A Convergent Dichotomy John Lennox on the Axioms & Implications of Science

welcome to the Veritas forum engaging University students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life the ladies and gentlemen thank you very much indeed for your warm welcome to Georgia Tech I have looked forward very much to coming here because in my youth I wanted to be an electrical engineer and I gather that this university has great distinction in its production of electrical engineers but whether fortunately or unfortunately I was persuaded to do mathematics and ended up at Cambridge in England but thank you nonetheless for your very warm welcome and I've been invited to address the topic a convergent dichotomy an oxford map petition and the axioms and implications of science I'm not sure what a convergent dichotomy is but we shall see what we make of it as we proceed axioms I do understand because I spent a large part of my professional life studying the implications of a set of four axioms which lie at the basis of the axiomatic system called group theory from a childhood I was fascinated by logical analysis and we were taught Euclidean geometry and it was fascinating for me to see how wonderful theorems like that of Pythagoras could be deduced by a bit of logical wizardry from a very few postulates or axioms and one of the questions people asked was did you need all those axioms to construct the system and I soon discovered that for centuries people had tried to deduce that Euclid's parallel axis his fifth postulate they tried to deduce it from the others and they couldn't do it and in the nineteenth century Bolyai and Lobachevsky showed that you could construct non-euclidean geometries hyperbolic and elliptic geometries that didn't satisfy the parallel axiom now Euclid's geometry was very useful for calculating fields and buildings but what about these new geometries were they any use and it turned out that they were exactly what was needed to study space-time and were crucial to Einstein's amazing work of relativity it was heady stuff for a schoolboy and as a result I fell in love with axiomatic systems and as I say spent my life tried to work out some of the implications of the four axioms that lie at the base of the abstract concept of a group that finds this application and study of symmetry and crystallography particle physics relativity theory and so on and my subject has the distinction whether you'd regarded as as a distinction we'll see of having the longest theorems and proofs in history I could well remember when fight and Thompson two American mathematicians distinguished themselves by proving a single theorem that required a 250 page addition of a mathematical journal to prove it but that was nothing compared to the 10,000 pages of argument required in my field to give the famous classification of finite simple groups I'm not going to bother you with any of that tonight you'd be glad to hear but you know axioms what are they they're fundamental postulates on which everything else is built and so it was very natural for me to ask what about mathematics itself does it have fundamental postulates and what about science which is larger than mathematics are there basic assumptions that are believed by all scientists or is it somehow axiom free and as I begin to search into this I find all kinds of fascinating things I noticed that all scientists believed one absolute axiom they believed that science could be done now that may not strike you as important but it is extremely important the fact that we can do science and that belief that it can be done lies at the heart of every true scientist if you didn't believe that you wouldn't do science now I met some people who believe that science was ever more closely approximating to a truth that was out there and that's the position I myself would take we call it critical realism I also found some people who believed there was no such thing as truth and yet they expected me to believe that what they said was true which didn't seem to me to be particularly impressive it was a self contradictory axiom I noted incidentally that not many of them were scientists at least if they were they left their post-modernism outside the laboratory so I then discovered that some people were so enamored with science that they believed that it was the only way to truth and that therefore science was coextensive with rationality now if that were the case of course half the faculties in most universities in the world perhaps apart from this one would have to close I don't know whether you do any humanities here or not but most universities do and Harvard for instance would have to close half its faculties and so at Oxford if science was the only way to truth now another thing I discovered that many people took as a fundamental postulate is that science on the one hand and faith in God and the other are at war there was a deep-seated belief that there still is that scientific progress will eventually rid the world of a need for something beyond science to explain the toughest questions about the universe as your invitation card says so there appears to be attention between science and the one hand and faith in God on the other I would like to suggest that that is a false and dangerously false assumption and it should be obvious that it's false take the Nobel Prize for Physics last year it was won by Peter Higgs a Scotsman much to the light of the Scots and he is an atheist a few years ago an American one at his name is William Phillips a low temperature physicist he won the same prize as Higgs but he is a theist he's a Christian now it ought to be completely obvious that what divides these two then is not their science they have both won the top prize in physics in the world what divides them is their world view Peter Higgs an atheist William Phillips a