UPDATE: Transcript added.

I had the opportunity to interview Professor Charles Murray, one of my favorite conservative intellectuals. I’ve written down some of the highlights of that interview, but you can listen to the entire interview, which I’ve embedded below.

The first I learned of Charles Murray was when I read The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which he wrote with Richard Herrnstein. In addition to being well-written and informative, the book was important to me because it was a sledgehammer breaking the chains that tied me to my leftist youth. It used hard data to confirm what I had intuitively known, but had been told all my life to deny: IQ matters. That truth helped set me free.

You can imagine, then, how excited I was when I was given the opportunity to speak with Professor Murray about his latest book, Taking Religion Seriously. The premise immediately resonated with me because Professor Murray, like me, came from an intellectual environment that said, both explicitly and implicitly, that smart people aren’t religious. God is for primitive, not sophisticated minds.

However, guided by his wife, a woman he describes as having a very high spiritual IQ compared to his own, Professor Murray explored whether God and religion are compatible with science, data, and intelligence. The Amazon blurb explains:

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. He argues that religion is something that can be approached as an intellectual exercise. His account moves from the improbable physics of the Big Bang to recent discoveries about the nature of consciousness, from evolutionary psychology to hypotheses about a universal Moral Law. His exploration of Christianity delves into the authorship of the Gospels, the reliability of biblical texts, and the scholarship surrounding the resurrection story.

Murray, the author of Coming Apart and coauthor of The Bell Curve, does not write as an expert. He acknowledges that those taking religion seriously for the first time, like himself, must grapple with topics and ideas that defy intellectual mastery. In this book, Murray offers his personal example of intellectual struggle toward religion.

“Maybe God needs a way to reach overeducated agnostics and that’s what I stumbled into,” he writes. “It’s a more arid process than divine revelation but it has been rewarding. And, if you’re like me, it’s the only game in town.”

Since my becoming conservative coincided with my becoming a fan of Judeo-Christian religions, while still struggling with the concept of God, I was anxious to hear what Professor Murray had to say, and I wasn’t disappointed.

My opening question was premised on the fact that he grew up, as I did, believing that God was only an answer for primitive people who had no explanation for observable phenomena. To the extent Professor Murray says that there is science that leaves God as the only answer, isn’t he just doing a sophisticated version of the same thing; that is, going as far as science will take him and saying... then, God!

Professor Murray had the perfect name for what I was describing: “the God of the gaps.” Thus, the sophisticates say that God existed to fill the gaps, so that with science having filled the gaps, we don’t need God. But he believes the opposite: that modern science proves God’s existence. “The relationship between science and religion has flipped over the last century.”

He pointed out that the Big Bang (which, incidentally, a priest theorized) came at a time when “accepted wisdom was that the universe was stable and eternal and consisted of one galaxy, the Milky Way, of which we were a part.” In the 100 years since then, we’ve realized the opposite is true.

There are many galaxies, with the “real kicker” being the realization that “about 14 billion years ago, the universe started from an infinitely small dimensionless singularity.” He added, “Well, you know what that sounds like? That sounds like the opening of Genesis,” a realization that has bothered many physicists and astrophysicists.

We discussed the problems with the theories people have come up with to explain that singular burst of everything from nothing, such as endlessly imploding and re-expanding universes, all of which gloss over the missing point of origin. Or, as Professor Murray said, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

Looking at these dead-end explanations, he said, “It seems to be more parsimonious and plausible to posit ‘an unmoved mover,’ as Aristotle put it, than it is to go through all these contortions, which still don't solve the problem, because eventually you cannot explain the initial miracle, which I would say is probably the common problem with all cosmological theories.”

His investigations didn’t stop with the Big Bang. Professor Murray has also looked at the consistency of near-death experiences and the phenomenon of “terminal lucidity,” when people with advanced dementia suddenly experience a total return of full brain function minutes, hours, or even days before they die. “These are all things,” he said, “that science is discovering for which ancient beliefs are a much better explanation than anything science has come up with.”

We also talked about C.S. Lewis. To the extent I have an understanding of Christianity, much of it came through The Last Battle, the final book in the Narnia series. Professor Murray, in turn, was amazed by the insights in Lewis’s Mere Christianity, a book that, through conversational prose, forces readers to articulate why they think they believe their atheism stands up better than Lewis’s faith.

Professor Murray is very humble about the insights he’s gathered. He sees himself as a student sharing his knowledge, not as some all-knowing Solon dictating the religious landscape.

