Essay

Belief

Creed

11 May 2023

8 min read

Questioning the question

Seemingly rational questions can suck the oxygen from the room. Andrew Steane was in such a room when it happened.

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.

A modern staging of King Lear has the cast across the page. King Lear is front of stage gesturing while the others look on

A 2012 production of King Lear at Hamburg State Opera.

rinkhoff-Moegenburg, professional photographers from Lüneburg, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We all know that asking questions is important. Asking the right questions is at the heart of most intellectual activity. Questions must be encouraged. We know this. But are there any questions which may not be asked? Questions which should not be asked?

Many a young adult might instinctively say “no: never! All questions must be encouraged!” but when invited to think it through, they will come to realise that there is a little more to it than that. There are, for example, statements which present themselves in all the innocent garb of questions, but which smuggle in nasty and false assertions, such as the phrase “why are blond people intellectually inferior to dark people?” There are questions which mould the questioner, such as “will I feel better if I arrange for this other person to be silenced?”

Questions can serve horrible purposes: they can focus the mind down a channel of horror, such as, “what is the quickest way to bulldoze this village?” Even more extreme examples could be given. They make it clear that not all statements that appear to be questions are primarily questions at all, and not all questions are innocent.

Every question is a connector to all sorts of related assumptions and projects, some of them far from morally neutral.

On reflection, then, it becomes clear that every question you can ask, just like every other type of utterance you can make, is not a simple self-contained thing. Every question is a connector to all sorts of related assumptions and projects, some of them far from morally neutral. This makes it not just possible, but sometimes important and a matter of ethics and duty, not just to refuse to answer, but to raise an objection to the question itself. More precisely, one objects to the assumptions that lie behind the question, and which have rendered the question objectionable.

“Have you stopped beating your children?”

“Tell me, my daughters … which of you shall we say doth love us most?”

“How do you reconcile your rationality with your religious faith?”

In all three cases the question is itself faulty. It is at fault because it has brought in an unjustified and untrue assumption. Such questions have no answer except to object to such assumptions and try to help the questioner see the situation more truthfully.

In the first case, if the question is pressed, and I am hauled up before the judge in a court of law, then I will protest, with a clear conscience and as forcefully as I can, that I never did beat my children in the first place and therefore the question is itself at fault. (Such a question is like the unethical practice called “leading the witness” which a good judge will rule out of order in a court of law.)

The second example is the question asked by King Lear in Shakespeare’s play. The play revolves around the fact that Lear has misunderstood the very nature of love. The one who loves him best will not, and cannot, reply in the way he anticipates. His daughter Cordelia chooses largely silence, and to show her love by her behaviour.

The third question is the one that prompted this article. I have been asked it, either explicitly or implicitly, many times. Every time I have been aware that the very atmosphere of the question has prejudged the issue. It is like being asked whether you have stopped beating your children.

To be fair, it is not as bad as the children example, but I use the comparison to help the reader get some sense of the issue. In the case of faith and reason, for any reasonable person, no reconciliation is required because their faith was never divorced from their rationality in the first place. Rather, the two have walked along together, each moulding the other from the start. Being asked to explain this is like being asked to explain that you are honest.

This is not to say that a dishonest or confused person might well have cognitive dissonances - muddles and inconsistences between what they tried to trust and what they had sufficient reason to believe. So, they would have some intellectual and spiritual work to do. And none of us is perfectly honest and clear-headed so we all have some learning to do. But most of us are not starting out from a place of complete dishonesty or contradiction. In particular, our scientific understandings and religious commitments are not pulling in different directions, as the dubious question seems to assume they are. Rather, the deeper our understanding of each, the deeper our appreciation of their roles as two aspects of a single dance becomes.