Christian and I want to suggest you that will never understand the contemporary debate unless we see that we are faced in this Academy as in every others with two diametrically opposed worldviews worldviews of course are our set of answers to the big questions of life and one of the questions have been asked since the time of the ancient Greeks is what is the nature of ultimate reality what is the really real and Democritus and leucippus who the brilliant fathers of the atomic theory they have the idea that you could keep dividing matter up and up and up until you reached an atom at Hamas something that could not be cut now of course we know that they were wrong but it was a brilliant idea and they then approached ultimate reality in this way they said well there are two fundamental things constituting reality there are the atoms and there is empty space and therefore their view of explain nation depended on this fundamental postulate everything had to be explained bottled up in terms of atoms and the void so they came up with theories like the atoms fell through empty space and they are glomer rated and they form galaxies and stars you know the story that is the philosophy we often call materialism now at the same time there were people like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle who believed yes the physical world is real but the really real is something beyond the physical world there are there is transcendence there are the gods or there is God and so barreling up towards us in the 21st century there are those diametrically opposed worldviews and various shades of course in between but one tends to find that the so-called tension between science and belief in God is a misrepresentation of the tension between those two worldviews and the interesting thing to my mind is this there are scientists on both side there are engineers on both side there are very high-powered thinking people on both sides of that divide so that is the first point I suggest that it's a worldview tension and it's not a tension between science and belief in God so the real question we need to ask is this if we believe in God as the creator and sustainer of the universe does that in itself create tension with the scientific approach to reality or do those two approaches in some sense converge even though they are very different the key question then for me is this granted that there are those two worldviews that others in between in which direction does science point where does it sit does it like Richard Dawkins which suggests point towards atheism or does it as I would suggest point towards theism so we can only decide things like this by looking for evidence I emphasize the word evidence I'm not talking about mathematical proof because map attica proof in the narrow sense you only find in pure mathematics you don't find it in physics you don't find it in chemistry you don't find it in engineering and all of those other fatals more strictly we should refer to evidence now it can be immensely powerful evidence for example I flew yesterday in a plane from London to Atlanta I believe there was enough evidence to trust this particular Boeing to take me here that is I trust the engineers and I'm staking my life from their competence so just because there's no mathematical proof doesn't mean we can't have enough evidence on which to stake our lives and of course in other things even more important than engineering I cannot prove to you mathematically that my wife who's been my wife for 46 years I can't prove to you that magically that she loves me but I'd stake my life on it because I would 46 years of evidence that she does so now you understand that kind of thing commitment in science as in life is made on the basis of evidence and we return to that in a little bit so where does science sit visa vie faith in God well the first stunning fact that is a stunning fact I believe although I've been familiar with it for many years it's this that modern science traces its rich to the 15th 16th and 17th centuries with people like Galileo and Kepler and Newton and you will all know of course that these men believed in God and that is no accident according to historians of science think of Alfred North Whitehead who said this Europe in 1500 knew less than Archimedes who died in 212 BC and yet two hundred years later Newton's Principia had been written and he raises the question why what was it about Europe at that time that made it so congenial for the explosion that we call modern science to occur so here's a North Whitehead it must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and the rationality of a Greek philosopher the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries but he gets slightly more simply and more expressively CS Lewis wrote this and he was referring to North Whitehead men became scientific why because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a law Giver now that is very interesting isn't it let me put it bluntly ladies and gentlemen I am not remotely ashamed to be both a scientist and a Christian because arguably Christianity gave me my subject you see far from hindering science it was faith in a rational creator that was the motor that drove science so that was Newton that was Kepler that was Galileo now comes the problem Isaac Newton's chair until recently was occupied by Stephen Hawking who is just a bit ahead of me in Cambridge and lightyears ahead of me in his mathematical brainpower incidentally but I remember him very well he says in his book co-authored with leonard nodding off the grand design that you've got to choose between science and god Isaac Newton says it was his faith in God that was a motor of the drove his science what has happened and I want to try and explain what has happened so that we can understand what is going on why is it that certain