The Rationality of Faith:

How does Christianity make sense of things?

Alister E. McGrath

Oxford University

A plenary lecture given at the meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society in San Antonio,
Texas, on 16 November 2016 by Alister McGrath, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and
Religion at Oxford University. An edited version of this lecture has now been published: Alister
E. McGrath, The Rationality of Faith: How Does Christianity Make Sense of Things?
Philosophia Christi 18, no. 2 (2016): 395-408.

It is a very great pleasure and privilege to be able to speak to the annual meeting
of the Evangelical Philosophical Society here in San Antonio. It gives me the
opportunity to thank you for all that you are doing to commend and explore the
rationality of faith. I speak to you as a lapsed atheist someone who once
believed that Christianity was utterly and irredeemably irrational, and that
atheism held an intellectual monopoly on rationality.

Our culture prizes rationality even if it does not fully understand what it means
by this complex and multifaceted notion. Let me invite you to listen to some wise
words from the Oxford writer Austin Farrer, reflecting on the significance of C. S.
Lewis as an apologist.1

Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief.
What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows
the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not
create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

1
Austin Farrer, The Christian Apologist. In Light on C.S. Lewis, edited by Jocelyn Gibb, 23-43. London: Geoffrey
Bles, 1965; quote at p. 26.

1
The cultural debate about the rationality of faith is driven by deep rhetorical
agendas. For the writers of the New Atheism, it is essential to establish a cultural
consensus that religious belief is irrational because if that is indeed so, the
debate is effectively over. Yet the New Atheism applies criteria of rationality to
religion which it signally fails to apply to its own views. It judges others by
standards which it refuses to acknowledge as normative for itself. In its more
extreme moments of which there are plenty! the New Atheism seems to
suggest that we can only believe what can be proved, totally ignoring the
question of warranted or motivated belief.

Christopher Hitchens, for example, boldly declares that New Atheists such as
himself do not hold any beliefs, in that they only accept what can be proved to be
right. Our belief is not a belief.2 Yet Hitchenss anti-theism actually rests on a
raft of moral values (such as religion is evil or God is not good) which he is
unable to demonstrate by reason. Hitchens appears merely to assume that his
moral values are shared by his sympathetic readers, who are unlikely to ask
awkward critical questions about their origins, foundations or reliability. The New
Atheism seems to be unable or unwilling to apply the criteria by which they
evaluate the beliefs of others to their own ideas.

For New Atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens,
rational human beings just think, whereas religious people think in the light of
their religious commitments and so are locked inside a religious world view that
is impervious to criticism. The New Atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling echoes this
concern, arguing that theological reasoning was unacceptable to a rational person
because it was undertaken within the premises and parameters of a system.3
Yet most of us would argue that all human thinking is elaborated within the
premises and parameters of some system or other, including mathematics and
logic. Observation and interpretation intertwine in an inescapable circularity. We
see this in science: a theory interprets experiments; yet experiments confirm or
disconfirm a theory. Grayling is a wonderful witness to a bygone vision of

2
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007, 5.
3
A. C. Grayling, The God Argument. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 66.

2
rationality that was plausible in the eighteenth century but seems hopelessly out
of place today.

The New Atheism seems to think that human beings can unproblematically find
their inevitable way to the luminous certainties of truth, including the non-
existence of God. Yet as I grow older myself, I have become increasingly
persuaded of the fragility of our knowledge of ourselves and our world, and have
come to respect those philosophers who acknowledge the limits of human
knowledge. I especially value John Lockes caution at this point. As many of you
know, after surveying the significant problems we confront in trying to
understand our world, he remarked: From all which it is easy to perceive what a
darkness we are involved in, how little it is of Being, and the things that are, that
we are capable to know.4

Lockes point was well taken by his contemporaries. Think, for example, of
Alexander Popes Essay on Man (1733-4), which locates human life and thought
within with a larger cosmic order, whose rationality is not always transparent to
its observers. We are, Pope tells us, born but to die, and reasning but to err,
trapped in an unsettling shadowy world suspended delicately between scepticism
and certainty.5 Popes famous declaration that humanity should study itself, not
God, does not arise from hostility towards religion, or even disinterest in
theology. Popes point is that the fundamental human inability to penetrate the
divine wisdom forces us to focus on ourselves instead.6
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.

