You might remember how famous philosopher Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, recently investigated Christianity. He found the evidence good enough to make a commitment. I wrote about what arguments he found convincing in this post. A new famous scholar, Charles Murray, has investigated into Christianity. Let’s see what arguments he looked at and where he came out.

Before we see what Charles Murray found, here is a good list of arguments for a Creator and Designer.

I have a list of 8 scientific arguments:

1. origin of the universe
2. cosmic fine-tuning
3. origin of life (building blocks and sequencing of information)
4. Cambrian explosion (and other surges of information in the fossil record)
5. galactic, stellar and planetary habitability, e.g. – habitable zones
6. molecular machines in the cell, e.g. – bacterial flagellum
7. evidence for a non-material mind, e.g. – split brain surgery
8. the waiting time problem

And then there are philosophical arguments, too:

1. the moral argument
2. the contingency argument
3. arguments for substance dualism, e.g. – intentionality
4. the argument from reason

And historical arguments:

1. reliability of the New Testament documents
2. minimal facts case for the resurrection, e.g. – Paul’s conversion
3. prophecy, e.g. – Psalm 22

I excluded all “soft” arguments from my list, because emotion-based claims grate on my software engineer and military history soul.

So, what was Murray’s starting point? He explains in a New York Post article:

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 friends who were religious.

When the topic of religion came up, professors and friends alike treated it dismissively or as a subject for humor.

I didn’t expend energy rejecting religion. It was irrelevant. I ignored it.

That’s his starting point. And why investigate Christianity when you are already at the top of your field, getting a lot of respect for the influential books that you are putting out?

So often, Christians are taught to think that Christianity is something that you investigate when you have a life crisis. Then you take this irrational leap into the dark, and turn over a new leaf, to get your life in order. Maybe to make people stop judging you. That’s how Christianity is seen today. Most people think that Christianity is about feelings and community, but that’s not the way Jesus saw it. Jesus said that everyone who is on the side of TRUTH listens to him. He used evidence in order to appeal to people who didn’t believe in him already. We talked about Christianity as a “truth quest” in our podcast episode with Dr. Gunter Bechly, who went on a truth quest and arrived at Christianity. Intellectuals who are curious and open can find solid evidence for the Christian worldview.

Science and Culture has an article up about what evidence Charles Murray looked at in his new book:

“Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant,” Charles Murray writes. “For them, I think I have a story worth telling.”

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular. He argues that religion is something that can be approached as an intellectual exercise. His account moves from the improbable physics of the Big Bang to recent discoveries about the nature of consciousness, from evolutionary psychology to hypotheses about a universal Moral Law. His exploration of Christianity delves into the authorship of the Gospels, the reliability of biblical texts, and the scholarship surrounding the resurrection story.

These align with some of the arguments that I mentioned (origin of the universe, fine-tuning, consciousness, moral argument, gospel reliability, resurrection), showing you how these arguments really do work on non-Christian scholars.

A Wall Street Journal article (archived) has more about his process of changing his mind:

Whatever else may be said about Mr. Murray, he can’t be accused of dishonesty or cowardice. He has a penchant for saying what many other writers and scholars know but either can’t say or can’t say clearly and without a thousand qualifications. He has often been typecast in liberal organs as an ideologue, but that is exactly wrong: Reading Mr. Murray’s work—this is most plainly true in “Losing Ground” and “Coming Apart”—you often sense that the writer would rather draw different conclusions but, in view of the evidence, can’t.

“Taking Religion Seriously” is, in that sense, typical of its author. Mr. Murray wasn’t searching for religious belief.

He starts out with a book written by a famous atheist astronomer, Martin Rees, about the cosmic fine-tuning argument. This argument is generally viewed by atheists as the most compelling argument for a Creator and Designer of the universe:

Mr. Murray’s conversion, if that’s what it is, began in the early 2000s, when he read a few theoretical accounts of the universe’s origins, among them Martin Rees’s “Just Six Numbers” (1999). So wildly improbable were the conditions necessary for the so-called Big Bang, it seems to Mr. Murray, that the whole business, whenever it happened, sounded very much like what Christians call creation. “I can’t believe I’m thinking this,” he recalls reflecting, “but it’s the only plausible explanation”—“it” meaning the divine origin of everything.

