1. The journey: clues to the meaning of the universe

1. The journey: clues to the meaning of the universe

I was cycling round France with some student friends. One particularly hot day, we decided to rest for a while by the side of a country road. As I filled my water bottle from a nearby pump, I noticed a man walking briskly along, his arms swinging from side to side with military precision.

Noticing the pump, he stopped, and waited for me to finish. I politely asked him where he was heading. ‘Nowhere!’ he told me. Regular walks, he declared, were his way of distracting himself from the meaninglessness of life. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m just passing time.’ A few moments later, I watched him striding defiantly into the distance, head held high, on his journey to nowhere in particular.

Life is a journey. That’s just the way things are, whether you believe in God or not. We are travelling along a mysterious road, wondering how to make sense of it. Does it lead anywhere important? Come to think of it, does it lead anywhere? And what are we meant to be doing as we journey?

Writers have been pondering such questions since the dawn of civilization. When all’s said and done, I would like to suggest that there are really only two possible responses.

For the first, let’s turn to the French atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). He shaped the thinking of many bright young things in the 1960s and had no doubt about the meaning of life: there was none. Everything that exists ‘is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance’.

It is a view with which the stranger I met in France would have had much sympathy. It is also shared by the world’s best-known atheist, Richard Dawkins (born 1941), author of The God Delusion and one of the founders of the ‘New Atheism’. At the heart of the universe, he declares, there is ‘no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference’.

Inflexible atheism of this kind takes it for granted that there is no God, no transcendent realm, and no ‘big story’ to make sense of things. What explanation, then, can it offer for why so many people believe in God? Dawkins’s answer is as simple as it is dogmatic: people of faith are deluded. They are small-minded individuals, unable to cope with the harsh reality of a bleak and pointless universe, who therefore resort to inventing meaning to console themselves.

I used to think that way myself. I assumed that intelligent people knew that there was no God, no meaning, no purpose to life, and that only fools believed otherwise. It made me feel good to be part of this intellectual and cultural elite. I know it sounds very smug and arrogant, but I took great pleasure in looking down on those around me who believed in God, and priding myself on being more intelligent and sophisticated than they were.

At school, one of my most vivid memories was looking out of the dormitory windows at night. When it wasn’t raining, I could see the stars, like pinpoints of light on a black velvet cloth. But although I was often overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the night sky, darker thoughts distracted me. The immensity of the universe seemed to stress my own insignificance. What was I, set in this great context? The answer was obvious: nothing.

Yet there is a second way of looking at things. What if the universe is actually studded with clues as to its meaning? What if those clues lead to a gateway for discovering a deeper order of things and our place within it? This view, which I eventually came to hold, stresses that the true meaning of reality is to know God, and that once we have grasped this, we can begin to make sense of our lives. There really is a ‘big picture’ and we are an important part of it. In fact, the world is so richly signposted with hints and rumours of the divine that atheists simply have to turn down the lights to give their unbelief a chance!

We will return to this central theme of a big picture of reality shortly. For now, we need to explore just where the idea of ‘faith’ fits in.

What is faith?

For some more excitable atheists, the word ‘faith’ is like a red rag to a bull. All faith is blind faith! As the journalist Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), who became a leading defender of atheism in his later years, boldly declared, ‘our belief is not a belief’.

It’s a neat and simple creed. But is it right? More interestingly, can it be maintained? As his numerous critics pointed out, Hitchens’s writings were full of assertions that couldn’t be proved, especially when it came to questions of morality and religious belief. I’ve no doubt that he thought he was right. But many of his bold statements lack any evidential foundation, and this is also true of the work of Richard Dawkins. As the cultural critic Terry Eagleton (born 1943) so devastatingly observed in a scathing review, ‘Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason.’

No one, however, would disagree with Hitchens when he asserts that mathematics and logic are subjects in which it is possible to prove that something is right. The following statements are completely reliable and trustworthy:

2 + 2 = 4

The whole is greater than the part.

