The Lapsed Atheist: Charles Murray Makes the Case for God

**Peter Robinson** (0:01)
What happens when a man finds himself beginning to doubt his atheism? Charles Murray on Uncommon Knowledge now.
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson, a graduate of Harvard. Charles Murray spent four years in Thailand with Peace Corps before earning a doctorate in political science at MIT. He has been a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for some three and a half decades. Dr. Murray is the author of a number of books, including his classic work on welfare, Losing Ground, and his intensely controversial book, The Bell Curve. Dr. Murray's latest book, Taking Religion Seriously. Charles, welcome.

**Charles Murray** (0:50)
I'm so glad to be back on the program.

**Peter Robinson** (0:54)
Taking religion seriously, my meandering pilgrimage, I'm quoting you, my meandering pilgrimage to belief has been devoid of divine revelation.
It's been a more arid process, but it has been rewarding. And if you're like me, it's the only game in town.

**Charles Murray** (1:12)
Charles, you're a graduate of Harvard.

**Peter Robinson** (1:16)
You can't talk like this. Religion, the only game in town? What do you mean?

**Charles Murray** (1:22)
Well, what I mean by that is there are millions of other people out there like me who are basically handicapped, which is to say, well, let me back up a little bit.
I think that something that casual agnostics, which is probably the best way to describe me before, are guilty of is thinking that the people who say that they have these deep spiritual experiences are making it up.
And what's really happening, I have come to have concluded, is that there is a quality called spiritual perceptiveness. In the same way that a professional musician hears music differently from the way I hear music. There are people who are not only tone deaf, there are people, of course, who are color blind. And they have to take on faith, as it were, that the colors red and blue and purple and so forth actually exist. Well, in the case with spirituality, I think it's the same thing. That it, pardon the expression, forms a bell curve. With some people who are very high on it.

**Peter Robinson** (2:31)
You can't help yourself.

**Charles Murray** (2:33)
I kind of know. Some people are very high on it, and some people are very low. And I think if you expressed my spiritual perceptiveness in the IQ metric, it would be 75, 80, somewhere around there. So the short story is this.
This is a book by a guy who has no natural talent for this, but who had come to realize that there is something there that I wanted to tap into, having watched my wife tap into it. And this is how I went about exploring it.

**Peter Robinson** (3:11)
I am speaking to the author of one big important book after another, Losing Ground. This is the 1984 book that changed the way everybody in the country thought about welfare. The Bell Curve, Human Achievement, Coming Apart, The State of White America. That's the 2012 book that all but predicted the politics that we're experiencing today. Now each of those volumes, I'm giving you my view as a layman, but as a reader of yours, each of those volumes was really very intellectually audacious, but there was a certain tone of audacity in each of those books. Charles Murray said in Losing Ground and in Coming Apart, you'd better read this book. I'm writing about something important. It so happens that I happen to see it better than anybody else. If you don't read this book, you really don't have much of a right to talk about the subject. That was the implicit and the books were so weighty that you actually pulled it off. They really didn't change the conversation on important topics in the country.
This is completely different. This is like an extended letter to a friend. It's warm, it's candid, it's modest, and here and there, it almost feels a little embarrassed about itself.
Why has the thunderer become so diffident?

**Charles Murray** (4:44)
Well, I would like to think it's because I know when I don't know what I'm talking about. So with something like Losing Ground, I was writing about topics which had been my career for 10 or 12 years before that, plus a lot of other reading, and I knew a lot about my subject, and so I wasn't afraid to go ahead and sound that way.
I'm tickled by the fact that you perceived it because I didn't intend for that tone to be in there, but the same is true of IQ. I know a lot about IQ, and so if you come up to me and you want to spout the usual objections to IQ, my first reaction, if I were being entirely candid, would be go away and do some homework and then come back and tell me what you want to do. This is different.