The Free Press keeps publishing articles by people who found God, though they never publish articles by people who gave up belief in gods. Two recent God-touting pieces are are “How the West Lost its Soul” by Paul Kingsnorth (see my post here) and “How intellectuals found God“, by Peter Savodnik (see my post here).
Now it looks as if a series of intellectuals are going to testify to faith in their own Free Press articles. The latest is political scientist Charles Murray, famous (or infamous) for his work on IQ, including his much-discussed book The Bell Curve. (I never read it because I’m too lazy, but it also keeps me from getting involved in another brouhaha.)
In the Free Press article below, Murray describes his embrace of a sort of pantheistic spirituality, so he doesn’t clearly embrace Christianity (but see below—Jesus manages to sneak in there). But Murray invokes the same old tropes: the God-shaped hole coming from lack of meaning, the invocation of mysteries in physics as evidence for God, the inevitable question of “why is there something rather than nothing?”, and the invocation of a “creative force” that, he says, explains our scientific ignorance. I will give some quotes, but I have to tell you that this piece doesn’t elevate whatever respect I had for Murray.
Here we go, with a denigration of people who are not spiritual. (Murray had tried transcendental meditation but it had failed). Murray’s quotes are indented
Just as people have different levels of cognitive ability or athletic coordination, so too they have different levels of perceptual ability. That’s true in the appreciation of music, the visual arts, and literature. I’m not talking about IQ. People with stratospheric IQs can be tone-deaf, unmoved by great art, bored by Shakespeare—and clueless about anything spiritual.
Thirty years later, watching my wife, Catherine, become increasingly engaged in Quakerism in the last half of the 1990s, that thought forcefully returned to me: People vary in their ability to apprehend spiritual truths.
I’d like to know what Murray means by “spiritual,” and I’d like to know even more some examples of what he considers “spiritual truths”. Just a few would do!
And here comes the God-shaped hole, not filled by “Western modernity” (presumably stuff like capitalism and antibiotics). Bolding here is mine:
Catherine observed once that she likes being in control as much as I do (which indeed she does). The difference between us, she said, was that her sense of need for belief was greater. I agreed with that, and I also had a suspicion about why. I had distracted myself with Western modernity.
I am using Western modernity as shorthand for all the ways in which life in the last hundred years has shielded many of us from the agonizing losses, pains, and sorrows that came early and often in human life since the dawn of humankind. Most people still suffer at least one such agonizing event eventually, but often not until old age and sometimes never.
So far, that’s been the case with me. I’ve lived my life without ever reaching the depths of despair. I’m grateful for my luck. But I have also not felt the God-sized hole in my life that the depths of despair often reveal. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a hole; it’s just that I’ve been able to ignore it. In the 21st century, keeping ourselves entertained and distracted is easy. And that, I think, explains a lot not only about me but about the nonchalant secularism of our age.
He’s got the hole! Next he dismisses the tenets of secularism:
My secular catechism from college through the mid-1990s went something like this:
The concept of a personal God is at odds with everything that science has taught us over the last five centuries.
Humans are animals. Our thoughts and emotions are produced by the brain. When the brain stops, consciousness stops too.
The great religious traditions are human inventions, natural products of the fear of death. That includes Christianity, which can call on no solid evidence for its implausible claims.
I look back on that catechism and call it “dead center” because it was so unreflective. I had not investigated the factual validity of any of those propositions. They were part of the received wisdom of most Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century. I accepted them without thinking.
I’m not going to go through these one by one, but I will say that I wrote a book justifying the first proposition (Faith Versus Fact). About the second, yes, human beings are indeed animals, and there’s plenty of evidence that thoughts and emotions are produced by the brain. When you do things to the brain (take drugs, have brain surgery when you’re conscious, etc.), your thoughts and emotions change. Where else does Murray think thoughts and emotions come from? I want an alternative explanation. And we have no evidence that people whose brain stops working (i.e., who are dead) still have consciousness. The parsimonious conclusion is that yes, thoughts and emotions, as well as consciousness, are produced by the brain. Things without brains, like rocks, don’t appear to have consciousness, though some addled advocates of panpsychism have suggested that.
