Adding Up the Evidence for God: A Social Scientist’s Journey through Apologetics

Charles Murray. Taking Religion Seriously. Encounter Books, 2025. $29.99. 200 pp.

I’m not easily surprised by works of Christian apologetics. Because I have been an avid student of apologetics since I was in high school—and because I have just finished writing a 400-page history of American Christian apologetics from the Puritans to the present—I have now read hundreds of apologetics books, as well as summaries of numerous others.

And as much as I look forward with anticipation to every new work of Christian apologetics, hoping that I will encounter some new persuasive argument that I haven’t heard before, I’ll have to admit that more often than not I end up a bit disappointed, because most works of apologetics are fairly predictable. They deal with questions that previous apologists have been writing about for decades, if not centuries. In addressing those questions, they rarely if ever present arguments that previous apologists have not already proffered. Even works of cultural apologetics, which often depend more on storytelling than systematic argumentation, largely move across well- trodden ground.

But Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously is different. That’s not because the arguments are new. Indeed, nearly everything Murray says in favor of Christian theism can be found in other books, as Murray himself readily acknowledges. What makes this book unique is that Murray has written the book not as a systematic argument intended to persuade the reader to become a Christian but as a window into his own thinking as he first encounters the evidence for Christianity and attempts to grapple with it. At this point in his journey, he is almost—but not quite—persuaded by the evidence for Jesus.

The book is especially valuable because Murray tries to be a relentlessly logical (but open-minded) thinker who systematically investigates all sides of every argument. His book summarizes the arguments for and against every proposition that he examines. Even if Murray is not yet persuaded that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God, his lengthy discussion of the evidence gives insight into how a sympathetic unbeliever might try to process Christian apologetic claims.

To be sure, Murray has come a long way in his belief. Until the late 1990s, he was an atheist or an agnostic. After growing up attending a liberal mainline Presbyterian church in a small town in Iowa, where the pastor did not believe in Jesus’s divinity and where his churchgoing father didn’t believe in heaven or hell, Murray decided as a Harvard sophomore that he didn’t need religion. For the next three decades, as he passed through graduate school and then into a promising academic career, he never gave religion another thought. He believed in science, and he thought that science had pretty much ruled out the possibility of miracles or a divine creator. He also felt no need of religion in his own life. He found fulfillment in his work as one of the nation’s best known (and most controversial) conservative social scientists.

Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve, which argued for a biological (and racial) basis for IQ, made him a pariah in much of academia but also catapulted him to fame among conservatives. The Bell Curve sold 400,000 copies within two months of its release, making it one of the most widely distributed books of modern American sociology ever published. Murray found an academic home at the American Enterprise Institute, where he encountered Christian believers, but for a long time, he didn’t pay much attention to their faith.

Although Murray’s wife was a theologically liberal Quaker who attended weekly Friends meetings, he felt no need himself to meditate, pray, or think about the possibility of God. By his own admission, he has no innate attraction to spirituality. Music (whether secular or religious) almost never moves him. Religious ritual or liturgy has no place in his thinking. He tried praying only once as an adult (sometime in the 1990s, he recalls), and he found the experience “scary.” It was safer to live with a strictly materialistic and rigidly logical universe.

I don’t think that Murray ever read a book like Philip Yancey’s Rumors of Another World (which argues that our love of music and beauty point us to God), but if he had encountered such a book during his long skeptical phase, I imagine that he would have been unimpressed. He didn’t sense any internal longing for the transcendent, and he wasn’t moved by the beauty of color or sound. An intuition of the spiritual might have been fine for his wife, and as far as Murray was concerned, she was welcome to meditate at as many Quaker meetings as she wanted. Science and data were all he felt he needed.

From Atheism to Theism

Yet science and data are not as conducive to atheism as skeptics often assume. As a data-driven social scientist, Murray knew a lot about probability, which is why he realized in the early 2000s, after a study of the matter, that the atheistic view of the universe he had embraced wasn’t just improbable—it was statistically impossible.

Martin Rees’s Just Six Numbers (1999) shook Murray’s atheism and prompted him to abandon it forever. Rees, a British physicist, noted that if the mathematical constants that govern the universe’s physics were just slightly different, no life could exist. For instance, as Murray notes, stars are powered by the conversion of hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion, which converts 0.7 percent of the hydrogen’s mass into energy. If instead only 0.6 percent of the hydrogen’s mass were converted into energy, “a proton could not bond to a neutron, helium could not be formed, and the entire process that produces the periodic table of elements would be foreclosed.” And if as much as 0.8 percent of the mass of a hydrogen atom were converted to energy, “two hydrogen protons would be able to bind directly, and no hydrogen would remain. No hydrogen would mean no fuel for stars.”

