Emily Jashinsky

He's, of course, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the author of what I think is one of the most important books of the last couple decades coming apart.

I reference it all of the time.

Charles Murray, thank you for being here.

I just finished taking religion seriously.

I'm absolutely going to be ordering tons of copies for Christmas gifts, so I encourage other people to do the same.

And I have a lot of questions, Charles.

I want to start with this line.

You write, the Big Bang gave me good reason for thinking that the creation of the universe was a mystery with a capital M. The fantastic brute facts of the Big Bang forced me to rethink everything.

I just wanted to start at that point because it seemed like that was maybe one of your starting points.

Could you walk us through a little bit why that moment was so important for you?

And you write about also the anthropomorphification of God in the Bible.

And then obviously one of your hangups towards the end of the book, we learn is the question of divinity, Christ's divinity.

And that's interesting because the question of Christ's divinity is probably difficult from your end because it anthropomorphizes very deliberately God.

And that's not just Old Testament as you write about, but it's the foundation of the New Testament too.

So why, talk to us a little bit about why, especially at Christmas season, despite finding the historiosity of the gospels fairly compelling, how do you think about that now in your sort of, where you are right now in your journey?

This is one line I wanted to ask you about.

You write, for me, CS Lewis was the perfect example of a, quote, smart person who still believed that stuff.

And that line stood out to me because there's something from coming apart, I think, in that line of itself.

where when you're surrounded by so many other smart people who have this kind of conventional wisdom about God and Christianity, the book is organized where you first start thinking about God and then about Christianity.

Was that even just maybe culturally a brick wall that you kept hitting up against?