As for the “great religious traditions” being human inventions, yes, of course they are. Biblical scholars tell us how the scriptures came to be, and we’ve seen plenty of religions invented by humans, including Christian Science, Scientology, Mormonism, and so on. Finally, it is not “unreflective” to think about what evidence there is for the truth claims of Christianity (read the Nicene Creed to see them). In fact, Murray’s “secular catechism” happens to be rational and, by and large, true.
Murray then lists a series of “nudges” that made him religious. They are given as “evidence for God” in the new book is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, (see my post on it here), and thety are, once again, simple God-of-the-Gaps arguments. Here are a few, quoted:
The first nudge, so soft that it barely registered (I cannot recall when it did more than cross my mind) was the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena—most famously E = mc2. There’s also Newton’s second law of motion (which is just F = ma), Galileo’s law of free fall (d = 1/2gt²), and many other examples.
It just seemed extremely odd that so many basic phenomena were so mathematically simple. It was almost as if someone had planned it that way.
Has he looked at the Schrödinger equation? And of course there are plenty of phenomena—evolution is one—that can be approached theoretically, but the equations are not at all simple. He has picked the simplest equations of physics as evidence for God, euations in which the laws of physics hold, and can be described mathematically. (I’m surprised that Murray doesn’t think that the laws of physics are evidence for God.) I discuss the Argument for God from the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics on p. 159 of Faith versus Fact.
One more God-of-the-Gaps argument from Murray:
The first unmistakable nudge involved the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I first heard it put in those words by the late columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer during a session of a chess club we started in the early 1990s. That I thought Charles had come up with it himself is proof of how unreflective I had been. Anyone who had taken any interest in theology would have encountered it long since. It’s one of the most famous questions in metaphysics.
But I hadn’t heard it, and it caught me by surprise. When I had thought about the existence of the universe at all, I had taken it as a given. I am alive, I am surrounded by the world, the fact that I can ask the question presupposes that the universe exists. There’s nothing else to be said. It is a mystery with a lowercase m.
Hearing the question stated so baldly and so eloquently made me start to take the issue seriously. Why is there anything? Surely things do not exist without having been created. What created all this? If you haven’t thought about it recently, this is a good time to stop and try to come up with your own answer.
How about the simple answerm ” There is something because ‘nothing’ is unstable and a fluctuation in nothingness can produce what we call “something”?
The unreflectiveness of Murray, and his failure to investigate what philosophers and scientists have to say about this stuff, is exemplified in the video below, one in which physicist Brian Cox takes on these questions and tells what science has to say about them. For many issues, the answer is “we don’t know but maybe some day we will.” But for Murray the answer is always “THE CREATOR”.
In the end, the unanswered questions of physics have led to Murray becoming a pantheist. I’ll leave you with his own description of his god:
None of that had ever made sense to me. Once I decided that there had to be an unmoved mover and was intellectually committed to accepting that conception of God, I was free to think about a truth that, once you stop to think about it, must be a truth: Any God worthy of the name is at least as incomprehensible to a human being as I am to my dog.
. . .Two other useful concepts entered my thinking sometime during the 1990s. One was that God exists outside of time—as taught by Aristotle but elaborated by Thomas Aquinas. Just trying to get your head around the concept of existing outside time is a good way to realize how unknowable a being we are talking about.
Quaker teachings are also helpful in de-anthropomorphizing God. They emphasize that God is not a being with a location. He is everywhere—not just watching from everywhere but permeating the universe and our world. And there is the most famous of Quaker precepts: “There is that of God in everyone.” It is not the same as saying, “There’s some good in everyone.” God is in you in some sense, along with permeating everything else.
How does Murray know that there is an unmoved mover (see Cox’s video above)? And how does he know that “God exists outside of time”? What does that even mean?