The same level of extreme precision was required for all of the other mathematical constants. For instance, if the electrical force was not exactly 10³⁶ times stronger than the gravitational force, life would never have formed. Instead, if the electrical force was only 10³⁰ times as strong as gravity, planets would never have formed and, even if they had, stars (including the sun) would run out of fuel in only 10,000 years, meaning that life would never have had time to evolve.

Murray realized that there were only three explanations that could be given for such a finely-tuned universe. The first possibility was that all of this had really formed by chance. But as he thought about the Big Bang, he realized that that was incredibly unlikely. Current scientific evidence suggests that the Big Bang is a non-recurring event. Between 10^-43 seconds and 10^-12 seconds after the Big Bang (that is, one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang), the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force all emerged, creating the basis for an expanding universe that is precisely tuned for the formation of life on our planet. The chance of all of this happening randomly is 1 in 10¹²³, according to Roger Penrose, a Nobel laureate in physics. Murray quoted Stephen Meyer when describing Penrose’s calculations: “If we tried to write out this number, there would be more zeros in the resulting number than there are elementary particles in the universe.”

Penrose is a self-described agnostic. Rees says he doesn’t believe in God either. But their findings about the finely tuned universe led Murray to rethink his own agnosticism, partly because he rejected the leading way that contemporary atheists (including Rees) explain the universe’s appearance of design: multiverses. According to the multiverse theory, there might really be 10¹²³ universes (or more) outside of our own.

For those who embrace the multiverse theory, the improbable becomes probable if you simply expand the number of tries—and in this case, expand it to an almost unimaginably infinite degree. Rees considers multiverses probable, based on string theory. Murray read several books advocating multiverses before concluding that “investigations into multiverse theory have not yet yielded any empirical evidence for its validity.” Multiverse theory is merely speculation—an interesting one, perhaps, but one without any empirical data to support it. Since Murray prides himself on being a strict empiricist, he couldn’t base his views on the origin of the universe on such a flimsy flight of fancy that lacks any empirical support whatsoever. A more straightforward explanation, he decided, was that “a God created a universe that would enable life to exist.”

Atheists commonly claim that the God hypothesis is just as far-fetched as multiverses are, but that’s not Murray’s view. He thinks that there are plenty of other pieces of evidence that point to God—which means that the idea of God is not simply a speculative hypothesis that we are forced to embrace because of a gap in our knowledge about what caused the Big Bang. Rather, it is a concept that fits all of the data that we have about the universe and ourselves.

For example, when we look within our own consciousness, we find an innate concept of right and wrong that can best be explained by the idea that we have a God-given sense of a fixed moral law, as C. S. Lewis argued. Murray is aware that there are naturalistic evolutionary explanations for the origins of a moral consciousness, but he notes that while those theories might explain why we feel innately that certain actions are right or wrong, they don’t give us any confidence for believing that our moral intuitions are based on anything universally binding. If we want to say that what Hitler did was objectively evil, we have to draw on an objective moral standard that cannot be the product merely of naturalistic evolutionary forces.

And besides, Murray says, we sense moral imperatives that make no sense in an evolutionary framework. Evolution might give us the biological impulses to protect our own children, but why would anyone ever feel the need to sacrifice their life for someone they’re not related to? Such altruism doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary point of view—and therefore, it’s an indication that perhaps there’s more to the universe than naturalistic evolutionary theories alone can account for.

Ross Douthat’s recent book Believe (2025) and Justin Brierly’s Why I Am Still a Christian (2025) cover some of the same evidence that Murray cites, which will also be thoroughly familiar to anyone who has read much about intelligent design. But if this evidence is not exactly new to informed readers, it was new to Murray when he was first encountering it—and it was therefore life-changing.

Murray could have simply become a deist on the basis of his belief in a finely tuned universe. This, after all, was what the British mathematician Antony Flew did when he investigated the evidence for the origins of the universe and the beginning of life. The result was his book, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2008). Indeed, an understanding of the full implications for the Big Bang has caused more than one atheist or agnostic to rethink their assumptions, since, as Murray notes, the Big Bang sure looks like an act of creation.

But once Murray abandoned his atheistic assumptions, he didn’t stop his investigations. After he opened himself up to the possibility of a God and to the existence of a non-material reality, he realized that there is other empirical evidence against a strictly material universe: near-death experiences and terminal lucidity (when people whose brains have mostly shut down become unexplainably lucid shortly before death).

