Last week, I began reading The Landscape of Faith by Alister McGrath. In the first chapter, he explores the concept of faith and how he has come to understand it, having once been an atheist.

I realized that faith is not an intellectual vice, but a simple necessity if we are to live meaningfully within our world. We cannot engage with the complexities of reality without making judgements we cannot prove. Every reflective atheist I know concedes this point…

The faith of rationalism says that it is impossible for anything to exist outside of what we can directly observe or experience. But this way of seeing reality can ensnare us.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, we can easily become trapped within a ‘picture’, a certain way of thinking ,and then find that we cannot extricate ourselves from our self-imposed servitude.

In it writes about the relationship between reason and imagination. Specifically, he describes how simplistic rationalism suppresses the imagination:

The New Atheism was deeply hostile to any appeal to the imagination. Although this deep prejudice against the imagination was carefully presented as a necessary defense of the rationality of science, it was really driven by a fear that people might discover and inhabit a deeper vision of reality than the diminished account offered by this ‘glib and shallow rationalism’ (C.S. Lewis).

Indeed, he points out how that suppression can lead us to

As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, we can easily become trapped with a ‘picture’, a certain way of thinking ,and then find that we cannot extricate ourselves from our self-imposed servitude.