Many people think faith and science cannot coexist in the same mind. Alister McGrath, theologian and scientist at Oxford, is living proof that this choice is a false one: he moved from the laboratory bench to the chair of theology without abandoning the rigor of either discipline.
Born on January 23, 1953, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, McGrath grew up in Downpatrick, the son of a doctor and a nurse. While still a teenager, he became an atheist and drew close to Marxism, convinced that science had made God unnecessary.
At 18, in his first term as a chemistry freshman at Oxford University, he realized that his rejection of God rested on assumptions he had never examined closely. Investigating the Christian faith with the same rigor he applied to science, he converted to Christianity that same year, in 1971.
He completed a doctorate in molecular biophysics at Oxford in 1977 under the supervision of biochemist George Radda, and the following year also graduated with honors in theology. He was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church in 1981 and, from 1983, began teaching Christian doctrine and ethics at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, where he would not receive his personal chair in historical theology until 1999.
Over the decades, he produced dozens of books that put Christian theology in direct dialogue with science, philosophy, and contemporary culture, among them the academic trilogy A Scientific Theology and the textbook Christian Theology: An Introduction, adopted in seminaries around the world.
He became one of the leading voices in dialogue with the so-called new atheism. In works such as Dawkins’ God and The Dawkins Delusion?, the latter co-written with psychologist Joanna Collicutt McGrath, his wife, he argued that Richard Dawkins’ criticisms of faith revealed little familiarity with the theology they claimed to refute.
He took part in public debates with Dawkins and other critics of religion, but also drew criticism from atheist readers and reviewers, who accuse him of simplifying or picking the weakest points of the arguments he refutes rather than engaging the strongest ones. McGrath acknowledges the risk and maintains that Christian apologetics must take seriously the best arguments of the other side, not the weakest.
Today a professor emeritus at Oxford, having held the chair of Science and Religion until 2022, McGrath continues to write and teach. His journey shows young Christians that an honest search for truth does not require choosing between the telescope and the Bible.
