The Ricochet Podcast - An Empiricist's Guide to the Search for God

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Charles Murray's inquiries into social science have resulted in the publication of a number of the most important (and controversial) academic books of the past half-century. It's safe to say he enjoys complexity and taking a stand — and yet there's one big question that Mr. Murray spent half his life dismissing, and the second half marveling at without quite settling. Today, he sits down with Steve, Charlie and a visiting Peter Robinson to discuss his most personal work yet, the just-released Taking Religion Seriously.Plus, our trio of merry hosts basks in the Democrats' disarray and they take a closer look at the Supreme Court's hearing in the Callais case that will settle the contradictions between the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.Sound clip from this week's open: Justice Brown Jackson spars with an attorney during the Callais v. Louisiana hearing.

All right. Shall we get started? No, the real reason that I'm returning to this podcast is that over the weekend, somebody referred to Steve Hayward as the new me, and I thought, that's it. The difference is that the remedy under the ADA and other anti-discrimination laws is not stereotyping. It's not race-based. I take your point. I take your point. But you're saying then that if the problem of No Access is about race. It's just too bad.

It's the RICOchet podcast with Stephen Hayward, Charles C.W. Cook, someone named Peter Robinson, talking today with Charles Murray about his new book, Taking Religion Seriously. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either. Welcome everybody to RICOA podcast number 762. It's Stephen Hayward sitting in the host chair today. the still vacationing James Lillix, joined as usual by Charles C.W. Cook and somebody on my

screen who was identified as Peter Robinson, although I'm doubtful. Well, in the age of AI, Peter, I'm skeptical. It's really you, but it's, I'm busy. So this is actually a hologram. Right. Okay, good. Where are you today? Are you out here in Sunny, California? I'm at home. I'm at home. I am indeed in Sunny California. Yes. I am preparing. We're having a big, deal at the Hoover Institution next week, a celebration of the life and work of Thomas Sol. And I'm prepping. I got a rather chastening note from the Supreme Court of the United States earlier saying that Justice Thomas would be attending and that he'd been asked to speak

and that he would like me to have a conversation with him on stage. Now, I don't know about you, but that made me sit up in my chair. Yes, it would me too. I would come, except I have a prior obligation at the University of Mississippi all next week. So I'm very sorry. I can't make it. Charles C.W. Cook is with us, but he had to dash to the front door to sign for the delivery of a passport. So I guess he's getting ready to flee the country or something like that. Right. Our special guest today, by the way, listeners, is Charles Murray, who will be on with us in a few minutes to talk about his dynamite new book just out this week, taking religion seriously. More about that and a proper introduction and due course. But first,

I don't know how closely you're following politics these days, Peter. I find as I get older, I find it hard to keep up with the day-to-day ratat-tat-tat of all the pundits and everything. Wow, coming from you. I always sort of relied on you to keep up on it for me. Well, I kind of keep up with the political science of it. I'll mention to you since you are there at Hoover. I am reading, just started last night, this brand new book by one of your colleagues, David Brady, the great political scientist. Oh, yes.

And I forget the title of it, but it's on sort of a little. electoral cycles going back 50 years, and it looks fascinating. That's the kind of thing I like, is sort of long-form, data-oriented, calm conclusions about things, and not polemics and, you know, the latest Twitter fights and so forth. We do have a, the midterm is going to, the midterm is going to be very, very important. I interviewed Speaker Johnson, oh, this would be going back four or five months now in Washington, and I said to him, on camera, what are you expecting? excuse me for the midterms and he purred like a cat and he said on camera we're out raising them

we have the morale we're going we've also done a remarkably good job this cycle of candidate recruitment we're going to retain the house and then we went off camera and i said no really how are things looking for the midterms and he said exactly the same thing this is a man who I don't believe is all that good at guile. So I am here to report that the Speaker of the House really believes that the Republicans are going to retain the House in the midterms. Well, now, I remember you saying a year or so ago that, just observing from afar, that you were impressed with Johnson coming into that job that's been so difficult. Now that you've met him and talked to him, is that, is your impression, your favorable impression,

notched up, stayed the same? Where do you land? I was I walked into that impressed by Johnson my view of him went up even more he is well he has to have political smarts to be able to hold that house together and he has held the house together excuse me he's held the Republican caucus together and of course as we all know his majority is extremely slim he has had to resort as of course anyone in that position would have to resort to calling in Donald Trump and giving him a call list on important votes.

You need to talk to these six guys. There are arms I need you to twist. Fine. Still, Mike Johnson has done that. But he's a genuinely good, relaxed, calm human being. His staff like him. You know Washington, Steve. You know that not all staffs like their principles at all,

even when they admire them or respect them in a certain way. His staff genuinely enjoys him. he is honestly he reminded me about my hero ronald reagan in the sense that despite all the pressures he's under despite all the activity worrying around him he himself seems a kind of node of calm a man who really is comfortable being himself so i was just impressed by him he does seem serene i'll give him that uh and about his staff at least they stay out of his shot i'm like so sorry that's right that's right that's right uh charlie his back passport in hand uh charlie you know one of interesting things this week is, I do like watching that Harry Enton guy on CNN, their

polls, who I think shoots pretty straight. And he's pointing out what ought to be pretty ominous for Democrats, which is their generic ballot margin, has been shrinking over Republicans. And now it's down to like three points, I think. And for a variety of reasons, I won't explain, the Democratic generic margin needs to be larger from that to win a House election. That's just the way it all falls out. And that's even before you factor in any possible gerrymandering that might have. happen before the election next year. Do you think that this is just a reflection of the way the shutdown is not really working for Democrats, or are there deeper tectonic plates behind this scene?

