Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Peacocke

There is a quiet provocation in Peacocke’s phrasing: he doesn’t defend theology by proclaiming its grandeur; he defends it by naming the suspicion that has made it sound faintly disreputable in modern intellectual life. “Not been convinced” is the key hedge. He’s diagnosing a cultural mood - a long, slow loss of confidence - rather than attacking some cartoonish “atheist academy.” That restraint is strategic. It implies the problem isn’t malice but a burden of proof theology has failed, or refused, to meet.

The sentence also smuggles in a concession. By specifying “the Western intellectual world,” Peacocke acknowledges a historically contingent prejudice: post-Enlightenment habits of mind that reward disciplines with reproducible methods and penalize those tied to confession, authority, or metaphysical claims. Theology, in that framework, is assumed to be advocacy in scholarly clothing. “Intellectual honesty and integrity” isn’t just moral language; it’s a demand for publicly legible reasoning. The charge is that theology can’t be more than sophisticated rationalization because its conclusions are, in some sense, pre-owned.

His context matters. Peacocke was a scientist-theologian trying to rebuild credibility across a border that 20th-century academe hardened into a checkpoint: facts on one side, faith on the other. By anchoring the claim in “my adult life in academe,” he’s admitting complicity and proximity - he’s speaking as someone who has watched institutions reward certain kinds of knowledge while quietly treating ultimate questions as either private therapy or intellectual vice. The intent is less to complain than to reopen the case: if theology is to matter, it must earn its place under the same harsh light as any other discipline.