I recall clearly a discussion with a friend by the side of a football field where our children were playing in a match. The subject turned to religious matters and, with a view to briefly describing his position, my friend said he based his conclusions on reason, and then gestured to some vague idea that I had something else called faith. The obvious implication was that his conclusions had a basis in reason and mine did not. This was not argued or demonstrated; it was the very starting-point of the way he thought the conversation should operate. This floored me. What could I say? It was like being told you are a sub-species, some sort of childish person who does not appreciate reason and therefore should shut up while the adults are talking. (It was also a bit like an amateur wrestler thinking he could advise Muhammad Ali on how to box).

What about the questions which betray assumptions which are themselves questionable, but which we don’t recognise as such, because of the assumptions of our culture and the intellectual habits it promotes?

Now we have arrived at the point of this article, which is not, I will admit, the general issue of questioning the question, but the specific issue of religion and rationality. I want to focus attention on where the issue of questioning the question really lies. The issue is not, “are there questions which are objectionable?” (we already settled that). Nor is it, “let’s have some intellectual amusement unpicking what is objectionable about some ill-posed question which we find it easy to tell is ill-posed.” No, the heart of this issue is: what about the questions which betray assumptions which are themselves questionable, but which we don’t recognise as such, because of the assumptions of our culture and the intellectual habits it promotes?

For example, where do you start in response to a question such as “how do you reconcile science and religion?”

I think you start by pointing out that if one has a healthy version of both then they are not estranged in the first place.

In order to show this, the discussion has to unpack the difference between a valid and invalid grasp of the nature of scientific explanation, and the difference between healthy and unhealthy religion. It will also include some effort to clarify what a person means by the term ‘religion’. The discussion may include some consideration of the history of science, and the lived experience of a research scientist. It should also bring in the brave efforts of reformers down the ages to realise fairer forms of human society.

In the room when it happens

But in order for this discussion to get going, there has to be some oxygen in the room. I have been in rooms where the question, “how do you reconcile science and religion?” has made me feel every bit as queasy as the “beating your children” one. The hollow feeling of having been pigeonholed before you can open your mouth. The feeling of being in the presence of people whose mental landscape does not even allow the garden where you live. The feeling of being treated like a mental underling - it is all there. My reaction is strong because rationality is a deeply ingrained part of my very identity. It is every bit as important to me as it is to the self-declared ‘rationalists’, so that to face a presumption of guilt in this area is to face a considerable injustice.

On the other hand, religion is a broad phenomenon, having bad (terrible, horrendous) parts and good (wonderful, beautiful) parts, so the question might be a muddled attempt to ask, “what type of religion is going on in you?” It still remains a suspicious question, like “are you honest?” but in view of the nastiness of bad religion, perhaps we have to live with it. Perhaps we should allow that people will need to ask, to get some reassurance, and to help them on their own journey. But we can only make a reply if the questioner does not come over like an inquisitor who has already made up their mind. The question needs to be, in effect, “I realise that we are both rational; would you unpack for me the way that rationality pans out for you?”

We all go forward in our lives with some sort of reliance on the ultimate well-spring of reality, whatever that is. We can’t do anything else.

Faith, in its healthy forms, is a kind of willingness. It is a willingness based on a combination of suggestive evidence, value, and lived experience. We all go forward in our lives with some sort of reliance on the ultimate well-spring of reality, whatever that is. We can’t do anything else. The faith which is called religious may include willingness to acknowledge this ultimate well-spring of reality in personal terms. We may express gratitude, for example, and objection, and we may ask for forgiveness or renewed hope. We thus behave in ways which cannot be addressed to a machine or a mere set of principles, worthy though those principles might be. When discussing science and religion we need the questioner at least to be open to the idea that this willingness can be a thoroughly rational willingness. It can be as subtle and deep as great poetry, not just shallow and thoughtless like greetings-card doggerel. Its relation to reason can be compared to the attitude we adopt when we recognize other humans as agents with aspirations and their own concerns. That is, it is in tune with reason, not unreason, but it is larger than reason. It is larger in the sense of richer, engaging more not less of us, as the arrival of the Nimrod movement in Elgar’s Enigma Variations is larger than a single melody.

