Article

Belief

Creed

Doubt

Faith

Royalty

5 February 2024

8 min read

Prince William's doubt is normal - it's impossible to be certain whether there is a God

Our limited human understanding means we will never fully understand God in this life, writes Graham Tomlin.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A young man wearing a dark suit talks to a minister wearing regalia.

Prince William talks with the Dean of Westminster Abbey, 2019.

LPhot Belinda Alker, OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons.

A new book, serialised in the Daily Mail, suggests Prince William is wondering whether he really wants to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. While he respects the Church, it claims, he doesn’t consider himself particularly religious and doubts if he should head up a church he doesn’t attend much. There has been a fair amount of comment on the contrast between his grandmother’s strong Christian faith, increasingly evident in her Christmas broadcasts as she came to the end of her life, and that of his father, who has also made a point since his accession to the throne of emphasising his own personal Christian commitment, both in statements around the time he became king, and in his Christmas broadcast this past year.

William, however, is less forthcoming. He was dutifully confirmed at Eton at the age of 14, and goes to church at Christmas and Easter, so presumably is not a hardened Dawkins-esque atheist. Like many of his generation he probably has his doubts about God and religion, doesn't often speak publicly about faith and so it's hard to know from the outside whether this really is a motivating force in his life or not.

Of course, there is a whole separate argument about why personal faith, while it helps, is not strictly necessary for such a role. Many British monarchs in the past have not had a very strong Christian faith. The significance of the role rests in the office not the person - it is a constitutional not a personal, arrangement. But that is a different story. What interests me is what this story tells us about faith and doubt and the experience of what it is to believe.

Like in my atheist days, I have days when I wake up and wonder whether it's all true. Am I deceiving myself?

I was once an atheist. Yet, like most atheists, I had my doubts. I tried to get on with my life not believing in God, yet every now and again something would happen to make me doubt my atheism. I would meet a Christian with a profoundly impressive life motivated by their faith and it disturbed me. An argument from a Christian writer momentarily seemed strangely plausible. An encounter of the beauty and wonder of nature suddenly might lodge the thought in my mind that maybe there is a Creator after all? Like all good atheists, however, I managed to push these thoughts to the back of my mind. I learn to doubt and resist these impulses and return to my central take on the world which was that there definitely is no God.

As it happened, in time, my doubts became too strong for me, and I began to think that Christian faith made more sense of the world than atheism did. And so, eventually and slowly, I became a Christian. Of course, the process happens the other way around as well. People with a notional Christian faith start to doubt it to the extent that it no longer makes sense to them.

I have now been a Christian for many years and a Bishop for a few of those. Like in my atheist days, I have days when I wake up and wonder whether it's all true. Am I deceiving myself? Have I wasted most of my life on something that is not real? I might read a book that is sceptical about some aspect of the Christian story and a doubt niggles away in the back of my mind. God suddenly appears silent in answer to heartfelt prayers, and for a moment I wonder if he is there at all. I have doubts, just as I did in my atheist days.

But just like I did when I was an atheist, I learned to doubt my doubts. Atheists often challenge Christians to come up with a piece of evidence that would suggest that God exists. And sometimes we try, with arguments from the design of the universe, apparent miracles, fulfilment of biblical prophecies and so on. But they never quite convince. The reason they don't convince is that the atheist can always come up with an alternative explanation. And that takes us to the heart of the issue.

For Christians, and for other believers in God for that matter, God is not another object in the universe that can be proved or disproved. I might find indications that point in the direction of there being a God but, as the atheist points out, you can always explain them away in some form or other.

Instead, atheism and belief in God are better seen, not as the result of a process of sifting evidence, looking for proof one way or another, but as different ways of looking at the world.

A cartoon etching of a duck that looks like a rabbit. — Wittgenstein's cartoon.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once picked up a common cartoon that circulated in German comic newspapers in the late nineteenth century to make a similar point. Looked at one way, it looks like a rabbit. Look at it another way it looks like a duck. Whether you see a rabbit or a duck is dependent upon other factors. Children who have just been to the local duckpond might be inclined to see a duck. Someone with a pet rabbit might be inclined to see a rabbit. Wittgenstein’s point was about the way concepts in our mind shape our perceptions of reality. We may perceive the same thing, but we see it as something different.

This idea of ‘seeing as’ – seeing something not just in itself, but ‘as’ something shaped by our mind’s perceptions, became well known in philosophy after Wittgenstein’s use of the image. It may help us in thinking about belief in God as well.