Sadly, it’s virtually impossible to prove things to be true in any other area of life. We can certainly give good reasons for believing, for example, that rape is wrong, or that democracy is better than fascism, but these things just can’t be verified.

Anyway, how significant are these truths of logic and mathematics? Why would someone poised on the brink of taking his own life put the revolver away on being told that the whole is greater than the part? Or pour the cyanide down the sink when she was informed that 2 + 2 = 4? These statements may be factually correct. They are, however, existentially insignificant, having nothing to say about the deepest questions of the human mind or the yearnings of the human heart.

I can verify that 2 + 2 = 4. But I can’t prove that life is meaningful. Nor can I substantiate the core theme of the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ Nor can I prove that there is a God. I can certainly give some good reasons for believing that these convictions are correct – but neither I nor anyone else can demonstrate that they are. Only shallow truths can be proved. The deepest truths of life lie beyond ultimate confirmation. The simple fact is that none of us, whether religious or secular, can prove any of the great truths we live by. That’s just the way life is.

What about science? Here, I have to confess a personal interest. I developed a love for the natural sciences when I was young, and even built a little telescope so that I could see deep into space. Awe-struck, I longed to know more about the mysteries of the universe. I went on to specialize in the sciences at high school, before going up to Oxford University to take a first degree in chemistry and then do research in molecular biology. For a while, I believed that science (which I will always love) might help me work out what life was all about.

But I discovered that it didn’t. And then I realized that it couldn’t. Science helps us uncover the hidden logic of our cosmic system, but that’s not the same as telling us why it exists and where we fit in. Although Richard Dawkins and I disagree on many points, I am completely at one with him when he states that ‘science has no methods for deciding what is ethical’.

The great German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) argued that early twentieth-century western culture was becoming obsessed with what he termed ‘rationalization’. Everything, influential voices declared, had to be proved, and science was the best way of proving things. Weber had difficulty in taking this seriously. Surely only a child would think that the natural sciences could answer life’s great questions about meaning or purpose? Weber made rather caustic remarks about adults who seemed to be locked into juvenile ways of thinking about science that could no longer be sustained:

Who – apart from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences – still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?

Weber had a still deeper concern here. An exaggerated emphasis on human reason was actually trapping people within an ‘iron cage’ of rationality. They were allowing themselves to be imprisoned by reason, in the sense that they could only accept things that could be proved. And that, Weber suggested, was leading to a very limited and inadequate grasp of reality. Humanity needed to be liberated from the rationalist prison it had created for itself.

There are still people today who talk about being ‘guided’ by reason when they are actually being constricted by it. They are desperate to limit reality to the very small and dull world of what reason can prove.

When I was an atheist, I tried to console myself by imagining that my atheism was an act of bravery and defiance. Atheism was so unappealing and unattractive that nobody would believe it – unless, of course, it was right. I know it sounds weird, but the drabness of a godless world became a reason for trusting that I was on the right track.

In fact, I was really just skimming the surface of life, accepting an arbitrary limit on my knowledge and refusing to go deeper. Believing that ‘what you see is what you get’ can be an excuse to be intellectually lazy and unadventurous. It’s like looking out to sea over a coral lagoon, and registering nothing but an expanse of turquoise water. Yet beneath the surface others are scuba-diving, taking delight in the coral reefs and the exotic and brightly coloured fish darting from ridge to ridge. None of this is visible from the surface, but it exists, waiting to be discovered.

It is not surprising that old-fashioned rationalism, which limits reality to what can be proved by logic and mathematics, has been given such a hard time in recent years. Most people are now willing to draw a much-needed distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ approaches to reason. The ‘thin’ approach limits knowledge to the proven abstract ideas of logic and mathematics, while the ‘thick’ approach recognizes the numerous beliefs that human beings may reasonably own, without being able to prove them by the highly restrictive methods of logic. ‘We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain’ (Terry Eagleton).

