Humphrys In Search of God is a programme in which presenter John Humphrys talks to religious leaders about his unfulfilled desire to believe in God. Today he talked with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. (This is a rough transcription - you can listen again this evening, BBC Radio 4, 9.30pm, and I imagine it will be available online too.)

To cut to the chase, Humphrys did not change his mind! But what is of value is more that they had a good argument about God.

H: Do you know that there is a God?

W: I don't know that there is a God, like a fact, but believing is a matter of being committed to the reality of God, and you grow in that relationship and become convinced of the certainty. It is the knowledge that comes from relation and that takes time.

H: Why has belief not happened to me?

W: What was chipped away at - that is, what did you think that God was?

H: A supreme being, creator, consciousness - what chipped away at it was the presence of so much suffering. A very clichéd reason but very real.

W: You are not very impressed by the free will defense (that in a world of individual free will, individual’s must be free to harm others)?

H: I am not impressed by it because it is fine for conscious adults, but children have no free will when they are murdered.

W: That is the case: that free will effects others. But there can’t be a universe when free will is aborted if and when it will badly effect others. The question then would be what the cut off point would be? You have two choices: you go on reflecting about the problem, or you say the idea of God and free will does not make sense?

H: My problem is really how to reconcile a God of love with a God of mercy - where is the love in a dying child?

W: In a way it is the same problem: how bad does any suffering have to be before God intervenes in order to clear his name, as it were? I would say that the world is created as it is and that is the system that God knew would have run.

H: Why did God create that system?

W: My faith tells me, and I trust this, that the world is such that it arises in these unspeakable ways. But that the world is not exhausted by these circumstances. God has more to do with these circumstances. God has eternity. Faith says that death is not the end of the story.

H: So the best you can offer those parents whose child has died is your reward will be in heaven.

W: No, not at all. Because the conversation of where is God in a particular situation is particular too. What you are saying then is that there is hope, not reward. That may be a mystery, but that is what it is to live with faith. And you have to cope with the knowledge that in our time frame there is no hope.

H: But you can live with it?

W: Just, just.

H: So is God an interventionist? In the Bible that is what he did.

W: The model this presupposes is that God is in one bit of the room and we are in the other. Although the Bible uses such language, there is already in the Bible a level of puzzlement about it - why does God not heal in all situations? The only way to make full sense of this is to say that God isn’t a person alongside other persons, God is the agency that is at work in everything. And in the world evil is possible but also moments of healing can break through. What I am trying to outline is that God has set things up in such a way, that when certain things come together, more is possible than might otherwise seem possible. The membrane is thinner, his action is nearer the surface. Perhaps human prayer or holiness but something comes through.

H: What about the argument that freedom is the highest good and so God cannot intervene?

W: I don’t believe that because God’s action can work with ours, not overriding our freedom but working with it.

H: But why do you pray if you know God is not going to intervene? They prayed in Auschwitz but nothing happened?

W: They prayed for two reasons. First, astonishingly, because God is always to be praised. They knew they were doomed. They went into the chambers praising God. Second, I pray so that in my focus, I may somehow make a channel for God’s action to come through in this situation. I do not know how, but it is one of the factors that might make a difference.

H: I want to believe. I have opened my heart. I have tried talking to God. And I have failed.

W: What do you want to believe?

H: I want to believe in the sort of vague God that you do! Because you get satisfaction from it and I want to make sense of the world. Bizarrely, those that profess faith don’t want answers. You have faith but not answers, and I want that.

W: The basic challenge to you, is can you John believe that you are the object of an unconditional love.

H: No, I can’t because I don’t believe that there is someone who made the world.

W: Does it help to give time to the silent waiting on the truth which for some people is the beginning of this. Breathing in the presence of question-mark. I can remove the question-mark theoretically but not personally. Sometimes faith comes from the silence very gradually eroding as something of love comes through.

H: I have a 6 year old child. He asked why did God allow Africa to happen?

W: It is a very difficult question. Perhaps you should say, ask someone who does believe in God. It is not irrelevant that belief in God comes more naturally to children. It could be like belief in Santa. Or you could say that there is something instinctive about God that life educates out of some of us - especially modern life that is a bit of a minority life in the history of the world. I wouldn’t rest the existence of God on this, but it is worth pondering that as far back as you can trace the history of humanity, there has been an awareness of something more than immediate reality.

H: Why do you not try to convert others?

W: When you are talking about the truth of the Christian faith, you don’t begin, this is the truth why don’t you believe! You need to understand what they are saying so that you can speak with them. Like the early church, you say this is what you say and it echoes with what we are saying, and I believe it echoes more fully if you believe what I believe.

H: What about things like the crusades?

W: It was a bad, a very bad episode. Religion and geo-politics do not mix.

H: If we had no religion we would have had less strife in the world.

W: I don’t know how you can say this. Religion is a convenient peg to hang complaints on. So is the answer that bad religion is a problem, and good religion is a solution?

H: You have said nothing that has knocked me back off my non-faith! Why has faith that is a gift of faith not be given to me?

W: My longing would have to be that this sense of God comes alive for you. I don’t believe that you are predestined to unfaith. But that God stands at the door and knocks.

H: What happens to me if I don’t open that door.

W: You are not fully in the company of God. It is your choice.

H: After death?

W: I’d love to think that you’d say that I got it all wrong! Death is not the end of us, that is rather axiomatic for a religious believer. God alone can judge how much of your resistance to God is culpable. The willingness even the wish to believe: God can work on that.

H: Isn’t the truth that ultimately you can’t know?

W: I can be confident enough to say that this is where my life must be. This is what I hope I want to take risks for. This is as clear and certain as it gets, and the relationship that develops day by day, deepens that confidence. I can’t by argument just transfer that confidence into another person’s mind.

H: There is hope for me?

W: Of yes. There is even love for you.