This article is a re-write based on one originally written in 2014 for the OUP blog.

Interview

Creed

Mental Health

Trauma

21 August 2025

17 min read

When the answers run out: Kate Bowler on faith, fragility, and the beauty of uncertainty

Kate Bowler in conversation with Graham Tomlin.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A woman sits and smiles in front of her bookcase.

This interview is an edited transcript of the Seen & Unseen Live event.

Graham

Kate Bowler is a four-time New York Times bestselling author. She's an award-winning podcast host and also an associate professor of American religious history at Duke University. She's the author of a number of books, including Blessed, a history of the American Prosperity Gospel. And they're wonderfully titled - The Preacher's Wife; The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities.

And you may know something of Kate's story, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 35. And then out of that, wrote the New York Times, bestselling memoir. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies That I've Loved, and her latest book, Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day. Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, And in Betweens. Kate hosts, the award-winning podcast Everything Happens.

We were just talking about students and teaching. What do you teach your students? You say American religious history? Is there a kind of theme? And how do you go about teaching your students? How does that work in your setting?

Kate
Sometimes they make me do the Puritans to Trump sort of lectures which I enjoy, but I think the heart of what I love is to talk about American religious myth making. What stories animate their accounts of how to live a good life. Most American stories end up being iterations of that and some pretty classic themes of righteous individualism, of wanting only good things because God is good, a sense that all things can be conquerable. So, it's got this intense agency to it.

I end up doing a history of American theodicies, explanations of evil. It mostly ends up being storytelling about whether people believe that they deserve the lives they got. It's a privilege to do it, especially at a divinity school. These are going to be people who are in the forefront of helping people interpret and explain their pain.

And I guess that's something about America, isn't it? Because America was born out of this hopeful sense of people leaving the terrible strictures of Europe, and going off to this free new land, and so on. So, I suppose it had sort of hopefulness and positivity built right into the beginning, didn't it?

It does. I also really just enjoy civic virtues, in general Canadian civic virtues. The Americans ones are, of course, the pursuit of happiness. Canadians have peace, order, and good governance as their primary civic virtues, which always makes me laugh. It's just so polite and so reasonable. But Americans are hoping fundamentally that they can become. The kinds of people that can conquer a fickle market, who can overcome any sort of structural evil, can be winners in a culture that doesn't ever really try to explain away inequality. It attempts to create the kind of people who can navigate it.

And you started out by studying the prosperity gospel, didn't you? And particularly within the United States. Is that right? The kind of idea that God wanted good things for you. You've been talking about that already, and when you did that study, what did you expect to find? And what did you find when you did that research?

Well, the very first time I bumped into the prosperity gospel I was in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is right in the middle of Canada, and we have only one fast road, and they had put up a traffic light. So, I was in a terrible mood. Then I saw all these people pouring out from what I thought was a factory that was running on Sunday morning, and then I thought, oh, no, I believe these are churchgoers. Oh, no, that factory is a church, and it turns out that was Canada's largest megachurch that was run by a man named Leon Fontaine, who had just been given a motorcycle by his congregants, and then rode it around on stage, and I thought, no, that is for Americans. I was so insistent on the idea that a story of health, wealth, and happiness was exclusive to an American cultural narrative.

I think I was 18, maybe 20 when I first bumped into it, and then I spent my entire twenties wasting my youth interviewing televangelists in Canada and the United States, trying to understand why it was so deeply American, and also why it was so infinitely exportable and ultimately discovered that there was something very deeply humbling about studying a movement of infinite spiritual expectation. It taught me that we all want to be able to comb through our own biography, to know whether we have any evidence of God's love, special appreciation connection to us, but also that even when we think that we don't have a prosperity gospel in our own lives. We probably do.