I think this is a weird moment in that usually all you need to do in politics is look at the popularity of the incumbent president or Congress. and reason from there. But at the moment, that's impossible because you see the headline which says Donald Trump is eight points underwater or the Republicans as a whole have an approval rating of 36%.

And then you look at the Democrats and they're 20 points worse. Now, in this case, they're not worse. They're slightly better on the generic ballot, but they're not better enough. And that is odd. Ever since I moved to the US,

politics was thermostatic you could pretty much guarantee that if a president had been there six years then there would be a pushback well in 2026 Donald Trump won't have been there for six years in quite the way that presidents are normally there for six years because his terms have been set apart from one another but he will have been president for six years and the democrats are really in a bad position for that if you compare it to for example 20 years 2014, where Republicans romped, it doesn't look like it's going to be anything like that sort of dynamic, which is odd. Well, you mentioned Trump being underwater in his personal approval ratings. We have here something of a reversal from the Reagan years. Peter will

remember this. It was said that Reagan's personal popularity was always very high, but the media and Democrats told us his particular policies and ideas were not popular. That turns out not to be true, by the way, if you really got into it. But that was the media span and talking point. But I do think it is, in the case of Trump, Trump himself is personally unpopular for all the reasons that we know, right? So it sometimes amazes me this approval rating is even in the mid to high 40s. But I do believe that a lot of his policies are popular. Correct. Right. And so I think that that plays out, I think, in an awful lot of the rest of the shaping of the political landscape. This was the point that Barton Swain made in the Wall Street Journal, what was it, yesterday, where he had this

outrageous column, which called, I think it was, he referred to Donald Trump as the tribune of democracy, the man who embodied democracy, far from being a threat to democracy, he's embodying democracy. And he went through it, issue by issue by issue, saying that although the Democrats are railing against him, they ought to think twice about how many Republicans approve of closing down the borders after the Biden years. A lot of Americans approve of that. Who approves of getting tough on crime in cities?

All Americans. On and on and it goes. The other bit of this is that, Steve, you and I do go back to the Reagan years, I cannot recall seeing the Democrats in such total and utter disarray. And if you close your eyes and try impartially,

to say to yourself, Democratic Party, what are the names that come to mind as the leaders or the most prominent members of the Democratic Party? And you get Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,

we're going to get Mom Dami. Apparently, he's on course to win election as mayor of New York. You've got Bernie Sanders. You've got Chuck Schumer, maybe the least unpopular of all these figures. In other words, Peter,

You're leaving out somebody, Peter. Yeah, no, because I'm leaving, I'm leaving him to you. So everybody I just named, everybody I just named is way over on the progressive left, and the country just won't have that. Okay, now over to you and the governor of the Golden State. Yeah, right. Well, Newsom, right? He's leading, by the way, the latest poll I've seen shows Newsom as the frontrunner for 2028.

Number two, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Wow. Exactly. The Democratic presidential nomination, right. Now, we'll talk about Newsom later on. I prefer to talk about him as little as possible, but he's taking a big gamble on his reapportionment initiative, I think. If he loses that, the blue will be off the rows, and I think he might,

but we'll save that for some other day. Have we seen any polling on that? Polling is difficult on an initiative, but it's always been very bad on California ballot initiatives, but a couple of polls have his initiative and a slight lead. So I wouldn't be confident. if I was nuisance about it. Now, do you need 50% for it to pass? Is it a simple majority? Yes. Because it's 60 in Florida. Yeah, no, it's simple majority. And so we'll see. All by mail, I think. It's just the only question on the ballot. Well, here, maybe I will spend 30 more seconds on

this. You may remember Peter, but maybe you don't. You were, I was a teenager at a time, but Ronald Reagan in his second last year's governor ran Proposition 1 as a special ballot measure in 1973. And it was a great measure. It was a tax and spending limitation initiative, but it was complicated and it lost because the, you know, the media and all the unions ran a very clever campaign against it. And Reagan made a couple of mistakes in the campaign. And that, you know, really stopped his momentum heading towards the 1976 cycle, I think. And I think the same thing could happen to Newsom. This is a gamble that Newsom's taking. So we'll see. Just my speculation. By the way, just, just, just, we keep hearing that the president, Donald Trump, really wants to cut back on and possibly even eliminate mail-in ballots because he considers them insecure.

Well, I have news for the president. He can relax because here in California, in my household, I have five children. Two of them are residents of Michigan. One is a resident of Texas. And one is a resident of New York. Only one of my five children is a resident here of California. California. And yet, I just received mail ballots for all of my children. I could, I, so, so, I mean, of course, it's just out, it's crazy. The mailing ballot, voting is out of control.

Now, they made a mistake with me because if I do vote for all my children, I won't, lawyers, leave me alone. I won't do it. I'm not that kind of guy. I was afraid you get Prop 50 every single time. I was afraid you were about to commit to a felony and I was going to mute you in case you started down that road meter. No, no, no, no. I wouldn't do that. But the idea that the mail-in ballots in California are in any way secure is absurd, preposterous. Do you know who else was opposed to mail-in-balloting? Jimmy Carter. I don't know if you remember that story. It's 20 years ago now, I think 2005. Jimmy Carter did some fancy commission with James Baker was the co-chair, and their report was very strongly critical of mail-in ballots because of the potential for fraud.