In the end, we get the same arguments for God that are endlessly recycled, and endlessly rebutted. It looks as if each generation comes upon these questions themselves (e.g., “Why is there something instead of nothing?:), and each generation has to be given the arguments why ignorance does not equate to God, whether he’s in heaven or permeating everything. But why is the MSM, especially the Free Press, so concerned with recycling the same old calls for faith? Is CBS going to start touting religion, too?
And Murray’s got a book. Click on the cover to go to the page. It turns out that Murray does indeed embrace a Christian god. Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:
Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.
I wonder how Murray decided that Christianity was the “right” religion. In the article above he doesn’t especially tout Christianity, and in fact says that most people’s view of Christianity don’t appeal to him. Is he a Christian pantheist? Is Jesus everywhere, too: in blades of grass, rocks, and sparrows’ wings? In the article, though, Murray seems to reject simple Christianity:
The New Testament’s verbal imagery of God as a father and Jesus sitting at God’s right hand reinforces the anthropomorphic view of God. That image has been reinforced still further by Christian art—think of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel depiction of God as a formidable old man with flowing hair, touching Adam’s finger.
None of that had ever made sense to me.
Voilà: the new book:
I have respected Charles Murray, but this? I can only put it down to an old man approaching the end of his life and looking for comfort. I’m not so cruel as to ctiticise that, but I do think that publishing a book about it is prideful. And I did not think Quakers approved of pride.
I agree about pride – it’s related to a kind of impatience with the slow advance of knowledge. Murray asks, “Why is there anything…What created all this?” And our host sensibly points out that, “For many issues, the answer is ‘we don’t know but maybe someday we will.'” For a proud intellectual like Murray, it can’t be true that his generation of geniuses won’t see the answers to these questions. Thus the answer must already be in front of us. And it’s the Quaker yahweh.
Elderly people starting to embrace religion, especially Christianity, has been described as “cramming for their finals”.
Pascal’s wager. I remember some arguing that that Christopher Hitchens should start praising a god just in case there is one. But how would you know which of the 2000+ is the right one to acknowledge?
Take your best guess! 🙂 The Pascal’s wager people might argue that, if all one wants is to increase the probability, acknowledging one god is is better than rejecting them all.
But no!
What happens if god thinks this to be dishonest? Maybe god would treat me better if I died an atheist. Or maybe just the general belief that some higher being exists would get me to heaven. It’s all very complicated and god isn’t helping by his rather selective and conflicting revelations.
😁
Agree. I find it quite irrational that a god might reject a good person who doesn’t believe in them but accept a paedo or serial killer just because he asks for forgiveness. In an interview clip I shared here recently, Stephen Fry said that if he found himself at the pearly gates, then he wouldn’t want to go in anyway because god is nasty and vindictive. I thought that was a very good statement.
“I can only put it down to an old man approaching the end of his life and looking for comfort.”
I think you have made a good point, although I have never understood why people suddenly turn to their particular god towards the end. As a haemophiliac I have been in and out of hospital most of my life and came close to losing it twice but have never pleaded to an imaginary thing for help.
In British hospitals we used to be forced to endure Sunday services from a local vicar/priest if incarcerated on a Sunday and one preacher stands out as twice I had the “pleasure” of hearing something that is so crazy it is hard to believe – on an orthopaedic ward in the 70s when hip spicas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_spica_cast) were common he delighted us with a sermon on the line of: “Take up thy bed and walk.”
I tackled him one day and pointed out that his sermon was insulting and also told him of my non-belief. His response was that he thought anyone with a disability would be looking forward to a better life in the hereafter, my response was that if his god was up to it a decent life the first time round would be preferable. No answer, he just walked away.
When I was shut in an isolation room for the bone marrow transplant, I was visited by a couple of anglican ministers (turned out my wife had filled in the religion box as C of E without asking me). Neither one was up to much when it came to debating which of us was in the right. Both were far happier discussing all the books I had brought with me. They were terribly impressed with Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens was on the shelf). In retrospect I missed an opportunity to have claimed to be Jewish….I think a rabbi might have had a bit more fight in him. Maybe next time!
Agree this is a very surprising turn for someone who, right or wrong, seemed like a thorough-going rationalist
I still like the comment from someone here years ago (that I’ve never been able to find since, in case anyone else can).