Both near-death experiences and terminal lucidity can best be explained as evidence that consciousness is not solely caused by brain activity; humans have non-material souls that can continue to function and observe even without chemical reactions occurring in the brain. And souls can leave the body while continuing their observations, as some accounts of near-death experiences indicate. Murray read the works of skeptics who attempted to explain away near-death experiences on strictly materialistic grounds and was unconvinced. Skeptics cannot explain how people whose brains had shut down were able to hear conversations and observe phenomena while in a near-dead state; the theory that their souls continued functioning even while their brains did not seems to be the best explanation for what they experienced.

From Deist to (Almost) Christian

Once Murray had empirical evidence to reject both atheism and materialism, he was ready to investigate the historical evidence for Christianity. Once again, he found that the evidence for the supernatural was far greater than he had once imagined.

Earlier in his life, he had dismissed the gospels as legendary, but Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses convinced him that there is good internal evidence for an early date for the gospels and that they consist mostly of history rather than myth. His book includes two full chapters defending the gospels’ historicity and early dates and suggesting why the skeptical views of mainstream liberal biblical scholarship are based on unwarranted assumptions.

Murray also found that the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection, as presented in such books as N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, was much stronger than he had initially expected. Skeptical attempts to explain away the resurrection were not very convincing, he decided.

I expected that at the end of the book, Murray would tell his readers that at the end of his 25-year quest, he had become a Christian. I knew from hints he had dropped throughout his book that he did not believe in biblical inerrancy, but I thought that in keeping with his rigorous logic, he would decide that the only reasonable answer to C. S. Lewis’s famous trilemma (Was Jesus Lord, liar, or lunatic?) was “Lord.”

I was wrong. Murray was deeply moved by Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and he wrestled at length with the trilemma. But in the end, he stopped just short of saying that Jesus was Lord.

“I now accept that Jesus of Nazareth represented himself as having a unique relationship with God—and suspect that he had such a relationship in fact,” Murray concluded. But he shrank back from the implications of saying that Jesus was fully God in the flesh.

And so, he concluded, “I have yet to experience the joys of faith. When I’m around Catherine and others who have, 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,” Murray wrote. “Perhaps the door will open eventually. But even if it doesn’t, I have much to be grateful for. My haphazard pilgrimage has already led me to believe that I live in a universe made meaningful by love and grace. That’s a lot.”

What Might Persuade Murray to Become a Full Believer?

Murray’s intellectual journey reminded me of the early nineteenth-century Harvard theology professor Andrews Norton. Like Murray, Norton collected a massive amount of evidence (in his case, hundreds of pages) to demonstrate the historicity of the gospels in the face of skeptical attacks from liberal German theologians. Like Murray, Norton argued that there were good empirical grounds for accepting the historical testimony of the miracles of the gospels, including Jesus’s resurrection. Like Murray, Norton believed that the universe did show incontrovertible evidence of a divine designer.

But Norton was also a Unitarian. He did not believe that Jesus was God in the flesh. And, like Murray, he had little use for most of the Old Testament.

While the moderately conservative Unitarianism that Norton represented has largely disappeared from the American religious scene and is therefore unfamiliar to most of us, I think that understanding its possibilities and limitations gives us a good framework for understanding Murray.

Like the early nineteenth-century Unitarians, Murray is a strict rationalist and empiricist—but an open-minded one. Throughout his life, he has not been afraid to go against the grain of prevailing opinion and follow the data wherever he has thought it led. He has no use for political correctness or deference to prevailing academic fads. It doesn’t faze him to think that perhaps most mainstream liberal biblical scholars in the academy are wrong; if the empirical evidence calls their late dating of the gospels into question, he’s happy to argue against them, just as Norton did in his day.

But just as the early nineteenth-century Unitarians found the doctrine of the Trinity irrational and unacceptable, so Murray finds the related doctrine of the incarnation impossible to accept: “I say that in part because of my belief that God must not be anthropomorphized, and that to talk about a human-like relationship with God violates that rule.”

Like early nineteenth-century Unitarians, Murray has a very high respect for Jesus. Jesus was greater than any other religious teacher in world history, he believes. In fact, Jesus was probably greater than any other person who ever lived, and he had relationship with God that was closer than any other person has ever had. But, quoting approvingly the liberal pastor of his childhood Presbyterian church, Murray also says, “Jesus wasn’t God. He was as much God as you can get into the human jar.”

It is indeed incredible to think that the God who did the things that first impressed Murray—that is, created the universe in a trillionth of a second and aligned it along precise physical constants that made the earth uniquely primed for the origin of life—could have entered the world as a human being. Murray, in fact, considers that so unlikely that despite all the evidence from the gospels that Jesus, in fact, did claim to be God, he shrinks back from the implications of that finding and wants to settle for a Jesus who merely had a unique relationship with God.

