Integral to humanity

From a review of Alister McGrath's Why We Believe:

His latest book, Why We Believe, provides McGrath with another opportunity to defend belief in the face of those who deride it as at best irrational and weird and at worst, dangerous. It coincides with the 1,700th anniversary of the Christian Nicene Creed, first adopted by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and still used today as a profession of faith by those with official positions in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran Churches.

But as McGrath rightly says of a creed – a word taken from the Latin credo, “I believe” – it might be a description of what a Christian believes, but it’s a limited statement. To truly understand belief, he argues, we need to see it lived. As he reminds his readers, CS Lewis, one of the 20th century’s most high-profile atheists-turned-Christians, as well as the creator of Narnia, understood that “the Christian narrative is primary; Christian creeds are secondary… creeds cannot convey either [Christianity’s] imaginative appeal or its subjective impact.”

McGrath’s basic premise is that belief, rather than being outmoded and unscientific superstition, is integral to being human. In a rewriting of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, he argues that homo sapiens needs to make sense of life, not merely survive it. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson would put it, we are meaning-seeking creatures. Beliefs, whether humanist, or Christian, or that of another religion, shape the way we understand and experience the world.

The most interesting issue about faith and its understanding of human nature, after all, is how it keeps bubbling up, not only in people’s everyday lives but in public discourse. While humanists, as McGrath points out, believe in the inherent goodness of people, a Christian such as Miss Marple understands the simultaneous capacity for its opposite. Only this autumn, forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead reached for Christian theology in her Reith Lectures to help explain evil. It was, she argued, an absence of good, and its antidote to evil was therefore to practise goodness – in other words, the development of virtue that theologians and philosophers from Aquinas onwards have been advocating.

McGrath uses this book to take on Dawkins et al once more: he complains that the New Atheists “degraded and rationalised faith”, and treated it as though it were “simply a form of data”. But he also gives an account of belief’s many facets, from the search for a big picture to the difference it makes to navigating a difficult world. He perceptively comments on how suffering, once seen as a connection between Christians and Christ, is now often perceived as a problem by Christian thinkers drawn into trying to rationalise pain. .... (more)

Catherine Pepinster, "Atheists, you don’t even understand what ‘belief’ is," The Telegraph, Jan. 9, 2025.