It became apparent by the end of our conversation that Professor Murray, having examined physics and astrophysics, paranormal phenomena, near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, and religious literature through the ages, and having lived with someone whose spirituality is real and effortless, has reached a conclusion in line with Hamlet’s: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

If that philosophy is atheism, it cannot answer all the questions, and, more than that, when faced with data leading inexorably to God, it contorts itself in endless and unsatisfying ways to avoid the obvious answer.

You can also listen to the interview on YouTube, Libsyn, and Apple.

Amazon screen grab. Fair use for review purposes.

UPDATE: My very wonderful friend again prepared a transcript. Neither my friend nor I had the time to proofread it with care, so it's a bit of "read at your own risk."

ANDREA: Hello. This is Andrea and welcome to a special edition of the American Thinker Takeaway podcast that I have been doing. I had the honor and the pleasure of interviewing Professor Charles Murray about his new book Taking Religion Seriously. I’m a big fan of Professor Murray’s. His book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which he wrote with Richard Hernstein, was one of the pivotal books in my political development. I read it not long after it was published. It resonated with me because it used actual data and intelligent arguments to say something I’ve always known intuitively to be true but had been told, growing up in San Francisco to deny, which is that IQ matters. And that it affects different groups of people. Saying IQ is a matter of nature or nurture, but when you study IQ, people fall in different places on the IQ scale, have different life outcomes, and different groups tend to fall in different places in the scale. Having reality affirmed was mind-blowing and I’ve been a fan of his ever since. I have heard him speak in person in San Francisco many years ago and came away deeply impressed, so when I had the opportunity to interview him about his new book, I jumped at the chance. So let me read to you the blurb for his book Taking Religion Seriously. “Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of G-d in general and Christianity in particular. He argues that religion is something that can be approached as an intellectual exercise. His account moves from the improbable physics of the Big Bang to recent discoveries about the nature of consciousness, from evolutionary psychology to hypotheses about a universal moral law. His exploration of Christianity delves into the authorship of the gospels, the reliability of Biblical texts, and the scholarship surrounding the resurrection story. Murray, the author of Coming Apart and co-author of The Bell Curve does not write as an expert. He acknowledges that those taking religion seriously for the first time, like himself, must grapple with topics and ideas that defy intellectual mastery. In this book, Murray offers his personal example of intellectual struggles toward religion. Maybe G-d needs a way to reach over-educated agnostics, and that’s what I stumbled into,” he writes. “It’s a more arid process of divine revelation, but it has been rewarding. And if you’re like me, it’s the only game in town.” What a great blurb. That resonated with me as much as his IQ book did because I have long been a fan of religion. In fact, I became a fan of religion when I became conservative. But I’m not a spiritual person. It’s not a place I go to naturally, so I was delighted to talk to someone who, like me, is working his way toward religion as an intellectual process. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Professor Murray.

ANDREA: I am so glad to be speaking with you. I’m a huge fan of all your thinking. I started out a Democrat and your books were transformative in helping me understand that perhaps my father’s Democrat party might’ve answered all my questions about governments and how the world works, but it certainly didn’t address the world I saw beginning in the 1990s. And I made this journey, as my readers know, from Democrat to conservative and I’m very grateful to you. You’re a very important person in my intellectual development and I was very excited to speak with you and learn about your book regarding your religious journey. And my understanding is that, like me, you were taught that science explains everything. If you are an intellectual, G-d is a primitive idea based on complete ignorance, and therefore smart people reject G-d. If I understand correctly, you’re saying that the opposite is true, and the apex of science and rational thought isn’t atheism. Instead, it’s faith. But also, if I’m correct in that conclusion about what you’re saying, so I’m putting words in your mouth, couldn’t one argue that you’re just putting a more sophisticated gloss on that primitive thinking, which is when you run out of answers for observable phenomena, the only answer must be G-d? And with that, I will turn this over to you.

