Speaker 1: All right, shall we get started now.
Speaker 2: The reason, the real reason that I'm returning to this
podcast is this. Over the weekend somebody referred to Steve
Hayward as the new me, and I thought, that's it.
Speaker 1: The difference is that the remedy under the ADA and
other anti discrimination laws is not stereotyping.
Speaker 2: We don't then it's not race basically. I take your point.
Speaker 1: 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've said at the end
of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he've
said either. Well, welcome everybody to Ricochet Podcast number seven
hundred and sixty two. It's Stephen Hayward sitting in the
host chair today the still vacationing James Lylax, joined as
usual by Charles C. W. Cook and somebody on my
screen who has identified as Peter Robinson, although I'm doubtful, Well,
in the age of Ai Peter. I'm skeptical it's really you.
Speaker 2: But it's I'm busy, so this is actually a hologram.
Speaker 1: Right, okay, good? Where are you today? Are you out
here in sunny California?
Speaker 2: I'm at home. I'm at home. I am indeed in
sunny California, right, I am preparing. We're having a big
deal at the Hoover Institution next week, a celebration of
the life and work of Thomas soul Right, and I'm prepping.
I'm 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.
Speaker 1: Yes, it would mean to I would come, except I
have a prior robbal Gay at the University of Mississippi
all next week, so I'm very sorrey. 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.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: A 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 rat tat tat of all the
pundits and everything.
Speaker 2: Wow coming from you. I always sort of relied on
you to keep up on it. For me.
Speaker 1: 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 scientists. Oh yes, and I forget the
title of it, but it's on sort of electoral cycles
going back fifty years and it looks fascinating. That's the
kind of thing I like, a sort of long form,
data oriented calm conclusions about things and not polemics. And
you know, the latest Twitter fight.
Speaker 2: So forth, we do we do have a the midterm
is going to just 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 GILE.
So I am here to report that the speed of
the House really believes that the Republicans are going to
retain the House in the midterms.
Speaker 1: 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 impressed? Your favorable impression notched up stayed
the same. Where do you land?
Speaker 2: I walked into that impressed by Johnson. My view of
him went up even more.
Speaker 3: He is.
Speaker 2: 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 give him a call list on
important votes. You need to talk to these six guys.
There are arms I need you to twist. Fine, Bill,
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, 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 of 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 really is comfortable being himself.
I was just impressed by him. He does seem serene.
I'll give him that.
Speaker 1: And about his staff, at least they stay out of
his shot. I'm like, sorry, that's right. That's what is
Charlie is back passport in hand. Charlie. You know, one
of the interesting things this week is I do like
watching that Harry Enton guy on CNN their Polson 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 variety
of reasons I won't explain the Democratic generic margin needs
to be larger from that to win a House election.
It's just the way it all falls out. And that's
even before you factor in any possible jerrymandering that might
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 the scene.
Speaker 3: 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 that.
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 an approval rating of thirty
six percent, and then you look at the Democrats and
they're twenty 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 twenty twenty six,
Donald Trump woul'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, twenty fourteen, where
Republicans romped, it doesn't look like it's going to be
anything like that sort of dynamic, which is odd.
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned Trump being underwater in his personal approval
rag we have here something but 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 he really got into it. But
that was the media spin 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 forties. 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.
Speaker 2: This was the point that Barton Swim made in the
Wall Street Journal What was it yesterday? Where he had
this outrageous column which you called I think it was.
He referred to Donald Trump as the tribune of democracy,
the man who body democracy. Far from being a threat
to democracy, he's embodying democracy. And he went through an
issue by issue by issue, saying that although the Democrats
are railing against him, they ought to think twice about
how many Republicans, how many Americans 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 Caesio Cortes. 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 somebody. Peter, Yeah, 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, well Newsom right, he's leading. By the way,
the latest poll i've seen shows Newsom as the front
runner for twenty twenty eight number two Alexandria Cossio Cortanz.
Watch he choose the Democratic Democramtocratic Nation presidential nomination.
Speaker 2: Right now.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Have we seen any polling on that. It's difficult on
that initiative.
Speaker 1: But it's always been very bad on California ballot initiatives.
But a couple of polls have it with his initiative
and a slight lead. So I wouldn't be confident if
I was.
Speaker 3: New for it to pass. Is it a simple majority? Yes,
it's sixty in Florida.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's simple majority. Uh, 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 thirty more
seconds on this. You may remember Peter, but maybe you don't.
You were I was a teenager at the time. But
Ronald Reagan, in his second last year's governor ran Proposition
one as a special ballot measure in nineteen seventy three,
and it was a great measure. It was a tax
and spinning 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, stopped his momentum heading towards the nineteen seventy
six cycle. I think, and I think the same thing
could happen to Newsome. This is a gamble that Newsom's taking.