It does work quite well in Florida, but the cost of it, and the Democrats would never accept this, is that they dis, what's the word, deregister or unenroll you after every election. So if you want a mail-in ballot, not to register to vote, but if you want a mail-in ballot, you have to re-register every time. You have to opt in. Wow. Each and every election, yes. Yeah, that would be a better way of doing things.

So they don't just send them out at infinitum. Yeah. And Charles Murray joins us now on the podcast. Charles is a resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, author of so many books that if I list them all and recall some of the controversies about them, we would use up half of our time at least. But we're here today to talk about his brand new book, Taking Religion Seriously. Charles, welcome to Rick.

I'm delighted to be with you guys. Well, now, I do have an important opening metaphysical question. I think it's a high metaphysical question. I can't wait. Well, it is. What is the Aristotelian ideal of the best dry martini? Well, here I'm thinking, of course, of Robert Bork, who had very strong opinions on all of this, The chief among them being no olives, that this is a drink, not a salad, in Robert Pork's words.

The second thing is that a martini is by definition gin. Vodka is another drink. Similarly, onions are not martinis. They are another drink. Now, having said all that, I have decided, after long consideration, that you don't want to put any vermouth in a martini. Or if, you know, the proverbial wave it over the bottle. I used to go to the Palm restaurant with Charles Crafhammer

and Bill Bennett and Pete Wainer for lunch at three or four times a year. And I was mystified as to why I liked the martinis at the Palm better than the ones I made. And I tried all kinds of different, drive vermouths, and it turned out that the palm doesn't put any of it's partinis, and I have stuck by that wisdom ever since. So did you ever find out their secret? Do they have a secret gin or something?

No, the secret is that if you have a twist, that you really do a good job of getting the lemon oil out. And that is, that's important. If you do that, the gin takes on a sufficiently lovely lemony aspect, that it makes it qualitatively better than if you don't get those few drops of lemon oil. Yeah, I think that is the correct answer, by the way, on all fronts. But let's move on from distilled spirits to... Charles has never been more himself. Charles has never been more himself than in discussing a martini because he begins even then

by defining his terms. Right. That's right. Right. Well, let's move on from distilled spirits to the Holy Spirit and your new book, taking religion seriously. So I guess, Charles, let's open up this way. I think for all your long-time readers and people who followed your work for decades now, this is an unexpected book, an unusual topic, a somewhat unusual approach. I mean, you are chiefly an empiricist, although my observation is you've always been an empiricist in the mold of James Q. Wilson or Pat Moynihan,

someone who wants to have data, but also thinks like a reasonable human being. So how did you decide, before we get into particular important aspects of the book, how would you decide that you're going to write this book and declare for the wider public what's been going on in your spiritual life? It's all Nick Eberstadt's fault. Nick Eberstadt is one of the nation's premier demographers and colleague at AEI, and he had been interviewing me along with another colleague, Carlum Bowman, for some long videos that AEI was doing, kind of an institutional,

history, and in this case, my life at AEI, and somehow we got on to religion in the last hour of three, and Nick, who is a devout Catholic, was entertained by, I think that's the right word, by the eccentric ideas that I'd been developing about my religious beliefs. And when they turned off the cameras, Nick looked at me and he said, it ought to be your next book. And I had at that time been struggling with a semi-autobiographical book about my role in the conservative movements and libertarian movements of the 80s and 90s, and I was really bored with it. You know, my career hasn't been that exciting. And, you know, enough for maybe an article, but not for a book. And this really appealed to me because the fact is, Steve,

that this evolution, I will try to avoid the word journey, which is way overused when you get to religion. But this evolution of my thinking has been going on for 30-some years. And it's been an important part of my life that I really haven't talked with anybody about. And the other thing which justified me in saying, yes, I'm going to write it, is I think I am representative of millions of Americans. I'm thinking of well-educated, successful people, adults, 40s, 50s, for whom religion has never been a big deal. They aren't militant atheists. They may identify as agnostics, but basically, you know, what's the point? There is no such thing as a personal God.

That's certainly true. We live in the world of the Enlightenment, where we know a whole bunch of other things about religion aren't true. And so who cares? right and i've changed from that okay so i think um if i i think maybe it's not too much of a simplification to say that your path to taking theism seriously has two major prongs one is you review some of the science which shows that the randomness hypothesis of the universe is implausible and other things and then there's the logic of morals which i'll hold for a moment also on the science there's one part i just want to ask you about and i know peter's uh jumping in

this chair to get in. I was delighted to see you talk about the shroud of Turin at some length in the book, which is a thing that's fascinated me for a long time. Then you also mentioned another thing that's been on my mind, which is quantum entanglement, this very weird business in physics where the two particles separated can be in harmony with one another. And then you mention a third one, which is that, I think it's page 143. You mentioned that, oh, I won't find it. The actual observation of particles can change their behavior. In all three of these cases, I've thought to myself, and this is a little bit too crude, perhaps, or irreverent, but these are all God's little jokes on the rational mind.

