Explainer

Belief

Creed

29 May 2023

5 min read

I believe in breadboards: cutting through the meaning of belief

A turn of phrase leads Andrew Steane to consider what we say and what we really mean when we say we believe in something.

Andrew Steane

Andrew Steane has been Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002, He is the author of Faithful to Science: The Role of Science in Religion.

bread a piece of cutlery rest on a breadboard

Photo by Caio Pezzo on Unsplash.

On holiday with my family around Easter this year, we rented a small cottage and went self-catering. This is a lovely way to enjoy a week, heartily recommended by me, at least.

As anyone who has done it will know, one of the standard experiences of the holiday house is the search of the kitchen for the items you need at mealtime. This year I was looking for a breadboard. You know: a flat wooden board on which to cut a loaf of bread. There did not appear to be one. But there were two marble boards which were plainly cutting boards. I then made a remark to my dear companion and wife Emma, I said,

“I think maybe the owners don’t believe in breadboards”.

This turn of phrase came quite naturally to me. It is a way of speaking that has been common in England for a long time, though it is less prevalent now. As I say, this way of speaking has a long history and it is not about abstract questions of existence. It is about practical questions of usefulness. If someone says:

“I believe in breadboards”

it does not mean

“there is some doubt as to the reality of breadboards, but I think they are real.”

What it means is:

“I think breadboards are useful; I think they help; they are a Good Thing.”

If someone says:

“I don’t believe in breadboards”

it means:

“I don’t think we need breadboards; they don’t help; we can cut bread another way.”

I am interested in this way of speaking because I am interested in what is going on when Christians recite, as many do, the summary statements called creeds, which mostly begin with the phrase “I (or we) believe in God, the Father almighty, creator …”.

I’ll come back to that in a moment. Before I do, let’s note some other ways in which the phrase “believe in” can be used. Sometimes someone may ask “do you believe in ghosts?” The question arises because ghost stories are strange and hard to verify and the very notion of a ghost is questionable, so the question is asking “do you think there is in fact any such thing as a ghost?” It is asking, “are ghosts real?”

And there are other contexts in which statements about belief might be made. Suppose a group of soldiers is cut off after an advance by opposing troops, and they are in doubt as to the way back to their own front line. Maybe the captain is advocating a choice which seems wrong to the private soldiers. They might debate among themselves. In this case, when putting into words his judgement on the matter, a soldier might find himself using the phrase, “I believe in the captain”, or, as the case may be, “I don’t believe in the captain.” Again, it is not a statement about whether there is a captain; it is a statement about whether trust in this particular captain is well-placed.

Now imagine a more homely scenario which has played out in many a household over the years. A daughter is telling her parents about her boyfriend. Perhaps the parents are not quite sure about this young man. They do not know him as well as their daughter does. They want to trust her judgement, but they are hesitating. Is our dear child perhaps a little blinded by infatuation?

What might the daughter say to explain how she feels? Having happily listed the boyfriend’s other good qualities, she might choose to add, “and he believes in me.” What does she mean by that? Is it that there is some doubt as to whether she exists, but the young man thinks she does? Of course not. What she means is that she feels that her friend knows her well enough to see her as she really is, and he affirms what he sees. He affirms that she has something to offer; she herself and not some other person or some other version who is not truly her.

There is a related experience which I have had many times with Emma. When faced with a decision about raising small children (what time should they go to bed? When can they go out on their own? etc.) I have often had the great boon of being able to say to myself “I believe in Emma.” What it means is, I think she has a lot of wisdom and good judgement on this issue, so I don’t need to agonise on it for too long; she has very likely already found a good answer.

Belief is much talked about in life more generally of course. There is the notion (quite dubious I think) that if you “believe” then you can realise whatever hopes and dreams you may have. Sometimes people speak of “belief” when what they really mean is hope. I won’t go into all these usages. The main point of this article is to say that if, in the context of a Christian gathering, you are invited to join in and recite a creed beginning with the phrase “We believe in God” then you do not need to make it function as an abstract statement about reality and existence, the way the question about ghosts functions. This is because “We believe in God” can function much better as a statement about practical helpfulness, like the statement about breadboards.

We Christians believe in God the way we believe in breadboards. We believe in God the way we believe in the good judgement of a close companion. It means we think our life as a community will go better if we pay the right kind of attention to our ultimate context, and the values and possibilities which are held there. We do not use the word “God” to refer to an airy being who might not exist. The word is, rather, a short (arguably too short) way to direct our attention. Our attention is drawn to those aspects of reality which can rightly and properly command the loyalty of a good and wise person. We don’t pretend to completely know what those aspects are. But we want to learn. Our gatherings and our creeds help us to acknowledge and embrace this ultimate context more fully.