I stopped being an atheist while I was a student at Oxford University, partly

because of my growing realization of the intellectual over-ambition of the forms
of atheism I had earlier espoused, but also as I came to realize that Christianity
offered a way of making sense of the world I observed around me and
experienced within me. Although I had not come across this quotation from C. S.

4
John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV.iii.29.
5
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, II.17-18.
6
Pope, Essay on Man, II.1-2.

3
Lewis at that time, it seems to me to summarise its intellectual virtues succinctly
and elegantly: I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not
only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.7 Christianity offered
me a conceptual framework that brought my world into focus. Mine was an
intellectual conversion, lacking any emotional or affective dimension.

Yet it was not so much that this or that individual aspect of Christianity seemed of
especial importance to me; it was its overall vision, rather than its constituent
parts, that lay at the heart of its appeal. As Quine suggested some time ago in his
Two Dogmas of Empiricism, what really matters is the ability of a theory as a
whole to make sense of the world. Our beliefs are linked in an interconnected
web that relates to sensory experience at its boundaries, not at its core. The only
valid test of a belief, Quine argued, is thus whether it fits into a web of connected
beliefs that accords with our experience on the whole.8

G. K. Chesterton made much the same point in his famous essay The Return of
the Angels, when he pointed out that it was not any individual aspect of
Christianity that was persuasive, but the overall big picture of reality that it
offered. After his initial agnosticism, Chesterton found himself returning to
Christianity because it offered an intelligible picture of the world. 9

Numbers of us have returned to this belief; and we have returned to it, not
because of this argument or that argument, but because the theory, when
it is adopted, works out everywhere. . . We put on the theory, like a magic
hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass.

Chestertons argument is that it is the Christian vision of reality as a whole

rather than any of its individual components that proves compelling. Individual
observations of nature do not prove Christianity to be true; rather, Christianity
validates itself by its ability to make sense of those observations. The
phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon.

7
C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry? In C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection. London: Collins, 2000, 1-21; quote at p. 21.
88
W. V. O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, in From a Logical Point of View. 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1951, pp. 2046.
9
G. K. Chesterton, The Return of the Angels. Daily News, 14 March, 1903.

4
My initial studies at Oxford University were in the natural sciences. I began with
an undergraduate degree in chemistry, focussing on quantum theory, and then
did doctoral research in the biological sciences. So perhaps it is not surprising that
I tend to approach the question of the rationality of our world with the kind of
inductive (or even abductive) approaches so often used by natural scientists. Like
the great English empirical philosopher William Whewell, I came to appreciate the
value of what he termed colligation the mental operation of bringing together
a number of empirical observations by superinducing upon them a way of
thinking which allowed them to be seen as interconnected. 10

Where Aristotle merely encouraged his readers to accumulate observations about

the natural world, Whewell pointed to the need to discern what patterns or
greater picture are intimated by those observations. Francis Bacon had earlier
used an analogy which is relevant to our reflections. Empirical philosophers are
like ants they simply accumulate observations. Rationalists resemble spiders,
who make cobwebs out of their own substance. Yet the true natural philosopher
is like a bee, which gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the
field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.11 For Bacon,
observations had to be digested and transformed within the human mind.

As a younger man, I found that the chief intellectual virtue of Christianity then
seemed to be that it offered a coherent and rationally motivated account of the
world, disclosing a hidden web of meaning and connectedness behind the
ephemeral and seemingly incoherent world that we experience. No matter how
fragmented our world of experience may seem, there is a half-glimpsed bigger
picture that holds things together, its threads connecting together in a web of
meaning what might otherwise seem incoherent and pointless. What once might

10
William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History. 2nd edn. 2 vols. London:
John W. Parker, 1847, vol. 2, 46.
11
Francis Bacon, Aphorism 95 from The New Organon, or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature
(1620). For a critique of this approach from the perspective of the social sciences, see Martin Hollis, The Philosophy
of Social Science: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 66-93.

5
have seemed to be a muddle and jumble comes to be seen as an interconnected
and meaningful vision of reality. 12

So how do we discover the rationality of faith? How do we come to grasp the

deep innate capacity of the Christian faith to illuminate our world and experience,
enabling us to find our way and make sense of things? Is this something that we
can attain by our own natural capacities? Or is it something that needs to be
shown to us? Here, we move into familiar territory, opening up the great
questions of the epistemic impact of sin, the capacity of divine grace to illuminate
our minds, and the place of argument in Christian apologetics. Let me try and
open up some of these questions.

