Alister E. McGrath

Born in 1953 in Northern Ireland, he spent his childhood in the countryside, and the natural world around him registered early. Long summer afternoons in the family garden in the early 1960s lodged something in him, a kind of attentiveness to the complexity and beauty of what simply existed, that didn’t resolve neatly into either science or faith. At the time he’d have said it pointed toward science. He arrived at Oxford in 1971 to read chemistry and was, by his own account, convinced that taking science seriously meant treating religion with “supercilious dismissiveness.” That was the working assumption of a great many scientifically-minded teenagers of his generation, and he held it without much anxiety. He was good enough at chemistry to take First Class Honours. He was good enough at the subsequent research that Professor Sir George Radda FRS, one of Oxford’s most distinguished biochemists, supervised his doctoral work in molecular biophysics. The bench science suited him: the precision of it, the discipline of having to be answerable to data, the way a well-formed hypothesis either survives contact with the world or it doesn’t.

But the dismissiveness didn’t hold. He has described them as “brooding misgivings and suppressed doubts about the reliability of atheism,” a phrase that doesn’t conceal the intellectual honesty it took to admit them. He became a Christian during his Oxford years. And what followed the conversion was, characteristically, a problem he couldn’t leave alone: how does a trained scientist hold this new commitment together with everything he already knew? Not alongside it, not in separate compartments, but together. The only answer he could find was to do what he’d done with biophysics: go deep, go formally, go rigorously. He took First Class Honours in Theology as well. Whatever that symmetry looks like from the outside, it wasn’t engineered. It was the shape his compulsiveness about understanding things took.

The academic credentials that accumulated over the following decades are worth stating plainly, because they bear directly on the intellectual authority his writing carries. Beyond the chemistry BA and the biophysics doctorate, he earned an Oxford Doctor of Divinity in 2001 for sustained work in historical and systematic theology, and an Oxford Doctor of Letters in 2013 for his contributions to the science-and-religion field. Add a Bachelor of Divinity, a Master of Arts, and three honorary doctorates, and the picture is of someone who didn’t treat the two disciplines as parallel tracks to be kept tidy and separate. He kept feeding each into the other, and the qualifications are the paper residue of that process.

His first sustained academic appointment at Oxford was as Professor of Historical Theology, a post he held from 1999 to 2008. The choice of historical theology as a base isn’t incidental. A thinker whose primary public profile is in science-and-religion might seem oddly positioned in patristics and Reformation scholarship, but the training gave him something essential: a professional historian’s feel for how arguments travel, mutate, and get misrepresented across time. The “warfare thesis,” the claim that science and religion have been structurally antagonistic since the Scientific Revolution, is the kind of slogan that collapses under historical scrutiny. McGrath had done the historical work thoroughly enough to know it collapses, and he’s been dismantling it ever since, not with counter-rhetoric but with the detailed evidence that the thesis required wholesale falsification of the actual record.

In 2008 he moved to King’s College London as Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education, becoming head of the Centre for Theology, Religion, and Culture. King’s offered a different institutional atmosphere, more urban, more publicly engaged, less insulated by Oxford’s self-sufficiency. It was a productive period in at least one respect that doesn’t always get mentioned: the students he supervised there. Dr. Andrew Loke, who had qualified in medicine at the National University of Singapore and taken a master’s in philosophy at Biola University before coming to King’s, completed his PhD in Theology under McGrath’s supervision and went on to research at the University of Hong Kong, publishing in Religious Studies and the Journal of Theological Studies. The combination of a former physician working alongside a former molecular biophysicist on theological problems isn’t the kind of thing that happens by accident. McGrath’s supervision attracts people who bring prior training in other disciplines and haven’t stopped asking what that training means for their theological thinking. Earlier, at Oxford, the historian Frank A. James III had taken his DPhil at St. Peter’s College under McGrath’s direction, going on to become Provost at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and later President of Missio Seminary in Philadelphia, with major publications on Peter Martyr Vermigli and the Augustinian inheritance of Reformation theology from Oxford University Press and Brill. Medical scientists, historians of the Reformation, systematic theologians: the range of those who’ve worked seriously under him is itself a kind of argument about the breadth of the project.

