Charles Murray

And I like to think of the 21st century as sort of growing out of adolescence and realizing maybe our parents were right about some things after all.

And this taking the greater interest in religion now, I think, is a return to human beings behaving normally.

I would also add one other thing to that, which is, as you suggest, the more we learn,

the more we face a situation not where science explains away the arguments for God, we have a situation where science is raising new findings that religion has answers for that science does not.

Actually, the most revealing interchange I had was after the Wall Street Journal op-ed where I was talking about terminal lucidity, a phenomenon where severely demented people, advanced dementia, have a period of brief return to full consciousness a day or two before they die.

And it provoked a response by Steve Pinker, who was sort of the ultimate child of the Enlightenment.

He's written books, of course, with that in the title, in effect.

And his response, I admire and like Steve, and I thought his response was silly.

It was content-free.

It didn't engage the substance of what I was doing.

It was sort of hand-waving, hand-waving about evidence that meets a lot of tests of scientific seriousness.

And there was an interchange, not just my response, but there was an interchange with the leading scholar on terminal lucidity,

where it just seemed to me that all the science and the hard thinking was on the side of that scientist and that Steve, for all his other virtues, has a kind of invincible faith in unbelief.

Yeah, I mean, look at the standing that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens had, for example, in 2005, 2006, where aggressive atheism was chic and it's not chic anymore.

And the instead...

you have all of these harbingers that you mentioned earlier that speak to a renewed interest in religion, not just as being socially useful, which I've always believed, but the truth value of religion.

And I find that encouraging.

I also, well, I remember a friend of mine who lives in New York and went to his Catholic church

the Sunday after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and he said that it had never been that crowded in his entire life that he'd been going to church there.

And so something's going on.