CHARLES: Well, what you’re talking about here is, we’ll call “G-d of the gaps”. And G-d of the gaps is essentially saying religion is used to explain things that have no obvious explanation, but science, for the last several hundred years has steadily been supplying answers that we didn’t have before, so earthquakes aren’t mystefying anymore, nor are thunderstorms, nor are floods and plagues. We understand all that in ways we didn’t before and you don’t need G-d to explain that. And to summarize it the way I do toward the end of the book, I argue that the relationship between science and religion has flipped over the last century. That from 1500 to the end of the 19^th century, religion is taking lots of body blows from science. And it explained the reason that an awful lot of intellectuals, in fact, I would say the vast majority of intellectuals by the end of the 19^th century, early 20^th century were secularized, becoming secularized. But in the 20^th century, you had a series of body blows to science, as it were, in terms of its ability to explain things in ways that made sense. The obvious example is the Big Bang. When the Big Bang theory was first proposed- let me back up a second- many people don’t realize that not much more than a hundred years ago, the accepted wisdom was that the universe was stable and eternal, and consisted of one galaxy, the Milky Way, of which we were a part. As of 1920, that was thought to be settled science. And it was during the 1920s that the red shift, it was discovered, and that galaxies are flying away from each other. The fact that there are many galaxies was discovered, etcetra, but the real kicker was when the Big Bang theory was proposed, first said about 14 billion years ago, the universe started from an infinitely small dimensionless singularity. Well, you know what that sounds like? That sounds like the opening of Genesis. 

ANDREA: {unintelligeble}

CHARLES: Yeah, it really does. And there were lots of physicists and astrophysicists who resisted the Big Bang theory, in part because they really were bothered by that. Well, that was one example. Quantum physics is the second example, where all sorts of phenomena have been discovered with, as Richard Feynmann has said, nobody still under- they don’t under- we still can’t explain it. It looks like we have contradictory things going on at the same time.

ANDREA: Yeah, and my problem with the Big Bang has always been “where did the singularity come from”? And then you get the theory, “Well, it comes from endlessly repeating and collapsing universes”, and then you get to “Well, where did they come? What is the point of origin of everything?” And that, I’ve not seen science can ever answer and that’s where it actually makes a lot of logical sense to see a divine being outside of it all that has always been.

CHARLES: Yeah. The technical term for what you just described is the “turtles all the way down” problem, where…

ANDREA: Exactly.

CHARLES: The Earth is at the back of a turtle, but then what is the next, the punchline is, is turtles all the way down. Yeah, I agree with you, it seems could be more parsimonious and plausible to posit an unmoved mover as Aristotle put it, that is to go through all these contortions which still don’t solve the problem. Because eventually, you cannot explain the initial miracle. Which I would say is the common problem with all cosmological theories. The physicists can’t explain the physics that they’ve been, for example, within trillionths of a second of the beginning. And they can’t explain that before that, and neither can any other theory. Is as if they say, “just grant me one initial miracle and I can explain everything else from there.”

ANDREA: {laughter}

CHARLES: So, to finish my original thought, oh, you have something else going on, which is science, not religion, science has been developing serious databases which are rejected by good Enlightnenment intellectuals like Steve Pinker out of hand because they call on the supernatural. But the near-death experiences…

ANDREA: Mm-hm.

CHARLES: …is one example that. The large database conducted by Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, of memories of children had of previous lives, of the good ones that could be verified indpendently. And a more recent phenomenon called “terminal lucidity”, whereby people with advanced dementia whose brain network for memory and cognition have been literally destroyed in terms of functioning networks, had a period lasting from a few minutes to maybe a couple of hours a day or two before they died in which they are back. Personality, recognition of spouse and relatives, okay. These are all things which science has discovered for which ancient beliefs are a much better explanation than anything science has come up with.

ANDREA: Mm-hm.

CHARLES: Yeah, that’s what I mean by the relationship has flipped. However, I want to go back and correct anybody who was listening or reading this. I am not instructing you as the writer on anything. I am offering you and example of a person who is just like you. And by “just like you”, I mean, you’re well-educated, probably have an advanced degree of some sort, you are successful, and G-d and religion have never been an important part of your life. You are not a militant atheist, you may even acknowledge the cultural advantages of religion, but as for whether you believe, it seems extremely impausible. We’re on a miserable little obscure planet in the corner of an obscure galaxy out of billions of galaxies in the universe, and the idea of a personal G-d is just silly. Or, as my wife put it, very succinctly, when she got to college she learned that smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. And that’s exactly what I learned when I went off to Harvard. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. They didn’t even bother to refute it. It was just part of the zeitgeist. And so the book says, “Well, I’m just like you.” And about 30-odd years ago, in a way, trying to catch up with my wife, I started taking religion seriously. Here’s what that phrase means for me, what it has meant for me. Here’s where it has led me, but, I even say it this way at the beginning of the book. I have to be explicit. I have to make my amatuer standing explicit. So that there are some topics that are which, you want to talk to me about IQ?  I can talk to you about IQ and I will be very surprised if you can come up with anything that I don’t know about the state of knowledge is. You talk to me about the Big Bang, or about near-death experiences, or about quantum physics, and if you’re going to take religion seriously, you do not have the option of mastering these subjects. Life is just too short to do it. You are forced to make your best judgments as you go along. And in my case, what, I know the word “journey” is often used. I don’t like it because it sounds way too bland. And what I had- what happened to me, and I think would happen to most people of faith start from this ground zero like I did, is it’s going to be a series of nudges, a series of jolts to your previous understandings and you’ll find your beliefs slowly evolving. They don’t have to be Road to Damascus revelations. So, the book is not Charles Murray authoritatively telling you what the story is about religion is. Charles Murray says, “Well, it beat the hell out of me, and I’ve been working on it for a long time, and here’s what it was like.”

