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.

Column

Creed

Death & life

Suffering

23 October 2025

4 min read

Dressing up in the dark: what Halloween reveals about our uneasy age

Why Halloween feels darker this year

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Skeleton figurines clothed in Victoria outfits.

Wallace Henry on Unsplash.

Something bothers me about the approach of this years’ All Hallows’ Eve on 31 October and its accompanying night-time Halloween parties, like an irksome background unease at an encroaching darkness behind the childlike cosplay of the event itself.

God knows, there have been infinitely darker years, some of them within living memory. Two world wars, one of them containing the Holocaust and it doesn’t get darker than that. Genocides, such as Rwanda’s, and famines, from China to Russia to Ethiopia. Terrorist atrocities: Munich, Lockerbie, Madrid, 9/11.

Mass murders of children: Dunblane, Peshawar, Sandy Hook, Southport, to name a few in such a grim litany. Harder to imagine, because they’re further away culturally in either time or place, are the great plagues, conflagrations and disasters of history: The Black Death, Indian Ocean tsunami, Hiroshima.

So one wonders if it’s impertinent to feel uneasy about Halloween this year. I suspect it’s the discomfort of something bubbling under and as yet unseen, like unexploded magma or the unbearable tension of a faultline threatening to give way.

To name it is to call out a most fragile world peace – the pretence of a peace in the Middle East that cannot hold; a peace process that hasn’t even started between Russia and neighbouring Ukraine. Both presided over by an American president who at best isn’t up to securing either and, at worst, has zip interest in democratic process and is only in it for himself.

Then there’s apparently unstoppable mass migration, driven by climate change, to western economies already going to hell in policy-free handcarts. The creeping re-growth of nationalism and antisemitism, social media fuelled hatred of refugees, the collapse of trust in institutions of state in the UK’s unwritten constitution, such as the royal family, parliament, the police and the Church. Grooming gangs and trafficked sex-slaves; we’re not in the gloaming of dusk – it sometimes feels like night has fallen.

At what price, then, do we dress our children (and ourselves) as ghouls and witches and demons and make jack o’lanterns to celebrate the dark side at Halloween? It’s the question at the heart of a debate that customarily divides between those of us who say it’s just a bit of fun and we shouldn’t be spoil-sports, against others who warn censoriously about conjuring up the devil, who once abroad will play havoc with those who so foolishly summoned him.

That’s a fairly pointless argument, as the positions just get repeated and that doesn’t get us anywhere. More fruitful may be to examine what the dark side is, what it is we’re conjuring, if anything, and whether it plays any role in what we fear we may be facing, which ranges from the breakdown of the world order, to great wars and, not to put too fine a point on it, an apocalypse.

Stumbling about in the dark, we’re bound to trip over what’s called theodicy – the theological study of how a supposedly all-loving God can tolerate human evil. One of the more recent and most accessible contributions to this school comes from the US journalist and academic Brandon Ambrosino, who imagines the pursuit of theodicy not to be climbing stairs of knowledge, but the descent to a dark basement: “If the living room is where we ask how exactly God moved Trump’s head out of the way of the shooter’s bullet, the basement is where we ask if God caused the bullet to end up in a fire-fighter’s body.”

One of Amrosino’s conclusions is that “evil is not properly a thing… Evil is nothing, literally [his italics]. It is a void in the fabric of God’s creation.” This concept of evil – the dark, as any parent would comfort a child – as empty is appealing. In the dark of that basement, there is nothing there but hope.

This idea of evil as a void, or moral vacuum, is told in the story of a student (not young Albert Einstein, as widely claimed) who demurs when taught that the problem of evil proves the non-existence of God. “Does cold exist?” asks the student. Of course, replies the teacher. But cold is only the absence of energy, which creates heat. Likewise, does darkness exist? Yes, but it has no wavelength, so it is only the absence of light.

What brings the energy of light and heat, like why there is something rather than nothing, is too big a question for now. But it may go some way to addressing the darknesses listed in the first half of this column.

And perhaps it’s a thought to carry into this Halloween. Children dressed as undead phantasms, with Mum’s lipstick tracing blood trickles from their mouths, aren’t joining the dark, but filling what is empty with laughter. And, in doing so, they’re mocking it, which must offer some sort of hope for the future.

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