The Great Mystery

Science, God and the Human Quest for Meaning

Alister E McGrath

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473634343
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

There is currently huge interest in the question of human nature and identity, and what the human future might look like. Who are we? Why are we here? What is our future? Are we alone? And what can religion bring, alongside biology and anthropology, to these important and exciting questions? The Great Mystery focuses on this fascinating field of study. Alister McGrath, bestselling author and Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, explores the question of human nature from both scientific and religious perspectives, and weaves together the results to open up and explore some of the deepest and most important questions about who we are, why we matter, and what our future might be. A follow-up to his critically acclaimed Inventing the Universe, in The Great Mystery Alister McGrath once again brings together science with religion to yield an enriched vision of reality, along with rigorous and thoroughly up-to-date scholarship and intellectual accessibility.

Part One

Wondering about Ourselves

1

Born to Wonder:
Asking Questions; Hoping for Answers

‘What a little vessel of strangeness we are, sailing through this muffled silence through the autumn dark.’1

John Banville

Life is a gift. We never asked to be born. Yet here we are, living in this strange world of space and time, trying to work out what it’s all about before the darkness closes in and extinguishes us. We are adrift on a misty grey sea of ignorance, seeking a sun-kissed island of certainty, on which we might hope to find clear answers to our deepest and most poignant questions. What is the point of life? Why are we here? And what is it about us that makes us want to ask these questions?

This book reflects on what it means to be a human being, at a time when many are wondering whether we can ever sort out the muddle and chaos of our world. If human beings are so wonderful, why is the world such a mess? Why do we use wonderful things for such nasty purposes? Why are we so resistant to facing up to uncomfortable truths about ourselves? These are hardly new questions. They bubble up, time and time again – especially when events challenge our easy-going assumptions about our own future, or that of the world.

During the ‘Roaring Twenties’, most Americans were happy to buy into the genial optimism of the age. Like the stock market, the world seemed to be heading upwards. Then the bubble burst. The Wall Street crash triggered a financial crisis in Germany, which gave Adolf Hitler the political impetus he needed to get elected. By 1934, Germany had turned Nazi. The unwelcome and unexpected rise of Fascism triggered unease in many quarters. Perhaps most importantly, it led to an overdue re-examination of some complacent settled assumptions about human goodness and rationality.2

Reinhold Niebuhr – a theologian noted for his criticism of the lazy and unthinking optimism of so much Western thinking – spoke of a pervasive sense of cultural unease and disenchantment in 1942, as the world collapsed into global war. ‘We have lived through such centuries of hope, and we are now in such a period of disillusionment.’3 Yet after an all-too-short period following the Second World War during which we dared to hope for a future that lived up to our past, that world-weariness is on the rise again.

So is it time to look at ourselves again, holding up a mirror so that we can see ourselves as we really are, rather than as we like to think we are? As I grew up in the 1960s, I was conscious of a pervasive if understated sense of optimism that now seems to have ebbed away, like a receding tide. Back in the 1960s, culturally defining and lingering memories of the Second World War helped to confirm the belief that things were getting better, and the hope that they would keep on getting better. Yet that spirit of hope now seems to have faded in the face of economic crashes and political crises, the rise of global terrorism, and the growing threat of climate change. Paradise seems to have been postponed – yet again. Perhaps, as Milan Kundera suggested, our longing for paradise is really an unattainable desire to escape from the limiting condition of being human.4

A time of crisis and disenchantment calls out for a fundamental rethinking of who we are, rather than collapsing into cynicism and despair. That’s what this book tries to do. It draws on both religion and science – two of the richest and most complex elements of modern culture – to explore human nature, especially our quest for meaning in life. In particular, it tries to address what is perhaps the most unsettling question of all, routinely ignored by so many smug and complacent social commentators: what is wrong with us? No single human discipline or research tradition is good enough to give the rich, textured and complicated answer that we need if we are to confront our weaknesses and shape our future, both individually and collectively. But we have to confront them, and work out where we go from here. It’s all about understanding ourselves, and this mysterious gift of life that has been entrusted to us.

The Quest for Meaning

So what is life about? As far as we know, we’re the only species on earth that asks this question, and dares to hope that we might find an answer. It seems that we are born to wonder, not merely to exist.5 To wonder is to reflect, to turn over in our minds what is known, to expand our imaginative capacity and to ask what greater truth and beauty might lie behind our world or beyond our settled horizons of vision. We want to know why things take their present forms, and whether they point to something deeper.

