The Sea of Faith: Don Cupitt, Science, and the Unvanquishable Role of Supernaturalism
BBC-4 is currently reshowing Don Cupitt’s ‘Sea of Faith’ series in six episodes. This is television as they don’t make it any more: calm engagement with the most sophisticated theological and scientific ideas of the last millennium. No patronising the audience here: Cupitt - a Cambridge academic - speaks to camera as if to his peers.
Cupitt’s thesis is that up to mediaeval times the entirety of life was sacralised. The Renaissance ushered in the age of scientific skepticism which increasingly rolled back the Church’s sacred territory. In the present age, when nothing appears beyond rational enquiry, is there a way to save Christianity from intellectual oblivion?
Cupitt was an ordained priest of the Church of England and also trained in the sciences: he certainly knows of what he speaks. Yet his proposed solution, his ‘Sea of Faith’ movement, is beset by paradox. It appears that the Church, seemingly at odds with modernity, cannot simply adapt to it without fatally undermining itself.
Secularism, emerging out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, did more than question religious authority - it redefined the scope of truth and knowledge. With the rise of empirical, rational and evidential science, the supernatural was gradually displaced as the explanatory framework for the natural world. Lightning, once seen as a manifestation of divine anger, became a problem of atmospheric electricity. Disease, previously understood as divine punishment, yielded to the germ theory of medicine.
The intellectual revolution secularism unleashed was profound: it introduced the idea that all phenomena could, in principle, be understood through reason and observation. But its implications for religion were devastating. For if the sacred is reducible to natural causes, then the divine is rendered redundant. Miracles, angels, and even the resurrection became not mysteries but embarrassments - challenges to be explained away or ignored; at worst no more than comforting fairy-tales for children.
This epistemological shift left religion in a defensive posture. The Catholic Church’s grudging acceptance of heliocentrism and Darwinian evolution symbolized the broader dilemma: how to maintain the integrity of faith without contradicting the findings of science. Some theologians like to claim that Reason and Faith occupy distinct, but complementary realms: yet defining the problem away does not solve it. Liberal theologians like Cupitt embraced the opportunity to reformulate religion within the bounds of reason, but despite themselves their ‘secularised faith’ encountered an insurmountable problem: the irreducibility of the supernatural.
The paradox of religion in the secular age is that its enduring appeal is rooted in precisely those aspects that secularism finds most untenable: its supernatural claims. To demythologise religion, as Cupitt advocated, is to render it rational - but also to deprive it of the very features that make it compelling.
Consider the central tenets of Christianity: the resurrection of Christ, the promise of eternal life, and the presence of God in the Eucharist. These are not disposable metaphorical embellishments but the core of the faith, imbued with a sense of transcendence that cannot be translated into purely symbolic terms. To the believer, these claims offer hope and meaning that transcend the limits of human understanding. To the secularist, they are merely unprovable assertions, unfortunately incompatible with reason.
Cupitt’s attempt to preserve the ethical and communal functions of religion while abandoning its metaphysical foundation is ultimately self-defeating. Religion thrives not as a collection of moral teachings or existential symbols but as a lived encounter with the divine (this psychological experience - true of all times and cultures - can occur without strong ontological commitments, of course).
The rituals, prayers, and sacraments of the Church are powerful precisely because they invoke a reality beyond the material world. Strip away the supernatural, and what remains is, at best, a philosophy of life - worthy of respect, perhaps, but not of worship; and in particular not a signifier of a committed ethical community.
This leads to the central paradox facing the Church: it can survive only by affirming those things that secularism finds incredible. For all its doctrinal controversies and political entanglements, the Church’s resilience lies in its refusal to relinquish the miraculous. Even when forced to accommodate scientific discoveries, it has done so in a way that preserves the mystery of faith. The doctrine of transubstantiation, for example, employs Aristotelian categories to frame the Eucharist as a miracle that transcends empirical scrutiny. No Catholic looks to physics or chemistry here.
The Church’s insistence on the supernatural is not mere obstinacy; it is a recognition that religion’s power lies in its supra-rationality. Faith, as Blaise Pascal observed, speaks to the heart in ways that reason cannot (and cannot understand). The believer does not require empirical evidence of God’s existence; they experience the divine through prayer, community, and the sacraments. This is why Cupitt’s secularized faith, however intellectually rigorous, feels bloodless to many. It answers reason’s demands but leaves the human longing for transcendence unmet: it evades the point of religion.
If Cupitt’s vision were fully realized, it would indeed mark a victory for secularism - a religion purged of supernaturalism, fully aligned with the scientific worldview. But this victory would come at a profound cost. Deprived of its metaphysical foundation, religion would lose its ability to inspire awe, provide comfort, and bind communities together. It would become, as Nietzsche foresaw, a shadow of its former self, clinging to borrowed forms but unmoored, hollowed out from within, collapsing out of history.
Broader cultural history reflects this dynamic. Attempts to create secular substitutes for religion, from Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity to Alain de Botton’s Atheism 2.0, have failed to gain mass appeal. They offer ethics without transcendence, rituals without mystery, and community without sacredness. Such projects may satisfy intellectuals, but they fail to resonate with the masses, who seek not only moral guidance but a connection to something greater than themselves.
Cupitt’s theology, while thoroughly aligned with rationalist proclivities, is ultimately marginal. It satisfies neither the devout, who cling to the supernatural, nor the secularists, who reject religion altogether. For most believers, faith is not a system of thought but a lived relationship with the divine. To abandon the supernatural is to abandon the essence of religion itself.
The clash between secularism and religion is often framed as a battle for dominance, but it is better understood as a negotiation of boundaries. Secularism demands that religion cede ground to reason and science, while religion insists on retaining the supra-rational core that gives human life its value and meaning. This tension is not merely a problem to be solved but a reflection of the human condition: our dual longing for understanding and transcendence, for rationality and mystery.
The Church’s apparently paradoxical position - defending the incredible in the face of secular critique - is not a weakness but the secret of its enduring relevance. For as much as modernity demands rationality, it cannot fully satisfy the human need for meaning, community, and wonder beyond the commonplace. Cupitt’s vision of a fully secularised faith may one day come to pass, but if it does, it will be a hollow victory - a triumph of reason over religion that leaves humanity longing for the sacred mystery it has lost.
Arguably a large part of Western society has already entered this antechamber to nihilism which Nietzsche so presciently foresaw.
And yet there are still options...
Don Cupitt died on the 18 January 2025 aged 90.
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