You're talking there about the the kind of desire can control outcomes a little bit. It struck me that I think the very first reflection you got in your book, which is called Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day, which is whenever everything is out of control, is that the sort of big theme that you found with it - the desire to control? And I guess that's something you've experienced in your own life, that sense of not being able to control things?
And one of the books I've been reading recently is this one by Hartmut Rosa, called the The Uncontrollability of the World talks about how a world in which everything has been planned and controlled would be a dead world. It's the uncontrollable things that kind of make life kind of interesting, when snow falls and you can't control it, or a sports game that you can't predict the outcome of. Do you think there's something in that? That we try to resist?

I am committed to resisting. I mean, if I could arrange some sort of consumer feedback to our Lord and Saviour, I would suggest that I would be given more control over my circumstances. I guess it's been a question that is really at the heart of so much of my both academic and spiritual interest is, what do we do now, when we feel ourselves confronted by all the things we can't control. Typically, the things that we can't control can do two awful things. One, they seem to preach the story of a God who is cruel and and just doesn't care. That can't possibly care enough to want to confront the evil that overwhelms. Because suffering isn't just like cosmetic change. It's just an avalanche that that sweeps everything away. And then in the face of that we don't know how to say what my friend Tom Long, who is a wonderful preaching professor at Princeton, says. He likes to say there's always two preachers at a funeral. There's the body. But what can tell a story that is bigger than death? So, I think that's the first thing - that suffering, of all the things that are uncertain seems to tell us something about God that isn't true.

I think the other thing, and maybe this is just especially the marketing for women. But when I began to be an unlucky person, I began to feel the sting of a very distinct kind of shame. I felt that it was not just circumstances, that there was something about me, something about my failure, something about my unlovedness. One of the first thoughts I had when I got my diagnosis was, well, of course it's me.

And that is an awful lie that buries itself somewhere in our hearts. But I think uncertainty can have this effect - we end up holding the blade on the wrong side, and it just it always feels like uncertainty. We sort of plunge it right into our chest. So, I think I think uncertainty in general, it's every wave and we have to learn to navigate, but mostly it feels like an affront on our essential goodness.

And how did you learn to manage that uncontrollability? There's a tendency in many of us to try to control everything, and we want to have everything sorted and ordered. And then you kind of get to the point where you realize can't do that. Then the temptation is to be just overwhelmed by it, and to feel there's nothing I can do at all. How do you navigate that sense of being out of control?

One of the American cultural diseases, she can say lovingly, is, they are high on what I like to consider is ‘everything is possibleism’. And so then, in the face of uncertainty, or confusion, or despair, or undoing, then the great fear is that you swing right into ‘nothing is possibleism’ and a kind of despair and nihilism. And I'm very interested in every, especially religious tradition that that helps us cultivate an experience of limited agency like, how do you find that space, spiritually, emotionally, communally, of what is possible today? And I've really, I've really struggled with this over the various intellectual and sort of seasons of illness in my life. In Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day I wrote these little snack size reflections, because I was in a period of so much chronic pain that I really just didn't even have brain space for more than an hour and a half a day. So that became an exercise in trying to still allow myself the joy of creation. Because isn't it so wonderful when your brain goes somewhere, and pain is so boring. And I mean talking about pain is so boring, telling it to your friend for the 200th time, like we are all over it.

So, I just was trying to practice the experience of limited agency, even if for the other six hours I would have to lie in the bath and take pain meds. But I've realized over and over again that trying to find that soft space is a place where I can re-experience, humanity, love, and really just the weird, wild gifts that God gives us. Even when life falls apart.

If anyone's watching this and hasn't found a book yet, I really do recommend it. It's a wonderful thing. It's got lots of different kind of poems and meditations and prayers, and it's got titles for when things are falling apart, when you screwed up, when you're in pain, when life feels incomplete, things like that.

I'm a huge bummer, Graham. Thank you. I think it's so funny. I think it's because we grew up Mennonite, and we love our version of like Saily Bread, and like the tiny little booklets, and all of them were very sweet and very precious moments. And then in my version, it's like, when you're worried you want to eat your own arm, you hate your life so much. So, I do kind of prefer them for the rawer times.

