Taking Religion Seriously

Taking Religion Seriously isn’t a book you would expect from a political scientist best known for Losing Ground and The Bell Curve. It’s not, however, surprising that a man eighty-two years of age should ponder the topics addressed in this brief work that can be read in a few hours. Broadly speaking, those topics are God, morality, and Christianity.

Though Charles Murray claims no special expertise on those matters, it’s obvious he’s devoted considerable time to exploring the subject matter - a largely intellectual journey that began three decades earlier...

Murray’s “secular catechism” in chapter three provides a succinct summary of the beliefs one is likely to inherit via cultural osmosis or higher education. Those materialistic assumptions dismiss religion and reduce humans to highly evolved animals living on a “nondescript planet on the edge of a nondescript galaxy in a universe with a billion galaxies.” Murray points out how unreflective that creed is, ignoring fundamental mysteries like the amazing relationship of mathematics with the physical world and even failing to seriously ask why the universe itself exists.

Those observations lead to thoughts about the Big Bang and its relevance for the idea of God, observations whose detailed mathematical elements can be skimmed over by non-physicists and reduced to one conclusion: The odds of there being a universe at all are vanishingly slim. This analysis is essentially the cosmological argument for the existence of God...

Part One ends with unexpected data offered to challenge the prevailing materialistic assumption that the mind and consciousness are essentially related to the brain...

In Part Two, Murray turns his attention to Christianity and begins by discussing its essential contribution to the cultural efflorescence of Europe from the 15th to the 19th century...

In sum, Taking Religion Seriously provides food for thought as well as numerous sources to further investigate the truly fundamental issues it raises...

That God doesn't exist: Charles Murray's new book is an enjoyable read, but many of its arguments are unpersuasive, by Bo Winegard,  Aporia, 19 August 2025.