I mean, when the particles change their behavior, when we're observing them in a scientific experiment, it's kind of like God's sitting back saying, ah, caught you looking, didn't I? Well, there have been a whole bunch of things that have happened in the last century that are God's little jokes. for example, what could be one better prank than to have physicists discover in the 20th century what is basically a gloss on Genesis. The big bag is genesis, let there be light. And also when you have the Enlightenment view saying,

we're all materialists now, the brain is where consciousness resides and once the brain quits, consciousness quits. What could be funnier than to have science and the ability to keep people, bring people back from near-death experiences provide a great deal of evidence saying, oh, maybe it doesn't work out the way we expected it to, maybe consciousness can exist independently of the brain.

This is not theologians arguing for a life after death. this is the science saying something's going on that we can't explain through existing neuroscience. Peter, jump in. Steve, am I permitted? You are, Mother May I?

Charles. I'd like to come to the question of miracles on which you're tiptoeing up to in a moment. But first, for me, the threshold question is this. Maybe I'm the outlaw. I just don't know.

would like to put this to you and then just see how you respond. But when you say, I, Charles Murray, I Charles Murray, Charles Murray, who produced at least three of the most controversial books of the last several decades and two of the most important, losing ground and coming apart, you produced two books in your career that everybody had to read. All right. And then you say, oh, by the way, I've never really been particularly interested in God. Now, Now, that stops me cold because all my life, I haven't been able – I did try. I got to college. I got to Dartmouth and realized that all the cool professors were atheists, and so I tried it.

And I was only able to keep it up for two weeks. I remember exactly. And then it just became too much of an effort. The existence of God seems to me everywhere present. I haven't always been happy about it. Lord knows I haven't always lived up to the implications, but I can't imagine how someone can go through the kind of life that you've led, the life of the mind, the life of awareness, the life of constantly interrogating this and that aspect of reality, the life of someone

who's such an American patriot, and we see God all over the founding. The founders had different levels of belief and different, but he's there. How can it be that you went through decades of your life, just not particularly interested in the question. All right. We are getting to what I consider the only potential real contribution that the book has. Most of the book is, you know, I am not an expert on a whole variety of things that I talk about in the book. And I say explicitly in the text, I am talking from my perspective about the Big Bang and consciousness and that I'm not an expert in any of this. I'm like you.

I am forced to try to make judgments about fields in which I don't have the time to master them. So in that sense, I'm not making contributions, but I think it is a contribution to say that spiritual sensitivity is the same kind of thing, quality in human beings, that the ability to appreciate music is, the ability to appreciate great art and great literature. In all of these cases, you have a trait that is not IQ at all. I mean, we all know really smart people, and actually, I'm kind of one of them, who looks at a picture in a museum, a great picture, and I'm not moved.

I leave it in five seconds and go on to the next one. And suddenly, there are people who are tone deaf, literally. Well, you are on the right-hand side of the normal distribution in spirit, spiritual sensitivity, for you not being preoccupied with God, not his social utility, but the truth value of God, is as natural to you as it is for some musicians to lose themselves in the music. And it's as unnatural for me. And I'm also married to a woman who is at the right say I hadn't cited that distribution on spiritual sensitivity, and I have the equivalent of a score of 75 on the IQ scale when it comes to spiritual sensitivity. So I think that's an important point

to make for a couple of reasons. First is, if it's true, and I'm sure it is, that means that people like me have to cobble together ways of getting into these problems that you don't have to do. You can take a much more direct route than people like I can. And the other thing is I want to disabuse my fellow people with spiritual sensitivity of 75. I want to get them from, I want them to stop saying, oh, people who claim all of these things about spiritual realities are just diluting themselves. I want them to realize, you are the one with the handicap. You are the one who does not have access to this information. So it's a trait.

It's a trait. It's a trait. Like many traits you've just spent your life studying, there's a bell curve here. Human beings vary on this point. And I'm not talking, I'm talking about reality. All right. The beauty of music is not in the imagination of people who can appreciate music. They are the ones who can see the beauty, similarly for great art.

And I'm saying people who have spiritual sensitivity are seeing things that are true that are very difficult for me to see. Can I just let me jump in for second, Peter, which is a short, clarifying follow-up question. So, you know, you used the phrase of Peter the bell curve and Charles, you talked about, you know, different modes or levels of spiritual perception. But do you think in general human beings have an instinct for reverence? Well, they certainly have, there is a religious instinct that is evolutionarily driven. Nicholas Wade has a very nice book about that.

an instinct for reverence that's the way I put it I'm not sure that's the right word I'm not sure that's the right word but I think I think the God-sized hole that people talk about I think that is I think that is a human characteristic

and I think that for most of us well we all have the god-sized hole buried in there somewhere some of us never have to access it a lot of times that becomes apparent to people in times of great stress and tragedy and so forth and if you live a life that doesn't have much tragedy in it it may very well be you can ignore it we can distract ourselves but i think the god-sized hole is a human characteristic By the way, you're answering all kinds of questions for me. You remember, as I, Steve would, Charlie wouldn't, Arnold Beichmann. Arnold Beichmann was one of my closest friends here at the Hoover Institution.