Imagine seeing a photograph of a beautiful valley and just knowing that’s where you want to live. This is the world that reason, when rightly understood, is able to open up to us. Applied to faith, reason helps us recognize the big picture that makes sense of the world and our lives. This means that we don’t need to launch ourselves on a random flight of imagination to believe certain things are true, or fling ourselves into the arms of a non-existent God we’ve conjured up as a way of coping with life! Rather, we can come to faith through carefully worked out arguments, or by leaps of the imagination based on our deepest intuitions. Some of us will be drawn to God by the quest for personal stability and significance, others by the sheer beauty of the things of God. All these approaches are valid. Think of them as individual threads woven together in a tapestry of faith.

C. S. Lewis discovered something of this richness when he moved away from what he termed his early ‘glib and shallow rationalism’ as an atheist. Pure reason offered him a bleak intellectual landscape that he could not bear to inhabit. Yet this, his intellect insisted, was all that there was. To believe otherwise was pure fantasy. Yet Lewis’s imagination taught him that there had to be more. ‘Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.’

It’s a fascinating story,

Finding the big picture

Lewis became an atheist in his teenage years, bombarding his Christian friends with the ‘thin artillery of a seventeen year old rationalist’.

Gradually, he came to see that his earlier way of thinking, which he had believed simple, was merely simplistic. Reading the classics of western literature reopened questions he assumed to be closed. ‘A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere’,

Many would agree that Lewis offers an intelligent, reflective and winsome account of the Christian faith. Yet why might his account be so attractive? His Oxford colleague Austin Farrer (1904–68), a distinguished philosopher of religion, put his finger on the answer. Lewis, he remarked, makes us ‘think we are listening to an argument’, when in reality ‘we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction’.

I know what Farrer meant. A few years ago, I was in Amsterdam attending a conference, when I found myself with enough time between lectures to visit an art gallery. I ended up going to the Van Gogh Museum and wandered happily through the exhibit halls. Every now and then, I paused by paintings that seemed to stand out – like Van Gogh’s 1890 work Wheatfield with Crows. I was drawn to this painting, and began to look at it from multiple angles. I admired Van Gogh’s brushstrokes and the rich and brilliant palette of colours that he used. But what drew me to the painting was its totality – its combination of patterns, colours and textures. Because I liked it, I wanted to know more about it. Having only limited time, I had walked past other paintings that did not have the same effect on me. Something about this one made me stop and examine it in more detail.

Lewis was drawn to Christianity not so much by the individual arguments in its favour as by its compelling ‘big picture’ vision of reality. It seemed to make sense of everything that really mattered to him and it connected with his inner longing for truth, beauty and goodness. As Lewis recalled, his atheism drove him to the conclusion that everything he loved and valued had to be rejected as ‘imaginary’. The few things this dogmatic atheism allowed him to believe turned out to be ‘grim and meaningless’. It was heartbreaking. But the Christian way of looking at things made sense of his hopes and longings – the things in life that he really cared about. It affirmed that they were real, and that they were important. As the pieces began to fall into place, Lewis realized that this landscape of faith he was exploring was the world he was meant to inhabit.

Lewis’s approach is one that many natural scientists would accept, resonating strongly, as it does, with their own working methods. A theory is to be judged against observations, by how well it can account for what we see and experience around and within us. Of course, there may be some loose ends. In places things may be a little fuzzy. Yet what really matters is that a good theory helps us make more sense of a complex and confusing world. As human beings, we are always going to be drawn to ways of thinking that illuminate and inspire.

Consider legal dramas and crime fiction. Every great crime writer teases their readers about the solution to the mystery they have created. None of the clues they offer is enough on its own, but considered together, they have a cumulative force that points towards a conclusion. It may not be possible to prove the conclusion absolutely, but there’s little doubt about what the best explanation of the clues might be. So we might recognize the fingerprints of God in the ordering of the natural world and in the deepest intuitions of human nature, and conclude that these clues call out to be woven together to allow us to see a bigger picture.

The philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) offered one of the most penetrating accounts of the philosophical implications and consequences of the scientific method (which may be defined as ‘a logical and rational order of steps by which scientists come to conclusions about the world around them’). For Polanyi, it was clear that the ‘pursuit of discovery’ was ‘guided by sensing the presence of a hidden reality toward which our clues are pointing’.

