Surprised by Meaning

Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things

Alister E. McGrath

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781611640991
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion et sciences

We live in an age when the growth of the Internet has made it easier than ever to gain access to information and accumulate knowledge. But information is not the same as meaning, nor is knowledge identical with wisdom. Many people feel engulfed by a tsunami of facts in which they can find no meaning.

In thirteen short, accessible chapters McGrath, author of the bestselling The Dawkins Delusion, leads the reader through a nontechnical discussion of science and faith. How do we make sense of the world around us? Are belief in science and the Christian faith compatible? Does the structure of the universe point toward the existence of God?

McGrath's goal is to help readers see that science is neither anathema to faith, nor does it supersede faith. Both science and faith help with the overriding human desire to make sense of things. Faith is a complex idea. It is not a blind leap into the dark but a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of wondrous things of which we are all a part.

Chapter 1


Looking for the Big Picture

Why do people like crime fiction so much? TV detectives have become an integral part of Western culture. The shelves of our bookstores are cluttered with the latest novels by the likes of Ian Rankin and Patricia Cornwell, as well as the greats from the past. Writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dorothy L. Sayers built their reputations on being able to hold their readers’ interest as countless mysterious murder cases were solved before their eyes. We devour the cases of fictional detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Perry Mason, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Miss Jane Marple. But why do we like this sort of stuff so much?

Dorothy L. Sayers had an explanation for this. In early 1940, Sayers was invited to broadcast to the French nation, to bolster its morale in the early stages of the Second World War. She decided to boost French self-esteem by emphasizing the importance of France as a source of great literary detectives.¹ Sadly, Sayers had still not quite finished preparing her talk on 4 June 1940. The German High Command, doubtlessly realizing the window of opportunity that this delay offered them, invaded France a week later. Sayers’s talk celebrating the French literary detective was never transmitted.

One of the central themes of Sayers’s lecture is that detective fiction appeals to our deep yearning to make sense of what seem to some to be an unrelated series of events. Yet within those events lie the clues, the markers of significance, which can lead to the solution of the mystery. The clues need to be identified and placed in context. As Sayers put it, using an image from Greek mythology, we “follow, step by step, Ariadne’s thread, and finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth.”² Or, to draw on another image popularized by the great British philosopher of science William Whewell (1794–1866), we must find the right thread on which to string the pearls of our observations, so that they disclose their true pattern.³

Sayers, one of Britain’s most successful and talented detective novelists, was unquestionably right in emphasizing the importance of the human longing to make sense of things. The “golden age of crime fiction,” to which she was such a distinguished contributor, is a powerful witness to our yearning to discover patterns, find meaning, and uncover hidden secrets. The detective novel appeals to our implicit belief in the intrinsic rationality of the world around us and to our ability to discover its deeper patterns. We are confronted with something that needs explaining—as in one of Sherlock Holmes’s best-known cases, the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville. What really happened here? We were not there to observe this event. Yet by careful analysis of clues, we may identify the most likely explanation of what really happened. We need to spin a web of meaning into which this event fits, naturally and persuasively. The clues sometimes point to several possible solutions. They cannot all be right. We have to decide which is the best explanation of what is observed. Holmes’s genius lies in his ability to find the best way of making sense of the clues he discovers during the course of his investigation.

We can see this human yearning to understand the enigmas and riddles of life in countless ways in our world, past and present. The Anglo-Saxons loved to tease each other with complex riddles, whose successful solution was the intellectual counterpart of proving oneself a hero in battle. More recently the rise of the natural sciences reflects a fundamental human longing to make sense of our observations of the world.⁴ What greater picture unifies our disparate observations? How can the threads of evidence and observation be woven into a tapestry of truth? It is a vision that captivates the human imagination, inspiring us to long to explore and discover the deeper structures of reality.

We long to make sense of things. We yearn to see the big picture, to know the greater story, of which our own story is a small but nonetheless important part. We rightly discern the need to organize our lives around some controlling framework or narrative. The world around us seems to be studded with clues to a greater vision of life. Yet how can we join the dots to disclose a picture? What happens if we are overwhelmed with dots and cannot discern a pattern? If we cannot see the wood for the trees?

We long to make sense of things. We yearn to see the big picture, to know the greater story, of which our own story is a small but nonetheless important part. Yet how can we join the dots to disclose a picture?