I remember walking into the lounge for a cup of coffee one afternoon, and Arnold, who then must have been 91 or 92, looked up and said to me, do you believe in God? And my first thought was, Arnold, it's a little late in the day for you to be asking that. question, but truly it had just kind of worked his way to the front of his mind. All right. So, onto this question of miracles, I'm not exactly certain. Bear with me, if you would, because I'm on the bell curve that puts questions in a sloppy way,

not as beautifully and precisely as you do. Come on, you're the best interviewer I've ever had. Would you repeat that for Steve to hear that? So I did an interview a couple of months ago with Carlos Air. at Yale. Carlos has a new book out entitled They Flew. And it is a book that takes seriously as a historical matter, he's a professor of history at Yale, accounts of two particular kinds of the miraculous behavior, supernatural behavior. The accounts all come from Catholic, not all, but overwhelmingly they come from Catholic countries, Italy and Spain, for the most part.

And we're talking about the 16th through to the 19th century, although one of the figures involved, Padre Pio, now St. Pio, died in 1961. And Carlos makes the point that we have extremely good documentary evidence that certain figures levitated in prayer, and certain other figures were capable of or experienced by location. That is to say we have documentary evidence that they were seen, spoke, touched, in two places at once. And one of the reasons we have such good evidence, particularly for the older figures, is that the Roman Catholic Church itself found all of this a terrible nuisance, doubted it, and in case after case after case, set up tribunals to investigate the matter

with the apparent hope of tamping it all down. Okay, and Carlos makes the point that we have historical, we have eyewitness testimony for these events that is at least as good as the eyewitness testimony we have for the speech that Elizabeth first,

the first gave at Tisbury. And that because of our, I was about to say, that's mistaken because of our secular, because of the Enlightenment, Northern European frame of mind that we have inhabited, we don't see it. There is an aspect of reality, and his argument is this is reality. Reality is big enough to contain things that strike us as levitation and bilocation, and we're not seeing it. So, in this book, do you find yourself seeing more of reality? Is that a fair way of putting the question? I see you nodding.

I was so interested in your account of this book, and the title is? The title is simply, they flew. Okay. When we get done with this podcast, I am getting the Kindle version of that book. Because I am wholly sympathetic to that point of view. There are a variety of things that are extremely well documented, that just look an awful lot like miracles. And some of those involve of healing,

but I'm not talking of something as simple as taking away the leprosy. I'm talking about what I read recently that has happened within the last decade or two with people who were dying of very complex, thoroughly diagnosed diseases, and got well instantly. Okay. I think that Carl Sagan's statement that has become such a cliche

that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is true, but what I think that a lot of the skeptics of the world don't recognize is what extraordinary evidence we have for some really weird stuff. Nicely put. So basically, well, I wouldn't have used the word stuff if this were a less polite company. But anyway, when it comes to miracles and the Bible, I still, you know, struggle to decide how much I accept as true and not true.

And of course, the resurrection is the acid test with all of that. However, the idea that miraculous things happen, I have no problem saying, There's a lot of evidence for that. So, Charles, we have the ideal audience for your book in our third host, Charles C.W. Cook, who, Charlie Cook, I don't think I'm betraying any real private information to say that you describe yourself as a churchgoing agnostic.

So Charlie Cook. Hi, Charles. This is true what Steve says. In a sense, this books for me, I'm on page 42, so I haven't got beyond that yet. but you started in 1985 so you were all around 40 then I'm now 40 and I like you have the 75 IQ thing I think and I compare it with music I just took my car yesterday in for its annual service and I was playing music in the car and I was so emotional getting my car done because of the music that I thought I must be right on the right hand side of your distribution for music but with religion

religion I'm not but my wife is I'm married to a Catholic and she is devout so she has that so I think I have the ideal patterns for the book but my question is so I had Ross Douthat on my podcast a few months ago and he's also written a book about religion and I said to him what is your aim here and he said my aim is to convert you my aim is to convince you that I'm right and preferably you have become a Christian, and preferably you've become a Catholic, right? This book, which I haven't finished yet, is that the aim, or is the aim more to sort of dispense with this sneering that you see among a lot of people who are within the world we inhabit,

people who are well-educated, where they really look down on all of these ideas as being silly or prehistoric or superstitious. Is that the aim of the book, or do you have a more specific goal? No, actually, you sound to me like my ideal reader. I mean, you are exactly the person I'm after. And what I'm saying to you... You should charge him more.

What I'm saying to you is, I feel your disability. Because I share your disability. and what I'm going to give to you is not a handbook. I'm just going to give you an example of how you can cobble together ways of thinking about this that will get you deeper and deeper into what I am confident is a really important, should be an important part of your life. And when you get to the end of the book, you'll see that the last chapter, which has to do what last chapters always do,

I explicitly don't try to foist Christianity on my readers. I say, look, there are two things I think you ought to take away from this, but neither one of them is directive about except to say, this is a worthwhile endeavor and you really should invest the effort. And not only should you invest the effort, but you can, despite our 75 scores on the perceptual ability scale, And that's it. So it's not a, I'm not trying to own the agnostic and make them feel bad about being agnostic.

I'm trying to say, you too can recover from this if you give it some effort. Another interesting thing that I'm picking up, despite only being 42 pages in, is very often the way that this topic is set up is as if on the one, hand you have religion and then on the other hand you have science and never the twain shall meet but it's quite interesting just reading the chapter on the creation of the universe or the big bang or however you want to look at it how intertwined a lot of those questions seem to be which is not the way we we talk about it i think that the relationship between science and religion has flipped 180 degrees and the You'll get to this later in the book, but from about 1400 to 1900 roughly, you had a situation

in which a variety of phenomena that had been seen as evidence for God were explained by science. And that's where the phrase God of the gaps comes from, and science progressively reduced the number of gaps and apparently reduced the space for religion. and in the 20th century, starting with the astronomical discoveries in the early part of the century, it's science that has discovered new phenomena we didn't even know existed for which they have no answers. So the Big Bang is the classic example. Are the three choices? Are we just the beneficiaries of a one and a trillion chance, which is kind of hard to deal with?