Newton called this invisible, intangible, hidden reality ‘gravity’. He was never quite sure that he really believed in the notion, but it seemed to make a lot more sense of his observations than anything else he could come up with. In the end, he was convinced it was right. Its ability to explain was an indication of its truth. In a famous image, he pointed to a greater reality lying beyond and behind what could be perceived:

I seem to have been only like a small boy playing on the sea-shore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Many, like Newton, have longed to see into that ocean of truth and map its depths. Or to return to the analogy we’re exploring, to find a trustworthy big picture that weaves together the threads of our experience and shows how we fit into the universe, culture and history.

We often feel overwhelmed by the complex world around us. There’s so much to take in. Is it just a jumble of facts? A collection of random pieces of information? Or is there something that holds it all together, that connects everything up? The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966) once wrote about looking down on the city of Zurich from a nearby mountain. It was night, and the shimmering sea of light he saw below him was vast and apparently random in design. But, he remarked, the city’s professional electricians would be able to make perfect sense of the pattern of lights. They would have the diagrams that explained what was going on.

The Christian faith allows us to see patterns in this apparent chaos of our world; to perceive a melody when others only hear a noise. Instead of being overwhelmed with information, we are enabled to discern meaning. The American poet Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950) expressed the universal quest for meaning in terms of making sense of ‘a meteoric shower of facts’ raining from the sky. These ‘facts’ are like pieces of a jigsaw that need to be assembled, allowing us to discover the Christian big picture, which gives us a framework for understanding things and a basis for working out what we ought to be doing. Everyone has a big picture, whether they realize it or not. It’s just that some people have a very small big picture, as we saw earlier, which limits reality to the cold realm of logic.

A quick return to crime fiction might be helpful here. Imagine that you’re reading a detective novel – perhaps one of Agatha Christie’s cliff-hangers. We come to the final scene – the great denouement, in which Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple gathers all the potential suspects together. Then the great detective sketches the big picture that explains the clues and links them together. Hercule Poirot tells the story of what really happened leading up to the murder on the Orient Express, and Miss Marple what led up to the appearance of a mysterious body in the library. This big picture does more than identify the murderer: it makes sense of all the clues. They are like threads, woven into its fabric. Things that once made no sense at all now do because they are seen in the right way.

To emphasize the importance of grasping this big picture, we shall now consider two of the deepest human intuitions – the heart’s desire, and our sense of moral obligation – and reflect on how these fit into the Christian way of seeing things.

The heart’s desire

A friend of mine left England some years ago to take up work in the United States. He liked living there but never really settled. Deep within, a little echo of a voice kept murmuring, ‘This isn’t where you belong. This isn’t where you’re meant to be.’ The memory of his homeland would not go away. While his head was telling him he was better off in America, his heart was saying something quite different. Eventually he moved back to London.

A core theme of the Christian faith is that this world is not our true homeland. We have been placed here for a reason, and there are things for us to do. But as Cyprian of Carthage (a Christian bishop executed in 258 by the Roman authorities for his faith) declared, ‘paradise is our native land’. Or as Paul reminds the Christians in the Roman colony of Philippi, ‘Our citizenship is in heaven’ (Philippians 3.20). We are journeying through this land, doing what we can to make it a better place, while at the same time knowing that we belong in another country. Home is where the heart is; and our hearts long to be with God.

Suppose that we were made to discover and love God, and that there is some kind of ‘homing instinct’ for God within us. If we were indeed created for another world, how would this play out in the real world of human experience? We could expect – indeed predict – a sense of agitation, reflecting the fact that we are not where we really belong. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) expressed this theme well in a prayer written around the year 400: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’

This sense of yearning for something that seems to lie beyond the frontiers of human experience is a constant theme in western literature. German Romantic writers spoke of Sehnsucht, described by the poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) as a ‘wistful, soft, tearful longing’. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) expressed ‘a nostalgic yearning, bordering at times on unendurably poignant sorrow’ that he experienced in ‘the dreams of my heart and in the reveries of my soul’, pointing to something of immense significance beyond the borders of human experience.