Many argue that we can give intellectually persuasive and existentially compelling
reasons for believing in God. I agree. In this case, the intellectual trajectory is
from our world of experience and observation to belief in God. Yet in this lecture,
I want to explore an alternative trajectory from belief in God to our world of
observation and experience. Thats the approach we find in Chesterton himself,
who invites us to step into the Christian mindset, and judge the quality of its
intellectual rendering of reality. Chesterton realized that testing a theory meant
checking it out against observation. The best way to see if a coat fits a man is not
to measure both of them, but to try it on. 13

It is a way of thinking that is characteristic of the natural sciences, which have

always emphasised their rational credentials. The rationality of our world is not
something that is predetermined by pure reason, but is something that is to be
discovered by engaging with our world. The fundamental question a scientist is
going to ask is not Is this reasonable? but What are the reasons for thinking
this is true? We cant lay down in advance what rationality is characteristic of
the universe; we have to find out by letting the universe tell us, or figuring out
ways of uncovering it. Scientific rationality is thus best thought of as something
that is discovered, rather than predetermined or predicted. In my first year
studying chemistry at Oxford, I specialized in quantum theory, and soon realized
12
This is an emphasis found particularly within unificationist accounts of explanation: see, for example, Thomas
Bartelborth, Explanatory Unification. Synthese 130 (2002): 91-108.
13
Chesterton, The Return of the Angels.

6
that I had to learn to conform my own thinking to the nature of the universe,
rather than tell the universe what form it should take, based on what seemed to
me to be reasonable.

Now let me make it clear that I do not believe that Christianity is primarily about
making sense of our world. Jesus Christ is proclaimed as the savior of humanity,
rather than as someone who merely enlightens us. Yet there is, in my mind, no
doubt that part of this process of evangelical transformation is the renewing and
transforming of our minds. The New Testament uses the technical term metanoia
to refer to a process of spiritual and intellectual reorientation and realignment, in
which the believer comes to share in the mind of Christ. 14

The notion of metanoia as remorse or regret is well attested in the classical

world; however, the term acquires new semantic associations in the New
Testament, which understands the notion as a mental transformation, including
the notion of repentance but extending beyond it. Paul thus speaks of the need
for believers to be transformed by the renewal of [their] minds, rather than
being conformed to the world. (Romans 12:2). A wide range of images are
deployed to describe this fundamental change in the way in which we see things:
our eyes are opened, scales fall away, and a veil is removed (Acts 9:9-19; 2
Corinthians 3:13-16).15 Christianity mandates an imaginative realignment through
which the world is seen as if with new eyes, a transformation that is brought
about by grace, not by human wisdom or achievement.16

So how we might affirm the reasonableness of faith? I hope that you will forgive
me for choosing what may seem to be an over-familiar example the argument
from desire that we find in various Christian writers, including Pascal and C. S.
Lewis. I shall consider Lewiss approach, as set out in Mere Christianity, and focus

14
Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy: The Importance of Repentance and the Centrality of
Grace. In Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, edited by Charles L. Griswold and David Konstan,
195-215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
15
Stephen K. Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin: A Historical and Contemporary Exploration of How Sin Affects Our
Thinking. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000, 10-12.
16
For a good account of this, see Ramelli, Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy.

7
on the intellectual direction of his line of reasoning.17 Lewiss starting point lies in
the domain of human experience: many long for something, only to find their
hopes dashed and frustrated when they attain it. There was something we
grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. 18
So what does this experience mean? And to what, if anything, does it point?

Lewiss argument is often presented in the following terms:

Every natural or innate desire in us corresponds to a real object that can

satisfy the desire.

There exists a desire within us that nothing created or finite can satisfy.

There thus exists something beyond the realms of the created and finite
which can satisfy this desire.

I have no doubt that there is merit to this argument; my concern is that it is not
Lewiss argument, which is rather framed using what Lewis himself termed
supposals. Suppose there is a God who created us to relate to him, as
Christianity affirms to be the case.19 This provides an intellectual framework
which explains why only God is able to fulfil the deepest longings of humanity, so
that we will never be satisfied by anything that is created or finite. Does not this
framework fit in well with what we actually experience of reality? And is not this
resonance of supposal and observation indicative of the truth of the supposal?