leading scientists now claim that you cannot believe in God and be a credible scientist when the early pioneers all fitted into that category well of course and I did to Veritas forums in the Netherlands last week and in each of them the first one was a physicist I was debating and the argument he came up with was that we've now discovered that God is a delusion like Santa Claus the sociologists that I debated and the second one said exactly the same thing so there's obviously a great deal of interest in Santa Claus these days now it seems to me ladies and gentlemen that it's perfectly obvious that God is not in the same category as Santa Claus I mean have you ever met an adult that came to believe in Santa Claus have you of course not some of you are awake obviously but just a few I have met many adults who come to believe in God I have met one who came to believe in Santa Claus now the Santa Claus idea is responsible it's in the title essentially of Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion of many people not thinking about this subject at all because they've accepted Freudianism in Freud's idea that all this kind of talk is an illusion God is a wish fulfillment a projection of our desire for a father figure in the sky and all the rest of it well it won't quite do actually because Germany's leading psychiatrist manfred lutz has just written a fascinating best-selling book called eine kleine Agusta discussed in a brief history of the great one it's not in English yet I'm afraid but in it he argues this he said look if there is no God then Freud's argument is wonderful a wonderful argument why religion is a delusion and we can forget about it if there is no God of course he says if there is a God the very same argument will show you that it's atheism that's a delusion the projected desired never having to meet God or to be held accountable for the things that we've done in our lives and Lutz's bottom line which he puts very clearly as this on the substantive question whether there's a god or not neither Freud Franklin or Jung can help you one little bit you'll have to look elsewhere and yet people still make these assertions hawking said not long ago religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark and I was asked by the London Times how I responded to that and I said well atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light well you shouldn't laugh really because that proves nothing on the basis of what I said but it's easy to make these assertions we've got to go deeper into the subject matter why then the opposition between science and God well one of the reasons is explained to you on the card that you got before you came in as science continues to explain questions once thought to be the result of the supernatural the gaps for which science has no answer seemed to be narrowing along with the need for something supernatural to fill them so when I had we have debates in Oxford from time to time every year we have a god debate where we dress up in dinner jackets and we have a confrontational parliamentary debate about God and last year I was in on the Christian side and Michael Shermer known to many a few editor of skeptic magazine was on the Atheist side and during the discussion he looked at me and he said of course he said you're an atheist you're an atheist with respect to 'ti started with a for Artemus b for bow and so on and went through the alphabet until he got to Zed for Zeus and he said you are an atheist with respect to all these gods and I confessed it immediately I am ladies and gentlemen and Arzu cyst I do not believe in Zeus and then he delivered the bottom line he says we just go one God further and we get rid of Jehovah the God of the Bible and I thought what an amazingly interesting argument because it shows he knows nothing about the ancient gods of the ancient Near East because people who write authoritative Lee about those gods so pointed out a very significant effect about them they are descended from the primeval universe they appeared whatever they where they appeared from the matter of the original universe and Verner Yeager a world expert on these gods points out that the God of the Bible is utterly distinct he did not descend from the heavens of the earth he created the heavens and the earth so the first point to realize is they're not talking about the same God and that alerts me to the deeper question here you see the ancient Greek gods were gods of the gapps think of the god of thunder I don't think Georgia Tech would believe in the god of thunder because you have got a department I imagine of atmospheric physics and ten minutes in there was shouldn't convince you that there's no god of thunder you can explain thunder by temperature gradients electrostatic discharges and all the rest of it so exit the god of thunder that is the god of thunder was only ever merely a God of the gaps a placeholder until science made in advance now what I discover today and it took me a long time to really realize it is this notion of a God of the gaps has become so widespread that many people particularly atheists but not only atheists think that that's what people like me believe I try and follow the logic of this if God is a God of the gaps then of course you've got to choose between him and science because you've defined God as a placeholder until the scientific knowledge comes but the God in whom I believe ladies and gentlemen is not a God of the gaps he's the God of the whole show he's the God of the bits I don't understand and he's the God of the bits I do understand so he doesn't disappear with every new scientific advance Newton of course saw that of the other sort as well so when Newton discovered his brilliant law of gravitation he didn't say wonderful I've got a law I've got an explanation I don't need God now what did he do