The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) spoke of “a meteoric shower of facts” raining from the sky.⁵ Yet these “lie unquestioned, uncombined.” They are like threads, which need to be woven into a tapestry, clues that need to be assembled to disclose the big picture. As Millay pointed out, we are overwhelmed with information, but we cannot make sense of the “shower of facts” with which we are bombarded. There seems to be “no loom to weave it into fabric.” Confronted with a glut of information that we cannot process, we find ourselves living on the brink of incoherence and meaninglessness. Meaning seems to have been withheld from us—if there is any meaning to be found at all.

Many find the thought of a meaningless world to be unbearable. If there is no meaning, then there is no point in life. We live in an age when the growth of the Internet has made it easier than ever to gain access to information and accumulate knowledge. But information is not the same as meaning, nor is knowledge identical with wisdom. Many feel engulfed by a tsunami of facts, in which we can find no meaning.

This theme is developed in a profound and powerful passage in the Old Testament, in which Israel’s king, Hezekiah, reflects on his experience of coming close to a complete mental breakdown (Isa. 38:9–20). He compares himself to a weaver who has been separated from his loom (v. 12). To use Millay’s image that we considered earlier, we could say that Hezekiah found himself bombarded with “a meteoric shower of facts,” which he could not weave together into a coherent pattern. Threads rained down on him from the heavens. But he had no means of weaving these threads together to reveal a pattern. He could not create a fabric from the threads. They seemed to be disconnected, pointing to nothing, chilling symbols of meaninglessness. The means of making sense of them has been withdrawn from him. He finds himself reduced to despondency and despair.

For some, there is no greater picture, no pattern of meaning, no deeper structure to the cosmos. What you see is what you get. This position is found in the writings of the leading atheist Richard Dawkins, who boldly and confidently declares that science offers the best answers to the meaning of life. And science tells us that there is no deeper meaning of things built into the structure of the universe. The universe has “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”⁶

This is a neat, fenced-in, dogmatic creed, which offers cosy certainties to the faithful. But is Dawkins right? It seems a surprisingly superficial reading of nature, which merely skims its surface rather than looking for deeper patterns and structures. Dawkins ultimately does little more than express a prejudice against the universe possessing any meaning, even if it is dressed up somewhat unpersuasively as an argument. I suspect that the real problem for Dawkins is that he is worried that the universe might turn out to have a purpose of which he does not approve.

For most natural scientists, the sciences are to be thought of as representing an endless journey towards a deeper understanding of the world. They are simply incapable of offering slick and easy answers to the great questions of life, such as those favored by Dawkins. Forcing the sciences to answer questions which lie beyond their scope is abusing them, failing to respect their identity and their limits. Dawkins seems to treat science as if it were a predetermined atheist ideology, rather than an investigative tool through which we can gain a deeper understanding of our world.

The intellectual vitality of the natural sciences lies in their being able to say something without having to say everything. Science simply cannot answer questions about the meaning of life and should not be expected—still less, forced—to do so. To demand that science answer questions that lie beyond its sphere of competence is potentially to bring it into disrepute. These questions are metaphysical, not empirical. Sir Peter Medawar (1915–87), a cool-headed scientific rationalist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on immunology, insists that the limits of science must be identified and respected. Otherwise, he argues, science will fall into disrespect, having been abused and exploited by those with ideological agendas. There are important transcendental questions “that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer.”⁷ The kind of questions that Medawar has in mind are what some philosophers call the “ultimate questions”: What are we here for? What is the point of living? These are real questions, and they are important questions. Yet they are not questions that science can legitimately answer: they lie beyond the scope of the scientific method.

Medawar is surely right. In the end, science does not provide us with the answers that most of us are seeking and cannot do so. For example, the quest for the good life has stood at the heart of human existence since the dawn of civilization. Richard Dawkins is surely right when he declares that “science has no methods for deciding what is ethical.”⁸ Yet this must be seen as a statement of the limits of science, not a challenge to the possibility of morality. The inability of science to disclose moral values merely causes us to move on, to search for them elsewhere, rather than to declare the quest invalid and pointless. Science is amoral. Even the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, perhaps one of the less-critical advocates of science as the arbiter of meaning and value, was aware of its disturbing absence of moral direction. Science, if “unwisely used,” leads to tyranny and war.⁹

Science is morally impartial precisely because it is morally blind, placing itself at the service of the dictator wishing to enforce his oppressive rule though weapons of mass destruction, and likewise at the service of those wishing to heal a broken humanity through new drugs and medical procedures. We need transcendent narratives to provide us with moral guidance, social purpose, and a sense of personal identity. Though science may provide us with knowledge and information, it is powerless to confer wisdom and meaning.

