Emily Parker spoke with author Alister McGrath about his latest book, 'The Great Mystery.'

Emily: Do you think we need more authors like Tolkien and CS Lewis today?

Alister: We certainly do. One of the reasons why people still regard Lewis and Tolkien so highly, is that nobody's come along to displace them.

What Lewis and Tolkien have done very well is to show that a brilliantly told story captures the imagination and opens up some really deep questions. I found that when I first read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I loved it. I was actually in my 20s at the time; I was a late-comer to Lewis. It really helped me to see how important these questions are.

Lewis is saying look, there are two stories in Narnia; one is, this is the realm of the White Witch, it's her place and the other is, this is really the realm of a noble lion, Aslan. Which story do you trust? All of us have to ask that question, which stories that our culture tells can we trust? Are we just random products of a random evolutionary process or are we people who are loved by God and are really special? We've got to sort this out, and Lewis and Tolkien both help us to realise how important these questions are.

Emily: How do you sift through everyone's opinions to be sure of what is right and what isn't?

Alister: What I hope is true about me, is that I keep all these questions under review. I think that you're right, we're bombarded by opinions, by questions and sometimes, particularly Christians feel that they haven't really got the best possible answers. One of the things I need to say, is that very often that's because we don't know our faith well enough. Christianity is rich, exciting and vibrant and the problem very often lies with people like me, who are Christians and haven't thought about their faith enough. It's about not resting, satisfied with a superficial faith, but going deeper and discovering the full riches of the Christian faith.

I'm sure you know Jesus Christ's summary of the Old Testament law: you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. Very often Christians don't love God with all their mind enough. In other words, they don't think about their faith, or realise it has some very good answers to the questions that our culture is raising.

Emily: What do you hope that readers will get from reading your book?

Alister: First of all I hope they'll enjoy the book, because it opens up some very interesting questions. More significantly, one of the things I'd really love is if people began to say, "These are really good questions about the meaning of life and I can begin to see that Christianity is offering some very important answers." I hope people begin to think through what these might be.

The book is about faith and science. One of the things I'm trying to say is science is really wonderful, but it doesn't answer the deepest questions that we are asking. So either we give up and say, "Well that's it," or we say, "Maybe there are answers, but science isn't able to help us find them." That was my experience, and that's why, in many ways, I wrote this book. To say that maybe science and faith illuminate part of this world in which we live, in different ways. But we need both if we're going to have a kind of stereoscopic vision that lets us lead life fully and richly.

Emily: Are there any other questions you'd like to look into that you haven't had a chance to look into further yet?

Alister: One of the frustrations of writing a book, is that very often you're limited by how long the book can be. Certainly I found myself really having to overlook questions that I knew were important, but just couldn't fit into this book. So the simple answer is yes, there's a lot more that needs to be said. I just hope that in this book I open up enough interesting questions to help people begin to realise that there's some very exciting questions and happily, there's some very satisfying answers as well.

Emily: For somebody that's looking at this from a position where they may not believe in a God, or are starting to explore those sorts of questions, what advice would you have?

Alister: Very often people looking in on Christianity from the outside, for example, will feel what I felt when I was an atheist myself. That is look, I just don't see how believing in God changes anything. One of the things I would want to say is that believing in God is not just like believing in an extra element in the universe, or something like that. It's much more. It's about realising that suddenly the universe makes sense and that somehow, life makes sense.

The thing that I discovered, which I value to this day, is that if there is a God and if that God is like Jesus Christ Himself, then that changes everything. Suddenly everything looks different. It's almost as if a sun has risen on a landscape and you see things clearly for the very first time.

Emily: How can we get hold of a copy of your book?

Alister: You'll find it at a local Christian bookshop, or indeed a mainline bookshop, but you can certainly get it from online retailers.