How To Be An Agnostic
which a full sense of theological agnosticism has largely been
forgotten – not only in the sense of having been marginalised
but even in the sense of having been lost. To see this, we must
take a step back and look at the history of ideas that lies behind
modern Christianity, the path that has led to contemporary
Church language and practice.
Myth and logos
It was a few hundred years ago that it fi rst started to look as if
a gap might be opening up between a scientifi c understanding
of the world and the Christian one, after Copernicus displaced
the earth from the centre of the universe. What we now call
the scientifi c revolution had begun. It’s clear that it would be a
mistake to think that from that moment on it was only a ques-
tion of time until atheism ruled the day, as if the earth’s demo-
tion obviously entailed God’s destruction too. Many scientists
continued and continue to see God in their observations and
experiments. Like Newton, they thought that the new science
revealed God to them more clearly.
However, something profound has shifted in this time. A sci-
entifi c way of talking about things has gained the upper hand.
This began with the tremendous success of scientifi c descrip-
tions of the natural world – a success that some would like to
see extended to every sphere of life, usurping the spiritual once
and for all. However, while science can now, I believe, be seen
to have lost this war over explanation – because it overreaches
itself when it claims that everything is explicable by a rational
materialism – the arrival of modern science has not left things
unchanged.
It’s this difference between the discourse of the social sciences
and that of the spiritual. It’s a move described very well by the
historian of religions, Karen Armstrong. In a nutshell she sums
it up by saying that the scientifi c revolution led to the triumph
of logos over myth. Logos – Greek for word, argument, speech
and reason – favours the worldview that latches onto facts and,