Putting Atheism on the Defensive
Academic pariah he may be, but on the big questions Charles Murray is a man of his time. Science, he believed for most of his life, had demolished the traditional notion of God. Consciousness is produced by the brain, nothing more. The Gospels are less history than folklore.
In fact, Murray’s immunity to theology goes even further: He has had “a perceptual deficit in spirituality,” he writes, no sense of a “God-sized hole” in his life. When his wife started going to Quaker meetings, the whole thing was incomprehensible to him: “I just didn’t get it.” No mystical or poetic yearnings could pierce the shell of Murray’s earthbound materialism. Even the work that made him famous—the ultra-controversial Bell Curve, with its radioactive musings on race and IQ—was, after all, the product of too much time spent staring at graphs.
I was born three generations after Murray, and on the other side of the Atlantic, but everything about his materialist assumptions is immediately recognizable to me; it has simply been the default setting of any educated person since at least the First World War.
There has been no shortage of clever religious believers—of geniuses, even—but they have rarely succeeded in explaining themselves to their baffled friends. (Virginia Woolf on T.S. Eliot’s conversion: “I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”) Christians have responded with outrageous paradox and performative defiance. But when forced to debate the hard scientific and historical evidence, they have usually started on the back foot.
All of which just goes to show that history has more unexpected, out-of-the-blue twists than any crime novel. Gradually and then suddenly, the burden of proof has recently shifted, to the point where it is atheist materialists who have begun to stammer and evade the obvious question, and Christians who have begun to sound impatient that people won’t just acknowledge the blatant truth.
This month, the psychiatrist Scott Alexander, the leading voice of the Californian “rationalist” movement, applied his painstaking evidence-testing methods to the Miracle of the Sun, a 1917 event where the Virgin Mary supposedly caused the sun to dance in the sky and appear to almost fall to earth. “I hope the visions of Fatima were untrue,” wrote the normally unflappable Alexander. “But I’ll also admit this: at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused.”
Alexander managed to retain his atheism via what he called a “very tenuous” explanation with “serious weaknesses.” But the episode caused him a crisis of faith; just as one guest contributor to his blog—the center of online rationalism—recently wrote of their “spiritual agonies” when looking into the disturbingly plausible miracles of Joan of Arc. After two centuries of Christians being plunged into existential crises after examining the scientific and historical challenges to their belief, the boot seems to be on the other foot.
Murray’s new book registers this change, as it has taken place in the mind of one scholar over the last 30 years. As it happens, his story has little to do with miracles. What shakes his atheism, to begin with, is a single book—not by a believer, but by the atheist cosmologist and former Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees. Rees’s Just Six Numbers ponders facts like the following (in Murray’s paraphrase):
The stars are powered by the conversion of hydrogen (1 in the periodic table) into helium (2 in the periodic table). The fusion process converts a tiny portion of hydrogen’s mass—to be specific, 0.007 of its mass—into energy. Life could not exist if that figure were much weaker or stronger [emphasis added]. If the value were 0.006, a proton could not bond to a neutron, helium could not be formed, and the entire process that produces the periodic table of elements would be foreclosed. If the value were 0.008, two hydrogen protons would be able to bind directly, and no hydrogen would remain. No hydrogen would mean no fuel for stars.
Several of the all-important physical constants of the universe are on a similar knife-edge. By one estimate, the probability that our universe is hospitable to life is 0.0(there follow more zeroes than there are elementary particles in the entire universe)1. Medieval man gazed up at the stars and saw a divinely arranged order; 20th-century man looked further, out into the unfathomable cosmos, and saw a meaningless anarchy; but today we can see into the hidden mathematics of the machine and find an eerily precise code.
Of course, you can resist the conclusion that this indicates the existence of an all-powerful coder by saying the universe “just happened” that way. But that amounts to a decision to stop thinking about probably the most astounding set of scientific data ever presented to the human mind. Or you can speculate that perhaps there are a gazillion universes and we happen to be in the one with the right numbers. But if you say that, you might glimpse a slightly pitying smile on the face of the monotheist who finds that the first verse of Genesis requires a lot less mental acrobatics. In either case, the switch has happened: It’s the unbeliever who is on the back foot.
For those like Murray, who consider the fine-tuning of the universe a strong reason to believe in God, all kinds of possibilities open up. His dogmatic materialism—”It seemed so obvious. The brain was the only possible source of consciousness”—begins to fade, as he examines the evidence for near-death experiences, and for sudden lucidity in those with advanced dementia. The more circumstantial arguments for God—conscience, the artistic and scientific achievements of Christian civilization—start to look more plausible.
So does the reliability of the Gospels. Murray enjoyably summarizes the research of scholars such as Richard Bauckham and Peter Williams, who have shown that the Gospel authors treat local geography, local nomenclature, and all kinds of minor details in a way that suggests intimate familiarity with the time and place of Jesus Christ.
Murray’s book, barely 150 pages of large text, is less a comprehensive argument than a kind of study guide, pointing the reader to the full-length works from physicists, philosophers, and Scripture scholars on which he draws. Even as a bibliography it is highly incomplete: There is no mention, for instance, of writers like Stephen Barr, Thomas Nagel, and Edward Feser, who have offered influential arguments against materialism, or much engagement with the Christian tradition beyond C.S. Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity.
Yet the book has its place, as a concise, lucidly written case study in a major development: the undermining of atheism by the very disciplines—science and New Testament textual criticism—on which it previously relied. If that really is what has happened, it is an astonishing and moving fact. How many simple Christians in the last two centuries, confronted by some egghead telling them their religion was hopelessly irrational, have simply clung on in faith, little knowing that before long they would be vindicated?
Taking Religion Seriously
by Charles Murray
Encounter Books, 185 pp., $29.99
Dan Hitchens is senior editor at First Things.
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