Introductionof not being able to become a Christian, out of a kind of faithful
humility. She wrote: ‘For it seemed to me certain, and I still think
so today, that one cannot wrestle enough with God if one does
it out of pure regard for Truth.’ So if modern belief judges itself
according to the standards set by a fact-testing, relevancy-seeking
scientifi c humanism, the challenge is to recover the spirituality of
the religious imagination. There is a negative and positive aspect
to this. Negatively, I want to argue that being beholden to the
scientifi c worldview distorts Christianity, and arguably other reli-
gions too. Positively, by exploring the apophatic tradition, as well
as revisiting the so-called proofs of God along with issues like the
problem of evil, I want to make the case that not knowing who
God is, and even that God is – being radically agnostic – is essen-
tial to theology. It is more fundamental than anything positive
that can be said about God. The general point is that the agnostic
spirit and a spiritual way of life are one and the same thing. To
lose the former is to lose the latter.
When it comes to science, agnosticism is crucial too: it is for
those who are neither utopian about a technological future, nor
Luddite about the achievements of the present. Negatively, the
technological age needs a vivid view of the limits of science, so
that it does not put too much faith in it, and an agnostic atti-
tude can provide that. Positively, agnosticism takes these limits
as pointing beyond what science can comprehend, to the persis-
tent mysteries of life – aspects of existence that carry value and
meaning because they are bigger than us, and are best captured
and expressed in non-scientifi c ways because they are glimpsed
not grasped. The hope is that these ways of talking can regain
some of the authority that the scientifi c worldview tends other-
wise to monopolise. Moreover it seems to me that the reinvigo-
ration of these other visions of reality is an increasing pressing
need. In a society that faces what has been called an epidemic
of ennui, and is on the verge of environmental crisis, it is not
just more technology we need but more than technology.
Remarkably, science actually quite spontaneously inspires new
kinds of spiritual response, from the fl amboyant New Age to a