Through a Glass Darkly

Journeys through Science, Faith and Doubt – A Memoir

Alister E McGrath

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529327632
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Christianisme

In what he anticipates will be his final book, respected scientist and theologian Professor Alister McGrath shares the story of a life spent in pursuit of truth: first through the discipline of science, then in tandem with the Christian faith he found as a young man. In Through a Glass Darkly Professor McGrath shares at length and for the first time how exactly he moved from atheism to faith while studying natural sciences at Oxford University, and how each discipline has informed the other throughout his life. This is a rich, inspiring read from one of today's greatest public theologians.

Part One

A Restless Freethinker: Discovering a New World

1

A Curious Mind

I was ten years old. Captivated by the sheer beauty and vastness of the star-studded sky on cold and frosty Irish winter nights, I had built myself a little telescope to allow me to see it in greater detail. I pointed it towards the skies for the first time and peered through the eyepiece. Time seemed to stand still as the star-fields of the Milky Way suddenly came into focus; I was overwhelmed by what I could see. It seemed to me, if only for a moment, as though I were poised on the brink of something – like standing on a beach, catching a glimpse of the far distance. This was the moment I realised that I wanted to be a scientist, looking at and understanding the immensity of the world.

I wasn’t on my own here. Since the beginning of history people have been enthralled by the solemn stillness of the star-filled night sky, wondering what it meant. The ancient Greeks saw meaningful patterns in the stars, and named these constellations after their heroes, such as Orion the great hunter and Andromeda the doomed heroine. Others found that those bright jewels of light in the midst of the cosmic blackness evoked an unspeakable sense of longing for something that was as indefinable as it was unattainable.

As a child I knew that feeling as I gazed entranced and uncomprehendingly at the cold and beautiful brilliance of the stars. Looking through my telescope made me restless to explore, a restlessness increased by the seeming difficulty of uncovering the mysteries of the night sky. I was probably only eleven or twelve years old when I resolved to set out on an adventure to discover as much as I could about the universe. I had no idea where this might take me, but I had a deep sense it would be rewarding and satisfying.

So who am I? I was born in the city of Belfast into a medical family in January 1953, the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. My father had been a junior doctor and my mother a nurse at the city’s Royal Victoria Hospital. My mother was born in Lismore, a small Irish town in County Waterford. Its main landmark, Lismore Castle, stands on a steep hill, dominating both the town and the Blackwater valley below it. My grandfather had served in the British Army during the First World War, and had returned to Ireland after being wounded in combat. He married the nurse who tended him at a military dressing station near Dublin, and settled in Lismore. One of my clearest childhood memories is a large and rather beautiful oil painting of Lismore Castle, which hung in my grandparents’ drawing room in Belfast. I had always assumed this was a memento of their early life together; much later, I learned there was more to it than that.

My mother’s family was Protestant and found themselves caught up in the lingering sectarian conflict in Waterford arising from the aftermath of the Irish Civil War of the 1920s. They were given the option of voluntarily leaving their house in Lismore or being burned out. Finding themselves refugees from another of Europe’s now long-forgotten conflicts, they initially found shelter in Dublin, before finally relocating to the mainly Protestant north of Ireland, where they would be safe. I only learned the story of what happened in Lismore from my mother ten years before her death, when she and her brother decided to return and pay a last visit to the Eden from which they had been expelled.

By the time of my birth, my parents had moved to Downpatrick, the ancient and historic county town of County Down, where my father served as the county’s Medical Officer of Health. I was baptised in Down Cathedral, the town’s best-known landmark, famous as the traditional burial place of Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. One of my fondest childhood memories was sitting on a bench in the Cathedral’s grounds on late summer afternoons, looking to the south towards the purple-headed Mountains of Mourne across the lush green patchwork of undulating fields and meadows that C.S. Lewis so aptly called the ‘soft low hills of Down’.

I attended Down High School in Downpatrick, a short walk from the Cathedral. I seemed to have some natural aptitude for reading and mathematics, and found myself excelling at both without the inconvenience of having to work at them. The school’s motto was Floreat Dunum – Absque Labore Nihil (‘May Down flourish! Nothing without effort!’). I conveniently ignored the second element of this motto, which was so clearly contradicted by my own experience.

It didn’t take me long to work out that I was both clever and lazy, so could get away with the minimum of effort and virtually no homework. I was much happier playing with friends, exploring the ‘Mound of Down’ (a megalithic hillfort close to the school), or racing on my bicycle along nearby country lanes. Without really trying, I kept on winning school prizes in English and mathematics. Yet nature seems to balance things out. While I was good at some things, I was useless at others. For a start, I lacked physical coordination, and came to accept that I would never be any good at sport, art or playing music. My only real talent lay in the life of the mind.

