Charles Murray was a casual agnostic, until he wasn’t. He deployed his intellect (educated at Harvard and MIT) to explore a change of direction.
Murray discusses this change in his book, “Taking Religion Seriously.” In a self-deprecating way he said, “This is a book by a guy who has no natural talent for (exploring spirituality), but who had come to realize there is something there that I wanted to tap into, having watched my wife tap into it.”
His wife Catherine studied at Oxford and Yale. But that did not equip her to understand why, when she became a mother, she loved her baby far more than evolution required. She felt like a conduit from something greater. Her pursuit of answers led her to the Christian faith.
That was Murray’s first nudge. There were more. The way mathematics fits physical reality, “It’s as if somebody planned it that way,” he said. He wonders why something exists rather than nothing, and points to the fine-tuning of the universe. He found evidence that consciousness exists independently of the brain, which suggests existence of the soul created by God.
Not only are the nudges toward belief in God, he feels nudged toward Christianity. He sees that something transformative happened to Jesus’ followers after the crucifixion, explainable only by a resurrection. The book, “Mere Christianity” by Oxford don C.S. Lewis demonstrates to Murray that intellectuals actually can believe the God of the Bible.
Murray’s journey is like the honest seeker who told Jesus, “I do believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). If you seek God, you will find Him. You will also find He has been seeking you all along. Murray’s story also validates this: husbands “may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives” (1 Pet. 3:1).
Murray said, “When I’m around Catherine and others who have (experienced the joys of faith), I sometimes feel like a little boy whose nose is pressed against the window, watching a party he can’t attend. I’m not done trying to join the party.” He is taking this seriously, as his book says.