he wrote principia mathematica one of the most famous books if not the most famous book in the history of science expressing the hope in it that it would bring the thinking person to believe in a deity because you see the more Newton uncovered of the way the universe worked the more he admired the genius of the God that did it that way and I suspect that's happened to you studying engineering here I'm not an expert engineer I can see a Rolls Royce engine and see it looks beautiful but if you studied engineering and you know exactly how it works and the tolerances with which it's machine you can say you know it took an absolute genius to design that gearbox in other words the more you understand of the gearbox the more you admire the genius of the person who designed it not the less and so it is that the more I understand of the universe the more I admire the genius of the God who did it that way now here comes the important point the confusion lies in thinking that God is the same kind of explanation as science gives and that's false of course you all know and you were probably introduced to it in school why is the kettle boiling well it's boiling because there's been a heat input of energy from a Bunsen burner the molecules of water vibrating faster and faster and faster and still steam begins to come off no that's not why it's boiling it's boiling because I want a cup of tea and you laugh well which of those explanations is correct and you say don't be silly they're both correct you see in ordinary life we're used to complementary explanations if we're thinking of a Ford Motor Car and I say well let me give you two explanations one is internal combustion and automobile engineering the other is Henry Ford please choose you would think I was a consummate idiot wouldn't you because you need both now certainly we can all say that Henry Ford does not compete or conflict with automobile engineering and the law of internal combustion as an explanation for the motorcar engine you need both to give you a fully orbed explanation in other words to abstract from that you need explanation in terms of mechanism and law on the one hand that's the scientific explanation and in terms of agency on the other Henry Ford and it's the same with the universe an explanation in terms of mechanism and law is not an argument against an explanation in terms of an agent in fact there would be no universe at all for physicists to study if God hadn't created it so it seems to me that a great deal of the confusion in this debate is failure to see the different levels of explanation now there's a little warning to be added in here we all know what it means to say science explains or do we the law of gravitation what does that explain well it explains how to calculate even without Einsteins Corrections putting a person on the moon absolutely brilliant stuff and I was so excited when I discovered Newton's law but does it tell you what gravity is no you didn't realize that but many contemporary scientists do not realize it nobody knows what gravity is nobody knows what energy is you see even at that level science explains has got limitations of which we're often unconscious and the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it this way he said the great deception of modernity is that the laws of nature are explanations of the phenomena of nature when there nooses thing they are descriptions of the phenomena of nature they enable us to predict certain events and they can be very powerful but they are not explanations in that fullest sense so what am I suggesting I'm suggesting number one the antagonism supposin God in the one hand and science and the other is to set up false alternatives and they get set up firstly or the basis of a false understanding of God understanding God as a God of the gaps of course you have to choose between God and science but I've never met a sensible Christian Muslim or Jew who believed in a God of the gaps secondly the nature of scientific explanation it deals with a certain level of explanation it doesn't deal with agency and the existence of a mechanism or a law that does something is not in itself an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed the mechanism so very frequently because I'm a mathematician people say to me oh I'm like Laplace who was showing his equations for ballistics to Napoleon and Napoleon said to him mr. Laplace where is God at all these equations and La Paz said Geneva besoin de set in four days I don't need that hypothesis well of course not he was talking about the laws governing motions of ballistics through the atmosphere through a vacuum and when I'm teaching that in class in Oxford I don't mention God either he was answering the question he was asked but if the question had been different if it had been mr. Laplace how is it that there is a universe at all in which the laws of motion operate then he might have had to mention God making tea now I'm well aware at this point that Richard Dawkins looms large and I meet it everywhere I go and I'll meet it here tonight so I might as well answered before I'm asked it and that is this look putting God in at any level as an explanation is nonsensical because if you believe as I do that God created the universe then you will have to ask who created God and then you'll have to ask who created the creator that created the Creator and so on it goes on forever and so it's nonsense so let's forget about it and go and play football and do something sensible well this who created God question I was amazed to find Richard Dawkins using it because you see if you ask the question who created God well it's abstract from it who are what created X the Assumption behind the question is of course that X was created well we know that created gods are a delusion and if Dawkins book had been called the created God's