So we'll see just my special by way.
Speaker 2: 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 as a resident here of California,
and yet I just received ballot mail ballots for all
of my children. I could I so so. I mean,
of course, it's just out. It's crazy. The mail voting
is out of control. I now they made a mistake
with me, because if I do vote for all my children,
I won't lawyers leave me alone.
Speaker 1: I won't do it.
Speaker 2: I'm not that excite guy again Prop fifty. Every single
time I was.
Speaker 1: Afraid you were about to commit to a felony, and
I was going to mute you in case you started
down that road.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, I wouldn't do that. But the idea,
right the mail in ballots in California are in any
way secure is absurd, preposterous.
Speaker 1: Do you know who else was opposed to mail in balloting?
Jimmy Carter? Really, I don't know if you remember that story.
It's twenty years ago now, I think two thousand and five.
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.
Speaker 3: It does work quite well in Florida. But the cost
of it, and the Democrats would never accept this is
that they dish what's the word, de register or unenroll
you after every election. So if you want to mail
in ballots, not to register to vote, but if you
want a mail in ballot, you have to reregister every time.
You have to opt in wow, each each in every election.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, that would be a better way of doing it.
Speaker 3: Just send them out at infinitum.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And Charles Murray joins us now on the podcast
to 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 Ricochet.
Speaker 4: I'm delighted to be with you guys.
Speaker 1: Well, now, I do have an important opening metaphysical question.
I think it's a high metaphysical question.
Speaker 2: I can't wait.
Speaker 1: Well, it is, what is the Aristotelian ideal of the
best dry martini?
Speaker 2: Huh?
Speaker 4: Well, here, I'm I'm thinking, of course, of Robert Bork
who had very strong opinions on all of this, chief
among them being no allies 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 martini's, 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
Crauthemmer and Bill Bennett and Pete Wayner for lunche three
or four times a year, and I was mystified as
to why I liked the martinis of the Palm better
than the ones I made. And I tried all kinds
of different driver moose, and it turned out that the
Palm doesn't put an invermouth, that's spartits. And I have
stuck by that wisdom ever since.
Speaker 1: So do you ever find out their secret? Do they
have a secret gin or something? No?
Speaker 4: 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 gen takes on a sufficiently lovely lemonae aspect that
it makes it qualitatively better than if you don't get
those few drops of lemon oil.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Well, let's move on from the stilled 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 longtime 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
patten weinhand, someone who wants to have data but also
thinks like a reasonable human being. So how did you
decide before we get into some particular important aspects of
the book. How did 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.
Speaker 4: It's all Mick Everstat's fault. Mick Everstat is one of
the nation's premier demographers and colleague at AEI, and he
had been interviewing me, along with another colleague, Carlin 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 onto 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've 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 the libertarian movements in the eighties and nineties, and I
was really bored with it. You know, my career hasn't
been that exciting and 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 thirty 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 forties fifties,
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 That 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?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And I've changed from that?
Speaker 1: Okay, So I think if 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 jumping in his 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 fascinating 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 mentioned a third one, which is that
I think it's Paige one forty three. You mentioned that
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
crew 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 deserving them in a scientific experiment,
it's kind of like God sitting back saying, AH caught
you looking, didn't I.
Speaker 4: 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 a one better prank than
to have physicists discover in the twentieth century what is
basically a gloss on Genesis. I mean, 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 brains, consciousness quits.
Speaker 1: What could be.
Speaker 4: 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 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 euroscience.
Speaker 2: Peter jump in stephenm I permitted, Charles, I'd like to
come to the question of miracles, on which you're tiptoeing
up to it in a moment. But first it's sort
of for me the threshold question is this Maybe I'm
the outlaw. I just don't know. I 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 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 it
exactly too, and then it just became too much of
an effort. I have. 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 belief in different
but He's there. How can it be that you went
through decades of your life just not particularly interested in
the question.
Speaker 4: 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'm 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 and
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 soddenly there are
people who are tone deaf. Literally, well, you are on
the right hand side of the normal distribution in 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 says unnatural for me. And
I'm also married to a woman who is at the right, say,
had side of that distribution on spiritual sensitivity, and I
have the equivalent of a score of seventy five 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 the spiritual sensitivity of seventy five. 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 deluding themselves. I want them to realize, you
are the one with the handicap. You are the one
who it has does not have access to this information.
Speaker 2: So it's a trait. It's a trait. It's a truth
that like many traits you've just spent your life studying.
There's a bell curve here at Human beings vary on
this point.
Speaker 4: And I'm not talking I'm talking about reality, all right.