ANDREA: I understand that, but I also know my parents were secular atheists- were, I don’t know if they were atheists. They were secular. They were both very learned in Judaism. My Dad had actually been raised in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage in Nazi Berlin. But they’d come of age in British Mandate Palestine and in Israel, which was secular, and they came to America and for me, I’ve always felt Jewish but I was never religious. But I am… I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read books about the Bible. I’ve read histories. But that’s very dry. And as you get older, my mother was an atheist until the day she died and she was absolutely terrified of death because it was the great nothingness. And I, as I have gotten older, have thought, “Yeah, that’s not an idea I like”. And this gets me to one of the books I found consoling, which is C.S. Lewis’s last Narnia book, which is The Last Battle. And I understand C.S. Lewis, I’ve read the books over and over, I have an understanding of faith and the Christian faith. It’s shaped by C.S. Lewis. And I read that you, too, were shaped in your ideas by C.S. Lewis. 

CHARLES: Yeah.

ANDREA: I wondered what you had to say on that.

CHARLES: Yes, I was introduced to Mere Christianity by a guy named Pete Bweiner, who is now a columnist, writes for The Atlantic and then other outlets, but he introduced me to it. I read it, and I was dazzled by it. It’s a funny thing about Mere Christianity, because it’s not flights of wonderful soaring prose, and on the contrary, it’s very conversational. But what you realize, two or three or four pages in, is here’s one smart person who does believe this stuff. And he just draws you into a variety of intellectual situations is if you read the book, where maybe you don’t agree with it, but if you don’t agree with it you realize you are forced to say why you don’t agree with it. And that in turn leads you into more exploration. So, and in a case like yours, where you are Jewish and a secular Jew, and you are particularly interested in converting to Christianity, it would seem to me that a good- now I said I wasn’t giving advice to people and now I’m giving you advice but…

ANDREA: Suggestion, not advice.

CHARLES: Now that’s, yeah. My wife is finds contemplative prayer very rewarding. And as far as I can tell, contemplative prayer is the kind of thing that is open to anyone, Jewish, Christian, whatever. And that leads to another aspect of my situation, which I try to describe in the book. I think a lot of us who disregard- who have not been religious have tended to look at people who are very religious and say to ourselves, either that we don’t think they’re very smart, or we say to ourselves, they’re deluding themselves. They’re scared of death, they’re trying to get a rationale. And we tend to dismiss their faith because we are so completely unable to enter into that. And here’s what I think is going on: I think spiritual perceptiveness is a trait in the same way that the ability to enter fully into music is a trait. And it goes from high to low in different people. For example, I like to listen to music. I like Bach and Mozart. I don’t get completely absorbed in them. I’m not brought to tears by them very often. I had a friend who was a brilliant violist. He heard music at a completely different way from me. And I’m never going to be able to hear music the way he did. And I just have to accept that. Similarly, my wife is somewhere on this trait of spiritual perceptiveness. If you convert it into the IQ metric, she has spiritual perceptiveness of 135 or something like that and I have spiritual perceptiveness of about 75. And I realized that early on. I realized that she wasn’t making it up. She is not deluding herself. She has access to insights I don’t. And so if you are like me, you are, in a way, you’ve got a perceptual deficit. And you have to tackle this thing from other directions. You, for example, you might be able to gothe route my wife did, which did not require the kinds of things I’ve done, but maybe you’re like me, in which case you take other routes.