Someone, probably a preacher, asked the guy, “When did you lose your religion, son?”
“I didn’t lose it – I set it down on the curb and walked away from it,” he replied.
That reminds me of HD Thoreau who, when asked on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God replied, we haven’t quarreled.
A comment and then a digression.
“People vary in their ability to apprehend spiritual truths.” So people are tone-deaf to god? That sounds a little bit like Murray’s patting himself on the back for being so perceptive. And does he really expect us to believe that he learned his secular catechism by rote, and never reflected on whether there were evidentiary reasons for accepting it?
Digression:
A man goes to a party and is introduced to one of the guests as Doctor so-and-so. The other guest says, “You know, I’ve been having this pain. . . ,” and the man interrupts him and says, “I’m sorry, I’m not that kind of doctor.” The guest apologizes and goes to mingle.
After a while the guest comes back and says, “I’ve got this tooth that’s really been bothering me. . . ,” and the man says, “I’m sorry for the confusion. I am not a dentist either. I am a doctor of philosophy.” The guest apologizes and again goes to mingle.
After a while he comes back and says, “So, tell me, doc, why is there something rather than nothing?”
Lol, to the joke. That is a good one!
To the earlier point, yes it is clear to me that all these opinion pieces where someone declares “I’ve filled my god-shaped hole, and you losers should too!” come across as a strange kind of snobbery. Self delusion too, of course.
I respect him and have gone back and forth on twitter/x with him (always positive) once or twice, and have read several of his books.
I might miss this latest book, but he is pretty old and when very high IQ people like him or Ayan H.A., or Nial F. “become religious” – which always has a lot of nuance, I cut them a break. Good people can have bad ideas, smart people can have some bad ideas.
I side with PCC(E) on this one though b/c as a friend once observed of me – “The godlessness is strong in this one.” 🙂
D.A.
NYC
CM’s argument on “mathematical simplicity” certainly spoke to me, but not in the way he probably intends. Our host has dealt with that, above, citing the Schrödinger equation. I mean, golly, CM found his courses in Physical Chemistry that easy? (but wait — there’s more.)
Regarding: “But why is the MSM, especially the Free Press, so concerned with recycling the same old calls for faith? Is CBS going to start touting religion, too?”
This may be a rhetorical question. Reading about trans and woke and all that, I kept encountering the phrase: institutional capture. There may be wider social forces. People want easy answers.
In addition to easy answers people want to belong and be patted on the back. Embracing, and loudly exclaiming that that have embraced, the in-group’s ideas gets them quick belonging and acclamation. It doesn’t really matter what opinion is embraced, it is the conformity that does it. We see it in the woke group, especially the trans group, in Palestine activism, and prior we saw it in the sceptic movement. We have always seen it in religion. However if someone dares step outside the shackles they will be exorcised. I think the Free Press notices great numbers when they publish this stuff (we read it if just to snicker) and they are desperate to be something more than just a fringe media. I don’t know, I am desperately trying to understand why people I previously admired for their ability to resonate and not fall prey to dogma all of a sudden do eventually succumb. Or do they really? It is so much more difficult, and lonely, to resist.
You may have misspelled “excoriated”. 🙂
Many people who are quite capable of reason most of the time—and are notably skeptical of wild claims and demanding of evidence—seem to have a great big hole when it comes to “faith” and God. The God-shaped hole is the place where reason fails and fantasy prevails.
What is going on with The Free Press? Murray may need an imaginary friend, but I fail to see why they think it’s necessary to let him tell the rest of us. It’s his personal business that he can’t cope with a life without mythology. It’s like publishing an article praising your favorite brand of toothpaste. It’s fine for him, but it serves no purpose to the rest of us. Those who want religion can go and find it.
Saying his ‘catechism’ is unreflective shows his own lack of thought. I believe those 3 things are true, but I believe them, because I’ve seriously thought about them, I didn’t just take them as received wisdom.
I get the feeling that he means “nonchalant secularism” as an insult, but it’s perfectly normal to be calm and casual about things you know to be true.
