Rev Prof Alister McGrath

The story is told of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus, who found himself washed up on the shore of the island of Rhodes. He knew nothing of the place. Was it inhabited? As he walked along the shore, he found some geometric patterns marked out in the sand. “There is hope!”, he declared. “There must be people here!”

Aristippus had seen features of the natural landscape which seemed to him to point to human intelligence. The patterns stood out as having been designed and drawn by people like himself. He was not on his own.

Lent is a good time to reflect on the natural world around us, and ponder its deeper significance. As human beings, we long to identify patterns in the rich fabric of nature, to offer explanations for what happens around us, and to reflect on the meaning of our lives. As the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once argued, “The pursuit of discovery is guided by sensing the presence of a hidden reality toward which our clues are pointing”.

There is no doubt that one of the most successful ways of exploring the world is offered by the natural sciences. As historians have often pointed out, a delight in the beauty of the world around us leads to a deeper desire to make sense of it. What we now call the “Scientific Revolution” was driven by this longing to go deeper, to understand more of the world in which we exist. What is the best way of making sense of the clues we see around us? What, to use Polanyi’s phrase, is the “hidden reality” towards which they point?

I certainly felt this deep sense of wonder when I was young. It moved me to want to study the heavens, and build a little telescope to look at the stars and planets. I studied sciences at university partly out of a sense of delight and fascination, and a deep sense of intellectual inquisitiveness. It was like scratching the surface of something deep and mysterious – yet something I very much wanted to know more about.

Thoughts like this have captivated the imagination of generations, from the dawn of civilization to the present day. Our distant ancestors studied the stars, aware that knowledge of their movements enabled them to navigate the world’s oceans and predict the flooding of the Nile.

Yet human interest in the night sky went far beyond questions of mere utility. Might, many wondered, these silent pinpricks of light in the velvet darkness of the heavens disclose something deeper about the origins and goals of life? Might they bear witness to a deeper moral and intellectual order of things, with which humans could align themselves? Might nature be studded and emblazoned with clues to its meanings, and human minds shaped so that these might be identified, and their significance grasped?

True wisdom was about discerning the deeper structure of reality, lying beneath its surface appearance. The book of Job, one of the finest examples of the wisdom literature of the Ancient Near East, speaks of wisdom as something that is hidden, that is to be found deep within the earth, its true meaning hidden from a casual and superficial glance.

The natural sciences represent one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the human race. They have opened up new ways of thinking, and cleared the way for a deeper understanding of the way the world is. I continue to find myself delighted and excited by new developments, even though my own days as a working scientist are long past.

Yet Lent is a time for critical reflection on our situation. It challenges us to confront our temptations and our illusions, and to think about new beginnings. Technological advance has placed into our hands new inventions and techniques which means that we can do things today that our ancestors could only have dreamed of. Yet this progress raises some real problems. A medical advance that helps us understand how the human body works might lead to new cures; yet it could also lead to a weapon of mass destruction, designed to use this knowledge of human physiology to destroy populations.

It is a very uncomfortable thought. There is nothing bad about science. The problem concerns how we, as human beings, choose to use it. Science is morally neutral. Perhaps we might go further. It is morally neutral, precisely because it is morally blind. We decide how it is to be used. And how trustworthy are we? Thoughts like this led the German social philosopher Theodor Adorno to raise questions about faith in human progress. For Adorno, the “progress” in question was from the sling to the atom bomb.

Now I have no interest in prophesying catastrophes, or taking cheap potshots at optimistic views of human nature. But surely we need to be realistic here – realistic about who we are, and the kind of things that we have done. The cultural critic Terry Eagleton describes the dream of “untrammeled human progress” as a “bright-eyed superstition,” a fairy tale which lacks any rigorous evidential base. “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition”, he writes, it is the belief that, “a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”

As a species, humanity may indeed have the capacity for good; this seems matched, however, by a capacity for evil. A recognition of this profound ambiguity is essential if we are to avoid political and social utopianism, based on naïve judgements about human nature. The novelist J. R. R. Tolkien is now best known for his Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote presciently in 1931, on the eve of the rise of Nazism, of how a naïve view of humanity leads to political utopianism, in which ‘progress’ potentially leads to catastrophe. In a poem dedicated to his Oxford colleague C. S. Lewis, he wrote:

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
Erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends.