In an unpublished autobiographical document of 1930, Lewis made the following

remark: I am an empirical theist. I arrived at God by induction. Lewis is clearly
alluding to the scientific, or at least empirical, basis of his faith. It is helpful here to
note the parallels with two related modes of thinking within the philosophy of
science which consider how science tries to work out how to make sense of

17
Alister E. McGrath, Arrows of Joy: Lewiss Argument from Desire. In The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis, 105-
28. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
18
C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity. London: HarperCollins, 2002, 135.
19
For this idea of a supposal, see Lewiss letters to Mrs. Hook, 29 December 1958; The Collected Letters of C. S.
Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper. 3 vols. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2004-6, vol. 3, 1004-5; and to Sophia Storr, 24
December 1959; Letters, vol. 3, 1113-14. Supposing there was a world like Narnia, and supposing, like ours, it
needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Redemption Christ would have there (1113).

8
things, and offer frameworks of evaluation by which rival explanations might be
compared.

The first of these, developed by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839-
1914), is generally known as abductive reasoning.20 Abduction is the process by
which we observe certain things, and work out what intellectual framework might
make sense of them. As Peirce understands the approach, abduction is basically a
kind of search strategy which leads us to generate some promising explanatory
conjecture which is then subject to further test.21 The characteristic trajectory of
this approach could be set out as follows. 22

1. We observe phenomena A and B.

2. But if C were true, then A and B would follow as a matter of course.

3. Hence, there is reason to suspect that C is true.

This naturally raises the question of how we generate C in other words, how we
come to propose a certain intellectual framework that might accommodate A and
B. Pierce himself is quite clear that there are multiple possibilities here including
those which he categorizes in terms of inspiration and imagination. There are
multiple logics of discovery; nevertheless, they are all to be subjected to a logic of
verification, in which any proposed framework of interpretation is checked out
against the observable facts. Theories are not to be judged by how they are
devised, but by their capacity to accommodate observation and experience.

We can easily use this approach to frame Lewiss argument from desire in Mere
Christianity, leading up to his conclusion that, if I find in myself a desire which no

20
See Lorenzo Magnani, Abduction, Reason, and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation. New York:
Plenum Publishers, 2001; Sami Paavola, Peircean Abduction: Instinct, or Inference? Semiotica 153 (2005): 131-
54. Pierces analysis of what he terms the fixation of belief is relevant here: Christopher Hookway, Truth,
Rationality, and Pragmaticsm: Themes from Peirce. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, 21-43.
21
Gerhard Schurz, Patterns of Abduction. Synthese, 164, no. 2 (2008): 201-234, especially 205.
22
Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1960, vol. 5, 189.

9
experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was
made for another world.23

1. We experience a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy.

2. Suppose that the Christian way of thinking is right; if this is so, these
resonances or harmonies with experience would be expected.

3. Therefore there are further grounds for holding that Christianity is true.

While some misread Lewiss approach as a deductive argument for the existence
of God,24 it is actually an abductive or inferential argument, primarily for the
existence of Heaven or another world, and secondarily for the existence of God.

The second approach I want to consider here is now generally known as

inference to the best explanation.25 This approach recognizes that multiple
explanations might be offered for a set of observations, and sets out to identify
criteria by which the best such explanation might be identified.26 There is a clear
verbal resonance with this approach in Lewiss statements in Mere Christianity
about how desire is to be explained. Let me repeat Lewiss conclusion: If I find
in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable
explanation is that I was made for another world.27 Lewis makes it clear that this
is not about proving anything; it is about trying to identify which, of several
possible explanations, is the best, or the most probable. Lewis sets out three
possible explanations of our experience of desire, and indicates which he
considers to be the best.

Lewis notes two explanations that might be offered of our sense of emptiness and
lack of fulfilment. This frustration might arise from looking for its true object in
23
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 136-7.
24
See the somewhat misleading and superficial analysis of this approach in John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the
Search for Rational Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985, 8-31.
25
Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004.
26
Although inference to the best explanation is sometimes confused with Pierces concept of abduction, they
should be seen as conceptually divergent: Gerhard Minnameier, Peirce-Suit of Truth: Why Inference to the Best
Explanation and Abduction Ought Not to Be Confused. Erkenntnis 60, no. 1 (2004): 75- 105; Daniel Campos, On
the Distinction Between Peirces Abduction and Liptons Inference to the Best Explanation. Synthese 180 (2011):
419-442.
27
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 136-7.