“though they never publish articles by people who gave up belief in gods.”
I think it would be good to test this. I hope there are good atheist writers who can submit an essay to The Free Press and see if they publish it. My own story isn’t worth reading, I just never saw any point in religion in the first place.
The Free Press is an “anti-Woke” publication, that’s its mission. And being non-religious is considered by them to be Woke, and thus bad.
This may be the reason: the FP is being heterodox towards liberal and especially “progressive” opinion, and religion may be anathema to those groups.
Of course traditional religions are anathema¹ to its progressive competitors.
. . . . .
¹ Literally a ‘thing devoted to evil, accursed thing’.
Thanks for the explanation. I realised it is anti-woke, but I had no idea that being an atheist is considered ‘woke’ 😱. I associate being woke with genderwoo and crazy ideas about colonialism like rewriting history. As an atheist, maybe I should go and collect my woke badge.
In my email feed, I get some regular mailings that offer snippets of various magazine articles (Pro Puplica, The Guardian, etc. etc.). There are many articles where I swear the author has nothing to say, but they need to publish some banality.
Maybe I could get a commission to write an article called “how to watch paint dry” 🙄
And “10 Things You Need to Know about Quick-Drying Paint”, with product recommendations.
We could make it into a series and do a different paint brand every week 😁
And then sell the franchise to a media conglomerate for millions of quatloos.
I had to Google quatloos 😁 That was a good comment, a funny one where I also learned something new 😁
That article about revolutionary war reenactment was GREAT. The author was very funny too.
I can’t take religion seriously. All religions based on supernaturalism are just far too ridiculous
These people anchor their arguments in catch phrases that rely on simplistic representations of reality. Among those is the idea that everything Western is decadent and empty of meaning.
I personally would not want to live in their ideal world, which rejects Western progress and presumably Enlightenment concepts. I have found that the most compassionate and interesting people I know tend to be atheists. I have never seen any evidence that embracing religion makes one a better person.
A couple minor points. The article by Peter Savodnik is from last year. That one can find it on their homepage under “The Best of . . .” could be an editorial decision, or it could be an algorithm looking at likes, comments, and clicks.
I don’t have access to either the article or the book, but I am curious about Murray’s word choice. He doesn’t say “God-shaped hole” in the excerpt above; he says “God-sized hole.” I wonder whether this was a conscious distinction and, if so, what he might be driving at other than variation in the phrasing. The former suggests design; the latter less so.
Murray wrote “It just seemed extremely odd that so many basic phenomena were so mathematically simple. It was almost as if someone had planned it that way.”
Jerry commented: “Has he looked at the Schrödinger equation?”
This is a wrong way to understand the difficulties of quantum physics. Mathematical complexity is not the problem. In fact, the Shrodinger equation is not more mathematically complex than the partial differential equations of classical physics (e.g. wave equation, heat equation, potential equation, etc.).
The problem is not the math, but the fact that we don’t how to interpret the math as describing reality.
Consider the simplest possible quantum system. That would be the two state system that describes electron spin or photon polarization. That is a VERY simple mathematical system. But even there my mind boggles when I try to intuitively grasp what the simple math is really saying about reality.
I take the view that humah brains just aren’t “wired” for the task of intuitively understanding quantum mechanics. We evolved from hunter-gatherer ancestors who needed to intuitively grasp aspects of Newtonian physics well enough to erect huts, throw spears, invent bows and arrows and boomerangs and stuff. But never ever before the 20th century was it useful for hominids to intuitively understand quantum superpositions and quantum entanglement. The task does not come naturally to a human mind.
The “unreasonable effectiveness” of maths at describing or explaining the universe may be an illusion: it might simply be that we best understand those bits that are well described by maths that we can deal with.
There may indeed be aspects of reality that are nonmathematical in nature and that we have no good way to try to understand. But the unreasonable effectiveness of math at describing the universe is no illusion. Give me the needed data and I can calculate for you the peak of the next lunar eclipse to a fraction of a second, and you can count on the fraction of a second. I call that unreasonable effectiveness.
