Like so many young people in the late 1960s, I regarded the idea of God as outdated nonsense. The 1960s were a time of intellectual and cultural change.
The old certainties of the past seemed to crumble in the face of a confident expectation of a revolution that would sweep away outdated nonsense, such as belief in God. Without quite realizing what I was doing, I adopted a worldview that then seemed to me to be the inevitable result of the consistent application of the scientific method. I would only believe what science could prove.
So I embraced a rather dogmatic atheism, taking delight in its intellectual
minimalism and existential bleakness. So what if life had to be seen as meaningless? It was an act of intellectual bravery on my part to accept this harsh scientific truth. Religion was just a pointless relic of a credulous past, offering a spurious delusion of meaning which was easily discarded. I believed that science offered a complete, totalized explanation of the world, ruthlessly exposing its rivals as lies and delusions. Science disproved God,
and all honest scientists were atheists. Science was good, and religion was evil. It was, of course, a hopelessly simplified binary opposition. Everything was black and white, with no sense of the many shades of grey that demanded their proper recognition. But this simplistic outlook suited me just fine then. Without quite understanding what was happening, I had fallen into an “in-group–out-group” mentality, which consolidates a privileged
sense of belonging to a superior “in-group” by ridiculing, vilifying and demonizing its opponents. (It is traditionally understood to be one of the nastier features of religion, but it has now become clear that it is characteristic of any fundamentalism, whether religious or anti-religious.) Religion was intellectually wrong, and morally evil. It was a contaminant, best avoided rather than engaged. Looking back, I now realize that the world must have seemed very simple to my sixteen-year-old mind. I lacked both the detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy of the sciences that would have shown me that things were rather more complicated than this and the wisdom to cope with the paradoxes, ambiguity, limits and uncertainty of any serious engagement with reality. Yet for about three years, I was totally convinced of both the intellectual elegance of atheism and the utter stupidity of those who
embraced alternative positions.
In December 1970, I learned that I had won a scholarship to study chemistry at Oxford University. Yet I could not begin my studies at Oxford until October
1971. So what was I to do in the meantime? Most of my friends left school in order to travel the world or earn some money. I decided to stay on at school and use the time to learn German and Russian, both of which would be useful
for my scientific studies. Having specialized in the physical sciences for two years, I was also aware of the need to deepen my knowledge of biology and begin to think about biochemistry. I therefore settled down to begin an extended period of reading and reflection. After a month or so of intensive
reading in the school science library in early 1971, having exhausted the works on biology, I came across a section that I had never noticed before: “The History and Philosophy of Science.” I had little time for this sort of material, tending to regard it as uninformed criticism of the certainties and simplicities of the natural sciences by those who felt threatened bythem. Philosophy, in my view, was just pointless speculation about issues that
any proper scientist could solve easily through a few well-designed experiments. What was the point? Yet in the end, I decided to read these works. If I was right, what had I to lose by doing so? By the time I had finished reading the somewhat meager holdings of the school in this field, I realized that I needed to do some very serious rethinking. Far from being half-witted obscurantism that placed unnecessary obstacles before the relentless pace of scientific advance, the history and philosophy of science asked all the right questions about the reliability and limits of scientific knowledge. And they were questions that I had not faced thus far—such as the underdetermination of theory by data, radical theory change in the history of science, the difficulties in devising a “crucial experiment” and the enormously complex issues associated with devising what was the “best explanation” of a given
set of observations. I was overwhelmed. It was as if a tidal wave was battering
against my settled way of thinking, muddying what I had taken to be the clear, still and, above all, simple waters of scientific truth. Things thus turned out to be rather more complicated than I had realized. My eyes had been opened and I knew there was no going back to the simplistic take on the natural sciences I had once known. I had enjoyed the beauty and innocence of a childlike attitude to the sciences, and secretly wished to remain in that secure place. Indeed, I think that part of me deeply wished that I had never picked up those books, never asked those awkward questions and never questioned the simplicities of my scientific youth. But there could be no going back. I had stepped through a door which up to that point I did not know existed, and could not escape the new world I now began to inhabit. I found that I could no longer hold on to what I now realize was a somewhat naïve view—that the only authentic knowledge we can possess is scientific knowledge based on empirical evidence.It became clear to me that a whole series of questions that I had dismissed as meaningless or pointless had to be examined again—including the God-question. Having been forced to abandon my rather dogmatic belief that science necessarily entailed atheism, I began to realize that the natural world is conceptually malleable. Nature can be interpreted, without any loss of intellectual integrity, in a number of different ways. So which was the best way of making sense of it?
AN ENRICHED UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY
My own rediscovery of the enriched understanding and appreciation of the
world made possible through belief in God took place at Oxford University. It was a somewhat cerebral and intellectual conversion, focusing on my growing realization that belief in God made a lot more sense of things than my atheism. I had no emotional need for any idea of God, being perfectly prepared to embrace nihilism—if this was right. Yet I mistakenly assumed that its bleakness was an indication of its truth. What if truth were to turn out to be attractive?
Please read The Big Question by Alister McGrath
A portion of it is available from RZIM.org (in the magazine)