all been exactly the same, but somebody who behaved virtuously in each of those traditions is going to behave quite similarly. And I think Christianity is perhaps the best exposition of a code of ethics. But because I have a long time believed in those concepts of virtue, I was kind of helped to keep me from going astray in the way I thought about policy.

May I just say, since we are coming to the end, that your whole way of asking me questions and talking about this, knowing that I am someone who has quite different Christianity than you have, I've really enjoyed. You have been wholly sympathetic without pretending that we agree with each other on these things. And I will say you have drawn me out in a way that very few people have done in the past, and I have more or

less enjoyed it. Occasionally I've gotten a little answery about whether I was saying things right, but it's been quite an experience.

you don't have to say it out loud. I would do that in a heartbeat. These conversations are what I enjoy as much as anything, so that opportunity is out there anytime, I would carve it out and enjoy it. And I do want to. I want to commend your book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Obviously as an evangelist an apologist, I would end it a little differently and invite people to repent and believe in Jesus. But that's just where we differ at this stage. But it's easy to read.

It's clear your premise of taking religion seriously. That's what you say you're arguing for, and you argue for it in a way that I think respects the reader and invites them to reflect in a non preachy way. I think it's an excellent book. I'm glad you wrote it, and if you write anything else in this lane, definitely send it to me. I'd love to continue that conversation as well. And for people, watch them before you click

away and make sure you hit subscribe. And by the way, a ton of you who watch these videos are not subscribed, so subscribe, hit that notification button. And if you want to study apologetics, which is really what we talked about today and Charles Murray talks about in his book, we'd love to have you join us at Biola University online

and in person our master's degree. If you're not ready for Masters, we now have a new certificate program with some of the leading lectures, leading lecture from leading apologists in the world. Big discount below, so make sure you check that out. Charles Murray, thanks for your time and for a wonderful conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

review helps. Thanks for listening to the Sean McDowell Show brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, where we have on campus and online programs and apologetic spiritual information, marriage and family, Bible, and so much more. We would love to train you to more effectively, live, teach, and defend the Christian faith today, and we will see you when the next episode drops