Inventing the Universe: Why We Can't Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God by Alister E. McGrath
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Evangelical Solipsism

Why is it that folk who one day realise that rational thought isn’t all that rational and that talk about reality can be a false friend, can find an answer to their feelings of uncertainty in thought and language about God? Surely whatever their conceptions of the divine, these are the product of the same process of thought expressed in the same language that they started with. Yet they feel sufficiently confident in their conceptions to harass the rest of us about them.

McGrath is an intelligent man. I know this because I listened to him lecture on the history of theology over two terms at the University of Oxford. He began his adult life as a scientist, in fact as a somewhat scientistic scientist who considered knowledge obtained in any other way to be bogus. His discovery that science provided what he calls knowledge without meaning was a turning point in his life, a conversion. In the well-established tradition of Christianity, he found meaning in the words of the gospel.

But according to his own evangelical tradition, the meaning that McGrath finds in Christianity is not something to be arrived at through thought or effort. In fact the source of such meaning is beyond human capabilities entirely. The Word of God is not contained in the words of Man, not even in the words of sacred texts much less the words that apologists use to explain those texts. Without divine intervention in the psychic/spiritual constitution of a person, such meaning must remain elusive. And the presence of such intervention compels the recognition of that meaning.

So even for McGrath, meaning must remain a mystery. He doesn’t know how or why he has come to find meaning in Christianity, nor even what meaning might mean except that he finds Christianity comforting in some way. For McGrath, Christianity is a way to tie up the loose ends that are left, perhaps permanently, by practical science and other modes of thought like, say, poetry, philosophy, or pure mathematics. Religion, specifically the Christian religion, brings everything else together for him into a Big Picture. And he wants the rest of us to see that picture as well.

Thus the somewhat arrogant paradox of the evangelical mind, no matter how intelligent or well-read it is. This mind persistently, and in its own terms somewhat blasphemously, believes that it can supply meaning which is not just beneficial but also necessary for the rest of us to have. It fakes being the voice of the God it has become obsessed by (or captured by; the theological meaning is the same). It also dismisses the criterion of meaning found elsewhere, or simply not found at all, as inferior to its own. Unlike the rest of us, this mind claims to understand that reality which is beyond language. Its experience of that reality is greater than ours; and the meaning it has gained from that experience is deeper, more profound, and just all-round better than ours.

It strikes me, therefore, that intellectual memoirs like Inventing the Universe are a form of solipsism. The entire evangelical attitude is one that presumes its mode of thought gives it unique access to reality. It knows what science and religion really are and how they fit together; and it throws words like meaning, method, and faith around with abandon in order to demonstrate their own meaningfulness. Apparently such an attitude is immune to education and intelligence. Other folk just don’t have the ability to understand what they should. What is presented, in one form or another, are words pretending to be more than words. These words are annoying whether they originate in an evangelical like McGrath or a radical atheist like Richard Dawkins. What makes any of these enthusiasts think that they have anything meaningful to say at all?

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