I Thought I Didn't Need God

Kevin Harris: Bill, the Wall Street Journal says^[1], quoting:

A succession of well-known authors and intellectuals, formerly cold to religion, are turning – or returning – to Christianity

The editors of Free Press write^[2],

Is the West experiencing a religious revival? Some say yes—or at least, that it needs one. . . . But how can religion compel the secular? Political scientist Charles Murray knows the answer better than most—because it happened to him. For much of his life, he explains in his new book, Taking Religion Seriously. . . . He was one of the “well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant.”

We've followed these instances of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Larry Sanger (the founder of Wikipedia), Tom Holland, and a host of others who are embracing the Christian faith in varying degrees after years of rejecting it. And now Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, has made significant steps toward Christian theism. Bill, I'd like to apply this trend and Murray's testimony that we're going to look at to your Systematic Philosophical Theology. Many intellectuals who are embracing or returning to the Christian faith will be drawn to this work. What do you hope it will accomplish for highly educated people like we're talking about?

Dr. Craig: My Systematic Philosophical Theology is designed to survey the whole body of Christian doctrine from the doctrine of scripture and doctrine of faith up through creation, Christ, salvation, the church, and the last things, and to examine the philosophical issues that arise in the course of exploring these Christian doctrines. I hope it will both inform people about Christian doctrine as well as provide good reasons for believing these doctrines and their coherence.

Kevin Harris: Of course, much of that applies to the layman as well. But what, if anything, did you have in mind for the layperson when writing these volumes? I’ll give you an example. Multitudes of our followers teach Sunday school classes, small group Bible studies, and things like that. Will this help the average group Bible study?

Dr. Craig: I don't think so. To be perfectly honest with you, this is intended to be a scholarly work that is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and scientists who are PhDs in these various areas. It's not really geared toward laypeople who would, I think, find it impenetrable and in many cases incomprehensible. Rather, for them, I would recommend my Defenders lessons, which are available online at our website, ReasonableFaith.org, which surveys exactly the same material but at a more elementary level accessible to laypeople.

Kevin Harris: In his new book, Murray gives detailed steps on how he came out of secularism. He says he tried to find some kind of spirituality, including his generation's interest in Transcendental Meditation, New Age, and so on, but he just could not embrace anything spiritual. He writes:

My failure got me to thinking about something that expanded into a semicoherent theory: 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. . . People vary in their ability to apprehend spiritual truths. . . I suffer from a perceptual deficit in spirituality.

That brings up several questions. Is this a psychological issue that some people are either resistant to or just don't get anything of a religious or spiritual nature? And secondly, does your section on the nature of faith in volume one most inform this issue?

Dr. Craig: My treatment of faith in volume one really handles other questions, such as whether faith involves belief and what justification there is for Christian faith. The closest relevant part would be on pragmatic justification for believing in God, which might well appeal to people like Murray since it is based on pragmatic considerations. Now, as for your first question, you'd need to be a psychologist to answer that question. But theologically, I would say that the doctrine of prevenient grace says that through the Holy Spirit, God speaks to the heart of every person and enables every person to come to saving faith if he or she wants to. So ultimately it is not going to be due to a psychological deficit or dullness that someone fails to come to faith. It will only be if they willingly resist and reject the drawing of God's Holy Spirit upon them.

Kevin Harris: Murray continues that his failure to be open to God is because:

I had distracted myself with Western modernity.

I'm 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 can 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.

I have more questions than I can ask about that one. It does seem that we have more ways to successfully distract and amuse ourselves than at any time in history. Just think how medical advances have made life so much better that he was referring to. He sees this as a factor. I suppose much of this is under the heading of the problem of evil and suffering. Will you deal with this in your Systematic Philosophical Theology? And let me ask one more question while you're thinking about that. Do we require despair to bring us to God?

Dr. Craig: The great French apologist Blaise Pascal said that we need to make man feel the despair from which he constantly seeks to distract himself. I think Murray is absolutely correct that through our amusements and media, we have been extraordinarily successful in distracting ourselves from the deep existential questions. Pascal said we need to bring people face to face with these questions, like the meaning of my life in the face of inevitable death. Now, in my Systematic Philosophical Theology, I do deal with the problem of evil, but again, it's with respect to different questions. It's whether or not the evil and suffering in the world justify disbelief in God. I argue that, in fact, it does not.

