Alister McGrath Gresham Professor of Divinity Gresham Lectures 2016-17 Divinity Lecture 6 Is matter evil? Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy Alister McGrath Gresham Professor of Divinity

Dr Duncan MacDougall

Francis Crick ““You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. . . . You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Raymond Tallis “I am an atheist humanist; but this does not oblige me to deny what is staring me in the face – namely, that we are different from other animals, and that we are not just pieces of matter.”

G. K. Chesterton “We have come to the wrong star ... That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.”

Philip Pullman “In the sort of creation myth that underlies His Dark Materials, which is never fully explicit but which I was discovering as I was writing it, the notion is that there never was a Creator, instead there was matter, and this matter gradually became conscious of itself and developed Dust.”

Philip Pullman “Dust sort of precedes [sic] from matter as a way of understanding itself. The Authority was the first figure that condensed, as it were, in this way and from then on he was the oldest, the most powerful, the most authoritative.”

Jeanette Winterson “We cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures.”

Psychology of Meaning Meaning is about “the extent to which people comprehend, make sense of, or see significance in their lives, accompanied by the degree to which they perceives themselves to have a purpose, mission, or overarching aim in life.” Michael J. MacKenzie and Roy F. Baumeister, “Meaning in Life: Nature, Needs, and Myth.” In Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, edited by Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netze, 25-38. New York: Springer, 2014.

Keith Yandell “A religion is a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions and practices.”

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