Why we believe: finding meaning in uncertain times

Believing is not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary.

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

Pages from books are pinned across wall.

Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash.

Alister McGrath’s new book: Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times will be published by Oneworld, in January 2025. He gives us a sneak preview of the theme of the book here – look out for it when it comes out.

Who can we trust? What can we trust? These are among the most difficult and cognitively demanding tasks that we face in everyday life. We look for friends who are smart, honest and dependable – just as we seek beliefs that are trustworthy and enable us to flourish. My argument in this book is that belief is natural, reasonable and has the potential for good. To deny it, to suggest that faith is only for those not willing to deal in facts, is simply to diminish us as human beings.

It is perhaps the greatest paradox that we face as human beings: we only seem to be able to prove shallow truths, but not the great truths of meaning, goodness and significance that lie at the heart of our existence and give order and meaning to our lives.

During my period as Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, I was able to reflect extensively on the scientific study of beliefs, which calls into question the cultural oversimplifications of recent polemics – such as those of the now-defunct ‘New Atheism,’ with its litany of unacknowledged beliefs. For some epistemic Puritans, we ought only to believe what we can prove. Logic and mathematics thus provide us with the norms that we should apply to everything in life. I share their admiration for these glittering peaks of human knowledge production. Yet these are singularities, areas of knowledge in which a degree of certainty is possible which distinguishes them from other domains of human understanding, rather than being representative of them.

The ideas I have been exploring in these past years and that you’ll find in this book are not new; in fact, they have a distinguished history in the long tradition of philosophical reflection and religious faith, which are deeply attuned to the problem of uncertainty.

My position is this: believing is not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary. It’s time to move on from movements and individuals who offer facile solutions in the face of life’s endless ambiguities, and face up to the critical importance of beliefs in shaping and sustaining meaningful human existence. Believing is a human stance to be embraced, not a liability that is to be eradicated.

In the end, we are all believers, whether we like it or not, whether we are religious or secular, in that our lives and knowledge are grounded and shaped by assumptions and beliefs that lie beyond comprehensive empirical verification or rational proof. Living in this vast space of ambiguity and uncertainty is an art, a skill that we have to learn.

Happily, as this book will show, it can be done.

Why We Believe will be published on 25 January 2025, By OneWorld.

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Faith

15 August 2024

4 min read

Faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing

Sarah Perry’s comments suggest a reawakening of concern for its observation.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A woman being interviewed gestures with a hand in front of her

Sarah Perry.

Waterstones.

If there’s one thing anyone who has ever written a novel can’t stand, it’s having to congratulate a successful novelist. So, it’s through gritted teeth that I warmly welcome the words of Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent) that religious faith is ceasing to be a subject of embarrassment in published fiction.

It’s about time. Perry told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that, for her latest book Enlightenment, she was asked to put in more theology: “I assumed that everybody knew what the doctrine of predestination meant.” Bless.

The cause of my pathetic envy as I applaud her is that I had my first (and, to date, only) novel published in 2017, to almost universal disinterest. I like to tell people that it was well received – all three people who actually read it said they enjoyed it and only one of them was a family member. It actually did a bit better than that, but you get my drift.

It was an unashamedly religious psychological thriller, titled A Dark Nativity. Brace position, here comes a one-sentence synopsis: The narrator, Reverend Natalie Cross, is a frustrated former aid worker who undertakes a mission to Israel, is kidnapped and held hostage, murders her way to freedom, discovers she was the victim of an Anglo-American plot, wreaks her terrible revenge and (spoiler alert!) gives birth to a son of uncertain paternity.

See what I did there? As well as the latter-day Nativity resonance, thematically I was interested in what redemption looks like in Israel and Palestine. I know, I know – but even I thought it would be distasteful to try to cash in on what’s happened there since.

Enough of the plug for a seven-year-old novel. My point is that its religious themes actively militated against it at the time. Novels addressing Christian faith (or any other kind) occupied a particular publishing niche – a harsher word might be ghetto. To try to break out of it was pointless. The great Christian novelist Penelope Wilcock told me (very kindly) that my book was too religious for the secular market and too secular for religious readers.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation.

The restricted area to which religion was confined had its stylistic rules. There was the cathedral close romp, which authors such as Catherine Fox had made their own. The vicarly whodunnit (lately updated by Reverend Richard Coles). Magic realism with its daemons and Philip Pullmans. And anything, in the wake of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, involving ancient plots that might make a movie, with hooded figures walking in slo-mo through cloisters.

Vicars had to be evil or silly. I may be both those things at times, but I’d like to think there is other stuff going on here for cultural exploration. My narrator, Nat Cross, was driven, often funny and more than a little mad. So like a lot of Anglican clergy.

If she’s right – and I very much hope she is – it’s why what Perry has to say is so hopeful. Because it begins to suggest that religious faith is slowly beginning to be accepted back into polite society. Whisper it softly, it might even become a cultural norm. If Richard Dawkins can describe himself as a “cultural Christian” and the historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, can claim that Christianity is the entire foundation of western civilisation, then there is everything to play for. And, indeed, write for.

It’s not as if cathedral frolics and the revelation of Jesus’s wife in Leonardo’s Last Supper was anything other than a fictional diversion of post-modernism. Religion and specifically Christianity had been a staple of the novel in English.

I hesitate to mention their names in the same column as the authors above (including me, most obviously), but Graham Greene’s exposition of Catholic guilt in The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s of the impossibility of moral reformation in Brideshead Revisited are probably the best religious novels of the twentieth century.

Further back towards the birth of the English novel, the Reverend Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is perhaps the most tragic portrait of a clergyman who is neither evil nor silly. He stand as a warning from history to today’s Church of England.

And it’s to that, the established Church, that Perry’s remarks ultimately turn our attention. We’re told that there has been a five per cent spike in church attendance recently, but that of itself isn’t sufficient to suggest a renaissance in our religious culture. Our arts and culture will only ever really reflect what we care about.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation. If so, that’s good news for the religious, as well as for religious authors. And I might just get a sequel out of it.