Trinitarian Theology of Nature

Alister E. McGrath, Lisanne Winslow

2020 | 192 pages

Reformation thought

an introduction

Alister E. McGrath

2012

Darwinism and the divine

evolutionary thought and natural theology

Alister E. McGrath

2011 | 298 pages

He returned to Oxford in April 2014 to take up the Andreas Idreos Professorship in Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, a named chair built for the kind of work he’d been developing across his career. The appointment came with a Fellowship at Harris Manchester College. From 2015 to 2018 he also held the Gresham Professorship of Divinity, a public lectureship with roots going back to 1597. He directed the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, which focused on supporting schools and churches in thinking through the practical and ethical implications of new scientific and technological developments. Grant funding secured from the Issachar Fund underwrote what he framed as the reinvigoration of natural theology in the life of the churches, carrying the intellectual work into parishes and congregations rather than keeping it in seminar rooms. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a teaching fellow at Regent College in Vancouver, and he has also taught at Cambridge.

The centrepiece of the intellectual project is the three-volume A Scientific Theology, one of the most ambitious constructive theology projects produced in English in the early 2000s. Its core claim is that theology can learn from the actual working methods of the natural sciences: not their conclusions, but their approaches to rationality, explanation, and the ontological status of theoretical entities. McGrath calls the position theological critical realism. Theological statements, on this view, are attempts to describe a reality independent of the observer’s preferences, just as scientific statements are. Both are answerable to something outside themselves. This puts him in direct conflict with the postmodern tendency in some academic theology to treat doctrinal language as a purely internal grammar with no external referent, and equally in conflict with the scientific positivism that dismisses theological language as cognitively empty by stipulation. He won’t take either exit. The argument has to be made where the two communities actually meet.

His engagement with natural theology is where this programme becomes most specific. It isn’t a revival of the eighteenth-century argument from design in contemporary dress. It’s something closer to a claim about the character of the natural world itself: that the universe’s mathematical order, its intelligibility, and the human capacity to find it beautiful and significant all raise questions that natural science opens but can’t by itself answer. He’s engaged at length with Karl Barth’s objections to natural theology, and he takes those objections seriously enough that his response is not a dismissal but a revision: a natural theology that begins from within Christian doctrine rather than from some neutral epistemological starting point, and that can survive what Barth actually said rather than a caricature of it. On his return to Oxford as Idreos Professor, he named two explicit research priorities: the defence of natural theology against Barth’s critique, and the investigation of challenges posed by Darwinism for Christian belief.

Two theologians appear with particular frequency in his published work: T. F. Torrance and Emil Brunner, both of whom developed substantive frameworks for relating theology and the natural sciences without one discipline consuming the other. Torrance’s realist theology of nature, which took the physical world seriously as the arena of divine action, recurs as a reference point throughout McGrath’s research. His interest in applying evolutionary models to the development of Christian doctrine, which cuts sharply against both conservative resistance to Darwin and secularist triumphalism about what Darwin demonstrated, shows an ambition to bring biological frameworks to intellectual history without dissolving doctrine into mere adaptive behaviour. It’s a methodologically risky move, and he knows it.

Inventing the Universe and The Great Mystery, two more accessible books from the 2010s, press the case for what he calls the mutual enrichment of theology and science, and he’s consistent in saying it isn’t his invention. He’s recovering a Renaissance tradition, the view of other disciplines as ancillae theologiae, handmaids of theology that sharpen and deepen its thinking rather than threatening its foundations. He’s also candid about the difficulty of presenting this in contemporary public culture. The warfare model of science and religion survives in popular discourse not because historians of science support it (they don’t, broadly) but because it’s simple and it flatters a culture-war reflex. McGrath belongs to both communities it purports to describe, and he won’t reduce either of them to the role it assigns them. He thinks the territory between the two is where the genuinely hard and genuinely interesting problems live.