ANDREA: Yeah, well, I’ve… for me, it has been the… I’m like you. I’m a 75 on the spiritual IQ. I do not… I’m just not a spiritual person. I like history, but I also, what I say is I believe in religion. I’m still trying to believe in G-d because… and I believe in a very specific religion. I believe in the Biblical Judeo-Christian tradition that in many ways to me reached its apex under our founders. At the time of peak Enlightenment, before the French Revolution took over and hang the last priest with the king, with the last entrails of the last priest, or whatever that was, did a row, and… So, I’ve become much more attuned to religion because I believe humans need religion. So I’m willing to… I’ve heard the expression “G-d shaped hole”, and that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to believe in G-d as if G-d really exists, but we need to believe in G-d because we exist.

CHARLES: Well.

ANDREA: And so I go to synagogue once or twice a month. Fabulous rabbi. I go to the Orthodox synagogue because it’s much more meaningful than the “kumbaya” stuff at a Reform place, and I love his analysis, I love the exegesis. I love the stories. I love the morality. But I still don’t click into G-d. I’m still there for the religion itself.

CHARLES: Okay. Let me suggest an alternative for you. And that is… the first step you have to do, to get over, I think, I’m being very proscriptive, as a contrary to what I said earlier about…

ANDREA: Well, you’re much smarter than I, and more knowledgable, so I come to you as a supplicant.

CHARLES: Now the… I think the first step for me was to look at all the work that has been done on paranormal phenomena. The body of work that was done over the course of the 20^th century is very impressive. It does not consist just of people using the Rhine cards, and trying to predict what the shapes of the cards are and ESP. It become much more sophisticated than that. There’s a lot of work that’s been done. And it seems to me that the binary yes/no question, is there such a thing as extra sensory phenomena that we cannot explain, and the reason we can’t explain them using ordinary science is they aren’t part of ordinary science. I think that question has been answered. And I think the question has been answered “yes”. They are hard to measure, they are… we have never been able to figure out how to turn them on and turn them off, but to dismiss all this evidence as being meaningless is actually an act of faith. Because kind of, confronting the evidence, you’d have to say that the paranormal is real. Well, once you say that, once you take that initial step, then a variety of other things become possible. And namely, an awful lot of the things that religion talks about become possible. And that seems to me, is a bridge I got over partly because I thought the binary yes/no question, do paranormal phenomena exist? And the second reason was, I think the body of evidence regarding near-death experiences and terminal lucidity is extremely suggestive of consciousness existing after the brain stops. And if you can believe that, as I do, your attitude toward death changes profoundly. It doesn’t change all at once, but in my own case, in my forties and fifties, early fifties, I was like your mother. I would have occasional moments of existential dread where I would look into the future and say, “It’s all going to disappear, I’m going to vanish”. And, as usual, human beings can’t really think about that very long without- they have to ignore it and I do. But I’ve had those moments. And I realize now that without being to plot that with the changes, I stopped fearing death many years ago. I still don’t, because I’m an applied statistician, so I think in terms of probability. I’m not 100 percent sure. I think I’m more than 50 percent confident that there is a life after death. And because of that, death does not present the same terrors to me and I would argue that I am not scrambling to come up with some way to avoid the truth. Actually, I think I’m basing my confidence on a hell of a lot of evidence. 

ANDREA: Well, I… the one thing I figured out a long time ago is we are manifestly greater than the sum of our chemical parts. And our minerals, you know, all that stuff and water that makes it, because that’s what I learned. We’re just a collection of chemicals and water, and when we die, ashes to ashes and dust to dust and our consciousness is not… you know, you can talk about synapses and brain cells and all sorts of stuff, but it cannot… science cannot define the essence of our human capacity, and it seems to me nothing vanishes. It has to go somewhere. So again, that’s something that science- and I haven’t studied this that closely, but growing up and thinking about it, science never had an answer for the uniqueness of us above and beyond our physical, corporeal being. So again, I know there’s something more out there. And you’ve concluded all of this something more leads to G-d. Where did you make that leap from obviously something more and all these phenomena to “it must be G-d”?