Do we have a million universes so that that's not real plausible either, which leaves you with the alternative that the parsimonious, plausible statement is the universe was intentionally created for some purpose. It's not random. It's not Richard Dawkins' pitiless in different universe. That's, by the way, I have. have a quote I really love. Well, it begins the chapter in the Big Bang, I think, from Jastrow, saying that the scientists who have been studying the universe and cosmology

clamber over the final rock, ready to make the final discovery, and there's a band of theologians that has been sitting there for centuries. And also in the case of consciousness, existing independently of the mind. That science has led us discover those possibilities, and it can't explain them through standard scientific paradigms. Charles Peter here again. In a way, I have another question for you, then I think back to Steve. And in a way, it's getting back to this, which side of the bell curve is one on? I feel, I may be mistaken, but I feel that many people feel that religion, spiritual matters,

all these things are fundamentally intuitive. And you say, I listened to a good deal of your conversation the other day with Nick Aberstadt at AEI, and you said something that I found very striking. I'm going to paraphrase you. I can't quite quote it. But this is a close paraphrase, that once you begin taking these matters seriously, you discover that spiritual matters are among the most intellectually exhilarating. I think that's the phrase you used, intellectually exhilarating subjects you will ever have encountered.

And I thought to myself, coming from Charles Murray, who more than most people, martini's aside, lives in his mind, that is a very arresting statement. Could you unfold that a bit? Well, I will give a concrete example of I'm starting to get more interested in Christianity after I read C.S. Lewis's mere Christianity. But then I immediately run into the revisionist literature on Christianity, the Bart Ehrman's of the world and who argue that, oh, the Gospels weren't even really written in the ordinary sense of that word. They were incrementally put together, redacted, augmented by anonymous authors. We have no idea who wrote the Gospels, et cetera, et cetera. And we really have no clear idea of what Jesus really said.

And that was all very erudite, and it was even persuasive. But then I came across the title of a book, I don't know how, called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. And it was a book, the thesis was, that the Gospels are very clearly intended to emphasize the degree to which they're based on eyewitness testimony. point number one part of being exhilarated is to have a fresh take on things and all at once here is out of the tired nihilism of the revisionist scholarship here is this thing saying actually you go back to the gospels there's a lot of eyewitness stuff in here and here are my reasons for arguing that which involves some really interesting understandings of Aramaic and the original languages in which the New Testament was written, and there are sentences that make more sense if what you're really reading is Peter's transcription of Peter's testimony to Mark, but it should read, we went across the river, we crossed the sea, and instead they used that they did. But it's a very sophisticated book. So at the same time, I had a scholar

who was taking an unpopular stance, documenting it to a fare thee well, and documenting it in really ingenious ways. And I just love that. And that's true of a lot of the other things that I got into in the traditional defense of the New Testament, where I say, you know what? this is meeting all of my tests for plausibility and tests that the revisionists fail miserably. Well, let me, Charles, draw us to an end with a sharper version of Peter's question. So, by the way, Charlie Cook,

if you run out of time, read the last chapter of the book where Charles restates the whole book and puts it in a summary form. I'm going to read the whole thing. I'm going to read the whole thing. I always do. I'm a completionist.

Right. And you'll be converted by the end, we think. That's what Peter Robinson hopes anyway. There's a fragment of a sentence here toward the end, Charles Murray, where you say, God must not be anthropomorphized. And I'm in heated agreement with that statement for a bunch of reasons. And it's absolutely with the unknowability of God. I long ago became something of a fan of the Protestant theologian Carl Barth,

even though I'm more Catholic in my theological sensibilities generally. He said God is holy other. Gons Anders, the German phrase for it, right? In other words, that we cannot have rational knowledge of the nature of God. And so my challenge is, is that that has to be, in other words, the final, to use Kierkegaard's phrase, that I don't actually like the leap of faith. That's got to be hard for you, given your rational, empirical nature. Exactly.

And it's not a leap of faith. things can make more sense to me if, for example, I keep reminding myself that God exists outside time, which not all theologians agree with, but some pretty good ones do. Because, for example, you have billions of people praying to God. And he's supposed to listen to all those. And maybe there are more billions of beings on other planets are, well, if God is outside time, that's no problem because there's no rush, you know. He doesn't have to do things sequentially. And in a variety of other ways, I don't want to anthropomorphize him because it makes it too easy to condescend to him. And of course, you shouldn't use the word him. That's why I like to use

the analogy between me and God and me and my dog. And even though my dog is half border collie and is way too smart for his own good, he doesn't have the slightest idea of what I am in any important way. And even though I'm pretty smart, I don't have the slightest idea of what God is in any concrete way. I can, I can,

the concept, for example, that God is love. Well, it's not just somebody like C.S. Lewis. My wife got star, on all this because the love she felt for our new daughter Anna back in 1985 was, as she put it in her brilliant phrase, she loved Anna far more than evolution required. And see, this is what happens with people like us. You know, when you've got an Oxford and a Yale degree, you say things like I loved her far more than evolution required. And she felt that. she was being a conduit for some greater love, which is very much like C.S. Lewis's argument