The Great Mystery draws on a distinction he finds illuminating from the Scottish scientist John Mackay: the contrast between the “balcony” view of faith, from which you can survey all the roads and their destinations, and the “road” view, in which you walk with limited sight ahead. He finds this honest about the texture of lived faith. He’s quoted Bertrand Russell’s observation that philosophy teaches “how to live without certainty” and applied it directly to theological life. Faith isn’t the suspension of uncertainty. It’s a way of travelling within it without collapsing into confusion.

His apologetic writing brought him an audience far beyond academic theology. The Twilight of Atheism (2004) argued that atheism, rather than being the natural destination of modernity, was a historically contingent movement and one in measurable retreat. Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life, also from 2004, examined Richard Dawkins’s published arguments about religion and evolutionary biology and found specific failures in both the science as applied and the philosophical moves built on top of it. The Dawkins Delusion? (2007), written jointly with his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, a psychologist, responded directly to The God Delusion, contesting Dawkins’s use of evolutionary biology, his reading of the psychology of religion, and his account of the history of religious violence. McGrath’s position wasn’t a rejection of evolutionary theory. He’d studied it at a professional level. His argument was that Darwinism doesn’t entail atheism, and that Dawkins’s philosophical inferences were far less secure than his scientific ones. The exchange gave McGrath a public profile as the scientist-theologian who could engage the New Atheism on technical ground, without retreating into confessional claims that the other side could simply decline to accept.

There’s something worth sitting with here. Every generation produces theologians who engage the sciences, and every generation produces scientists who are willing to argue for religion. What’s genuinely rare is someone who completed formal doctoral work in both, who sat in Radda’s biophysics laboratory and then worked through the patristic sources and Reformation controversies until Oxford judged the result worthy of a Doctor of Divinity. The borderland McGrath writes about isn’t a poetic figure; it’s the intellectual territory he has actually occupied for fifty years. And his insistence, repeated across dozens of books in quite different registers, that the physicist’s commitment to a reality independent of our theories and the theologian’s commitment to a truth that exceeds our categories are not naturally opposed but naturally related, that they’re asking versions of the same question about what underlies what we observe, is a claim that carries different weight when it comes from someone trained in both traditions. Mystical and scientific traditions across centuries have circled the same strangeness: that the world exists, that it’s ordered, that we can partially read it, and that partial reading keeps opening into something larger. McGrath works that territory specifically from inside Christian theology and modern biophysics, but the question he’s asking is older than either.

His textbooks have shaped theological education across Britain and North America. Christian Theology: An Introduction has run through multiple editions and is standard across faculties on both sides of the Atlantic. Theology: The Basics makes the discipline available to readers with no prior formation. Science and Religion: A New Introduction covers the field he now professionally occupies, and it assumes intellectual curiosity rather than prior Christian commitment. These aren’t simplifications in the reductive sense. They’re attempts to carry real intellectual content to readers who might otherwise never encounter it, and they’ve introduced thousands of students to serious theological thinking on those terms.

Alongside the writing and the academic administration, his personal spiritual practice during the Oxford professorship years was rooted in a rural benefice on the western borders of the Oxford diocese, where he led worship on Sundays in churches built nine hundred years ago. He has described those ancient buildings as embodying a “theology of place”: each one with its own particular character, layered with generations of memory, promises, fears, and hopes, still giving the communities gathered inside them a sense of stability. For a thinker whose working canvas covers cosmology, evolutionary biology, and Reformation history, the scale of a small Cotswold congregation isn’t a retreat from the main argument. It’s what the argument is finally about.

He retired from the Andreas Idreos Professorship in September 2022. His formal Oxford career had started fifty-one years earlier, when a teenager from rural Northern Ireland came up to read chemistry and couldn’t stop asking, for the rest of his working life, what chemistry and Christianity were actually saying to each other.