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain … a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite – the beatific vision, God – I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life … it is the actual spring of life within me.

Russell’s daughter, Katharine Tait, recalled that he was contemptuous of organized religion, dismissing its ideas mainly because he disliked those who held them. Yet Tait took the view that her father’s life was really a search for God. ‘Somewhere at the back of my father’s mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found anything else to put in it.’

This is something many of us experience – a deep sense that we belong elsewhere. Surely there is something better; something more than what we know? Does thinking this suggest that we are the victims of a meaningless delusion? Or might it be a clue to the meaning of our lives, and our place in the greater scheme of things?

For some helpful reflections on this subject, let’s turn again to C. S. Lewis, who was aware of a feeling of divine restlessness throughout the years before his conversion to Christianity. Lewis observes that most people yearn for something, only to find their hopes dashed and frustrated when they actually attain it. ‘There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.’

It’s a concept that the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) understood. She wrote of what she called her ‘moments of being’ – short, stabbing instances of insight, which seemed to her to reveal ‘some real thing behind appearances’.

You too may have felt that you were on the threshold of something deep and significant, only to find entry barred as the moment of insight faded away. The deep sense that there is ‘something there’ haunts us, though hardened rationalists may dismiss it as superstitious nonsense.

Why is it so difficult to grasp the elusive significance of this kind of experience? Lewis suggests that there are three possible answers. First, because we are looking for meaning in the wrong place. Second, because there is actually no meaning to be found. But third, and more helpfully, we could regard these earthly longings as ‘a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage’ of our true desires. They are ‘arrows of joy’, shot from our true homeland, designed to wake us from our spiritual slumber. No earthly pleasures could satisfy our yearning for more – and neither are they meant to. Their purpose is to arouse us, to suggest that there is something real to be found, and to make us restless so that we search for its source. ‘Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.’

Personal relationships can create a bitter-sweet longing for something more significant – something that comes through the relationship, but is not actually in that relationship. It’s a theme that recurs again and again in great literature. Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) conveys the frustration many of us will encounter (to some degree at least) through the experiences of the novel’s central figure – the world-weary Captain Charles Ryder. At the beginning of his ‘sacred and profane memories’, he is a student ‘in search of love’; by the end, he is ‘homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless’, musing on how his quests seem doomed to fail to find their object.

Pleasure, beauty, personal relationships: all seem to promise so much, and yet when we try to grasp them, we find that what we are seeking is not located in these things at all. Lewis suggests that we gradually come to realize, as he did, that, ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’

This does not, of course, prove that Christianity is true. Nor does it prove that there is a God. But that’s not Lewis’s point. His argument is that our experience chimes in with what the theory suggests. The ‘big picture’ is able to fit it in and make sense of it.

Let’s look at how the Christian big picture is able to fit in a second aspect of human experience.

A sense of moral obligation

It is very difficult to be a normal human being and not think that some actions really are wrong and some really are right. But there is a problem with this. For if Richard Dawkins is correct in believing that ‘good’ is just something we invent, then we have to face up to the deeply disturbing fact that, as the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) put it, ‘there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves’.

Rorty was profoundly uncomfortable with his own conclusions, not unnaturally. For what could he say when ‘torturers violate the innocent’ if there was no authority beyond human culture to be invoked? Nonetheless, he insisted, that was just the way things were. His colleagues and students disagreed, and regularly challenged him on the point. In the end, Rorty simply refused to discuss his views. But you can’t run away from this evasion of issues.