that a lot of the moral law is God's way of revealing himself to us. And so I have, I can say to that degree I can understand God, but I just want to keep in mind that's just a tiny part. Well, you know, gosh, I'm going to have to go back and find this. A few months ago, I wrote a long essay on my substack called Can God Time Travel? And I think I said, no, that's a ridiculous question, but I forget my chain of reasoning. But I wish we had time to talk about C.S. Lewis. I've got my old copy of the abolition of man, which I read according to my fly leaf in 1976 when I was a senior in high school. And I'm still reading it now all these years later. And so my last question is, where to from here? How are you going to extend your speculations from here? And can we expect maybe

some more articles or maybe even a sequel book to this? Oh no, no more articles, no more sequel. Well, I have too quickly say that there are no more books. I've been caught out. I keep writing another one. But I really don't. We will all be meeting Charles in

purgatory. We will have 10,000 years to get really good at poker. Well, what I see as my next step, are to try to join the party. I'm referring to something I say on the last page of the book

that I often feel like a small boy with his nose pressed against the glass watching a party on the other side that he can't join. And I'm referring to people like Peter who has access to the kinds of joys I don't yet have access to, and I would still like to. And it's also true that I still have

this person living with me, named Catherine, who is at about 135 on the distribution of perceptual, spiritual perception, and I figure if I hang out with her another 10 or 15 years, maybe I'll get there. Charles, does Catherine say to you, oh, Charles, I'm so delighted that you've been able to work your way to the, or does she say, Charles, it's about time. I do remember a conversation we had maybe 20 years ago, maybe 15, before I had I was sort of a little ways along on this, and she just, we were talking, and she just looked at me and said, Charles, you believe it to God. And she announced it to me, and I said, well,

yeah, I guess I do. And she also, her other role in life is to lovingly roll her eyes. as I get interested in something like the Shroud of Turin, or for that matter when I am interested in other historicity of the Bible, because to her that's largely beside the point, that it's the substance lies in Jesus' teachings, as it lies in the kinds of ways you can enrich your life by contemplation and prayer, and her husband is out there being the empiricist again,

and looking up new sources and putting together data. And I think she thinks it's kind of cute, and I think she's glad that I'm doing it. But she's way further along than I am. She does not have her point that out to me. If you know, I so love the idea that there's someone on the face of the earth who looks at Charles Murray and says, oh, he's so cute. Well, so I'm really glad she thinks so.

and she will even use that phrase. But she does not, she does not condescend to me. But if you know, Catherine, you know she would never do that. Right. Well, I do. And Charles, give her my best. And thanks for joining us. Good luck with this book.

It's so much fun. We'll catch up in person sometimes soon, I hope. Yeah, well, I would just assume we'd not take another 10 years before I'm on ricochet again. Yeah. Okay. It's a date. Deal. Right.

Bye-bye, Charles. Bye, bye, take care. Well, I'll try to quote the other big story this week, which I gather you follow as part of your duties of hosting law talk, is the oral argument at the Supreme Court over racial gerrymandering under the Voting Rights Act, where once again, we had the delight of watching Justice Katanji Brown Jackson make an utter fool of herself. But beyond the spectacle, what are your takeaways from what we heard this week? Well, we talked about this on the most recent law talk this week, and I asked John you and Richard Epstein to explain this to me, because on the surface, it seems incomprehensible.

You have Louisiana passing these redistricting maps. They pass a map, and the map apparently dilutes minority votes too much, and thereby is in violation of Section 2 of the voting rights. Act. So they pass a new map that creates a second district in which minorities are a majority and that's illegal because it violates the equal protection clause. So they just can't win. If they create a minority rich district, that's racial gerrymandering. And if they don't, then they're violating the Voting Rights Act. The problem, obviously, is that both parts of the Constitution that are relevant here are fighting. You've got the 15th Amendment and its

expression in the Voting Rights Act against the 14th Amendment. So it's tough. But from what I understand, the real dispute is whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act actually requires the creation of majority-minority district. And also, whether the Supreme Court ought to assume that conditions in the United States are the same in 2025 as they were in 1965, which they're very clearly not. So I suspect what's going to happen in this case is that there will be a majority, probably six to three, of justices who say, look, we are not allowed absent extraordinary circumstances to sanction government decisions

that are explicitly based on race. This is a government decision that, is explicitly based on race. Section 2 is not quite as clear as progressives claim it is in justifying it. And even if it were, the reality on the ground is not remotely close to what it was in 1965. And so what you might get, although I think this is questionable on originalist grounds, but what you might get is a version of where, oh gosh, I forgot no name, the Supreme Court Justice from Arizona, who was the first female.

Sandra Day O'Connor. Thank you. Sandra Day O'Connor wrote. You may be forgiven for forgetting. Well, Sandra Day O'Connor, and I wasn't a fan of this because I don't really think the Constitution works like this, but Sandra O'Connor famously said that, you know, affirmative action was okay, but maybe not in 20 years. Yeah.