He was also impressed by the case for the reliability of the gospels, including the relatively recent, ground-breaking work done by Dr. Richard Bauckham on the eyewitness backing of the gospels:

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened?

If you’re a student of apologetics, then you’ll have heard of these concerns before, maybe in the writings of William Lane Craig for one and two, and N.T. Wright for number three. That’s why Christian apologists spend all this time reading this stuff, so that we can suggest these books to skeptics like Charles Murray! And these books do work on skeptics. It’s a shame that so many Christians never learn about how to use these books in church.

Anyway, if you like stories about very, very famous non-Christians taking a look at the good evidence for God’s existence, and Christianity in particular, then mark this one down on your list. It’s good to not care too much about flashy celebrities, and people who draw crowds based on their entertainment ability. Life isn’t about that. Life is about taking the time to puzzle about the evidence in nature and history that you can follow to get into a two-way relationship with the Boss. Many people seem to get so busy with other things. Some of these things are bad, and some of these things are good. But the purpose of life is surely to puzzle about the big questions, and to be reconciled with God.

Maybe you’ve been a Christian all your life, and you don’t even know why. Maybe you’d like to find out how to show non-Christians your work? In that case, it’s helpful to consider the stories of people like Gunter Bechly, Larry Sanger, Charles Murray, etc. and do a little study to see how good the evidence that they found really is. It’s fun to talk to people about the clues that the Boss has left.

So, I am still on Cloud 9 from the amazing essay and lecture by Helen Andrews that I posted on the weekend. My female friends were unanimous in their praise for the article. My male friend Blake and I talked about it for 2 hours on the phone. My other male friends have not had the chance to read it. But on the heels of that, here’s another fantastic podcast about feminism. Terrell found it for me.

I don’t need to introduce economist Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (of the Ruth Institute) to regular readers of the blog, as she is well known for her opposition to feminism, and her policy-oriented approach to solving the problems of the Sexual Revolution. Whereas many social conservatives just moan and complain about the Sexual Revolution, and then expect men to “fix it” so that women are happy, Dr. Morse has all sorts of interesting ideas about what laws and policies to change to bring us back to normal.

Her guest Dr. Hannah Spier is someone I had never head of before. She’s a former psychiatrist who is married and lives in Switzerland with her husband and children. She’s a stay-at-home mother now. And you might not believe this but she describes herself as very supportive of “men’s rights”. Now, don’t get me wrong, she’s not a basher of women. What I heard in the podcast was a lot of discussion about what feminism is, and how women who believe in it order their lives. Does it work out for them?

Anyway, I have the video version and the audio version. So here’s the uncensored video from Rumble:

And the audio-only version: (opens in new tab)

https://sites.libsyn.com/20124/psychiatrist-proves-feminism-is-even-worse-than-we-thought-hannah-spier-dr-j-show

Don’t forget that our Knight and Rose Show is also posted on Rumble, if you don’t like YouTube. I certainly don’t.

I was supposed to be working on work-work (work related to my job) on Sunday, and doing the laundry. But I could not escape from this podcast. I kept re-winding it to play parts over.

Anyway, I was going to write a summary of this, but I fed Grok the transcript, and told it the parts that impressed me, and asked for a summary. I got this:

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse and Dr. Hannah Spier explore how feminist ideology influences women’s choices, often leading to mental health challenges and unfulfilled desires. Dr. Spier, a psychiatrist, shares insights from her practice, highlighting how societal pressures and personal decisions rooted in feminism can create resentment and emotional distress across different life stages.

For women in their 20s, Dr. Spier observes a pattern of pursuing demanding degrees while grappling with unmet emotional needs. Many focus on dating or social status, influenced by feminist ideals of career-driven success, only to face anxiety and panic attacks when academic and romantic goals clash. This mismatch stems from chasing a glamorous career image that doesn’t satisfy deeper attachment needs.

In their 30s, women often experience burnout from unfulfilling jobs, compounded by the pressure of declining fertility. Dr. Spier notes that some women invest years in relationships with partners hesitant to commit, partly because career-focused women initially seem less likely to prioritize marriage or children. When these women later seek commitment, the delay can lead to conflict.

