Alister McGrath's Abandonment of Atheism
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The library at Methody smelled of dust and floor polish. I sat two tables over, supposed to be finishing a problem set in physics, but my eyes kept drifting to the stack McGrath had pulled from the back shelves. He had already worked through most of them by the time the rest of us finished lunch. Titles on the history of astronomy, on how theories change when new instruments appear, on what counts as proof in different centuries. He never looked up when the bell rang for afternoon classes.
We had both stayed on after the scholarship results came through. He was headed for Wadham to read chemistry. I had a place at another college for the same subject. The extra terms gave us time to strengthen languages and finish the entrance work, but they also gave us the run of the small collection on the history of science. Most days we said little. He would mark a passage with a finger and keep reading until the light faded.
One evening he closed a book by a philosopher of science and left it open at the page. I glanced across. The argument was about how observation never stands alone, how every measurement arrives already shaped by the questions a person brings. He had underlined nothing, yet the next morning he returned with another volume on the same shelf. By the end of that week he had worked through the set twice.
We walked back to the tram stop together once. He asked whether I thought chemistry could ever settle questions about why anything exists at all. I said the question had never occurred to me. He nodded as if that settled something for him rather than for me. After that he began carrying a notebook to the library and writing brief lines after each chapter.
Oxford in October 1971 felt larger and colder than either of us had pictured. Wadham’s chemistry labs ran late into the evenings. We shared a bench for practicals on reaction rates. Between titrations he mentioned that he had started reading theology in the evenings. Not for a degree yet, just to see whether the arguments held once the schoolboy version of science had been set aside. He spoke without heat, the way someone describes checking a calculation a second time.
By the middle of our second term the change showed in small habits. He stopped repeating the line that religion only asserted what it could not prove. Instead he would ask what kind of evidence would count for or against a claim that the universe had a purpose. The question was not aimed at anyone in particular. He asked it while stacking flasks or while waiting for a spectrum to print.
In the spring of 1972 he took the step of attending a set of lectures on the history of Christian thought. I went with him once. The room was half empty and the lecturer spoke without notes. McGrath sat near the back, wrote steadily, and said nothing on the way out. Two weeks later he told me he had decided the Christian account made better sense of the order he already saw in the natural world than the picture he had carried from Belfast. He used the word “sense,” not “certainty.” He still ran the same experiments and still expected the same numbers.
We finished the undergraduate course together in 1975. He stayed on for a doctorate in molecular biophysics while adding a second undergraduate degree in theology. The college allowed it because the statutes were old and the tutors were curious. Most evenings he moved between two libraries, one for spectra and one for doctrine. The pattern never looked dramatic from the outside. He simply stopped treating the two subjects as separate rooms.
Years later, when his first books on the relation between the disciplines appeared, I recognized the same questions that had surfaced in the Methody library. The tone had changed from defense to exploration, but the habit of testing one field against the other remained. He never claimed the reading had forced a conclusion. He said only that it removed the reason he had once thought no further reading was needed.
The last time I saw him in Oxford he was carrying a stack of journals on both topics. The afternoon light caught the brass fittings on the microscope he still kept on a side table in his rooms. He set the journals down, adjusted the focus on a slide, and went back to his notes without looking up. The page in front of him held columns of data on one side and a list of theological references on the other.
In the months after that afternoon the rooms emptied for the long vacation and McGrath moved his microscope and the stacked journals to a flat off Iffley Road where he finished the calculations for his DPhil thesis on the kinetics of certain enzyme-substrate interactions. The degree was awarded in 1978 by the university’s board of faculty, the examiners noting in their report that the work contained “precise numerical agreement between observed rate constants and the values predicted by transition-state theory.” At the same time he enrolled for the Oxford Diploma in Theology, attending lectures in the Examination Schools on the patristic period and writing essays that compared Athanasius’s account of creation with the steady-state cosmology then still discussed in some physics seminars. By the summer of 1980 he had been ordained deacon in the Church of England at Christ Church Cathedral, the service lasting ninety minutes and the bishop’s charge quoting the ordinal’s requirement that a priest be “apt and meet” to teach.
Two years later, already serving as curate at St Leonard’s Church in the London suburb of St Albans, McGrath published his first article in the journal *The Churchman*, under the title “The Nature of Scientific Explanation,” in which he quoted Michael Polanyi’s phrase “tacit knowledge” and applied it to the way experimental data in molecular biology are interpreted within an existing theoretical framework. The piece ran to fourteen pages and cited twelve references, including a 1974 paper by Eigen on hypercycles. Colleagues at the parish noticed that he kept a copy of the offprint in the vestry and occasionally read from it when preparing confirmation classes for sixth-form students who had brought their own questions about cosmology.
In 1990, after returning to Oxford as lecturer in historical and systematic theology at Wycliffe Hall, McGrath completed the manuscript of *The Genesis of Doctrine*, published by Blackwell the following year. The book opened with an epigraph from Newman’s *Grammar of Assent* and contained a chapter examining how the Nicene formula of 325 was shaped by the philosophical vocabulary available in the fourth-century schools of Alexandria. Reviewers counted 287 footnotes; one of them, in the *Journal of Theological Studies*, observed that the argument rested on “a chemist’s habit of checking each step against measurable quantities.” During those same years McGrath also supervised undergraduate practicals in the physical chemistry laboratory on South Parks Road, where the apparatus still included the same Perkin-Elmer spectrophotometers he had used as an undergraduate.
By the spring of 2004 he had been appointed Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford and had delivered the Bampton Lectures on the theme “The Science of God,” later expanded into a volume of 254 pages that included a table comparing the fine-structure constant measured in 1998 by the CODATA committee with the value required for carbon resonance in stellar nucleosynthesis. In an interview recorded for the BBC Radio 4 programme *In Our Time* that October, McGrath stated that “the universe discloses a rationality that invites continued investigation rather than final closure.” The broadcast lasted forty-five minutes and was repeated the following week after listeners requested transcripts.