Is there anything that would convince a strict rationalist like Murray to rethink his assumption that God’s transcendence means that God could never be anthropomorphized by becoming a human being?

I think there is. Murray has spent two decades evaluating the evidence about God from history and science, but to get to the next stage, he may have to consider a different type of evidence—the internal evidence of the Bible.

This was Jonathan Edwards’s favorite evidence for Christianity. His final book, which he died before completing, was A History of the Work of Redemption and the Harmony of the Old and New Testaments. This was a study of how the entire Bible is an internally consistent story of God’s salvation of humanity through Christ. I think that if Murray applied his analytical skills to a study of the Bible’s description of God’s attributes and God’s project of redeeming humanity, he would see that both the Old and New Testaments portray this theme with amazing consistency—and that the gospels’ descriptions of Jesus are fully harmonious with both the Old Testament’s portrayals of God and with the scriptural prophecies of a coming Messiah. Jesus’s divine identity and his redemptive work on the cross cannot be separated from the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus.

But as Murray admits, his aversion to an anthropocentric depiction of God prevents him from making this move. Though he doesn’t say it outright, I suspect that his strong antipathy to anthropocentric portrayals of God stems from his belief that such depictions cheapen the majesty and power of God. The God who created the entire universe with such finely tuned precision could not possibly have entered the earth in human form, with all the limitations of a human being.

Some early nineteenth-century New England Unitarians felt the same way. Near the end of his life, President John Adams lampooned the idea of the incarnation by saying that he could not believe that the Creator “who produced this boundless Universe, Newton’s Universe and Herschel’s Universe, came down to this little Ball to be spit upon by Jews.”

But maybe instead of thinking of the incarnation as an unacceptable degradation of the perfect deity who created the universe, we could instead view these actions of the Creator as a voluntary self-emptying form of self-revelation that will make us marvel. Indeed, that’s what Philippians 2 suggests. And it’s the framework for the gospel narrative.

As Timothy Keller noted in his book Jesus the King, the gospel of Mark begins with an astonishing display of Jesus’s power. For the first eight chapters of Mark, Jesus performs one miracle of healing after another, and everyone around him is continually amazed. Because Jesus’s miracles were restorations of God’s creation order, Jesus’s miracles essentially revealed himself as the creator, setting right a creation that had fallen into disrepair. The crowds that marveled at Jesus’s miracles were exhibiting a similar reaction to the one that Murray had when he realized the fine-tuned precision with which God designed the universe. That’s the right reaction to have. We should marvel at God’s power of creation.

But then, halfway through the gospel of Mark, Jesus pivots. He will not be the king that people expect him to be, he essentially tells his disciples. Instead, he will be the king who shows his glory by taking on the shame of the cross. The rest of the gospel is the story of the disciples’ struggle to come to terms with what ultimately turns out to be an even more magnificent (and far more surprising) story of God’s work than the creation alone could have led us to expect.

To be open to this story, Murray will have to be open to the possibility that God can reveal himself in more than numbers. But as someone who loves calculating probabilities, maybe he can ask himself how many other religions have come up with a story like this. The answer is none. What, therefore, is the probability that humans could have invented it on their own? What, especially, is the probability that if humans did invent it, the inventors would have been devout God-fearers from the world’s most monotheistic culture—a culture uniquely primed to view such an idea as blasphemy? And what is the probability that hints foretelling parts of this story of incarnation would be interwoven throughout the entire Bible simply by chance?

The insights that Murray has reached on his spiritual journey so far are impressive, and I imagine that they may be helpful in convincing scientifically minded skeptics to consider the evidence from science and history that point to God’s existence. We can learn a lot from Murray’s open-minded determination to follow the data wherever it leads, even when it has challenged his atheistic assumptions. As a person who is perhaps on the road to Christian faith, he has accomplished a lot.

But I can’t help but wonder how much greater Murray’s testimony might be if he takes the additional step of reconsidering his skepticism about the incarnation. I hope that he’ll look again at the biblical evidence with his characteristic open-minded willingness to reexamine his assumptions and follow the data. If he does, I imagine that he might be amazed by where the evidence leads him next.

As strange as it might seem, he might find that God’s most amazing act in the universe’s history did not occur a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang but rather about 2,000 years ago on a cross just outside Jerusalem.

But to reach that conclusion, he’ll need to reconsider who exactly was hanging on that cross. If, as Christians believe, it was the same Creator who invented the mathematical constants on which the universe is framed, it changes the whole equation.