A social scientist seeking faith

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 05, 2026 | In Reviews

For years I have admired the work of Charles Murray, a social scientist who is thorough in his research, perceptive in his analysis, and fearless in his willingness to tackle delicate issues. His books—I am thinking particularly of Losing Ground and Coming Apart—offer challenging new ways to look at the dangerous problems afflicting American society today.

Murray’s latest book, Taking Religion Seriously, poses a different sort of challenge, explaining how the author has come to recognize the wisdom of Christianity, after many years of disinterest in questions of faith. In the process he invites readers to do the same:

I’ve done a lot of homework and I’m presenting my considered judgments, but there’s no reason for you to assume I’m right. If you, like me, are taking religion seriously for the first time, you face the same problem...

If this subject matter is new to Murray, his approach to the project is not. Having at last taken up the question of faith, he plunged into the same sort of exhaustive research that has characterized his social analysis, reading extensively on issues at the intersection of faith and reason. This short book includes solid arguments, scrupulously documented, on topics as disparate as the Big Bang theory and the historicity of the Gospels, the probability of a universe emerging solely from random evolution and the universality of natural law, near-death experiences and the Shroud of Turin. He writes as a hardheaded skeptic, demanding answers, and often surprised to find them.

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton remarks that “it would be much more interesting if God were to tell me what he thought of me, than to have man telling me what he thought of God.” But Murray escapes that criticism, because Taking Religion Seriously is really a book about Murray himself, tracing his path from agnosticism toward belief.

Murray began his journey by noticing that the truths unveiled by science are more complex, more elegant, and more beautiful than what could reasonably be expected to emerge from any random process. Like so many intellectuals he had been trained to assume that science could ultimately explain everything; he came to suspect that something more was in play. “It was almost as if someone had planned it that way.”

Next Murray probed the origin of the universe, asking Heidegger’s question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Isn’t it remarkable that in the late 20th century, a highly intelligent and educated man, a critical thinker, could find himself for the first time pondering such a fundamental metaphysical question? Even the Big Bang theory doesn’t provide a satisfactory answer regarding the origin of the universe. What banged?

Taking Religion Seriously looks carefully at scientific theories that purport to explain the origin of the world and the origin of man. Murray convincingly demonstrates that the efforts to explain our world and our lives as the results of purely material forces, the products of random chance, require an acceptance of outcomes so absurdly improbable that in comparison, religious faith is a far safer bet.

From that point, Murray turns his attention to Christianity. Once again, after examining the claims of the faith carefully, he concludes that secularist attempts to explain away the power of Christian faith are based on assumptions that range from the unproven to the outlandish; it is easier to accept the faith. Citing C. S. Lewis, he argues that any serious inquiry must conclude that Jesus was either a madman, a liar, or the Son of God. Murray is not quite ready to accept the latter conclusion—at least not in an orthodox Christian way—but he has dismissed the former two.

Again leaning on Lewis, Murray also notes that all the major religions and all great cultures have in common certain basic moral principles: the natural law. Here too he sees the evidence that something has been imprinted on the human soul, and acknowledges that our society is handicapped by the failure to recognize it. “Doesn’t the evanescence of moral principles in the present age suggest a special need to seek moral bedrock?” he asks.

As the books ends, Murray is poised at the doorway of Christian faith, looking in, more than a bit enviously, but also approvingly, at those who are inside. He agrees, he accepts, but he does not yet believe. Faith is gift, he has learned, and “I have yet to experience the joys of faith.” Reading that conclusion, I found myself thinking that, whether he knew it or not, Murray was asking for prayers. I’m happy to oblige.