The beauty of music is not in the imagination of
people who are going to 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 4: 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 Yeah, it's
it's it's 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. That if you live a life that doesn't
have much tragedy, it may very well be you can
ignore it. We can distract ourselves. But I think the
God's size follow was a human characteristic.
Speaker 2: Charles, by the way you put your answering all kinds
of questions for me, you remember, as I Steve would,
I Charlie wouldn't. Arnold Bitchman. Arnold Bichman 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 ninety one or
ninety two, looked up and said to me, do you
believe in God? And my first thought was, Arnold, is
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. Try.
Speaker 4: You're the best interviewer I've ever had.
Speaker 2: Oh 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 as 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 sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, although one of
the figures involved, Padre Pio now Sat Saint Peo, died
in nineteen sixty one. And Carlos makes the point that
we have extremely good document mentary 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 it Tisbury, or that because of our
not I was about to say Western, 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 strange
things that strike us as levitation and by location, 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, You
see that. I was.
Speaker 4: I was so interested in your account of this book.
And the title is the title is simply they flew. Okay,
they we got done with this podcast. I am getting
the kindle version of that book right, and 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 are dying a very complex,
thoroughly diagnosed diseases and got well instantly. Okay. I 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. And nicely put so basically, well,
I wouldn't have used the word stuff for this were
a less polite company. But anyway, anyway, the 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.
Speaker 1: So Charles, we have the ideal audience for your book.
In our third host, Charles CW. Cook. Who, Charlie Cook,
I don't think I'm betraying any real private information to
say that you describe yourself as a church going agnostic.
Speaker 3: So Charlie Cook, Hi, Charles, this is true what Steve
says in a sense of books. For me, I'm on
page forty two, so I haven't got beyond that yet.
But you started in night teen eighty five, so you
were all around forty then I'm now forty and I
like you have the seventy five IQ thing, I think,
and I compare it with music. I actually 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 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 Rosstauthat 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 will become a Christian, and preferably you become a Catholic.
Right this book, which I haven't finished yet, is that
the aim or is there aim more to sort of
dis 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?
Speaker 4: No, Actually, you sound to me like my ideal reader. Okay,
I mean you are exactly the person I'm at and
what I'm.
Speaker 2: Saying to you you should charge him more.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying.
Speaker 4: 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 way 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 seventy five scores on the
perceptual perceptual ability scale. And that's it. So it's a
I'm not trying to own the agnostics and make them
feel bad about being agnostics.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to.
Speaker 4: To say, you too, can recover from this if you
give it some effort.
Speaker 3: Another interesting thing that I'm picking up despite only being
forty two 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 talk about it.
Speaker 4: I think that the relationship between science and religion has
flipped one hundred and eighty degrees, and they'll get to
this later in the book, But from about fourteen hundred
to nineteen hundred, roughly, you had a situation in which
a variety of phenomena that had been and seen as
evidence for God were explained by science. And that's where
the phrase God of the gaps comes from that, and
science progressively reduced the number of gaps and apparently reduced
the space for religion. And in the twentieth 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 on a
trillion chance, which is kind of hard.
Speaker 2: To deal with?
Speaker 4: Do we have a million universes? So that that's not
real plausible either, which leads 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
Pitilla's in different universe. That's by the way, I have
a quote I really love well. It begins the chapter
in The Big Bang, I think Rutford Jastro 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's science has let us
discover those possibilities, and it can't explain them through standard
scientific paradigms.
Speaker 2: 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 curves went 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 abersat 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?
Speaker 4: 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 Ehraman'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 ceter
and we really have no clear idea of what Jesus
really said. And that was all very aerod diede 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.
Speaker 1: It was a book.
Speaker 4: 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 a transcription of Peter's testimony to Mark, but
it should read we went across the river, we cross
the sea, and instead they used the 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 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.
Speaker 1: Well, let me Charles Tross 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.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read the thing.
Speaker 3: I'm going to read the whole thing. I always did.
Speaker 1: I'm a completionist, right, and you'll be converted by the end.
We think that's that's what Peter Robinson while anyway, there's
a fragment of a sentence here towards the end of
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 the unknowability of God.
I've long ago became something of a fan of the
Protestant theologian Karl Bart, even though I'm more Catholic in
my theological sensibilities. Generally, he said God is holy other
gone's under as the German phrase work 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 Cureguard's phrase, But
I don't actually like the leap of faith. That's got
to be hard for you, given your rational empirical nature.
Speaker 4: 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, 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.
That 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 I'm pretty smart, I don't
have the slightest idea of what God is in any
concrete way. I can the concept, for example, that God
is love. Well, it's not just somebody like c s Lewis.
My wife got started on all this because the love
she felt for our new daughter Anna back in nineteen
eighty five was, as she put it in her brilliant phrase,
she loved Anna far more than evolution required.