Suppose right and wrong are just matters of personal choice – things that we have invented. What if preferring liberty to oppression is like preferring chocolate to vanilla ice cream – a matter of personal inclination? What, then, if we see people doing something we believe to be profoundly misguided, even though those doing it believe it to be right? Nazi Germany seems to have thought it was perfectly acceptable to exterminate Jews. Fortunately, others thought this was reprehensible. Moral relativism (the idea that there are no objective moral values to judge things by) implodes, finding itself unable to provide a secure basis for its fundamental convictions. ‘This is good’ becomes reduced to ‘I like this’ or ‘my friends and I like this’. Justice then becomes a matter of power and influence, in which the ideas of interest groups are enforced.

It’s an important point. Even the most hardened moral relativist has problems defending the view that you do what you like. Nobody really takes that view seriously. As Lewis points out, we are all aware of something ‘higher’ than us – a norm to which people appeal, and which they expect others to observe; a ‘real law which we did not invent, and which we know we ought to obey’.

And it’s not just about personal issues. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) realized that the moral relativism of the 1920s made it possible for him to establish a fascist state in Italy. Since the wisdom of that age was that ‘all ideologies are of equal value’, in that they are all ‘mere fictions’, then it didn’t matter what you believed. Everyone was free to ‘create their own ideology, and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which they are capable’.

Yet there is a massive disconnection between this way of thinking and the deepest intuitions of the human heart. If there is no ‘natural justice’ built into the structure of the universe, what’s to stop power groups within society imposing their own ideas about what is right and wrong? And how can we resist this, if there is nothing beyond us that holds these people to account for their ideas and what they do with them?

Many secular ethical thinkers, such as the Anglo-Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99), have recognized the implications of this. Murdoch argued that we are compelled to believe that, ‘as moral beings, we are immersed in a reality which transcends us and that moral progress consists in awareness of this reality and submission to its purposes’.

That was the conclusion the poet W. H. Auden (1907–73) reached in 1939– the year after his famous ‘Stop all the clocks’ poem was published – following his arrival in New York. Auden had lost his religious faith in the early 1920s, adopting instead a vague left-wing outlook that emphasized the fundamental goodness of human nature and the ability of human reason to resolve crises. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, he went to a movie theatre in a German-American district of Manhattan and watched a newsreel depicting the Nazi attack on Poland. He was appalled when ‘quite ordinary, supposedly harmless Germans’ in the audience began shouting ‘Kill the Poles!’

Shocked, Auden realized that he could no longer believe that human nature was good. Yet if he was to say that such things were absolutely evil, he had to have some absolute standard by which he could defend this judgement. As the significance of this sank in, he realized that his liberalism was self-defeating: ‘The whole trend of liberal thought has been to undermine faith in the absolute.’ Auden’s return to faith in God was triggered by his realization of the importance of the ‘absolute’, and the ability of the Christian ‘big picture’ to incorporate and defend it.

Auden and many others came to see that the Christian way of thinking helps us make sense of these kinds of dilemmas and move towards a solution. God is the ultimate foundation and safeguard of justice, no matter how badly humans fail to grasp and implement this. Our deep sense of moral obligation is a fingerprint of God, a reflection of God’s vision for a renewed creation, and an invitation to us to help make this world a better place. Once again, this is not about proving that Christianity is true. Rather, it is another example of how well the Christian intellectual framework seems to correspond with what we experience in our lives, and with the deepest intuitions of our hearts.

Expanding our vision

Throughout this chapter, we have been exploring the idea that Christianity enables us to see the big picture; it expands our vision of life to allow us to appreciate the depths of reality, rather than limiting our vision to the very restricted realm of what we can ‘prove’. It is one of the most assured results of philosophy that reason has its limits, as do logic and science. We have seen that all three can be extraordinarily useful in helping us avoid making mistakes. But knowing that you cannot draw a triangle with six sides does not go very far towards answering the really important questions about life. It won’t help us find, let alone grasp, the truth, beauty and goodness that lie at the heart of a meaningful life.

As we touched on earlier, everywhere around us there are hints and clues of a world beyond the frontiers of reason that we are invited to explore and inhabit. We may hear snatches of its music in the quiet moments of life. Or sense its fragrance wafted towards us by a gentle breeze on a cool evening. Or hear stories of others who have discovered this land, and are ready to share their adventures. All these ‘signals of transcendence’ encourage us to believe that there is more to existence than our everyday experience. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, the human imagination reaches beyond the limits of reason. ‘Every true artist’, he argued, feels ‘that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.’