delusion I don't think anybody would have bought it you see philosophers have a word for this they call it a complex question because it hides the sumption x' that hide the real issue if you say who created god you're immediately assuming that what you're talking about was created but the central claim of Christianity and indeed Islam and Judaism is that God is eternal he wasn't created so the question doesn't apply to him but there's this thing in its tail as I pointed out to Richard Dawkins I said to him I think I'm going to ask you your own question you believe the universe created you so please tell me who created your Creator I've waited seven years for the answer to that you see what is really at issue ladies and gentlemen is the question of what is ultimate reality do the questions go back forever and I think on both sides they don't for me as a Christian the ultimate reality is God he is the creator he is eternal and from any of my atheist friends and I have many of them the ultimate reality is the multiverse mass-energy something like that they don't go back forever so the real question is not whether there's an ultimate reality or not but which reality is ultimate is it God or is it the universe now related to that is this God cannot be an explanation at any level because explanation by definition particularly in the scientific world always precedes from the simple to the complex it's reductionistic it reduces complicated things to simple things as dawkins says in his book that his objective is to explain elephants and so on in terms of physics and chemistry so therefore if you postulate God as the explanation for the universe then God is infinitely more complex than the universe so it's no explanation at all I take that seriously and when I came to discuss it with Richard Dawkins I said there is one area where that doesn't work I pick up a book it's called The God Delusion it's 400 pages long roughly speaking it's quite complicated so I ask what is its origin and I discovered its origin is the infinitely more complicated mind of Richard Dawkins so I dismissed that explanation because the explanation is much more complicated than the thing you're explaining that's exactly his argument and you see ladies and gentlemen explanation reductionist explanation is extremely powerful but there's one area I want to suggest to you where we all realize it does not work and that is where language is involved where information is involved I have often sat with leading scientists who have said they believe everything can be explained bottom-up in terms of physics and chemistry and in one famous occasion in Oxford but it's been repeated I was sitting with the director of one of the biochemistry labs and he said that we had nothing to talk about because he discovered rather too rapidly that I believed in God and he said that dinner he was an atheist and we were going to have a miserable evening which is not the best way to begin a dinner and I said no no no you're a reductionist I am very interested in reductionism I know at least three kinds and I know one we share in common at least and that's methodological reductionism we split a big problem into little problems we study the little problems and get insight for the big problems he said that's what I do I said good but he said that's not what I mean I said I know it isn't oh I know it's not what you mean what you mean is that everything can be exhaustively explained in terms of physics and chemistry he said exactly so I picked up the menu and I said why don't we do an experiment and he said what here at the dinner table I said yes this is Oxford why not so he said what's the problem it says roast chicken I said yes it does and look at it roas t look at those marks on paper they carry meaning you've already interpreted the meaning I said those marks are OAS T in that order and with that shape our semiotic they carry meaning he said exactly okay I said have a go explain to me the semiotic s-- in terms of the physics and chemistry of the paper and ink and his wife he was sitting beside him said rather too loudly get out of that if you can but his answer stunned me he didn't try to get out of it he said it can't be done I was so shocked I said what do you mean physics and chemistry have only been running for five or six hundred years it doesn't matter you cannot do it because it involves semiotics and meaning the explanatory power of physics and chemistry is not adequate to account for the meaning and then he said where did you get that argument he could say I wasn't clever enough to have thought of it myself and so I confessed that I got it from the Nobel Prize winning medic called Roger Sperry now here's the interesting thing about that little story ladies and gentlemen he said the situation with the semiotics with the language demands an explanation in terms of an intelligence an intelligence of the gaps are we back with the God of the gaps we'll know and yes it depends on the nature of the gap because what I think we need to take on board is there are what I call good gaps and bad gaps there bad gaps are closed by science the good gaps are opened by science and this is one of them I'm interested as a mathematician in trying to understand the very difficult subject of the theory of information and you see if you study the works of people like lettered Bree Ewing and above all Gregory cited his work on information theory and the basic ideas that surrounded that a machine can transmit information but not generated that to my mind is utterly fascinating this is a difficult topic if there's a lot of argument about whether it applies completely here or not but it suggests something very important because the human cell is an information processor it is a machine it's more than machine if it is a machine then what we're faced with that machines