So how does the Christian faith come into this? Christianity holds that there is a door hidden in the scheme of things that opens into another world: a new way of understanding, a new way of living, and a new way of hoping. Faith is a complex idea which goes far beyond simply asserting or holding that certain things are true. It is a relational idea, pointing to the capacity of God to captivate our imaginations, to excite us, to transform us, and to accompany us on the journey of life. Faith goes beyond what is logically demonstrable; yet faith is capable of rational motivation and foundation.

Faith is thus to be seen as a form of motivated or warranted belief. It is not a blind leap into the dark, but a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of things, of which we are part. It is something that elicits and invites rational assent, not something that compels it. Faith is about seeing things that others have missed, and grasping their deeper significance. It is no accident that the New Testament speaks of coming to faith in terms of the recovery of sight, seeing things more clearly, or as scales falling from someone’s eyes (Mark 8:22–25; 10:46–52; Acts 9:9–19). Faith is about an enhanced capacity of vision, allowing us to see and appreciate clues that really are there, but which are overlooked or misunderstood by others.

Yet the New Testament also speaks of faith, not as a human achievement, but as something that is evoked, elicited, and sustained by God. God heals our sight, opens our eyes, and helps us to see what is really there. Faith does not contradict reason, but transcends it through a joyous divine deliverance from the cold and austere limits of human reason and logic. We are surprised and delighted by a meaning to life that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves. But once we’ve seen it, everything makes sense and fits into place. It’s like reading an Agatha Christie mystery novel already knowing the final denouement. Like Moses, we are led to climb Mount Nebo, and catch a glimpse of the promised land—a land that really is there, but which lies beyond our normal capacity to see, hidden by the horizon of human limitations. The framework of faith, once grasped, gives us a new way of seeing the world, and making sense of our place in the greater scheme of things.

One of the most familiar ways of envisaging God’s presence in life is set out in Psalm 23, which speaks of God as our shepherd. God is always with us, a gracious and consoling presence on the journey of life, even as we “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” (23:4 NIV). The Christian tradition speaks of God as our companion and healer, one who makes sense of the puzzles and enigmas of life. The world may seem like shadowlands; yet God is our light, who illuminates our paths as we travel. As the Dominican poet Paul Murray puts it, God is “the needle’s eye through which all the threads of the universe are drawn.”

So how do we try to make sense of things? In the next chapter, we shall explore this in more detail.

Chapter 2


Longing to Make Sense of Things

In his brilliantly argued critique of the “New Atheism,” the leading British cultural critic Terry Eagleton ridicules those who think religion was invented to explain things.¹ Eagleton has in mind the faintly ludicrous overstatements of Christopher Hitchens on this matter, such as his brash assertion that, since the invention of the telescope and microscope, religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”² “Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place,” Eagleton retorts. “It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster, we can forget about Chekhov.” For Eagleton, believing that religion is a “botched attempt to explain the world” is on the same intellectual level as “seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.”

Yet despite Eagleton’s correct judgement that there is far more to Christianity than an attempt to make sense of things, Christians do believe that certain things are true, that they may be relied upon, and that they illuminate our perceptions, decisions, and actions. Faith enables us to see things in different ways; it thus leads us to act in ways consistent with this. Whatever else the Christian faith might be, it is unquestionably concerned with believing that God exists and that this existence possesses significance for human identity, agency, and action. As the Harvard psychologist William James pointed out many years ago, religious faith is basically “faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.”³

Christians have always held that their faith makes sense in itself and makes sense of the enigmas and riddles of our experience. The gospel is like an illuminating radiance that lights up the landscape of reality, allowing us to see things as they really are. The French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil (1909–43) made this point especially well. Although a late convert to Christianity, she came to a deep appreciation of its power to shed light on our experience of the world.

If I light an electric torch at night out of doors, I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous objects. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this...