Coming on to how Christian faith helps you navigate those, one thing that struck me as I was reading through it is there's a difference between, one of the common approaches to suffering you get in the modern world, which is the stoic idea that you just sort of grit your teeth, you can't control what's going to happen to you, but you can control your own emotions.

That's such crap, isn't it?

It’s pretty common, isn't it? You get that sort of sense of stoicism, these days there are stoic podcasts and books. What do you see is the difference between that and what Christian faith says to on how you navigate these really difficult periods of life?

I want to say specifically that what I truly believe is crap is the phrase, the argument, ‘you might not be able to control but you can control how you respond.’ I mean, anyone who's been unexpectedly stabbed with a needle knows that that is fundamentally not true. And the reason why I am so sensitive to it is, you know, as somebody who’s had a public cancer diagnosis, I see how quickly the cultural narrative is so intense, I've seen every single person who suffers is lined up to give that response, because what everybody wants to know is, well, just tell me that there's an escape hatch on the other side of it.

Modern stoicism is - and when I say modern it did not have a Renaissance until the 2010s, which is wild - in part a result of an incomplete theology of masculinity that has been available, and it has become a way to explain specifically to men that there's an almost natural impassivity that is theirs should they claim it, And that in the face of chaos, global and personal, that there's a higher path. Stoicism is always, of course, stripped of its original cosmology, refitted with self-help techniques. But what I really object to, which is at the core, is a story about control.

Emotional management is, of course, a therapeutic good. But, man, we're 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm. It makes me want to add the word dude at the end of that sentence. We are 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm, and we have not yet found a way to control our emotions, and that is because, as spiritual creatures we are always, we have this ache, we have this soul-cry that Augustine named so beautifully. We have a spiritual restlessness that no kind of emotional management strategy can overcome, and because it it is meant to be satisfied fundamentally by our love, our love of God, our love of others, and frankly, an unsolvability that tells us that we are an incomplete story. If we could be a complete story, I don't know if we really should be religious at all. Frankly, I really would. I would probably do other things with my time.

It does seem to be something about desire at the heart of this. The Stoic response is to just slightly repress your desires, keep your desires under control. It is offering a sort of sense of control. Or Christian faith is actually about redirecting your desires to something that is bigger than yourself and more powerful and beautiful than you are. And so whereas sort of stoicism seems to say, just control your desires, Christianity in some ways almost says let your desire for God grow as you go through this.

But I was wondering a little bit about prayer, and how prayer works for you in times of real struggle? I often seems to me that when you go through really difficult times, the time when you kind of feel you need to pray, is often the time it's hardest to do so. Do you find that? What role prayer plays for you in moments of uncontrollability, of the sufferings and struggles of life. What role does prayer play for you in that?

This stoicism to prayer thoroughfare is a perfect continuity of the argument. Stoicism, and I mean just living inside of the precarity of this world, reminds us again and again that life requires so much more courage than we thought. Maybe we were convinced along the way that prayer also doesn't require courage just to get to that place of spiritual honesty again, I mean especially if you feel like your prayer was supposed to follow a different template. Whether it was always supposed to very quickly move from brief needs, long descriptions, great thankfulness. That's the classic three-parter, but most often are our honesty requires us to be incomplete before God. I mean utterly, or angry or unknowing. Maybe this gets back to your certainty comments at the start about like, how do we manage such enormous uncertainty? Do we imagine prayer as a strategy for certainty? And if we're hoping it's that, we might be we might be unsatisfied. I just know that when I pray honestly that when I'm in a really terrible season, my prayers sound more like it's 2am. And I'm the sort of self who is buying things on Amazon and wishes I could call people and say things and cannot be trusted. Those prayers sound something like, help me! Help me! Save me, make them come back. Make this stop! Those are necessary, deep, guttural cries.

My 2pm prayers, I've got Trinitarian round-outs. I've got sophisticated nuanced theology. I'm quoting here and there.