The debate with Richard Dawkins at the Oxford Union in February 2007 drew an audience of 475 ticket-holders and was recorded for later podcast release. McGrath’s opening statement referred to the 2006 book *The God Delusion* by page number when he noted that its treatment of Aquinas’s Five Ways omitted the distinction between primary and secondary causation found in the *Summa Theologiae*. The exchange lasted two hours; the motion that “the motion that religion has done more harm than good” was defeated by 234 votes to 179. McGrath kept the printed programme among his papers and later cited the division figures when lecturing on the public reception of scientific atheism.
In 2014 McGrath accepted the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science and Religion, the first endowed chair of its kind at Oxford, and moved his office to the third floor of the Faculty of Theology and Religion building on Gibson Building, where the shelves held both the multi-volume *Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology* that he edited and the bound spectra from his 1970s biophysics experiments. During the 2020 lockdown he recorded a series of online lectures for the university’s Department for Continuing Education, each forty minutes long, on the topic of “Natural Theology after Darwin,” drawing on correspondence between Charles Kingsley and Charles Darwin dated 1860 that he had examined in the Bodleian’s Special Collections. The recordings remain available on the department’s platform and have accumulated more than 92,000 views.
On an afternoon in late September 2023, McGrath stood at a lectern in the Examination Schools once more, this time delivering the annual Hinshelwood Lecture to an audience that included current chemistry undergraduates. He placed a single sheet of paper beside the microphone, the left column listing measured values for the cosmic microwave background temperature from the Planck satellite data release of 2018, the right column quoting a sentence from Augustine’s *De Genesi ad Litteram* on the distinction between the temporal beginning and the ontological ground of creation. After the lecture he answered questions for twenty minutes, then walked back across the courtyard carrying the same leather briefcase he had used since the 1990s, its corners reinforced with brass studs.
In the weeks after the Hinsleywood lecture McGrath returned each Wednesday afternoon to the Gibson Building to supervise two DPhil students whose theses examined the 1863 correspondence between Baden Powell and John Henry Newman on the limits of inductive reasoning in natural philosophy. One of the students, Elena Rossi, recorded in her supervision notes for 9 October 2023 that McGrath had directed her to the precise wording in Powell’s essay “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity” where the phrase “the uniform course of nature” appears twelve times. The following month he submitted a 4,800-word review to the journal *Science and Christian Belief* of the 2022 monograph by Sarah Coakley on evolutionary theodicy, citing page 147 of that work and contrasting it with the 1975 transition-state calculations he had performed on triosephosphate isomerase.
By March 2024 McGrath had completed the revisions for a second edition of his 2009 volume *A Fine-Tuned Universe*, adding a new chapter that incorporated the 2023 Planck Legacy Archive release on the tensor-to-scalar ratio and quoted a 1991 letter from John Polkinghorne to the effect that “theology must now speak of a contingent order whose regularities are themselves gifts.” The publisher’s production schedule listed the print run at 3,200 copies with release set for September. During the same period he continued to attend the weekly Eucharist at St Mary’s Church, Iffley, arriving early enough on most Sundays to read the notices board before the 9.30 service began.
In June 2024 the university’s Congregation approved his emeritus status, effective 1 October, while retaining his access card to the Radcliffe Science Library stack where the 1978 bound volumes of his DPhil spectra remain on shelfmark 1898 d. 47. That summer he delivered three online seminars for the Ian Ramsey Centre, each running fifty-five minutes, on the topic of “Inference to the Best Explanation in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” drawing on the 1665 minutes of the Royal Society that record Robert Boyle’s objection to Descartes’s vortex theory. Attendance logs showed 184 unique log-ins across the three sessions.
The narrator met him once more on 14 November 2024 outside the Bodleian’s Weston Library, where McGrath was returning a microfilm of the 325 Nicene acts that he had consulted for a footnote in a forthcoming article for *Theology and Science*. He mentioned that he had begun sorting the contents of the Iffley flat, separating the theology volumes from the chemistry offprints, and had already placed the Perkin-Elmer logbooks from 1974–1977 in archival boxes labelled for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The conversation lasted twelve minutes before he crossed the courtyard toward the bus stop on Broad Street.
During the first quarter of 2025 McGrath contributed a 2,100-word essay to the *Zygon* symposium on fine-tuning arguments, quoting the exact numerical value 0.007 for the strong coupling constant as listed in the 2022 Particle Data Group review and attributing the phrase “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” to Eugene Wigner’s 1960 paper. The piece appeared in the June issue, pages 312–319. In April he travelled to Cambridge to examine the papers of the late John Lucas at the University Library, requesting specifically the folder containing the 1971 typescript on Gödel’s theorem and its implications for physical determinism.
By September 2025 the online lecture series from the 2020 lockdown had reached 147,000 cumulative views, with the segment on Kingsley’s letter of 18 September 1860 accounting for 31 percent of total watch time according to the department’s analytics dashboard. McGrath’s own copy of that letter, transcribed in his hand in a notebook dated 1983, remains on the desk in the Iffley flat beside a photograph of the 1975 Wadham chemistry cohort taken outside the college lodge.
On an ordinary Tuesday morning in January 2026 McGrath walked from the flat to the corner shop on Iffley Road for a copy of the *Times Higher Education Supplement*, the same route he had taken most mornings since 1982. He carried the leather briefcase with the brass-studded corners, now containing only a single folded sheet listing the accession numbers of the enzyme kinetics notebooks he intended to donate that week to the university archives.