The equation may be simple … but fifty years on, I still struggle with the Hamiltonian,
I respect him and have gone back and forth on twitter/x with him (always positive) once or twice, and have read several of his books.
I might miss this latest book, but he is pretty old and when very high IQ people like him or Ayan H.A., or Nial F. “become religious” – which always has a lot of nuance, I cut them a break. Good people can have bad ideas, smart people can have some bad ideas.
I side with PCC(E) on this one though b/c as a friend once observed of me – “The godlessness is strong in this one.” 🙂
D.A.
NYC
“Why is there anything? Surely things do not exist without having been created.”
This is the primal error. The answer to “Why is there anything?” is: “There is something. Surely it is therefor impossible for there to be nothing, including a creator. Existence exists.”
My slightly different response to this question, not being a physicist, is to ask, ‘Why have you assumed that nothingness is the default state from which something is a deviation in need of explanation?’
On the unreasonable effectiveness of maths leading to gods, maths is a useful way of describing regularities, without which we would be very unlikely to exist, in our universe. One might just as well assume that the unreasonable effectiveness of language in describing our universe leads to gods.
Given the title of his book and the unoriginality of his arguments, one has to ask if Murray ever took his unbelief seriously.
I would be on your side, but suggesting this weak spot: there is no such thing as nothing …. or nothingness. “It” cant be a default state.
There is no such thing as nothing, since by definition it means a given demarcation in objective reality in which there are no things. That only stands if there is something.
I wonder whether the biggest nudge towards religion was his wife getting heavily involved with Quakerism.
I also notice that having emphasized how unknowable god is, CM immediately lists several things which the Quakers tell us about god.
Mr Murray’s dialema.
Is he saying he has put a lot of facts, truths of science into the hole 🕳 where gid should be and it hasn’t satisfied….
the fear of the unknown!
Mixing in that common human cognitive trait with aging, losing the will to fight that sense of control of worldly complexity, disorder, preverlence of misery and suffering, I’ll add that if you look you will find it, all the negative stuff. Possibly undiagnosed mild depression I believe this is not uncommon. On the lighter end no absorbing hobbies? Ok I don’t know but YOU have to find meaning and I like most here find this to be a regression and a dulling of the mind to a SOP.
noun
1.
a thing of no great value given or done as a concession to appease someone whose main concerns or demands are not being met.
Meet my friend god.
One explanation for the god-shaped hole is that religion is a byproduct of our theory of mind, which is important for a social animal. (This is supported by women being more religious than men and autists being more irreligious than normal people.) Though that does not make it true of course.
Regarding the God shaped hole:
When I contemplate causelessness and nothing, something that I’ve done a lot of in my 66 years, I am filled with a painful longing and deep sense of mystery and beauty. This painful longing certainly could be described as a hole in my psyche. But what is this hole? Calling it a God shaped hole begs the question.
The painful longing comes from the fact that something as consequential as – Where did everything come from? – has no answer. In my mind at least, the logic seems very clear. “Nothing” is non-existence. It has no properties and no potential. Nothing can come from it because there is no “it” from which to come. With nothing to come from, existence must be without cause.
The sense of mysterious beauty comes from, at least for me, the inescapable feeling that causeless existence has to be magical or supernatural. But feelings aren’t truths and an absence of cause is also an absence of information. It’s a complete information vacuum. One can make up any mystical or religious story about it that one wants. But the likelihood that any such story is true is almost nil. But, with exactly nothing to go on, the likelihood that such stories are projection from the known is 100%. Which, I have no doubt, is why we almost always make our gods in our own image.
Having read The Bell’s Curve and most of his other books, I’m a great admirer of Murray’s work. I like him as a person too: from the few interviews I’ve seen and his interactions on X, it’s clear to me that he’s thoughtful, measured, decent, and agreeable—with a dry sense of humor, to boot.
But I’ll skip his latest book, which, by the way, provides further evidence that high IQ and rationality aren’t too strongly correlated.
