The Resilience of Religious Doubt

Charles Murray’s new book, “Taking Religion Seriously,” in which he elaborates his reasons for trading atheism for a heterodox form of Christian faith, is a bit of a curious reading experience for me. This year I published a book arguing that it should be possible to reason one’s way from skepticism to belief and trying to unspool some threads of argument that the doubter might follow across the threshold of religious faith.

What I proposed, Murray’s book explicitly embodies. It’s an intellectual memoir in which the author, over many years of reading and arguing, thinks his way into religion, and it follows many of the same signposts that I recommended as guides for the traveler — from scientific discoveries to supernatural evidence to New Testament interpretations.

While promoting my book, I was asked more than a few times whether I really thought someone starting from outside religious faith could make this kind of journey intellectually, whether argument alone could really convince anyone of religious claims. Now I can hand them Murray’s book and say triumphantly “yes” — with, of course, the proviso that Murray, a famous conservative policy thinker with a Quaker wife whose professional life brought him in contact with an unusual number of religious intellectuals, is maybe a slightly idiosyncratic case study.

But rather than just discuss the convergences between our arguments (which you can find elaborated and sometimes critiqued in the evangelical writer Bethel McGrew’s joint review), I thought it might be more fruitful to talk about how reading Murray’s book and agreeing with so much of it also made me ponder the inevitable resilience of skepticism.

Christmas is a good time for that contemplation, insofar as Christmas itself is an argument for religious belief. Here is this profound and magical-seeming event, the obscure birth of an infant in the provinces of a powerful and cruel empire that radically redirects 2,000 years (and counting) of human history, that introduces a story and a value system into the world that’s so powerful that even nonbelievers can’t shake its influence, that once a year makes almost everyone stop and listen for angelic choirs, hearkening to the numinous, seeking to encounter once more what W.H. Auden called “the actual Vision” …

And yet it’s also an event that, according to Christianity’s believers, happened only once, and when it happened, by God’s apparent design, only a very few were chosen to see the fullness of the miracle — Mary and Joseph, a scattering of shepherds, a few perspicacious Zoroastrian priest-astrologers. And that’s if you accept the historicity of the infancy narratives, which even some believers (including Murray, even as he’s come around to accepting the historical credibility of the Gospels as a whole) regard as possibly pious fabrications.

So there will always be the understandable question: Couldn’t God have made it a bit easier?

“I thank you, Father,” Jesus says at one point, “that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.” OK, but why not give the wise and understanding just a little more to work with? Couldn’t we get a few more witnesses for the choirs of angels? Maybe a skeptical pagan historian, at least? Couldn’t the Incarnation (to say nothing of the Resurrection) have happened in the age of digital camcorders? Couldn’t we at least have a clearer sense of whether Luke was really mixing up the timing of a Roman governorship when he dated the trip to Bethlehem?

What applies to an extreme religious event like Christmas also applies to a lot of supernatural evidence. To the extent that the religious data seems convincing, to the extent that this world seems far more intentional than accidental, it’s still usually possible to imagine a scenario in which the data was more convincing still — where God’s existence was 10 percent clearer or 30 percent more certain, where skepticism had slightly fewer refuges and the religious argument was more assured of carrying the day.

Take the evidence for consciousness as a property unto itself, intertwining with the material world but not dependent on matter for existence and capable of surviving in some form after death. Murray’s book and mine offer overlapping accounts of why one should take this view seriously, from direct experience to philosophical inquiry to scientific findings to all the wild reports from the borderlands of perception and the frontiers of life and death.

But consider one example that his book alone discusses: the strange phenomenon of terminal lucidity, in which people with a catastrophic loss of brain functioning, a near-total loss of self, suddenly return to themselves and have a normal-seeming, often beautiful encounter with family members just before they die.

Murray’s discussion of this phenomenon yielded some argument — here’s his back and forth with Steven Pinker of Harvard on the subject — over whether these unexpected returns are physiologically inexplicable. But even if you accept that terminal lucidity is one of the many aspects of reality that make a lot more sense if you posit a God than if you don’t, it also has this important feature: Not everyone experiences it. It may be more common than official medicine acknowledges or understands, but it’s certainly not something that the family members of a person suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia can simply count on in their loved one’s final days. It’s a thing shown to some and not others, a grace bestowed rather than a predictable event.

And why is that? Why does it have to be unpredictable? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if this particular piece of evidence for consciousness’s immaterial integrity were just made available to everyone dealing with a dying parent, a lost-to-dementia spouse? There’s a lot of suffering in life and a beyond-extra dose of suffering involved in having someone you love disappear mentally long before they die. Why not give all caregivers the reassurance of a last encounter, all sufferers a last chance to recollect ourselves to ourselves?

While also, of course, giving the religious arguers one especially sharp arrow in our attempts to persuade skeptics and materialists that they do, in fact, possess a soul?

One possible answer is that it wouldn’t matter all that much, that short of a world where God is always and everywhere apparent and all creaturely freedom overridden, there’s no evidentiary dial that you can turn that would overwhelm the will to disbelieve. And certainly you can find examples in which more evidence doesn’t seem to help — nonconversion stories in which people have an enviably direct experience of God and say, in essence, “no, thanks.” (Maybe some of the shepherds saw the angelic choirs and just went back to sleep.)

But having spent more time than usual arguing about religion in 2025, I think that there are a few dials that God could twist that would strengthen my position, and I definitely wouldn’t say no if I were offered, say, a few contemporary versions of the 17th century’s saintly levitators as backup for my arguments.

In their absence (for now, before the Machine God is unveiled or the U.F.O.s descend), the reasonable religious conclusion has to be that skepticism no less than suffering belongs to the divine plan, that whatever calibration made this universe very good to create also requires space for some of its denizens to believe that nobody created it.

Which means that neither Charles Murray nor I should become too smug in our shared insights or too disappointed when readers find those supposed insights unconvincing. The settling of these debates, no less than the announcement of a birth 2,000 years ago, is reserved to higher powers than our own.