by Alister McGrath, Seen & Unseen
From dismissal to curiosity: how the conversation shifted
Is there a new interest in Christianity in Western culture? There are many straws in the wind suggesting that something is happening – for example, the huge crowds that turned out to hear the Pope recently in France, one of Europe’s most secular nations. I’ve been engaged in public and private discussions about Christianity since the early 2000s, and I’ve seen a definite shift in both the tone and focus of those discussions in the last twenty years.
Those conversations became particularly intense in 2006, with the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Many young people, mostly American, European, and Chinese students who were visiting Oxford, asked if they could meet me to discuss Christianity. They had read my books and wanted to talk about questions of faith. Some were secularists, initially convinced that the “New Atheists” had inaugurated a golden age of reason. Others were Christians, many of whom were fearful about what seemed to be the rapidly diminishing rational credentials of their faith.
These were fascinating conversations, allowing me to tune in to the changing shape of Western culture and forcing me to develop responses to their probing questions. They came to an end when I retired from the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science and Religion at Oxford in 2022. While it’s important not to overinterpret them, a clear pattern emerged which is helpful in understanding changing attitudes to Christianity in recent years. Let me explain.
For at least five years after the appearance of The God Delusion, my visitors believed – some reluctantly, others enthusiastically – that religion was on its way out. It was being displaced and discredited by a new wave of scientific rationalism. Yet gradually, doubts began to emerge about this judgement, initially expressed with hesitation and later with increasing confidence. The “certainties” of the New Atheism seemed intellectually precarious. They were aggressively asserted, but lacked rigorous evidential foundations. New Atheist writers expected their religious opponents to prove their beliefs – but seemed to think that their own beliefs were so self-evidentially correct that they didn’t need to be proved.