I started watching a recent interview he gave at the American Enterprise Institute, but got bored and gave up after about 40 minutes. (Here’s the link, if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/live/ooFix0JbJ3g?si=toNkCvgWSzCP0qhs.)
In the interview he does say that the laws of physics are evidence of God, particularly the apparent fine-tuning of the Universe to support life like ours. He discards the explanatory power of multiverse theories on account of there being zero evidence for other universes.
As an aside: regarding the laws of physics and how everything seems to be ruled by them with astonishing mathematical precision (hence God), I remember Dawkins wondering somewhere (probably X) what a non-mathematical universe would look like—would that be even possible? It’s a wonderful question, and indeed it prompts the thought that any other reality would be unthinkable—far more incomprehensible. One could even argue that it’d rather be the consequent random and chaotic world that would need a God to make sense of it!
Going back to Murray and his beliefs, it’s not uncommon to see intelligent and learned people come up with ill-conceived philosophical arguments and elaborate rationales to justify their belief in some abstract spiritual entity—the “unmoved mover” permeating everything, etc. (while emphasizing, of course, that their conception of God has nothing to do with the infantile notion of a bearded guy floating in the clouds, etc.), and then they end up expressing belief in the Resurrection, or the Immaculate Conception, or some such thing. I’m not sure whether Murray’s reasons and ultimate faith mirror this, but it looks like it, for how could he be a Christian otherwise?
ISTM that high IQ and rationality are strongly correlated; but as you point out, rationality is a tool that also lets learned people come up with ill-conceived philosophical arguments and elaborate rationales. Wishful thinking is no respecter of IQ.
I asked Google why older people often become more religious. I got an AI answer, and most of it is entirely as expected. The reality of mortality really hits home, they discover community and purpose that was lacking when friends and family are increasingly gone, and so forth.
It turns out that this trend has a name, it is called the “retirement surge” (in religiosity).
But I wonder if it’s an effect of the aging brain. Is it not so that some brains are more prone to feeling spirituality? And of course what and who we are is what our brains tells us about ourselves. So an aging brain with a thinning neocortex and other diminishments might start to have subtle hallucinations. They may hear whispers in their subconscious: “I yam what I yam”.
Sometimes it is indeed the result of encroaching mental illness. Schizophrenics can become intensely religious, Terry Davis being a notorious example.
Christianity has also encouraged increasing piety in old age when worshipers are terrified of going to hell.
Damn! I seriously do hear that voice at least once a week. But in my defence I did recently pass the mini-ACE assessment. And I don’t think it’s God, or even Popeye.
Thank you very much for once more taking arms against the sea of nonsense, even though opposing it is much like Thor’s attempt to chug Hymir’s drinking horn — it’s a very big sea indeed.
Re why there is something rather than nothing, if there weren’t then nobody would notice. Sampling bias, a.k.a. the observation selection effect.
Re the mathematical simplicity of natural laws, again it’s sampling bias. The known natural laws are simple because we are relative simpletons. The study of complexity as a topic is currently a thing in physics, and it’s a bastard. Maybe super-intelligent space aliens or AI will someday give us a clue, if it can be presented in baby-food bites that we can digest.
Murray should try explaining F=ma to his dog.
According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a deeply pleasurable and rewarding state of being, perhaps more than any other. Flow occurs when a task provides us with just the right amount of challenge and stimulation—shooting the middle between boredom (lack of challenge / interest) and undue stress (too demanding).
My speculation is that as people get older they find ‘their group’ is composed of other older people who find contemplation of god just the right amount of challenge and stimulation then when they were younger, and therefore rewarding.
God may or may not exist but one thing I’m confident in saying is that Christology remains a wholly human ‘theological’ construct. And the only reason for theology to exist is that nothing has been revealed! History has created nothing more then a grand, pretentious, theological counterfeit. All is vanity and chasing after wind. And all counterfeits are ultimately exposed and overthrown. And that would be the ‘judgement’ I would like to see in my life time.
I look forward to the Free Press’s upcoming series of articles on intellectuals who have rejected religion and the supernatural … or they could simply ask our host, or Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins, for a response to this series.