cannot and I quoting Bremen I generate any information that's not either in their informational structure in their input that would suggest to me that a not a purely naturalistic account is doomed to failure if the capacity to produce something linguistic is involved which is why of course the moment you see letters on paper or your name written in the beach you immediately in fare upwards to an intelligence no matter how many automatic processes which you may not of saidan are involved in putting those letters in the baits you and fare upwards to an intelligence well we have lived to discover the longest word that's ever been discovered it's called the human genome it's four and a half billion letters long roughly speaking in a four-letter alphabet the codons that form it so you've got this three and a half billion letter long word everything exactly in the right order like a computer program and I asked many people these days what is the ultimate origin of this and they say chance and the laws of nature I say hold on a minute you see your own name written on a beach and you immediately unfair intelligence why don't you infer it here because you see ladies and gentlemen every analogy we know all the experience we have both within and without science tells us that where there's language there is a mind now what I'm suggesting to you therefore is this as we move into the question time is that these worldviews can be put in a slightly different way the optimist worldview of materialism starts essentially in the beginning with the particles and the particles generated the worlds and the worlds generated life had life generated consciousness and consciousness generated the mind and the mind generated the idea of God because there isn't a God the other worldview goes like this in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God the same was in the beginning with God all things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be and here is the biblical solution to the question that has been asked again and again in a series of books by Stephen Hawking Lorentz Christ and so on why is there something rather than nothing the answer is because an infinite eternal God caused it to be if you deny his existence you have a massive problem as any reading of the books by Hawking and Christ will show they have not solved the problem they're nothing from which they claim the universe started is no such thing it is alive with potentiality it is a quantum vacuum and I had the opportunity to debate Alan Guth the father of the idea of inflation which has been confirmed by the experiments of the South Pole on gravity waves and I said to him in public at the MIT Harvard faculty Club I said Alan there's a great deal of confusion out there about nothing I said look the nothing that you think the universe came from is not the nothing that most of us believe that nothing consists in that's the absence of anything he said no it isn't I said thank you very much they have not solved the problem because of course if you are driven by the standard model and here's the fascinating thing to believe in a starting point for space time you are driven therefore to believe there was nothing in the philosophical sense before that and so you're presented with a massive problem how do you get something from nothing but the physicists can't get something that's physical from nothing that's non-physical so they have to redefine nothing to be physical listen to Laurens crisis definition he says in his book because something is physical nothing must also be physical especially if it's defined as the absence of something what I was staggered when I read that but ladies and gentlemen it seems to me that here we come to a very interesting pointer from science towards God Allan Sandage is regarded rightly as one of the fathers of modern cosmology he discovered the quasar and he says you know God to be as a mystery but he is the answer to the question why there is something rather than nothing I make the point again if God hadn't created it didn't sustain the universe there would be nothing for you and Georgia Tech to study thank you very much not the first question I mean I ask is evolution is a horrendously cruel process so how can they good God create through such gratuitous cruelty okay that's pretty succinct thank you alright the second one is how can we do physics at all if the world is not a causally closed system since Christianity claims it's not how couldn't we do physics are told if the universe is not causally closed okay thank you all right is that you done who's next it's good for the audience to hear all the questions and then I'll comment on them I have this can we reduce meaning to causation through something like speech act theory are those all your questions yeah oh I see it was supposed to be one each actually but there we are that's right off you go the rest of you hello doctor clinics hello okay first question when you're talking about if if the hypothetical was okay theism is answers to people afraid of the dark you retorted with atheism as people's answer to a fear of the light we have evidence that people are afraid of dying and that being it that's a fear that we can empirically observe and people will tell you themselves they have what evidence do we have that atheists are afraid of an existence that continues after death do we have any whatsoever of any kind okay and you wanted just one question is that correct sir well I just have one more if it's okay sir okay let's hear it anyway all right I I appreciate it thank you do it in the regards of God creating the universe you posit that if God had not created the universe then the universe would not be exist for us to discuss because the universe cannot come from nothing but you also posit God is uncreated than in order to solve this however if