When I was ten, our English literature teacher realised that he was going to finish his year’s teaching two weeks early. Rather than allow us to do our homework during his lessons, he told us that he was going to read aloud to us a book he thought we might like – Farmer Giles of Ham. None of us had ever heard of it. (Twenty years later, I became aware that this was an early work of J.R.R. Tolkien.) Mr Archer made himself comfortable on his desk, cleared his throat, and began to read. I – and, I afterwards discovered, most of those present – were entranced by the narrative. I discovered for the first time how my imagination could be taken captive, leading me as a willing prisoner into a world of which I knew nothing – save that I wanted to be part of it, and explore it. Archer ran out of time, so we never discovered how the book ended.

On returning home after that final lesson, I began to explore the family bookshelves. There was no sign of Farmer Giles of Ham, but there were other titles that sounded promising, including The Coral Island, Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. Having devoured them, I looked for more, and stumbled across the detective novels of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. I had no idea that these three writers were leading representatives of the ‘Golden Age’ of British crime fiction during the 1930s; I simply fell in love with the genre, and went on to explore others – most notably, the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Detective fiction allowed me to indulge my emerging love of stories alongside my intuitive desire to try and make sense of things. I was invited to step into the fictional narrative, identifying the clues, and struggling to find their explanation. It was not irrational, yet it was somehow more than rational – almost like the construction of an imaginative vision of what had happened, discerning what lay beneath the surface of the narrative. When you grasped this deeper understanding, the original narrative was seen in a new way. I learned how to make sense of clues which in themselves proved nothing and pointed to many possibilities, but which cumulatively disclosed a wider picture – a single solution, a golden thread that held all the clues together in a deeply satisfying conclusion. I was hooked and began to read such novels and stories voraciously, relishing the different approaches to the genre I discovered.

My eyes were opened in another way about the same time too. I was becoming aware of the beauty and mystery of the natural world around me. During the early 1960s, we spent our annual family holiday in County Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland. I happily explored the shoreline and little pools of saltwater, clutching my copy of The Seashore for Boys and Girls (1954) to help me make sense of what I found. On good days we walked along the sands, taking in the salty smell of sea and seaweed, and watching the advancing lines of waves breaking gently on the beaches of the Silver Strand. (On bad days, we waited inside our car for the rain to stop, drinking endless cups of tea from a large Thermos flask as the windows misted up with condensing steam.)

The country lanes and rivers of County Down provided what Wordsworth so aptly described as ‘fair seed-time’ for my soul, prompting me to love nature and long to know more about it. Our family home in Downpatrick was only a few minutes’ walk from the Quoile Pondage. My schoolfriends and I often played along the banks of the Quoile, seeing who could skim stones the farthest along its surface. Yet as I stooped down on the river’s edge one day to find a suitable pebble, I found my attention being diverted to what was in the water – to the silky green filaments of algae growing on stones beneath the surface. A few days later, I went down to the river’s edge on my own, and collected a small glass jar of water, trying to work out what was in it with a magnifying glass that my father used to peruse his collection of postage stamps of the British Commonwealth.

Shortly afterwards, a great-uncle who had retired as a pathologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast gave me his old brass microscope, which he had bought while he was a medical student in the early 1900s. It was made by Ernst Leitz, a German specialist manufacturer of optical instruments that later achieved fame for its Leica cameras.1 It worked perfectly for my purposes, opening up a new living world invisible to the naked eye.

What fascinated me most, though, was the night sky. When walking home from school events on cold winter’s nights, I was often overwhelmed by the beauty of the starlit heavens above me. I learned the names of the constellations and the brighter stars, and began to read books on astronomy. It seemed so much more interesting than the rather dull science I was being taught at school.

Encouraged by my success with my great-uncle’s microscope, I made a small telescope out of some old camera lenses, and was astonished at the rich vistas even this crude instrument made possible. My parents bought me a proper telescope shortly afterwards, allowing me to observe the moons of Jupiter, the mountains of the moon, and the faint fuzzy patches of light that I later learned were galaxies far beyond our own. I soon realised the limits placed on my own unaided vision. I saw darkly; the telescope enabled me to see more clearly. The night sky was far richer and more beautiful than I had ever thought possible. It was like discovering a new world, one that had always been present, but that I had until this point lacked the necessary clarity of vision to see.