Kevin Harris: Next, Murray writes:

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 these propositions. They were part of the received wisdom of most Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century. I accepted them without thinking.

That catechism there sounds like most of the battleground upon which you've been fighting your whole career. Murray says the secular catechism comes from academia, which trickles down to the lay level, I would add. Which of those propositions have you most concentrated on?

Dr. Craig: Undoubtedly, the first proposition: that the concept of a personal God is at odds with everything that science has taught us over the last five centuries. I show that is not only unjustified, but in fact demonstrably false, and that much of what science teaches us is very supportive of belief in personal theism. And then the second one: that the great religious traditions are human inventions, natural products of the fear of death, including Christianity, which can call on no solid evidence for its implausible claims. Here I show that the miraculous claims of New Testament Christianity, particularly that God raised Jesus from the dead, are very solidly grounded in historical facts that are today recognized by the wide majority of New Testament historians who have written on these subjects.

Kevin Harris: Murray continues:

In describing how I got unstuck . . . I experienced a series of nudges spread over many years.

The first nudge, so soft that it barely registered . . . 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 . . . and many other examples.

It just seems extremely odd that so many basic phenomena were so mathematically simple. It was almost as if someone had planned it that way.

Did you address this in the argument from the applicability of math, Bill? I believe that's volume 2B.

Dr. Craig: Yes, absolutely. There’s a whole chapter devoted to the question of the applicability of mathematics, and the question famously proposed by Eugene Wigner, the Nobel Prize–winning quantum physicist, concerning the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. So I’m really impressed that Murray is so reflective as to appreciate this argument from mathematical applicability.

Kevin Harris: Now that was just a soft nudge, he says, but now continuing, he writes:

The first unmistakable nudge involved the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” . . . 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. . . .

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.

I want to pause right there and say that question really gets to the bottom line. Is this covered in your work on the attributes of God and the argument from contingency, also in volume 2B?

Dr. Craig: In volume 2B, this is the first and most fundamental argument for the existence of God that I consider. It is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s famous argument from contingency to the existence of a metaphysically necessary being who provides the reason as to why something exists rather than nothing.

Kevin Harris: Then Murray continues:

Whatever that answer may be, it is vulnerable to an infinite regress. What created the force behind the creation? Even if your answer is “God,” you must ask how God came to be. At that point you’re stuck with saying that it’s turtles all the way down.

“It’s turtles all the way down,” by the way, is the punchline for a joke in Stephen Hawking’s book – it illustrates the vicious infinite regress that he mentioned. Is this where the kalam comes in?

Dr. Craig: Yes. The kalam cosmological argument argues that there cannot be an infinite regress of temporal events and that, therefore, there must be an absolute beginning of the universe at which the universe came into being. Honestly, I’m really rather shocked that Murray thinks that one is just stuck with an infinite regress. There are numerous arguments against the metaphysical possibility of an infinite regress.

Kevin Harris: Next, he writes:

Some eminent thinkers have argued that the question about existence is meaningless; others, that the universe did not require an act of creation. I couldn’t buy either answer. I decided that the existence of something rather than nothing is a mystery with a capital M.

I haven’t any good explanation for what could have caused the universe, but I believe there must have been a cause, and I recognize that any answer the human brain can comprehend runs into the turtles-all-the-way-down problem. What Mystery really means is that the universe was created by an unknowable creative force that itself has no explainable source, a concept Aristotle referred to as the “unmoved mover.” By the late 1990s, that sounded to me like a description of God I could accept.

Is the unmoved mover and a necessary being the same thing, Bill?

Dr. Craig: No, not necessarily. But notice that the idea of an unmoved mover denies the infinite regress that Murray thinks we’re stuck with. The series of causes has an end in a being which itself is uncaused. Now, if it’s a temporally first being, it need not be metaphysically necessary. But if you’re asking Leibniz’s question as to why anything at all exists, then this first sufficient reason for the existence of the contingent realm must itself be metaphysically necessary, or it would be part of the realm of contingent beings.