On a Christmas Day edition of ‘The Rest is Politics’ with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart (soon after his appearance on Re-Enchanting’), two of the most popular podcasts of our times met when Tom Holland of ‘The Rest is History’ came on the podcast. As it was Christmas Day, Alistair Campbell asked Tom Holland whether he believed the Christmas story and all the rest of the Bible. His reply referred to this very picture of the duck / rabbit, and he said: “There are times where I can believe it, and there are other times where I look at the stories and think this is absolutely ridiculous - how could it possibly be true? I think the Infinity of space, I think of vast geological time and I think it's absolutely nonsense. So I kind of veer between the two.”

In a way he’s right. You can’t decide between the two ways of looking at the picture by some process of forensic scientific evidence. There is no ultimate way of deciding whether it is a duck or a rabbit.

Now the analogy with faith is imperfect. The picture could be a rabbit, it could be a duck. Whereas, to put it bluntly - there either is or is not a God – both can’t be true. Where the image helps us, is that in our limited understanding of things it is impossible for any of us to say, whether believer or atheist, that we know 100 per cent definitively that there is or is not a God. Even Richard Dawkins agrees on that point!

The other difference is that you can’t be neutral on this. Whether you see it as a duck or a rabbit probably makes no difference to your life. Yet faith is more than just an opinion. It is a way of life. To ‘believe’ in God, in the Christian sense of ‘believe’ is not just to hold the opinion in your head that God exists, but to decide to live as if it true that God exists, that he is revealed in Jesus Christ, that each person you meet each day is a precious soul, for whom Jesus died and so on.

The American philosopher Michael Novak put it like this:

“The centre of the argument concerns whether I should think of the universe as impersonal and indifferent to me, and ruled by randomness and chance. Or whether I should interpret it as personal through and through, in such a way that all things that are and have been and will be dwell in the presence of God a person who understands and chooses all that he brings out of nothingness into existence.”

Whatever faith position you take up - to believe that there is a God or that there isn't, you will have doubts. But the nature of faith is not to have an absence of doubt, but it's how you treat those doubts. At the end of the day, each of us has to decide which approach makes most sense of the world that we experience every day. Does the problem of Evil – why bad things sometimes happen - mean you can’t believe in God? Or does the problem of Good – why good things sometimes happen – mean you can’t be an atheist?

Prince William, and Tom Holland for that matter may have their doubts about faith, But that is no reason not to decide to believe.

When I became a Christian it was because the world no longer made sense to me as a place that emerged by chance, that has no ultimate purpose, that our intelligence emerged literally from non-sense. Our deep need for love seemed to fit better with the idea that this world emerged out of love, than that it emerged from a heartless, random void. Seeing the world in that way makes better sense to me than the alternative. It doesn't mean everything suddenly makes sense, but it does offer me a better way of thinking and living in the world. I can't prove it. I have my days of doubt. But that's the way I choose to believe, and choose to live.

Article

Culture

Feminism

Film & TV

Re-enchanting

19 March 2025

6 min read

Why are we so bewitched by witches?

We’re so post-Christian, we’re actually becoming pre-Christian.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

In a still from Wicked, the witch stands and looks to the sunset.

Universal Pictures.

I was slowly making my way out of the cinema; squinting at the harsh light, stretching out the aches caused by sitting in one chair for too long, and eavesdropping on a conversation happening just in front of me. It was between two young women and it went like this:

Woman 1 – I think that witches are to women what the Roman Empire is to men – I think about them at least once a day.

Woman 2 – Oh, me too. Me too. I think every woman does.

Woman 1 – yeah, I reckon it’s innate. An inherent part of being a woman is relating to witches.

Woman 2 – and an inherent part of being a man is being scared of them.

The conversation went on, but at this point I was in danger of following these strangers to their car - the eavesdropping was getting weird, I had to call it a day. But the snippet of their conversation that I did hear was enough to get my mind whirring, enough to spend the following days wondering if they were right.

And I must say, I’ve become more than a little sympathetic to their hypothesis.

As I write this, Wicked, the cinematised tale of two Oz-born witches, has broken a dozen box office records. It is the highest grossing movie adaptation of a stage musical in history, having amassed over $700 million at the box office. It has been nominated for 63 awards, including 10 Tony Awards, 10 Academy Awards and a Grammy.

Witches have also dominated the literature charts over the past couple of years, with terms such as ‘Romantasy’ and ‘Hex Appeal’ becoming legitimate book categories. On social media, witch-related content has become a phenomenon; the hashtag ‘WitchTok’ not only exists but has been viewed tens of billions of times. In 2024, British actress, Suranne Jones (Dr Foster, Gentleman Jack) released a documentary that investigated the infamous European witch trials. In the same year, Elizabeth Sankey made a documentary about how learning from/about witches helped her recover from severe postpartum mental illness.