And the thing is with that is, that is better than permanent racial discrimination. It's worse than saying racial discrimination is flatly illegal. So I think the court just may go down the road where they say, look, there have been points in our history where this was justified. It is no longer justified. We're not allowing this one. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the clearest things Chief Justice Roberts has ever said

was that counting my race as a sordid business. And so Charlie, I think we saw two things out of it this week. And then Peter, see what you think. One is the way you put it is it's obsolete. I mean, in 1965, it was one thing to say in 1965 to say Montgomery, Alabama. No, I'm sorry. You can't elect your entire city council with at large, you know, just the whole city votes for five candidates. You have to have districts where, you know, black candidates could possibly get a majority. Okay. I think we've gone from something like, I think around numbers, a hundred elected blacks in office in the old states of the Confederacy to now over 10,000. So why do we still need to be doing it this way? And then connected to it, I think you really saw exposed this week. especially Sotomayor and Jackson, the transparency of why they want these districts done.

They want to elect black Democrats. And I thought it was very effectively parried by one of the advocates for Louisiana that in fact there are something like, what, 60 black members of Congress or members of senior levels of the government, and only 15 of them are in majority-minority districts. And politically, here, Peter,

I've always said for a long time to liberals, I said, well, wait a minute, is it a good thing? Isn't this really creating a ghetto? Shouldn't you want white candidates to appeal to black voters and black candidates to appeal to white voters? Is it on our politics more healthy that way than in trying to divide us up and say your political interest in ideology should be determined by your melanin level? Correct, correct, correct. By the way, I was struck. I didn't follow the arguments or the case with. anything like the degree of interest that you and Charlie did, but arguing for, I believe,

the Solicitor General and for the state of Louisiana were a lawyer with a Hispanic surname and another lawyer who was clearly of South Asian, Indian, or Pakistani descent. The idea that we're in 1965 is absurd. My question would be as follows, to follow up on, if I may, on, on This is not me just making yak talk. This is me asking a real question to see what Charlie thinks. I interviewed three or four months ago Justice Alito. And Justice Alito, rather to my surprise, he's very cautious, speaks in measured terms.

Even his demeanor is measured and moderate and cautious. But the one place that he was just explicit, so to speak, unvarnished, not that he spoke with any particular anger or energy, but he was absolutely explicit in his view that the Constitution is colorblind and that drawing distinctions based on race is unconstitutional, full stop. Now, this is in my head because I'm doing,

I'll be interviewing Justice Thomas on Monday morning, and I looked at his concurrence as students for fair admissions versus Harvard, which held two years ago that admissions, Pache Sondra de O'Connor and Grutter saying, well, as long as you mean well, and as long as we can expect discrimination in admissions, university admissions, to fade over time, it's constitutional. And in Students for Fair Admissions, the court found that it just wasn't constitutional. And in his concurrence, Justice Thomas was utterly explicit and really quite ringing.

You could almost hear him saying. It almost felt like a piece of oratory rather than a dry analytical document, again, that the Constitution is colorblind. Is the court, with all of this gerrymenting, if making distinctions based on race is unconstitutional, then we stop our analysis right there. This gets thrown out. We stop just trying to parse how things were in 1965. We just stop it right there. Does the court have the guts to go that far? So I actually slightly disagree with the analogy because I do think there's a legal wrinkle here.

If you look, for example, at the question of affirmative action you mentioned. Yes. Affirmative action is in my estimation banned both in statute by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by the 14th Amendment. That is a clear case. I'm with Alito. I watched your excellent interview of him. And I see why he was emphatic.

The wrinkle here is that while the 14th, Amendment bans racial discrimination. The 15th Amendment leaves it up to Congress to enforce voting rights, and it gives it some wiggle room to consider race. And the reason for that, obviously, is that if you look at the South at the time, it was predicted correctly that southern states would try to prevent freed slaves from voting. Where I think progressives have made a big mistake is they conflate voting rights, that is, making sure that people are not prevented from voting based on their skin color, with racial gerrymandering, which is not the same thing. And that quote from Justice Jackson, where she said, black voters are disabled, was preposterous, because

she wasn't suggesting that black voters are unable to vote. They can't go to the polling place. They can't fill in the mail ballot. She was suggesting that if they are not given their own racial enclaves, then they're somehow unable to participate in American democracy. But I do think it's slightly more complicated than the other areas where I'm 100% against any racial questioning whatsoever because the 15th Amendment does allow Congress to consider it in an affirmative sense. It's just that they've taken it way too far. And now what they're doing is they're creating areas within states in which the government,

the federal government, no less, basically says the Democrat has to win because they can conflate Democrat and African American. So it is slightly different. But yeah, I mean, the last thing I'll say is it has annoyed me in the media coverage because the media coverage has all been conservative justices may weaken voting rights act. But you could just as easily write conservative justices may bolster equal protection clause, which is good. I see, yes, yes.

Well, all right. So both of you mentioning Justice Alito allows me to circle back to where we began with Charles Murray, because I'm reliably informed that Justice Alito is a gin martini man, a dry gin martini man, and not with an olive. This is what Hadley Arcus tells me. He knows him well. It is another fellow martini man. But that brings us to the end of our show today.

This podcast brought to you by ricochet.com. Please support the site by becoming a member. the best place for civil center-right conversation. My RICOchet union contract requires me to remind everyone to take a moment and leave a five-star review at Apple Podcasts or Spotify or the other places where you may source your podcast material. It brings us new listeners and allows us to grow our audience. And Peter, great to see you.

We were worried you're in the Witness Protection Program somewhere. And Charles, I will see you again in two weeks. I'm away next week, but I will see you again in two weeks. Bye-bye, everybody.