10
the wrong place; or it might be that there is no true object to be found. If this
second explanation is true, then since further searching will only result in
repeated disappointment, suggesting that there is no point in trying to find
anything better than or beyond the present world. Lewis, however, suggests that
there is a third approach, which recognizes that these earthly longings are only a
kind of copy, or echo, or mirage of our true homeland. Since this overwhelming
desire cannot be fulfilled through anything in the present world, this suggests that
its ultimate object lies beyond the present world. For Lewis, this third is the most
probable explanation (although he does not clarify the criteria by which this
probabilistic judgement might be made).

Lewis clearly sees his analysis of the human experience of desire as an expression
of the rationality of faith. Conceding that other explanations of this experience
are indeed possible, he argues that the Christian explanation is the best of these
explanations.

Earlier, I noted the limits placed upon the human capacity to understand, which
can be framed both in terms of the natural limits placed on human intellectual
capacities, and the debilitating impact of sin. So what are the implications of such
limits for our reflections on the rationality of faith?

Let me draw on my own experience here. I began to love science about the age of
eight and eagerly tried to absorb scientific works that I now realize were far too
advanced for me. At the age of thirteen, I finally plucked up the courage to ask
one of my teachers to explain Einsteins theory of relativity. He loaned me one of
his books to read, and a week later we met for half an hour to talk about it. Ill
never forget how the conversation ended. Youre not ready for this just yet. Your
brain needs to grow before youll be able to take it in. Well talk again in five
years time. My mind needed to expand before I could make sense of Einstein.
Its no accident that some of the ancient Greek philosophers talk about education
as psychagogia an enlargement of the soul. The vastness of the reality we
inhabit simply cannot be grasped in anything other than a partial and limited
manner by the human mind.

11
The human mind struggles to take in the vastness of our universe. The great
physicist Werner Heisenberg argued that scientific thinking always hovers over a
bottomless depth, given the limits placed on human understanding. 28 We are
confronted with the impenetrable darkness of the universe, and our difficulties
as we struggle to find a language adequate to engage and represent this. 29 Our
universe is a mystery something with so many impenetrable and
uncomprehended dimensions that our minds simply cannot take it in.

Similarly, our minds struggle to even begin to cope with the immensity and
majesty of God. Christian theology has long recognized that it is impossible for us
to represent or describe God adequately using human language. The sheer
vastness of God causes human images and words to falter, if not break down
completely, as they try to depict God fully and faithfully. Thats why the
theological notion of mystery is so important. A mystery is not something that is
contradicted by reason. Rather, it is something that exceeds reasons capacity to
discern and describe thus transcending, rather than contradicting, reason.

To speak of some aspect of nature or God as a mystery is not to attempt to shut

down the reflective process, but to stimulate it, by opening the mind to
intellectual vistas that are simply too deep and broad to be fully apprehended by
our limited human vision. We can only cope with such a mystery either by filtering
out what little we can grasp, and hope that the rest is unimportant; or by
reducing it to what our minds can accommodate and thus reduce it to the
rationally manageable. Both strategies distort, disfigure and mislead.

Some suggest that mystery is just a superstitious persons way of referring to an

irrationality. As a slogan, this suggestion may be both slick and simple; as a guide
to reality, however, it is superficial and deeply misleading. Those of us who have
studied quantum theory know it has developed its own rationality of our fuzzy
world, which calls into question inadequate common sense conceptions of what is
reasonable, shaped by our limiting experience of reality. Lesser rationalities

28
Werner Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit. Munich: Piper Verlag, 1989, 44.
29
Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, 44.

12
such as those of the bygone Age of Reason tend to evade the challenge of
more expansive visions of rationality by dubbing them irrational.