By their 40s, married women with children may face depression and marital strain, often feeling guilt over their children’s struggles, like ADHD, which Dr. Spier links to attachment issues from balancing work and family. Resentment toward husbands for perceived unequal responsibilities can push some toward divorce, seeking relief but facing new challenges.

Both critique feminism’s narrative that pits men and women against each other, arguing it undervalues motherhood and fuels bitterness. They encourage women to make choices aligned with their biological and relational needs, fostering healthier emotional lives and stronger families, rather than adhering to societal pressures that may lead to regret.

What was most interesting to me about all this was how even though women were making these decisions all along, it was pretty clear that they had been sold a bill of goods by powerful people who wanted them to go in this direction for whatever reason.

In particular, I was pleased to hear Dr. Spier mention how women who are committed to full-time careers deliberately choose men who support that. I.e. – men who don’t want to be burdened by commitment and children. So, to the woman who has her eventual demands for commitment and children rejected, it looks like “all men are bad” because the man she chose was bad. I know that many modern women, for example, consider support for abortion rights to be a non-negotiable when dating a man. If a feminist woman chooses a pro-abortion man, it gives her maximum autonomy for her career during her 20s. But how likely do you think it is that a pro-abortion man is going to suddenly sign up for marriage and children when she hits 32? It seems unlikely. After all, abortion is nothing but seeking reckless sexual pleasure, and then resorting to deadly violence to avoid the consequences of your actions. A man who believes in that is not going to sign up for marriage and kids. Marriage and kids are responsibilities, and pro-abortion men don’t want that.

What we need to do is to tell women that good men are men who want to commit early, and raise kids early. And so, they need to choose those good men early. Men marry for a specific plan. Good men want a helper who can help them with their plans. It’s wrong to pass up good men in the woman’s 20s, and then hope that they will be there in the woman’s 30s. That’s not a good deal for the good men. They will not take that deal. The right solution is for older women to teach younger women to reject feminism when they are still young. So, please share the podcast with young women.

Announcement: The blog just reached 10,000,000 page views since I started it in January 2009. So, leave me a comment on Facebook, Twitter or below this post, if you want me to keep going! I’m thinking about scaling back the blog and the podcast and the YouTube channel, since I am ready for early retirement! Maybe I will just scale back the blogging to days when I really am bursting to speak out.

The article I want to comment on is written by Helen Andrews. It might be the best thing you read all year, it’s certainly the best thing I’ve read this year. Better than anything you will hear from popular Christian authors and podcasters, who tend to shy away from policy and controversy. This article is about what is really going on in big woke corporations, outside of the happy Christian bubble.

Here is her article in Compact Magazine.

And here is the excerpt:

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

This part was my favorite:

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

She doesn’t mention domestic violence laws and family courts, perhaps strategically, but these both are nothing like traditional legal processes. Many intelligent men are avoiding relationships out of caution about false accusations and divorce. It’s called the “marriage strike”, and it is just the rational response to the feminization of the police force and family courts. Especially for men of means who have more to lose.

These two approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.

If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. It was possible to believe back in 1970 that introducing women into the legal profession in large numbers would have only a minor effect. That belief is no longer sustainable. The changes will be massive.

Her article is based on a speech that she gave at NatCon5: a national conference of conservative thought.

Please read her article, and watch the video if you like. Send it to all your friends. Post it on social media. Share the video with all of your friends. I found the article cathartic. It really moved me. I did cry for a bit because I have experienced what she is talking about, in corporate America. It really was not easy to get through.

It’s great to see Helen Andrews take up this issue of institutional feminization, which I think is the core danger of our time. Except for a very small minority, nobody seems to have the balls to say that we need to roll back things like single mother welfare, no-fault divorce, student loans for worthless degrees, anti-discrimination laws for businesses, me-too false accusations at work, etc. Most social conservative Christians, for example, claim to be pro-life and pro-marriage, but they are terrified about confronting women about their role in causing those problems. Similarly, they don’t want to confront women about their support for leftist policies.

Well, Helen Andrews has said something about one of the problems, and we all need to follow her lead. And the best part is, she doesn’t think that blaming and shaming men is the answer. She thinks the answer is changing laws and policies. That’s rare.

You can find more of her articles here.

