Alister McGrath on the nature of belief

A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as “all truths are scientific truths” cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers.

Yet Ayer’s ideas survive today in mutated form and influence other subjects besides philosophy. Though partly infected by relativism, the humanities have witnessed a growing impulse to redescribe everything in material and supposedly objective terms. The move is reductive. It involves restricting us to a world of causes rather than reasons, sounds rather than music.

The defects of a scientistic or positivist approach emerged in a public debate between Richard Dawkins and John Habgood, then Archbishop of York, in 1992. If you search the universe for certain kinds of connection, those are the only ones you will find, Habgood warned. Everything else slips through the net. Religion is a case in point. God does not appear in the scientific account of nature because the objectives and methods of science shut out anything — any hint of purpose or intention or feeling or value — which might point to a Creator. That is not a criticism of science. It is a description of what science is, and the key to what makes it so successful in studying those aspects of reality in which purpose, feeling, value and so on are not of central importance.

Habgood’s argument applies across the piste. An array of discourses — not just those concerned with spirituality — purport to shed light on truths that elude scientific treatment, but this should not render them suspect by definition. Take a ready example. Our understanding of others, not as objects to be analyzed but as persons to be encountered, is just as real as our knowledge of stars or genes — more so, in fact, because it is more direct and involves a greater spread of our capacities. Aristotle had already developed this insight before the birth of Christianity. Educated people do not expect the word “certain” to mean the same thing in every context, he held, adding that it is the mark of a juvenile to think that certainty can only apply in the mathematical sphere. Mathematics poses no difficulty for a “juvenile” in this sense. But an area such as ethics is difficult, even for a mature person, because certainty isn’t so easy to come by. You have to grow into it.

Alister McGrath’s title is therefore germane. The first-person plural in Why We Believe refers to the gamut of human knowledge beyond the provinces of mathematics and the laboratory. A big chunk of the author’s thesis could be summed up as follows. It isn’t reasonable to suppose that only reason, narrowly framed, reveals the world to us. A better path involves reason harnessed to our ethical and aesthetic impulses. The process will not involve simple certitude. Whether we realize it or not, we are all people of faith at some level.

It is the mark of a juvenile to think that certainty can only apply in the mathematical sphere

McGrath is very well equipped to voice this message, being a former Marxist and atheist who became a theologian after pursuing doctoral research in biochemistry. Various teaching posts at Oxford followed; he ended his career there as Andreas Idrios, professor of science and religion. His conclusion — that all of us, religious believers and secularists alike, need broad narratives with which to craft our lives, even though their truth cannot be proved beyond doubt — recalls Tom Holland’s remark that belief in human equality involves as big a leap of faith as accepting the existence of angels.

McGrath’s support for more capacious models of knowing leads him to the second main strand in his case. Frustrated that New Atheist polemic has caused religious faith to be widely dismissed as weird or dangerous, he accentuates the case for the defense. As society becomes more fractured, “contemplating something larger than ourselves could not be more essential.” Far from representing a failure of rational thought, “accepting the unknown is… an existential necessity.” The book duly casts itself as a manifesto for the re-enchantment of the western mind.

While McGrath is a sure guide to epistemology, I am not convinced that his theological inferences, in the smaller space he allots to them, are as robust as they could be. His later discussion of the link between religion and violence is too impressionistic for such a complex topic. Other relevant matters (including the dangers of undue subjectivism) are skipped over. Listing Dawkins’s misunderstandings and caricatures is useful as far as it goes but doesn’t form a solid foundation for “re-enchantment.” Deeper probes are needed. Why We Believe avoids a philosophical defense of theism and only hints at the poverty of naturalism’s bid to describe the world comprehensively from the bottom up.

McGrath offers penetrating glances at science and other areas, including law. It’s just puzzling that we are given a thinner menu when it comes to his greatest area of expertise.