Both are reflections of how much we're not even entirely known to ourselves, except that we find ourselves unfolded by our circumstances.

Pressing into how you deal with enduring pain. You talk very movingly about what it's like to go through really quite searing pain that just doesn't go away. And you have to kind of deal with it. Here in the UK we've been having a debate over the last few months about assisted dying. Which is a route out of pain for some people towards the end of life. Did you ever experience the temptation to that? Or has your experience helped you reflect upon that kind of route that our society is offering people at the moment? Can you end this by ending it all.

Canada's been having similar and terrible debates with terrible consequences. I think one of the great worries, especially with North American theologies of the self, is that the suffering, those who suffer are inherently less valuable because we are not the worker self. We're not the productive self. We're simply the the feeling and the limited and the precarious self.

What really worries me, especially with some of these exit interview for people who apply for euthanasia in Canada, is is quotes like ‘It's not that I don't want to die it’s that I can't afford to live’, because so many of the things that relieve pain are frankly so expensive and so off insurance. Any discussion about pain and assisted suicide are also just always, at least in North American context, conversations about who is valuable and whose pain is insurable.

I know that one of the major differences that I've had in my own life between a self that was in so much pain I could barely function to this version, is that I could pay for my own treatment. I feel overwhelming compassion for all those who feel like they will suffer without end because there are no social services to alleviate it.

I've been in a situation where I'm so desperate to live that I have not fundamentally experienced despair that has a telos to it. I've experienced despair at times in which I feel my own helplessness.

I had a lovely interview with Dr. Catherine Mannix. She developed a cognitive behavioural therapy therapeutic approach inside of palliative care in the NHS. And it was really it ended up being a way to talk about how do you experience control inside of that much suffering. Her books are about people who thought that they would want to die in that much pain. In these little case studies, I found her description to be so deeply Christian. What she was arguing was that even in the midst of deafening pain, that helping people find a small, soft place of narrow choice and meaning-making could reinfuse their lives with such purpose that otherwise our culture would erase. I just wish that everybody that inside of our conversation about when pain is too much, had a little bit more of that place of gentle possibility.

One of the phrases that that really struck me as I was reading your book is that ‘we are united by our fragility.’ The implications seem to be that that's actually what we have in common. The fact that we are fragile or incomplete, in your language from earlier on. It got me thinking about how that might change the way we think about each other and community and relationships, and maybe even church. What that difference would it make if we actually thought that was the centre of what we have in common, our fragility. Do you have any thoughts on that?

At heart, I'm an anti-culture warrior. In this time of increasing binaries our democratic structures or any kind are fragile, especially in the United States, the big tent umbrellas of denominationally or otherwise. I do think it is important for us to sort of spiritually land on what we think makes us all deeply the same. I know that when I started down this path there was a lot of humiliation because I was treated as disposable by the healthcare industry. I was truly humbled by it. In suffering you are laid low and there's a little key in that that I found that I've never wanted to give up. IT is that the second I knew I suffering, I could see it so much more easily in other people. And that I could know that a broken heart is an open heart. If you can keep that at the at the centre of of a story about our difference Ihave just found it easier, easier on Facebook, easier at family gatherings, just easier. We have a contingency that we're all grappling with, and we can't always see it on each other's faces. But if we know that we all are so worried that we're wearing a sweater and someone's going to pull a thread and then there we are, naked to the world. I think I know that it inculcates a deep feeling of humanity in me.

There’s something about approaching another person with that thought of I'm fragile and kind of so are you. Especially it's not that terrible if you see my fragility, and maybe I begin to look for the fragility and the other person, and that makes that person that much more approachable somehow, and a bit more human. This militates against the idea of going to everybody else and trying to give to give out this image of being complete, and I've got everything sorted, and I know all the answers. The kind of image we try to present of ourselves.

I think I think invulnerability is exhausting, and we could just cut ourselves some slack.

Find out more about Kate

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