My time in woke corporations

I wanted to add a few more words about my experience working in woke Big Tech corporations while fighting for my green card and early retirement.

The company that eventually sponsored me for my green card was a Platinum partner of the Human Rights Campaign. So, they are a far far far left woke company. They would push me hard to do many secular left actions that I disagreed with. When you are not a permanent resident, you can’t go to Human Resources, or sue the company. You have to lay low and avoid threats and find another way to speak your mind. This is something that many Christian leaders who were born in the USA don’t understand about aliases.

Here’s a few things I encountered in the 16 years before I got my permanent residency (green card):

• was asked to wear a rainbow ribbon to support gay rights by my female manager
• was called into my female manager’s office after a Muslim complained about my disagreement with Islam
• had my blog leaked to Human Resources by a Muslim who found out about it somehow, and was called in to explain it
• gay male co-workers would try to get me to disagree with LGBT in front of people so them could send me to HR
• had to use vacation days to avoid woke training, and then was asked why I did that
• was badgered incessantly to donate to the United Way, a woke non-profit
• was called into a meeting with a Director because I spoke to a CHRISTIAN woman about apologetics at work (she was offended because I made her feel bad about her fideism)
• was passed over for IT promotions for female candidates who did not even have STEM degrees, or in one case ANY degree or IT work experience
• hauled into Human Resources after a Hindu communist complained because I asked him why he didn’t stay in India if he was so opposed to free market capitalism
• was called onto the carpet by my female manager for making the no-degree and no-experience lady feel bad when she declined to reply to my e-mails about requirements for an entire week
• was denied a letter of reference from the Human Resources lady at a previous employer that I needed for my application for Permanent Residency, (she knew I was a conservative and Christian because I slammed their woke policies in my exit interview)

And I could go on and on, but this is the kind of thing that I had to put up with, mainly from cry-baby feminists and LGBT activists, in corporate America.

Not just in woke corporations

I don’t expect Christian leaders who have given me flack for my alias to understand this, since none are legal immigrants by employer sponsor and few have worked in a woke Fortune 100 IT shop. But even outside of woke IT corporations, I have seen many “conservative” Christians throw out the Bible and side with crying women against men who were in the right Biblically and morally. I have seen “pro-child” “Mama Bear” Christians urge women to initiate divorce over money, and lie about their husbands in family court in order to get custody of kids, even though the divorce was completely unBiblical and immoral.

Many very “manly” looking Christian leaders fold up like origami for women, too. Many years ago, a very famous masculine-looking Christian apologist told my 30-year-old girlfriend that she should feel free to go to Europe to do TWO NON-STEM DEGREES, and that I would be here waiting for her to marry her when she returned. She returned to America at age 34. She didn’t work when she was in Europe, just lived off of donations and debt. And she never used those extra degrees for work. No one had the boldness to confront her about her crazy choices, not even that male “masculine” apologist. And in fact two other male apologists were so desperate to be liked by her, that they also told her that going to Europe at age 30 was a great idea. Do you ever wonder why so many aging Christian women are struggling to get married? Many of them wasted their 20s chasing worldly happiness, to the applause of weak Christian men who merely appeared masculine.

A famous woman apologist once told me that I should not reject women who had tens of thousands of dollars of debt as a wife candidate, because “if Jesus forgives her sins, then who are you to judge her? You need to lower your standards”. We just don’t have Christian leaders who are tough enough to confront women about the lies they believe, and their poor decision-making.

Last point from me. I’ve mentored several women who went through a wild phase as non-Christians. I teach them apologetics and economics, and build up their resume and finances. Once they get their lives on track, the most frequent phrase I hear from them is “everyone was lying to me when I was young”. People tell young women what they want to hear, and it causes them problems in the long run. It is a mistake to think that men exist as ATM servants who will just dispense cash and fixes when women have gotten themselves into these problems. We need to do better at telling women the truth early, even if it hurts their feelings.

Read and share Helen’s article

So, yes. It’s just so encouraging to see an article that finally takes a step into saying “maybe it’s not a good idea to have these laws that force businesses to place women into positions of authority”. Read the article. Share the article. And just consider; should we confront the threat to civilization posed by the feminization of our institutions? Or should we cower in fear of displeasing women, and just keep telling them what they want to hear, so that they will like us?