Kevin Harris: Next, he writes:

My ruminations about “Why is there something rather than nothing?” had a side effect. They helped me to stop anthropomorphizing God and instead give him the respect he deserves.

The Bible relentlessly anthropomorphizes God, starting in Genesis with the assertion that God created man in his own image. The God of the Old Testament has the full range of human characteristics—he gets angry . . .

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. 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.

Several things there. What he says could be taken as a criticism of the Bible’s anthropomorphic description of God. Is that a weakness in the Bible? It also sounds like he needed a good dose of The Attributes of God from volume 2A.

Dr. Craig: I don’t think it’s a weakness, but it certainly is characteristic of the Bible, which is not a philosophical or theological book, but a book written in the ordinary language of religious belief and experience. But fortunately the Bible itself gives reason to think that these are merely literary figures of speech, not to be taken with a sort of literalism. For example, even though the Bible will speak of God’s eyes, or ears, or the arm of the Lord, all of these serve a clear literary purpose. The Bible also affirms such things as God’s incorporeality and his omnipresence, which would be incompatible with his having a literal physical body. So I think the Bible itself, when properly interpreted, shows that these are literary figures of speech.

Now, in addition to that, as you say with reference to volume 2A, perfect being theology (that God is a maximally great being) supplements biblical revelation by using philosophical reflection to expound on these attributes of God.

Kevin Harris: Murray then writes:

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.

I know you have a lot to say about that one, Bill. Do you have a section on God and time?

Dr. Craig: Oh yes, certainly. That is in volume 2A on the attributes of God. There’s a whole chapter on divine eternity and God’s relationship to time. And then again, it’s covered in volume 3 on the doctrine of creation when we ask about God’s temporal status without creation. I defend the rather unusual view that God is timeless without creation and in time since the moment of creation. I find this to be a coherent and plausible view of God’s eternity and relationship to time.

Kevin Harris: Secondly, he writes:

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. . . . These are not concepts that can be fully processed (at least by me), but they are powerful antidotes to thinking about God as an especially wise and powerful grandpa.

It’s funny how he actually was thinking that. He really had this anthropomorphic view. And again, I know you have plenty to say on this. I want to remind everyone to check out the Reasonable Faith YouTube videos on God’s attributes.

Dr. Craig: Yes. In volume 2A on the attributes of God, I have an entire chapter – very interesting; it’s fascinating to explore this – on God’s relationship to space, his omnipresence. I think that God is spaceless as well as timeless without the universe.

Kevin Harris: In conclusion, here’s what Murray says in an interview with Michael Shermer in answer to a question about the rise of Christianity. Check out this clip.

Charles Murray: But as I read the letters of Paul, the ones that are undisputed, it sure looks to me as if he is, we know for a fact that he was writing at least by the 50s, if not earlier. And he was preaching a pretty well-developed Christology in those letters. And I know that the revisionists dispute that. I know that the revisionists say no, his language can be interpreted otherwise. I find it hard to interpret otherwise. And I also pay special attention to Paul saying that he spent three days—no, thirteen days or something like that—in Jerusalem with Peter and James (I guess this was the second one). This, just a year or two after the crucifixion. And that, as one biblical scholar says, it’s hard to believe they spent all of that time talking about the weather. Paul certainly seems to associate himself with the message that was being given by the disciples in Jerusalem, and that was that Christ was risen from the dead, which is not a secular leader in any important sense of that term.

Kevin Harris: Well, that seems to be solidifying Charles Murray’s spiritual journey so far, in particular the philosophical grounds for God and the early testimony for Jesus’ resurrection. Is his answer to Shermer on the right track here?

Dr. Craig: Oh, I think so. We shouldn’t be uncharitable about getting the numbers exactly right from memory. The point is that Murray exhibits that remarkable combination of natural theology – arguments for God’s existence, including the contingency argument, the argument from the applicability of mathematics – and the historical evidence for the facts undergirding Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. This is marvelous. For those of us working with Reasonable Faith, this is like music to our ears. And so I’m thrilled for Murray’s journey and wish him all the best as he continues to go forward.^[3]