Yet I was becoming conscious of a massive disparity between my growing technical and factual knowledge of astronomy and the sense of wonder or awe that I experienced in beholding the solemn stillness of the starlit canopy above me. I mentioned this to one of my English teachers at school. ‘That’s why we need poetry!’, he declared, adding that science wasn’t any good at dealing with feelings or beauty. He did not persuade me that science was wrong; he did, however, make me open to the possibility that it was incomplete, failing to address something important, deep and significant within human nature.

I knew – or at least thought I knew – what he was getting at. It was astonishing that such a complex universe existed; yet it seemed equally astonishing – and very special – that I was here to observe it, to experience such a sense of wonder at its beauty and intricacy, and to think about what it all meant. But how could I weave such a strongly subjective, even emotional, response to nature into the detached and objective accounts of science that I was learning to value? In the end, I set such thoughts to one side. Perhaps they were a distraction, getting in the way of more important things.

The teaching staff at Down High School certainly thought so, and began to express concern that I was not focusing enough on my coursework. My performance in school examinations was not what it had been in the past. It was obvious to the school that I was too easily distracted and was not putting in the hours of dedicated study at home that would ensure a strong examination performance, and hence a place at university. My parents agreed with this judgement, while feeling it was only part of the picture. They began to suspect – rightly – that I was intellectually understimulated. My explorations in astronomy were not a symptom of an inability to concentrate on my coursework, but rather an indication of a desire to go into things more deeply than the limited resources available at Down High School allowed. It was a fine educational establishment, but could not offer the specialist teaching in the natural sciences that I craved. I needed a big change.

In the end, it was my mother who worked out a solution. She had been educated at the Methodist College, Belfast – a grammar school known to my mother and just about everyone else as ‘Methody’. The school – one of Ireland’s largest – had a strong reputation in teaching the natural sciences. It accepted a small number of students as boarders, living on the school premises during term, although they were free to go home at weekends. Ernest Walton, Ireland’s only Nobel Laureate at that time, had studied science at Methody as a boarder from 1915 to 1922, and gone on to share the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951 for splitting the atom. In 1961 Stanley Worrall was appointed Headmaster, and presided over a significant expansion of the school’s teaching facilities in the natural sciences. Methody was the obvious choice for someone like me who loved the sciences. It would allow me to specialise in chemistry, physics and biology as individual subjects.

My mother’s solution, however, had two components: the first was designed to appeal to my love of science; the second was designed to break my crystallising habits of academic idleness before they overwhelmed me. Rather than travelling by bus daily between Downpatrick and south Belfast, I would be a boarder at Methody – and thus be required to do two hours supervised study every weekday evening during school term. This, my mother firmly believed, would help me overcome my complete lack of intellectual discipline.

My father was very happy with this possibility. Methody was across the street from Queen’s University Belfast, where he had studied medicine in the 1940s. It would, he remarked, make my own move to Queen’s much easier when the time came. Happily, however, I also had a say in this decision. I visited the school with my parents and was shown around its dormitories and science laboratories. As I walked around, meeting students and exploring the school’s buildings, I had a curious sense of standing on a threshold, having to make a decision that would shape the rest of my life. What my mother was proposing would give me more independence, force me to work harder, and allow me to immerse myself in the academic fields I had come to love. I struggled to find a downside.

‘So what do you think?’, my mother asked me as we drove home aft...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Imprint Page
• How to Use this eBook
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One - A Restless Freethinker: Discovering a New World
• 1 A Curious Mind
• 2 Science as Sense-Making
• 3 A Sceptical Chemist
• 4 Dreaming of Oxford
• 5 A Crisis of Faith
• 6 Discovering God
• Part Two - An Unexpected Conversion: Exploring a Strange New World
• 7 Shipwrecked on an Island of Faith
• 8 A Travelling Companion: C.S. Lewis
• 9 The First Mountain: Science
• 10 The Second Mountain: Theology
• 11 Wandering: Searching for a Calling
• 12 Oxford: Finding a Calling
• 13 The Two Peaks: The View from the Top
• Part Three - Old Questions, New Insights: Living on the Island of Faith
• 14 On Reconsidering What Once Seemed Obvious
• 15 Seeing Reality: Christianity as a ‘Big Picture’
• 16 Revisiting Plato’s Cave: On Darkness, Shadows and Light
• 17 Longing for Certainty: Proof, Faith and Doubt
• 18 Delusion: Faith as Wish-Fulfilment?
• 19 Maps of Reality: Coping with the Complexity of Our World
• 20 Science and Faith: Conflicting or Enriching?
• 21 The Irrationality of Faith? The Doctrine of the Trinity
• 22 Through a Glass Darkly: Journeying through Doubt
• 23 A Loose Ending
• Some Notes on My Books
• Notes
• Endmatter page 1