Perhaps I was an agnostic? He responded, “Do you really want to sit on the fence forever?” That question made me realise that if issues about human value and ethics mattered to me, the response that perhaps there was a God, or perhaps there wasn’t, was unsatisfactory.
During dinner, Briggs asked me whether I believed in God. I sat next to Professor Andrew Briggs, a Professor of Nanomaterials, who happened to be a Christian.
I was attracted, but I wasn’t convinced.Ī few months later, near the end of my time at Oxford, I was invited to a dinner for the International Society for the Study of Science and Religion. As I read, I was struck at how intellectually compelling, complex, and profound the gospel was. With an awkward but humble reluctance, I opened a book of sermons by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. One afternoon, I noticed that my usual desk in the college library was in front of the Theology section. I began to realise that the implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear. The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent. But I knew from my own research in the history of European empires and their encounters with indigenous cultures, that societies have always had different conceptions of human worth, or lack thereof.
I remember leaving Singer’s lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason? Yet, without reference to some set of capacities as the basis of human worth, the intrinsic value of all human beings becomes an ungrounded assertion a premise which needs to be agreed upon before any conversation can take place. The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities. Singer recognised that philosophy faces a vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth. There, I attended three guest lectures by world-class philosopher and atheist public intellectual, Peter Singer. King’s is known for its secular ideology and my perception of Christianity fitted well with the views of my fellow students: Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous.Īfter Cambridge, I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford. As an undergrad, I won the University Medal and a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake my Ph.D. My identity lay in academic achievement, and my secular humanism was based on self-evident truths. I knew from the age of eight that I wanted to study history at Cambridge and become a historian. I grew up in Australia, in a loving, secular home, and arrived at Sydney University as a critic of “religion.” I didn’t need faith to ground my identity or my values.
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