So, you see, the cinema-goers have a point. A deeply convincing one. There’s an undeniable gravitas to the existence of witches – be it in the past or the present, in medieval Europe or in the imagined City of Oz. Whether we shroud them in stereotype (black cats, pointy hats, broomsticks) or strip them of it. We are, in fact, quite captivated by the very concept of witches. I suppose, as usual, I’ve found myself caught up in wondering why this may be.

Firstly, I agree with what the women in the cinema were getting at – it has an awful lot to do with the female identity. Whether it be factually correct or not, when we think of the mass persecution of witches, we tend to tie it into a larger narrative of historic persecution of women. Particularly outliers - women who could not, or would not, fit neatly into the box of societal expectation. This tendency of ours isn’t without cause, The Hammer of Witches, a popular 1487 publication that gave instruction for seeking out witches, explicitly taught that women were more likely to be working with dark magic. And so, the reclaiming of the term ‘witch’ – in all of its nuances – has often been a feminist act. A means by which so-called ‘feminine’ attributes have been rehabilitated in public discourse and celebrated in popular culture.

For example, the reason that The Hammer of Witches declares women to be more prone to witchcraft is that they are emotionally weaker than men. Which leads me to recollect that when the American Presidential election was raging on, I scrolled past a thirty-second clip of a man telling an interviewer that he wasn’t going to vote for the then-Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, because women are too emotional to be President. The validity of this idea has been repeatedly debunked but the line of thinking has persisted: women’s (purportedly) larger emotional capacity is a bad thing, a distinct weakness, a doorway to chaos. So, is it any wonder that Wicked - a story in which the protagonist’s emotional sensitivity is the precise key to her wonderous abilities – has had such a profound impact?

Our re-energised obsession with witches points toward our desire for an enchanted world.

I also have an inkling that it has something to do with the mystery attached to female physiology. We, as women, are told repeatedly (both explicitly and subliminally) that there is something inherently unknowable about our bodies, something elusive about them. When it comes to our own anatomy, we’re told to simply accept an element of mystery. Again, this is a reason that women have so often been linked with witchcraft - both positively and negatively. The female body confounds us. It sounds kind of lovely, doesn’t it? The idea that our bodies can elude us. But, in reality, this ‘mystery’ is not at all romantic. It’s the reason that there is still no cure for female specific medical conditions such as endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome or premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

And so I wonder, is it less painful to lean into the time-old witchy notion that our ‘mysterious’ bodies were designed to confound medicine than it is to accept the unjust fact that women’s bodies are drastically under-researched? This is certainly a theme woven through Elizabeth Sankey’s afore mentioned documentary about post-partum mental illness.

So, to sum up, I’m agreeing with my cinema-pals. It’s a feminine thing. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’m partly agreeing with them, because I’m of the firm opinion that it’s also a spiritual thing.

I can’t speak for ages gone by, but I think I can speak for this one – our re-energised obsession with witches points toward our desire for an enchanted world. It’s a symptom of what cultural commentators are calling the ‘re-Pagan-isation’ of our society. The fact that we’re so post-Christian, we’re actually becoming pre-Christian. We long for a world that is alive, a reality that has seen and unseen realms. It’s deep and tenacious craving that sense, materialism, and rationalism simply can’t satisfy. To quote the ever-brilliant Dan Kim,

‘What has ‘sensible’ society given us? For many, it’s been the managed and catastrophic decline into societal disillusionment, a generation of broken promises, and the feeling of being feudal serfs under the dominion of national banks and billionaires while we medicate ourselves to death with algorithmically driven AI slop in the spiritual vacuum of a fragmented and polarised society… And so is it any wonder that people are looking beyond the sensible towards the magical, the mystical, and the Esoteric?’

I think Dan’s dead right. He’s referring to the spiritual practice manifestation here, but I think his diagnosis also sheds light on the way that witchcraft is captivating our imagination once again.

I wonder if women are, and have always been, hungry for affirmation that their femininity (whatever that means to them) is part of them being fearfully wonderfully them – and therefore, something to be celebrated. To feel seen, understood and cherished. But I also wonder if they long for a reality in which they can have embodied spiritual experiences, a reality in which they don’t have to shirk their feminine identity in order to connect with the divine. Where their spiritual cravings are neither dismissed nor demonised and they are liberated to show up as their full selves – bursting with a stubborn inkling that all that they see is not all that there is.

To sum up, here’s my hunch: those total strangers in the cinema were quite right – witches do capture the imagination of women in a particularly interesting way. And, the more I’ve pondered that, the more I’ve become convinced that the reason why witches are the in-thing once again is anything but trivial.

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