Nobody yet knew of the depths of depravity and cruelty that would be created by the rise of Nazism and Stalinism in the 1930s. Yet Tolkien saw that everything rests on the moral character of human beings. Technological developments can be used to cure or to kill. Sadly, the choice is made by human beings, and the choices they make can be disastrous. Science is neutral. It puts tools in our hands. What we do with them is up to us. It’s an uncomfortable thought, and one that it’s easier to ignore, or dismiss as anti-scientific rambling. Yet the problem is real, and it is one that we must confront, rather than simply try to deny.

But what of other questions? Sir Karl Popper, another great philosopher of science, once commented that “science doesn’t make assertions about ultimate questions – about the riddles of existence”. The kind of questions that Popper has in mind are ones that most of us think about from time to time. Why am I here? What’s the point of life? I have no doubt that science can identify the mechanisms of life. But that’s not the same as telling us what life is about. The question here is about meaning, not mechanism.

One of my scientific heroes is Sir Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine some years ago. He was not a religious man. In fact, I think it would be fair to describe him as a rationalist, with a distaste for many aspects of religion. In one of his final publications, entitled The Limits of Science, he reflected on the kind of questions raised by Karl Popper. Medawar insisted that “science is incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon.” Yet he drew a sharp distinction between questions about the organization and structure of the material universe, and what he called “transcendent” questions.

What sort of transcendent questions did he have in mind? Medawar makes it clear that he is speaking of what he called “questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer” – such as: What are we all here for? What is the point of living? These questions, Medawar suggested, were best left to religion and metaphysics. Science could not answer them. And that did not mean, Medawar insisted, that these were what he termed “nonquestions or pseudoquestions such as only simpletons ask and only charlatans profess to be able to answer.”

Lent is a time to revisit such questions. Though Medawar died some years ago, the questions whose importance he recognised remain at the heart of human reflection. What are we here for? What is the point of living? Many of us are suspicious of slick and easy answers to these deep and significant questions. We might be tempted to dismiss engaging them, through dissatisfaction with some answers we have heard. But failed answers do not invalidate these deep questions. They remain on the table, as powerful as ever.

One such answer is that we find our true identity and meaning through coming to know God. This is now the answer – or, at least, part of the answer – that I myself would give. It is not one that I always adopted. While I was a student at Oxford many years ago, it gradually came to capture my thoughts and imagination and my journey since has been from atheist to priest.

It is an answer that continues to thrill and excite me. For me, discovering God was like finding a lens that helped me see things more clearly. Faith offers be a bigger picture of reality. It doesn’t just make sense to me; it makes sense of me as well. C. S. Lewis once wrote: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not just because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else”. I do not find that believing in God contradicts science, but rather that it gives me an intellectual and moral framework within which the successes of science may be celebrated and understood, and its limits appreciated.

Let me end with a reflection of Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most significant contributors to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Newton’s scientific and mathematical breakthroughs – such as his discovery of the laws of planetary motion, and his theory of optics – placed him at the forefront of new scientific understandings of nature. Yet for Newton, what could be seen of nature was as a pointer to something deeper, lying beyond it, signposted by what could be seen. As he wrote towards the end of his life:
I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
That ocean is still there, its unplumbed depths inviting us to go deeper and go further.

Lent is a time for reflecting on the deeper meaning of nature. It might mean nothing at all, an accidental cosmic happenstance, devoid of meaning and purpose, characterized by blind pitiless indifference towards us.

Or it might point to something deeper. The great Harvard psychologist William James once commented that 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.” Or, to use the famous words of the Psalmist: “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord!” The enigmas remain, certainly. But we see them in a new light.