The question of the meaning of life used to be seen as making philosophy intensely relevant to life.6 Yet as the philosopher Susan Wolf noted recently, it is hardly ever asked in philosophical circles nowadays – and then only by naïve young students, whose lack of sophistication causes professional philosophers to cringe with embarrassment.7 Many now wonder whether academic philosophy has lost touch with the questions that really matter to people, and which brought philosophy into being in the first place. That was the view of Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), in his widely read classic Walden (1854). ‘There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.’8

Sadly, Thoreau’s words will probably ring true for all too many readers today. Philosophy seems to have become the study of other philosophers, an exercise in academic introspection and professional self-reference rather than an engagement with the deepest questions of life – questions that are now often dismissed as intellectually incoherent or naïve, because they are so difficult to answer. Yet perhaps Milan Kundera needs to be heeded when he remarked that ‘it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence’.9 Such questions probe our limits, challenging us to take intellectual risks in transgressing the boundaries of a cold rationalism.

Yet while Wolf ruefully notes that discussion of whether life has any meaning now seems to have been ‘banished from philosophy’, it most certainly has not been marginalised in the everyday lives of ordinary people, who seek meaning, value and purpose in order to make sense of their lives, and meaningfully inhabit our strange and puzzling world. Professional philosophy has not discredited the validity of trying to find meaning in life; it has just embargoed it.10

Happily, there is no shortage of others anxious to engage with this ultimate question, and take it seriously. Psychology – an empirical research discipline which is far more attentive to human needs and concerns than philosophy now seems to be – has highlighted how important the question of meaning is to our wellbeing.11 Human beings seem to yearn for a ‘big picture’ which helps us feel that we are part of something greater than ourselves.12 That’s just the way we function as human beings.

To explore this further, let’s see how the human quest for meaning in life links up with another fundamental human experience – a sense of wonder at the beauty of our world.

Wonder and the Meaning of Life

From time to time, we find ourselves overwhelmed by a sense of awe or mystery, often when confronted with the beauty or majesty of nature, which seems for a moment to intimate a grander vision of reality, perhaps lying beyond the horizons of our experience. Many experience a sense of wonder and joy at the fact that there is anything at all; others when they are struck by the full significance of the astonishing fact that we are alive, and able to behold this strange world in which we find ourselves. It is as if, for only a moment, a veil is removed and we catch a half-glimpsed sight of a promised land, waiting to be mapped and explored.

G.K. Chesterton spoke of the ‘object of the artistic and spiritual life’ being to ‘dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder’.13 Captured by this vision, we long to know more.14 It can become a gateway to science, art, literature and religion15 – in short, to everything that gives value and meaning to human life. A sense that there is indeed some such big picture becomes a driving force for creative exploration, in whose slipstream arise the great human quests for knowledge and wisdom.16

We cannot overlook the power of this sense of wonder to excite the poetic imagination, which throws down the gauntlet to what often turn out to be narrowly dogmatic and excessively cerebral accounts of our world, inviting us to consider that there is more to reality than an impoverished rationalist philosophy might allow.17 Nor can we fail to recognise the capacity of a sense of ‘rapturous amazement’ (Albert Einstein) to motivate and empower the natural sciences. Richard Dawkins and I disagree about many questions in life, but we both know and delight in the beauty and vastness of the world around us.18 Yet the immensity of our universe conquers our minds, and forces us to engage with the universe on its own terms. Why? Because it is too vast for the ‘all too limited human mind’ (Dawkins) to take it in fully.19

As Aristotle pointed out more than two thousand years ago, our experience of wonder serves as an invitation to set out on a journey of discovery of our world, in which our mental horizons are expanded and our eyes opened.20 The natural sciences are ultimately an act of intellectual homage to our universe, as we try to grasp its mysteries with the tools we have at our disposal. Yet all too soon we find that the conceptual systems we forge as intermediaries for this act of comprehension strain to cope with these overwhelming realities, like old wineskins struggling to cope with new wine. Our sense of wonder expresses both a delight in the grandeur and glory of our universe, and a recognition of the inadequacy of our capacity to take it in fully. As we shall see, science and religion, in their different ways, invite us to raise our eyes from the world of what we see around us, and try to imagine a deeper vision of reality which underlies and explains what we observe.21

How Does Science Fit Into This?

I opened this chapter with a quote from the Irish writer John Banville, whose early writings show a clear appreciation of the ‘rage for order’ that underlies the human quest for meaning. Banville notes how scientists such as Copernicus and Kepler sought to impose order on the world, and then tried to live in accordance with the framework of meaning they believed it disclosed. ‘I saw a certain kind of pathetic beauty in their obsessive search for a way to be in the world, in their existentialist search for something that would be authentic.’22

Yet the plausibility of that vision faded in the twentieth century, confronted with the fragility and provisionality of human knowl...