Alister McGrath: Science and Faith Were Never at War (The Ache, Pt. 2)

Lee C. Camp (0:00)

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Now, on to the show. I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

Alister McGrath (0:28)

Interestingly, as I looked at the stars, I had this deep feeling that there's more to the world than what we're seeing. Almost a sense there's something really, really big here and we're only seeing part of it.

Lee C. Camp (0:41)

That's a 16-year-old in Belfast in his back garden with a telescope he bought himself. He is also at the time an atheist and about to become a considerably more committed one. This is part two of our three-part series we're calling The Ache, an exploration of a longing that modernity has not quite been able to cure. We began last week with a line from the German sociologist Max Weber written a century ago. The fate of our times, he said, is characterized by rationalization, by intellectualization, and above all, by the disenchantment of the world, the de-magicking of it. The world measured, explained, put to use, yet emptied of meaning. And Weber had a second phrase for the place that that leaves us, the iron cage.

Last week, Bell Tyndall Riley explored with us what the ache looks like in contemporary culture. Witchcraft on TikTok, Tarot, and the mainstream, a generation reaching for something the disenchanted world has not provided. Reaching, as Bell put it, in whatever direction is nearest.

Today's guest in his youth was not really reaching for anything. He was, by his own account, an aggressive atheist. The ache nonetheless happened to him, too.

Alister McGrath (2:08)

So if you like, I was conscious of what you might call being in a sort of liminal situation on the boundary between the ordinary and something really very special. And that thought never went away.

Lee C. Camp (2:21)

Alister McGrath grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, watched violence done in the name of God, and drew the conclusion that seemed obvious. Get rid of religion and you get rid of religious violence. He had a second reason as well. He was a young scientist and he had been told that science and religion were at war. He went to Oxford to read chemistry, partly for the chemistry, partly because it was a long way from Belfast. He's been there now more or less ever since. He holds three Oxford doctorates in molecular biophysics, in theology, in intellectual history, and is now an emeritus professor of science and religion at Oxford. Which matters given where we recorded this. Oxford is a city that's been arguing about science and religion in public and sometimes rather loudly for a century and a half. It's where this series began, in a manor house north of town, and it's where our guest has spent nearly the whole of his adult life on both sides of the argument.

We put to him the question we're putting to all three guests. If the world really has been disenchanted, if the magic has been drained out of it, is there anywhere to go from here, and what would it cost to get there?

Next week, we take the question to the Isle of Sky, to neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist, who thinks the trouble runs deeper than argument, down into the structure of attention itself. But today, Oxford and Alister McGrath.

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