Enriching our Vision of Reality

Alister McGrath is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford, and eminently suited to the post with Oxford doctorates in both natural science and Christian theology. In this eloquent and sophisticated book, he sets the scene by discussing the general notions of intelligibility and coherence, quoting Einstein to the effect that science can only teach us how facts are related to each other, and that humans need more than a purely rationalist conception of existence. McGrath suggests that the enrichment of his title should come about through integrating multiple levels of reality and through and interweaving of scientific and theological narratives. In the second part, he discusses the contributions of chemist Charles Coulson, theologian Thomas Torrance and physicist and priest Sir John Polkinghorne, and it is interesting to see what he gleaned from each of them.

This leads into six parallel conversations between theology and science looking at theories and doctrines as ways of seeing reality, the legitimacy of faith in terms of proof, justification and intelligibility, analogies and models as representations of a complex reality, the status of faith in Darwin, and finally human identity and natural theology. These open up rich seams of discussion, all of which move beyond the conflict model to seek constructive engagement. As examples, McGrath addresses the relationship between evidence and rationality, pointing out that, in both science and theology, we use inference and judgement, and that theory and observation are in fact entangled. The author certainly achieves his goal of demonstrating the intelligibility and coherence of his view, which he thinks is best argued for by theologically informed scientists, although scientifically informed theologians also have an important role to play. It is at this level the new atheists need to engage rather than setting up simplistic straw men in their imaginations.