Murray believes his exploration of faith led him to see a moral weakness in societies that abandon religion altogether.
Political scientist and author Charles Murray says a late-in-life spiritual awakening has changed the way he views the world, science, and society, and that a loss of faith in the West has left a dangerous cultural vacuum.
Murray recently spoke with Jan Jekielek, host of Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders,” about this shift in outlook and discussed his book “Taking Religion Seriously,” which was published in October.
A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the 1994 best-seller “The Bell Curve,” Murray described a shift from detached secularism to belief in a “mysterious force” that “created an intentional universe that permits life.”
“I think that some mysterious force created an intentional universe that permits life,” Murray said. “That was a pivotal event.”
Murray said his journey began decades after attending Harvard in 1961, where, he recalled, “it just was the zeitgeist. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.”
Religion, he said, was “of no particular interest for the next 25 years.”
His wife, Catherine, changed that trajectory. After the birth of their daughter, she told him, “I love Anna more than evolution requires.” Her decision to explore Quakerism led Murray to reconsider his own assumptions.
“I had to recognize there is such a thing as a quality known as spiritual perception,” he said. “I couldn’t follow her on this trip that she was taking, but I kind of wanted to.”
Reading British astronomer Martin Rees’s “Just Six Numbers” convinced him that the fine-tuning of the universe could not be accidental.
“The odds against those settings being just right are literally trillions to one,” Murray said.
“So what are our options? … The two options are, it was [evolved] by chance, and the other option, being a higher authority directed [an ordered universe], that seemed to me a lot more plausible.”
When asked how faith might have altered his earlier intellectual work, Murray said his beliefs would have added faith to the secular trilogy of family, community, and vocation he once identified as the sources of human satisfaction.
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