Imagine someone strolling up and down a long, sandy island beach. One day, as he walks along the shoreline, he notices something that has been washed up by the tide. It is a strange plant, like nothing he has seen before. He shakes his head, puzzled. Where has this come from? Nothing similar grows on his island. Then he realizes its significance. It has come from another land – a land beyond his horizon, brought there by the ocean currents. The world turns out to be bigger than he realized.

Having aroused our suspicions that there is more to life than the bleak landscape of modern secularism, these signals of transcendence, or echoes of a divine voice, don’t prove anything in and of themselves. But they do make a lot of sense when seen within the context of the Christian big picture.

Yet the God who planted these clues in the created order does not hang around, waiting for us to notice him. God chooses both to speak to us, and to come and find us. Some philosophers assert that reason leads only to the idea of God as some kind of first principle of the universe. Yet we must gently insist that God cannot be limited by reason in this way. There is no good philosophical reason for not believing in a God who speaks – who, in some sense of the word, wants to be known. The Christian vision of God does not contradict reason; it simply expands and enriches it, transcending the limitations of the slick and superficial rationalism that so many seem to take for granted.

To explore this further, let’s use a familiar analogy, found in the writings of the classic Greek philosopher Plato. Plato asks us to imagine a group of people, trapped all their lives in an underground cave.

I remember very well the first time I ever read this passage in Plato. I was in my final year at high school, waiting to go up to Oxford to study the natural sciences in depth. I felt as if I were poised on the brink of a new and wonderful world that would confirm my youthful atheism and give it new intellectual resilience. As I read Plato’s analogy, the hard-nosed rationalist within me smiled condescendingly. Typical escapist superstition! What you see is what you get, and that’s the end of the matter. But a still, small voice whispered words of doubt. What if this world is only part of the picture? What if this world is only a shadowland? What if there is something more wonderful beyond it?

Had I come across the writings of C. S. Lewis at that stage, I would have known that he once experienced the same dilemma, as the imaginative deficiency of his youthful atheism began to dawn on him. Yet even without reading Lewis, a seed of uncertainty had been planted within my intransigent atheist mindset. I could not have known then, but within a year, my doubts would grow to the point where they overwhelmed me and led me to rediscover Christianity.

Suppose we take Plato’s analogy a stage further and ask the crucial question: how could the people in the cave become aware that reality was much bigger than their cramped and dingy cavern? They know only a dark, smoky world; how could they discover that beyond it lies a bright, brilliant and clear land of fresh breezes, intoxicating fragrances, rich colours and lush landscapes?

There might be clues within the cave to suggest the existence of a world beyond its damp and dark walls. When the wind blew in the right direction, our subterranean inhabitants might catch the scent of a distant flower, or hear the murmur of a mountain stream. They might find inexplicable drawings etched on its walls of things they had never seen.

There is another possibility. What if someone from outside were to enter the cave? What if this person were to explain what lay beyond and offered to take them there? In the end, the people in the cave would have to make a decision: will we trust this stranger, or not? Will we allow him to lead us out of the familiar place we have always known to a new and mysterious world?

These themes are explored in the Gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament. Who is this person? Is he to be trusted? Is there a world beyond the one we know, and can Jesus of Nazareth tell us anything about it? Or lead us into it? Is he just a respectable religious teacher, with a few useful tips about living a good life? Or is he the one who is able to change everything, bring healing to those who are broken and wounded, and give us hope in the face of death?

We shall examine these themes in more detail in later volumes. For the meantime, our focus is on the ‘big picture’ – a vision of reality that the Christian faith asks us to trust, invites us to enter and encourages us to unpack and savour. We’ve looked at some aspects of this theme in this present chapter. In the next, we will focus in turn on three models or images that will help us explore the big picture further.

↑ Back to top