Now I understand that you are focussing on the Trinity at your conference this
year. For many outside the Christian community, this doctrine is a classic instance
of the irrationality of faith. Augustine of Hippo offered us one of the finest
accounts of the limits of our ability to capture God in neat formulae. If you think
you have grasped God, it is not God you have grasped si comprehendis non est
Deus. If you can get your mind around it, its not God. Its something else that you
might incorrectly think is God. Anything that we can grasp fully and completely
cannot be God, precisely because it would be so limited and impoverished if it can
be fully grasped by the human mind. It is easy to create a god in our own likeness
a self-serving human invention that may bear some passing similarity to God,
but falls far short of the glory and majesty of the God who created and redeemed
the world.

Theres a story about Augustine which makes this point rather nicely. Augustine
was bishop of Hippo Regius, a Roman coastal town in North Africa. While writing
his major work On the Trinity, he decided to take a break and went for a stroll
along the beautiful beaches nearby. As he walked, he came across a young boy
behaving rather strangely. Over and over again, the boy went to the edge of the
shoreline, filled a spoon with seawater, and then emptied this into a hole in the
sand.

Augustine watched this diverting scene for some time, mystified. What was going
on? Eventually, he decided to ask the boy. He pointed to the Mediterranean Sea
and informed Augustine that he was going to empty the ocean into this hole in
the sand. Augustine dismissed this. You cant do that! Youll never fit the ocean
into that tiny hole. The boy is supposed to have replied: And youre wasting
your time writing a book about God. Youll never fit God into a book!

Now I need to concede that there are some very awkward questions about the
historical reliability of this story! But whether it is true or not, it makes a point
that we simply cannot evade as we try to wrestle with God. In the end, our minds
just arent big enough to cope with the conceptual vastness of God, so brilliantly
13
expressed in the theological notion of glory. God simply overwhelms our mental
capacities.

C. S. Lewis made this point when reflecting on human difficulties with the
doctrine of the Trinity. We see things from a limiting and constrictive human
perspective. He suggests that we think of ourselves as Flatlanders, two-
dimensional people who try and fail! to visualize three-dimensional objects.30

Flatlanders, attempting to imagine a cube, would either imagine the six

squares coinciding, and thus destroy their distinctness, or else imagine
them set out side by side, and thus destroy the unity. Our difficulties about
the Trinity are of much the same kind.

Lewis doesnt actually offer his readers a defense of the doctrine of the Trinity or
any new evidence for believing in it. Instead, he provides a visual framework that
allows us to perceive its apparent irrationality in a new way, and thus to realize
that our previous difficulties arose from seeing them from a limited (and limiting)
perspective. The Trinity is indeed a mystery but that does not mean it is an
irrationality.

This framework helps us to understand the creative tension between theology

and worship, which paradoxically celebrates both the fact that so much of God
can be grasped, however inadequately, by the human mind (and hence leading to
theology), while at the same time recognizing that so much remains beyond the
human capacity to understand (and hence leads to worship, in the sense of
acknowledging that the greatness and majesty of God eludes verbal analysis, and
is best expressed in praise and adoration).

So how does the Trinitarian logic of faith relate to the logic of our everyday
world? Are they the same? Or are they different? And if so, how are they
interconnected? For the New Atheism, the logic of faith is an irrational web of
nonsense, having no connection with the rational processes of normal human
intellectual transactions. Its a hopeless overstatement, as I know you will agree.

30
C. S. Lewis, The Poison of Subjectivism; in C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection. London: HarperCollins, 2001, 664. Lewis
also uses this image in Mere Christianity, 162.

14
But there is an issue to be explored here. Let me offer you a way of thinking here
that you may find useful in thinking about the rationality of the Christian faith.

My suggestion is that we think of the Christian faith as offering a metarationality

by which I mean a greater vision of rationality, which is able to accommodate
and account for everyday human rationality, while at the same time helping us to
grasp its limits. Let me illustrate what I mean by reflecting on the transition from
classical Newtonian mechanics to relativistic quantum mechanics, which took
place during the first few decades of the twentieth century.31

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, classical mechanics was seen as a self-
sufficient and intellectually autonomous area of theory, capable of accounting for
what could be observed in nature. Based on the extensive earlier observational
and analytical work of individuals such as Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), Johann
Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and Isaac Newton (1643-1727),
classical mechanics was widely regarded as a fundamental theory, capable of
mathematical formalization.32 It did not require to be positioned within a richer
intellectual framework to be understood, but was an autonomous and essentially
complete theory.