CHARLES: Well, I had my own Road to Damascus moment but it was empirical rather than spiritual. I read a little, slim book called Just Six Numbers by Martin Reese who was the astronomer royal in Britain and astrophysicist. And the six numbers referred to the physics of the Big Bang. And what he was describing is not contraversial among physicists. He was describing the very odd fine-tuning of the Big Bang. There are a variety of phenomena not in the physics that do… are not motivated by theory. They are what are called “brute facts”. I mean, they’re just there. And, for example, one of them is the ratio of the force binding atoms and the magnitude of the force we call gravity. That ratio is huge because gravity is much, much weaker than the forces binding atoms. Well, it is the case that if that ratio were not very much different, then you could not have… then the Big Bang created all the elements, they’re created stars, created planets. And life could not possibly have existed. That’s just one of the six numbers. The others are the same way. If they were a little bit different, we would live in a universe of black holes and nothing else or we would live in a universe of radiation and nothing else. And the odds against these various parameters being fixed together to provide the basis for the universe are one in trillions. Literally, one in trillions. And I read that, and I said to myself, well, I was actually picking up from the way that Francis Collins put it in his book, well, I was actually picking up from the way that Francis Collins put it in his book, The Language of G-d, we have three choices. One is, well, we’re alive. The universe exists so it’s trillions to one that’s how it worked out. The other is a multiverse theory, that you alluded to earlier, whereby there are actually millions of universes out there. The third one is, the universe was intentionally created. There was some intention behind it, and among other things that intention permitted the universe to support life, and I can’t accept the one in trillions thing. That juts doesn’t… I can’t buy that. I go out and look into the sky on a cloudless night and I can’t buy the million universes, either. I don’t think there are a million of these things out there. And that left me with, again, I’m thinking empirically. The most parsimonious, plausible conclusion is that the universe is intentional. And that is what made me say okay, what is this intention? What shall I give a name? How shall I name this? And I said to myself, you can’t just say it’s a mystery. You’re trying to avoid what it really is. You’re saying there’s a G-d. That was my moment where it opened up.

ANDREA: And my last question, and I’m so grateful for the time you’ve given me. My brother-in-law also believes that the universe was created. He believes that alien beings from another planet created it. Why have you chosen the Biblical G-d as the most likely explanation for the G-d that created it, and why haven’t you sai like my brother-in-law, that some alien beings are the gods? And I’ll just preface this by saying I’m a big fan of Dennis Prager, and Dennis Prager’s whole point is that G-d created humanity. He is a moral G-d, that we are His special creations and He wants us to be good. And so I’m a huge fan of that. That theory. 

CHARLES: Okay. Your brother-in-law still has a problem if he says we were created by aliens, because it’s the turtles all the way down problem. 

ANDREA: Exactly.

CHARLES: Okay, maybe aliens. Yeah, so he’s not getting out of anything. Prager is summarizing in a way, what C.S. Lewis has is his first five chapters. The first five chapters don’t mention Christianity at all or even religion much, but he talks about the evidence that there exists a moral law. And that there is a sense of decent behavior that is way more widely shared across cultures than we oftentimes realize, at least among the advanced civilizations. For example, there is no culture, ever, that celebrates selfishness, you know. There is no culture ever that says a man can have any woman he feels like. Cultures differ. Some say you can only have one woman as your wife and other cultures say you could have four, but you can’t just have anyone you want. And he goes through a whole variety of things that seem to be embedded in human beings as natural responses. And he says, “okay, we can just say they’re instincts”, but that doesn’t work, and he goes through a very elegant disposition on how these don’t match instincts, evolved instincts, that evolutionary biology can only take it so far. And he ends by saying, essentially, suppose G-d were trying to reveal himself to human beings? How could he do it? And, again, I’m summarizing, but he says He would do it by urging us to behave in certain ways which would reflect His being. And that is goodness. And the idea of G-d as love is a very powerful explanatory force there, and I’ll just conclude by telling how my wife got started. She had our first baby, and the love she felt was, as she put it, “far more than evolution required”. 

ANDREA: What an elegant phrase.

CHARLES: It is, and it has been quoted subsequently public by some of my friends because it is an elegant phrase. And her further conclusion was, is, she felt like she was a conduit for love that was coming from somewhere else. Well, if I cannot think of a more dramatic way of getting to the concept of G-d is love, given her experience, and that leaves us to the kind of conclusion that Prager has. And it’s the kind of conclusion I have. I just wish I had it in a more deeply felt way. But even though my Christianity, and is is a kind of eccentric kind of Christianity, is arid, more arid than I would prefer, and I wish I had more deeply felt faith than I have. I also have a fair amount of confidence that… (audio trails off).

ANDREA: That’s wonderful. I… what you say resonates with me because as I said, you and I have the same spiritual IQ.

CHARLES: {laughs}

ANDREA: I am so grateful. I really can’t thank you enough.