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Church and state

Creed

Monsters

6 October 2025

4 min read

Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

An AI montage show a black and white school at the centre of a red and yellow circular grid upon which are the San Francisco skyline and map.

San Francisco Antichrist.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Sometime between 95 and 110 AD, a Christian called John the Evangelist (it is said) wrote about ‘the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and even now is now already in the world.’

Fast forward two thousand years, and the Antichrist is back on the agenda, this time via Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir (a data analytics company) and the first external investor in Facebook, who is currently offering his thoughts on the “politics of the Antichrist” in a four-part lecture series in San Francisco.

Thiel previously said, in an interview in 2024, that he thinks that if the ‘Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.’ By Armageddon, he means the destruction of the world arising, for instance, from nuclear war, bioweapons, climate change, or AI. And in that interview, Thiel referenced an instructional documentary film from 1946: One World or None. Its thesis is that the answer to atomic warfare is to have the nations of the world unite. According to Thiel, such a global government would be the most insidious danger of them all. ‘The slogan of the Antichrist,’ he said, is ‘peace and safety’, which ‘resonates’ in ‘a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon’. So, the promise of perfect peace is a false one: it would lead only to a one-world totalitarian government.

We have been here before. On 13 January 1814, at one of thousands of services of national thanksgiving to celebrate the Peninsular Army’s entry into France, which heralded the end of the Napoleonic Wars, The Venerable Joseph Holden Pott, the Archdeacon, ascended the pulpit in the St Martin-in-the Fields Church on Trafalgar Square in central London. There had, he said, never been a ‘fitter moment’ to encourage ‘patriot zeal’ ‘on sound and righteous principles’, which he expounded for his flock. Jesus Christ was ‘a true patriot’. First, he loved the place of his birth and the people around him; then, he demonstrated love for the whole world. The ‘spirit of true Patriotism regards the good of other Countries as connected always with its own.’ However, one’s home country always come first.

Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon, who rose to power on the wave of revolutionary unrest in France, was cast by the ruling elite in Britain as the Antichrist. Protestant Britain was depicted as the new Israel, which would deliver Europe from all its woes. With the risk of political Armageddon in their own country, the establishment reasserted the importance of religion to the nation state.

The politics of the Antichrist will always tend to have traction, but the risk is that the response to the belief that the Beast is rising out of the sea, to use the image deployed in the Christian Bible, will be just as destructive: a religious revival that is all about reactionary politics or remembrance of things past.

Thiel’s take on history is that it its linear, angled toward the End Times. His thought is cyclical, collapsing in on itself, in that it is a tired trope that has been used before. For instance, it has been used during the Napoleonic Wars, and it is not guaranteed by a strong faith that can move mountains, which is arguably what the world needs more than anything else.

Saint John meant, by the ‘spirit of the Antichrist’, ‘every spirit that does not acknowledge’ Jesus Christ as Lord. And soon after, the early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, who sold Christianity in a competitive marketplace, wrote about the ‘sects both of barbarian and Hellenic philosophy’ that unlike Christ ‘each vaunts as the whole truth the portion which has fallen to its lot’.

The risk with Thiel is that he is simply validating unchecked ‘tech’ taking over the world. It is also sectarian that Thiel’s thoughts, for all their seemingly counter-cultural boldness, are often expressed in the shadows. His remarks in his current lecture series in San Francisco, for example, will go unrecorded. They are speculative in their nature.

By contrast, those writers who lived through the first half of the twentieth century, which Thiel sees as a turning point in the politics of the Antichrist, flaunted their wares in public, with incisive clarity. They spoke of the way in which the spirit of Christ transcends time and all other ideology, like Clement of Alexandria in the first century.

One such writer was C. S. Lewis, who wrote an article ‘On Living in Atomic Age’ (first published in 1948), in which he exhorted us not to exaggerate ‘the novelty of our situation’. We were always going to die, irrespective of the politics of the world around us, and as ever our mission is to better ourselves by turning to Christ. We should not assume that we alone can save the world. But Peter Thiel sounds he like does.

So, we still have much to learn from the Christians from the early church. Saint Paul wrote to Christians in Thessalonica warning them not to be deceived by the Antichrist, who ‘sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.’ And anyone encountering Peter Thiel’s (or indeed any one’s persons) political ideas would do well to remember that.

The PayPal founder’s obsession with the Beast is nothing new.

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