Why is rejecting religion so hard?

Leaving religion is easy. Rejecting religion is harder. Charles Murray and Robert Baird have recently reminded us of this secular reluctance to completely leave religious thinking behind.

I have to acknowledge my reluctance to write about Murray, whose racist pseudo-science in the 1994 book The Bell Curve has done so much damage to American society. But I am not relying on any argument that Murray is making in his new book, Taking Religion Seriously. Murray serves as an illustration of how attractive religion can be to secular people.

Murray’s book is a personal account of how over a lifetime, first as an atheist, and then as an agnostic, he was intellectually drawn to religion—because it provided an account of the order in the universe—then to God, and finally to Christian belief. Murray began as a straightforward materialist. But he became fascinated by the fine-tuned laws of nature through which the universe becomes a home to life.

The fine-tuning argument, again

Readers of OnlySky are probably familiar with claims like these. The argument goes that if the force of gravity had been slightly different, the universe would either have collapsed or expanded without creating stable structures, like galaxies, stars and planets. And so forth. The person then concludes that the universe must be directed. Murray is even cruder than that. Having decided that somebody must have “issued an order” for the Big Bang and a universe of orderly development, Murray becomes a believer in some kind of god.

After that, Murray immerses himself in the disputes over the historicity of the Gospels and of the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. He concludes that the best evidence is that the Gospel writers were either contemporaries of Jesus or were at least writing based on accounts from such contemporaries. Contrary to the earlier scholarly consensus, recent evidence suggests the Gospels were written in the 40s or 50s CE. In regard to the resurrection, Murray concludes that “something” must have happened shortly after Jesus’ execution to explain the rapid expansion of the new religion. It is unlikely that, in proclaiming the resurrection, the early followers of Jesus were involved in an elaborate fraud. They must have believed what they were reporting. Murray feels that his foray into Christianity has rendered his life more meaningful—though it apparently did not cause him to consider how much his academic writings have contradicted the teachings he says he believes in. Murray never mentions the controversies over his work.

In looking at Murray’s experience, I do not mean to suggest that he is convincing. Since reading the book, I certainly have not become a believer or a Christian. But I would propose that we secularists should think about order and meaning in the human experience. Too often we act like it is our job to discredit religion. Our job is to figure out the truth of reality and the meaning of life, including the undoubted differences about these matters among ourselves. The best part of secular thought has always been that it is open to ideas compared to religious dogmatism. But that openness has to work both ways. We must be able both to criticize religious conclusions or agree with them. We should be reading someone like Murray who goes from atheism to religion to see what we can learn from him.

Secular yearnings

Robert Baird offers a different form of secular attraction to religion. He is an example of what happens to religious impulses when secular thought shuts down all such yearnings. Baird recently wrote a review of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. In that book, Douthat makes a case for religion very similar to the considerations that attracted Murray.

Baird is a journalist, author and thoroughgoing secular thinker. His review of Douthat’s book begins with his description of what he calls the “mainstream scientific view.” In this account of reality, the Big Bang happened, natural laws came to be, and, much later, by chance, life occurred and then randomly developed through evolution to produce Homo sapiens, whose dominance is certain to be “temporary.”

Baird’s point is that, according to this materialist account, “there is no such thing as human significance.” You may believe that human beings have an “inalienable human dignity” but they don’t. All of our activities, our hopes and dreams, are no different from the “instinct that attracts butterflies to horse manure.” To paraphrase Baird, Mozart is excrement. Baird thinks that Douthat just does not understand science.

Baird presents a lot of criticisms of Douthat, which frankly are fun to read. Much more important than that, however, is Baird’s own underlying discomfort with what he has set forth as the secular account. Baird admits that he shares “Douthat’s rejection of the nihilism demanded by the scientific view,” though he calls his reluctance an “uncomfortable personal fact.” Baird adds that he has “some sympathy… for the idea that our existence is not a freak cosmic accident.” And Baird admits that he and most people “don’t want to disappear into nothingness when we die. We don’t want to feel that the whole drama of our lives is pointless, and we don’t want to accept that our moral intuitions and judgments are a meaningless hangover of evolution.”

Baird ends his review in an unintentionally revealing way. He criticizes Douthat’s “smug self-aggrandizement” and “complacent” approach to religion. In contrast, Baird finds very attracting an account Douthat quotes from his mother of a genuine religious experience. In Baird’s opinion, that account of a powerful mystical encounter demonstrates religion’s “weirder, wilder, more violent, and more destabilizing” side, which shows religion to be an “alien force of transcendence.” Baird concludes that if one is going to reject the mainstream scientific account of reality it should be to embrace that kind of genuine religious experience.

Don't apologize for seeking transcendence

Secular thinking, or at least the influence of what Baird thinks of as secular thinking, has been bad for him. Baird feels he must apologize for not being a nihilist and for being attracted to transcendence, as if these were signs of weakness. But Baird seems unaware that there are scientists who reject what he calls the “mainstream scientific approach.” He should read Bobby Azarian’s book The Romance of Reality. He should be told that the biologist Stuart Kauffman, and others, consider life to be close to inevitable given the nature of matter and its self-organization, rather than a matter of chance. The British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris does not find the universe to be “bleak” as Baird does, but “strangely fit to purpose.” The “bleak” universe that Baird describes is not the only secular account.

This is not the context in which to make a case for these alternative views. Rather, I am describing the closed box that both Murray and Baird found secular life and thought to be. There is no reason for this. Secular thought should be completely open to all varieties of human experience, since we don’t have anything that we must defend. Ironically, it was that closed secular quality, which is often adopted to keep anything that might seem religious out of the secular space, that left Murray open to religion. And, if that has not yet happened to Baird, it is only because he has successfully suppressed his deepest yearnings. Baird seems to me likely to end up a religious believer too.

The future of secular life and thought has to be greater openness. Only in that way can we make progress toward a fruitful and flourishing secular civilization. If we don’t do that, religion will remain a very attractive alternative.