I probably shouldn’t be holding my breath.
Imagine an island populated by people who had never been exposed to religion or the idea of a god. Would they have the god-shaped-hole? Likely not. They might experience an intimate connection to nature and the world. But they would not have the frame of reference to consider a supernatural reason for what they felt. And I doubt it would diminish their life in any way.
We know that according to the World Happiness Report that the happiest and healthiest cultures on earth happen to be the least religious. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman has a great book: Society without God, Second Edition: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment
“Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with more than 150 citizens of Denmark and Sweden, among the least religious countries in the world, he shows that, far from being inhumane, crime-infested, and dysfunctional, highly secular societies are healthier, safer, greener, less violent, and more democratic and egalitarian than highly religious ones.”
The authors of these Free Press pieces never consult or present data, it’s always just opinion-based blathering. I’m quite sick of it too.
But that’s exactly what every primitive society ever studied does: it makes up a religion of varying degrees of sophistication to explain natural phenomena and human emotions it can’t understand. The supernatural fills their big god-shaped hole.
About those utopian Western European societies.
1) Their Christian religions (with Judaism playing its role) made them what they are. They lost their religions after they achieved prosperous Utopia. You could argue as credibly that they are going to lose Utopia, having forsaken religion. It just hasn’t happened yet.
2) Europe split up into its nation states, some of them tiny, during the Enlightenment, as Spanish Catholic hegemony broke up. The borders of these new states enclosed homogeneous peoples and excluded outsiders for centuries. Each nation became homogeneous first. Then it became nice. The loss of religion just shows that a culturally homogeneous ethnostate with high social trust doesn’t immediately descend into anarchy as religion ebbs away. But Sweden, Denmark, and Holland are getting nervous and distrustful about their new arrivals who very much do hew to a dogmatic religion that commands obedience, not just from its own flock but from atheist ethnic Swedes, Danes, and Dutch, too. Will the locals have to rediscover their Christianity to drive them out? Or is that too much bother for a cause lost anyway?
This post inspired me to buy your book Faith vs Fact. I am like Murray, an unattached Theist. We could say Pantheist but for complex reasons I think that term is not terribly meaningful.
What I will say, however, is that much of this discussion on both sides is grounded in a misunderstanding of what the other says. For example, not to be mean atemporality is fundamental to any classical conception of God and unites the God of Aristotle Platonism, the Abrahamics, Advaita, Mayhana, Zen and more.
This is why for example, secular government was referred to medievally as temporal powers.
The idea can be easily, if imperfectly, expressed in modern physics terms by saying God is superluminal. Thus all times are simultaneous with respect to God. Simultaneity being of course relative. As such God has no experience of time or indeed experiences of any kind.
God to use Aquinas’s framing is not a being but being itself. He is what medieval philosophy called thatness and whan Zen calls suchness. Many of find the depth of parallel between–as best we can tell–utterly unconnected religious traditions to be, at minimum, intriguing.
There is much more to be said, but much of it can be summed up as the common pseudo-Calvinistic conception of God that is popular in the Anglophone would is just non-theistic drivel that has nothing to do with the classical conception of God shared by seemingly ever major religious tradition. Perhaps, not Manicheism if you still want to count them but more or less everyone else.
Lastly “Is Jesus everywhere, too: in blades of grass, rocks, and sparrows’ wings?”
I am not a Christian but this question is not hard. Yes, of course. To Christians Jesus represents the Logos, the logical ordering principle of the universe, and so is manifest in everything.
If you take religion seriously you will see that the Enlightenment and Science represent a turning back towards classical theism away from the Deistic sentiments of the early Modern Period. Science is Pistis of the Logos.
Well I am so glad that you know that God does not correspond to the kind of God most people believe. But in fact most scientists are atheists for a good reason: there is NO EVIDENCE FOR ANY KIND OF GOD. We do not need that hypothesis. Until you have evidence for any kind of supernatural being, I would advise you not to come to this site and make claims about what kind of God there really is.
I hope someone here will actually read the book!
There is a lot more to it than what the post and comments seem to suggest.