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As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars
NY Post ^ | Oct. 20, 2025 | Charles Murray

Posted on 10/21/2025 5:43:57 AM PDT by Heartlander

As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens recorded a two-hour conversation in 2007 deriding religion that got millions of YouTube views and was said to have sparked an atheist revolution.

“Not believing in God was no longer just fashionable,” as journalist Peter Savodnik put it. “It was, for those on campus, for best-selling authors, for those who dominated our most rarefied intellectual spaces, the only rational position worth having.”

No longer.

In the fall of 2025, it sometimes feels as if every influencer in good standing has gotten religion. David Brooks, Ross Douthat, E.J. Dionne, Peter Thiel, Andrew Sullivan, Arthur Brooks, Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson are only the most prominent of intellectuals who have gone public with good things to say about God, ranging from vague invocations of a universal force to doctrinal Christianity.

What’s going on?

I have a theory: We are emerging from the West’s intellectual adolescence.

Beginning in the late 1600s, the Enlightenment delivered a series of body blows to the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible.

They began with Newton’s clockwork universe and concluded with Darwinian evolution, Freudian psychology and Einsteinian relativity.

But the Enlightenment, a great force for progress in some ways, suffered from tunnel vision. Reason and empiricism were enthroned as the only legitimate framework for intellectual inquiry.

By the late 19th century, “scientism,” as William James called it, had taken on some of organized religion’s unattractive features, treating intellectuals who tried to explore the supernatural as heretics.

By the middle of the 20th century, academia’s appraisal of religion amounted to “Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.”

That’s the message I got when I reached Harvard in the fall of 1961.

None of my professors was religious (at least visibly). I didn’t have any...

(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...


TOPICS: Education; Religion; Society
KEYWORDS:

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Charles Murray’s latest book is “Taking Religion Seriously.”
1 posted on 10/21/2025 5:43:57 AM PDT by Heartlander
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To: Heartlander; All

After decades of laughable academic standards and a criminal ‘media’, no wonder we have waves of irresponsible and demanding morons running around!!!


2 posted on 10/21/2025 5:51:15 AM PDT by SMARTY (In politics, stupidity is not a handicap. Napoleon Bonaparte I)
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To: Heartlander

They should have invited the great Anthony Flew to this roundable.

Oh, wait.


3 posted on 10/21/2025 5:55:09 AM PDT by ConservativeDude
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To: Heartlander

His take is quite encouraging, and he tells some real truths about modern “Art“


4 posted on 10/21/2025 5:58:38 AM PDT by jagusafr ( )
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To: Heartlander
This is precisely why the Modernists, Marxists, and Militants of every stripe who have infiltrated His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church have been spiritually abusing The Faithful who just want to practice authentic and ACTUAL Catholicism.

They are all about "arrested development."

They are all about contraception of anything and everything.

They are fulfilling the Evil One's plan:

SOLVE ET COAGVLA

5 posted on 10/21/2025 6:03:04 AM PDT by Rocky Mountain Wild Turkey ("I have an open mind ... just not so open that my brain falls out onto the floor!!")
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To: Heartlander

He’s onto something. Physicists can’t explain how the universe today could have created itself out of nothing.


6 posted on 10/21/2025 6:06:56 AM PDT by Socon-Econ (adi)
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To: Heartlander

Religion has been with us from the beginning... And it will be with us until the end. Believing in nothing has never been a popular religion... But that in itself is a religion as much as worshipping the sun is a religion.


7 posted on 10/21/2025 6:17:25 AM PDT by jerod (Nazis were essentially Socialist in Hugo Boss uniforms... Get over it!)
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To: Socon-Econ

And the religious can’t explain how God just always existed.


8 posted on 10/21/2025 6:59:00 AM PDT by Poison Pill
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To: Poison Pill
The question of 'who designed the designer' is most famously put forth by Dawkins in his book The God Delusion which fellow atheist Michael Ruse reviewed and stated, "would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing".

1. A known designer is not required by Intelligent Design - you don't need to know who designed the designer when you discover an arrow - you know it was designed. (Can be applied the the fine tuned universe, DNA, rare earth, consciousness, etc...)

2. We know the universe had a beginning (Big Bang) and if there was an infinite past we would never arrive at the present. Logical reasoning leads to the conclusion that the initial cause of motion must be something that is not, itself, in motion - an unmoved mover - the Prime Mover (concept advanced by Aristotle). If every cause is the result of a previous cause, or, if everything is caused by something else, then we have an "infinite regress" of causes which is logically incoherent (who designed the designer). Furthermore, natural processes cannot create natural processes (circulus in probando). So we are logically left with 'creation' from outside of nature.

3. When postulating a creator outside of nature, asking who created the creator would be like asking 'how long did it take to create time' - 'how much area did it take to create space' - 'how much weight did it take to create matter'.

4. From a theological Judeo-Christian standpoint, the question becomes "who made God?" - which means you are reduced to thinking about created gods. I don't know any Christian who believes God was created. It just becomes an absurd question you might hear a child ask.

SEE ALSO: God, Gods, and Fairies - David Bentley Hart

John Lennox’s response to Richard dawkins for the “Who designed the designer”:

‘It’s the old schoolboy question, ‘Who created God?’, I’m actually very surprised to find it as a central argument in your book because it assumes that God is created. And I’m not surprised therefore that you call the book “The God Delusion” because created gods are by definition a delusion. And if you say, ‘if there is a God you have to ask, ‘Who created God?’, that means you are reduced to thinking about created gods. Well none of us believe in created gods, and I think that argument is entirely beside the point and perhaps you should put it on your shelf marked celestial teapots, where it belongs.”
-John Lennox

9 posted on 10/21/2025 8:15:06 AM PDT by Heartlander (Charlie Kirk was a civil rights leader, and they killed him.)
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To: Poison Pill

And the religious can’t explain how God just always existed.
***********
The explanation is that God exists outside of time. We’re created beings who cannot understand this because we must live in time, but God is not. This makes more sense than the creation creating itself.


10 posted on 10/21/2025 12:34:03 PM PDT by Socon-Econ (adi)
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To: Socon-Econ

All you are doing now is just giving is an unsupported opinion. That’s no explanation of how, which is what you were asking physicists to give you about the Universe. If you’re going to do that, then just say the Universe exists outside of time and has always existed and save yourself a step.


11 posted on 10/21/2025 1:18:07 PM PDT by Poison Pill
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