Speaker 2: And see, this is what happens with.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 1: Well you know, Gosh, I'm going 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 nineteen seventy six, 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 are you going to?
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?
Speaker 4: No, no more articles, the more secret. Well, I too
quickly say that there are no more books. I've been
caught out. I keep writing another one, but I'm really.
Speaker 2: Obvious we will all be meeting Charles in purgatory. We
will have ten thousand years to get really good at poker.
Speaker 4: Well, what I see as my next steps 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 one
hundred and thirty five on the distribution of perceptual spiritual perception,
and figure if I hang out with her another ten
or fifty years, maybe I'll get there.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: I do remember a conversation we had maybe twenty years ago,
maybe fifteen before I had got I was sort of
a little ways along on this, and we were talking
and she just looked at me and said, Charles, you
believe it to God? 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, 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 news 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 she does not
have her point that out to me.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: Well, so I'm really glad she thinks so, and she
believe and use that phrase.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 1: She does not.
Speaker 4: She does not condescend to me. But if you if
you know Catherine, she know she would never do.
Speaker 1: That, right, Well, I do, and Charles give her my
best and thanks for joining us. Good luck with this book,
so much fun. We'll catch up in person sometime soon,
I hope.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, I would just assumably not take another ten years
before I'm on a ricochet again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, it's a date deal, right, byebye Charles, Bye
bye toaqre Well try to cout. 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 jerry mandering under the
Voting Rights Act, where once again we had the delight
of watching Justice Ktanji Brown Jackson make an utter fool
of herself. But beyond the spectacle, what are your takeaways
from what we heard this week?
Speaker 3: 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
two 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 clauses. So they just can't win. 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 fifteenth Amendment and its
expression in the Voting Rights Act against the Fourteenth Amendment.
So it's tough. But from what I understand, the real
dispute is where the Section two 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 twenty twenty
five as they were in nineteen sixty five, which they're
very clearly not.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: 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 two 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 nineteen sixty five.
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.
Speaker 2: And Andrede O'Connor, thank you, Sandraday O'Connor. You maybe be
forgiven for forgetting.
Speaker 3: But Sanderday O'Connor and I wasn't a fan of this
because I don't really think the constitution works like this.
But SANDREDA. O connor famously said that, you know, affirmative
action was okay, but maybe not in twenty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the clearest things
Chief Justice Roberts has ever said was that counting by
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 what you
put it is it's obsolete. I mean in nineteen sixty five,
it was one thing to say in nineteen sixty five
to say, Mintgomery, Alabama, No, I'm sorry, you can't elect
your entire city council with at large, you know, the
whole city votes for five candidates. You have to have
districts where where you know black candidates could possibly get
a majority. Okay, I think we've gone from something like
I think in around numbers one hundred elected blacks in
office in the old States of the Confederacy to now
over ten thousand. 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 Soda
Mayor 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 sixty black members of Congress or members of the
senior loves of the government, and only fifteen of them
are in majority minority districts. And then politically here I've
always said for 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 melonin.
Speaker 2: Level correct correct correct, by the way I was struck.
I didn't follow them the arguments or the case with
anything like the degree of interest that you and Charlie did.
But arguing for I believe this 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 nineteen
sixty five is absurd. My question would be as follows
to follow up on if I may 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, the way 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, on Varnish, not that he spoke with any
particular anger or energy, but he was absolutely explicit in
his view that the Constitution is color blind 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 Patscha, Sora Dey, 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 in the 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 color blind. Is the court fight with all
of this jeremndring. If making distinctions based on race is unconstitutional,
then we stop our analysis right there. This gets thrown out.
We stopped just trying to parse how things were in
nineteen sixty five, We just stop it right there. Does
the Court have the guts to go that far?
Speaker 3: 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 nineteen sixty four and
by the Fourteenth Amendment. That is a clear case. I'm
with Alita. I watched your excellent interview of him, and
I see why he was emphatic. The wrinkle here is
that while the Fourteenth Amendment bans racial discrimination, the Fifteenth
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 one hundred percent against
any racial questioning whatsoever, because the fifteenth 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 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 weeken Voting Rights Act, but you could
just as easily write conservative justices may bolster equal protection Clause,
which is.
Speaker 2: Good nice, yeah, yes.
Speaker 1: 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 the Justice Alito is
a Jen Martini man, a dry gen Martine man, and
not with an ollif this is what havi Arcis tells me,
who knows him well and as another fellow Martini man.
But that brings us to the end of our show today.
This podcast brought to you by Ricochet dot com. Please
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leave a five star review at Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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cast material. It brings us new listeners uh and uh
and makes us allows us to grow our audience. And Peter,
great to see you. We were worried he in the
witness Protection program somewhere and uh, 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.