Yet following the work of Max Planck (1858-1947), Albert Einstein (1879-1955),
and Niels Bohr (1885-1962) in the early twentieth century, it was realized that
classical mechanics was a special, limiting case of a more complete theory. As the
theory of quantum mechanics developed in response to a growing body of
evidence which older theoretical models simply could not accommodate, it
became clear that relativistic quantum mechanics was the more fundamental
theory, capable of far greater explanatory capacity. And, perhaps most
importantly of all for our purposes, this more fundamental theory was able to
account both for the successes and the failures of classical mechanics, by

31
This topic is covered in standard textbooks, such as C. L. Tang, Fundamentals of Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. For some accessible reflections on the theological relevance of such
developments, see John C. Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship. London: SPCK,
2007, 48-72.
32
Rob Illiffe, Newton, God, and the Mathematics of the Two Books. In Mathematicians and Their Gods:
Interactions between Mathematics and Religious Beliefs, edited by Snezana Lawrence and Mark McCartney, 121-
44. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

15
identifying its limited sphere of validity. The correspondence principle, first
identified by Niels Bohr in 1923, sets out, clearly and elegantly, how quantum
mechanics reduces to classical mechanics under certain limits.33

Now neither relativistic quantum mechanics or quantum field theory invalidated

classical mechanics; they showed that it was a special case of a more
comprehensive and complex theory. 34 In effect, classical mechanics was seen as a
special case of relativistic quantum mechanics, applying to large bodies moving at
low speeds in other words, the everyday world that we experience, and which
classical mechanics mistakenly (though understandably) assumed to amount to
the totality of things. The classical model was thus accounted for on the basis of
the greater explanatory capacity of the relativistic model, and the limits of their
correspondence established. And, perhaps more importantly, the relativistic
approach explained why the classic theory worked in certain situations, and not in
others. Its validity was affirmed within certain limits.

We see here an important and well-understood insight from the world of

scientific theory development: that a better theory is able to accommodate all the
valid insights of an earlier theory, while at the same time expanding its horizons
and identifying the basis of its plausibility. 35 A theory with considerable
explanatory capacity is able to create conceptual space, valid under certain
limiting yet significant conditions, for a theory which might, at first sight, appear
to be quite independent, yet, on closer examination, turns out to be a special case
of the higher-order theory.

You can see where I am going with this. I am suggesting to you that we think of
the distinct Trinitarian logic of the Christian faith as the greater framework a
way of understanding ourselves and our worlds which transcends the limits of
human reason, yet at the same time helps us position what we might call our
native or everyday rationality within an informing context. Human rationality
33
For comment, see Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times, in Physics, Philosophy and Polity. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991, 192-6.
34
See, for example, N. P. Landsman, Mathematical Topics between Classical and Quantum Mechanics. New York:
Springer, 1998, 7-10; Franz Gross, Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Field Theory. New York: Wiley, 1999, 18-22.
35
For progress as incorporation in the development of scientific theories, see John Losee, Theories of Scientific
Progress: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2004, 5-61.

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operates within limits and outside those limits, it distorts and impoverishes our
understanding of God and our universe.

This Trinitarian logic enfolds within itself an understanding of human nature,

created in the image of God, yet tainted by sin. It helps us understand the
fundamental human longing for meaning and significance, and interpret this as a
disguised or veiled human longing for God so famously summarized in
Augustine of Hippos famous prayer, You have made us for yourself, and our
heart is restless until it finds its rest in you. It helps us understand why there
might be some fundamental resonance between natural and evangelical ways of
thinking so intriguingly explored, for example, in Bishop Butlers Analogy of
Reason while noting areas in which such forms of reasoning might go astray or
fall short.

I must conclude! In this lecture, I have focused on some themes in the natural
sciences, which seem to me to be helpful in public discussions of the
reasonableness of faith. Yet these are only part of a much richer vision of reality
which stands at the heart of the Christian faith, capable of capturing the
imagination as well as nourishing the mind.

The public rhetoric of the moment means that we need to reaffirm the rationality
of our faith, without reducing the gospel to what C. S. Lewis once called a glib
and shallow rationalism. It can be done! The gospel allows us to make sense of
our world, and inhabit it meaningfully, while at the same time giving us a vision of
hope for a greater world and vision of reality which awaits us in the New
Jerusalem.

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