we posit that we have to concede that things that are not created exist and so we can no longer carry on the assumption that the universe is created because we don't know this create it or not we don't know what happened before the Big Bang so if you could I guess offer your thoughts and opinion on that okay I've got it I've got it very interesting who's next I have two questions one of which what's going to be his I was gonna give it to him however well you can give it to me yes you state that when we say Ling or when we see language we infer to intelligence now some a skeptic could say to this that prior to Darwin whenever we saw nature we infer to intelligence so why is it that you believe that the inference you're discussing is justified given that we now know that the other isn't and my other question is a light-hearted question Richard Dawkins has recently been using his Twitter account to express his support of a youtube atheist who goes by the name Jaclyn Glenn and in in her most recent video one that he shared she asks the following question why can't evidence for the big bang be evidence for the existence of an almighty ham and cheese sandwich so my question for you sir is do you worship a sandwich it's a question because it refers to very common objections to cosmological arguments which usually goes like this why does the cause of the universe have to be a God why can't it be a computer or a sandwich or the Flying Spaghetti Monster why does it need to be what you call God okay we've got it okay is that it gentlemen is that it well thank you very much now these are very interesting questions and as usual they would require lecture each so I'm not going to do them in the order that they came I going to try and reorder them slightly how could we do physics at all if the universe is not causally closed I would suspect that we wouldn't know anything at all or be able even to reason if the universe were causally closed now this is an argument that CS Lewis has developed very powerfully you see the thing that I left out of my account because they ran out of time was this one of the biggest problems these days relates to what I said at the very beginning all scientists believe that we can do science and you refer to it we can do physics what do we do it with well we do it with our mind but what is the mind well it's the brain according to the reductionist and what is the brain it's the end product of a mindless unguided process now I would put to you that if you go into your lab at Georgia Tech tomorrow and you are introduced to a new piece of equipment by your professor who says by the way ladies and gentlemen this is a very interesting new piece of test equipment it was constructed by a mindless unguided process and I want you to use it for your final examinations I think you'd object you wouldn't trust it and you see from where I sit as a Christian I have a rationale for trusting my intelligence because there's a God behind the universe that the mind is studying and behind the mind now this is an argument that is now being taken up very powerfully by one of the leading philosophers in this country called Thomas Nagel and Thomas Nagel has written a book called mind and cosmos and his fellow atheists are massively upset if you want to see how upset they are just google his name because Nagel is arguing that if you take this closed universe reductionist view you end up by undermining rationality as Alvin Plantinga one of America's leading philosophers a Christian this time points out of Dawkins is right that our minds are essentially our brains and our cobbled together by mindless unguided processes then he has given a strong reason to doubt anything they tell us including his science and his atheism and my biggest problem here is this my main objection to atheism might be honest with you is not because I'm a Christian it's because I'm a scientist it undermines their very rationality I need to do science and ironically it's the fact that the universe is open and there is a creator gives the rationale behind that now this is a Q&A I can only approximate two answers your question is brilliant it deserves a whole lecture but that's all I can say because there are other things that we need to be able to do the fear of death what evidence do we have of atheists fear Max Horkheimer was a brilliant thinker and he says you know I fear that there might not be a God and I fear it because if there's no God then there'd be no ultimate Justice Thomas Nagel says I don't want there to be a god and other people have said like Thomas Huxley the relief that came when he discovered that there was no God and therefore there was no judgment to be faced after death I mean I I could I can't I can't pull the ball out of my head but there are dozens of people the fear of death is an immense driving power not only for Christians but for atheists but the difference between the two of course is christianity has an answer to death it's the resurrection of Jesus where atheism has by definition no answer whatsoever so I think you can't say with many atheists very honest they are afraid of death they are afraid of non-being because they want of some ultimate significance now can we reduce meaning now what I've written down here I can no longer read was it can we reduce meaning to speech acts was that the question well half a minute I could interpret that in a marvelous way I think that would suit my purposes very well and that would be that when you read the description of creation at the beginning of the Bible it goes like this and God said let there be light and God said and God said in fact according to the Bible it is a speech act but it's more than the speech act if I say let there be light nothing will happen unless somebody's working a switch at the back of the room I can't create light the amazing thing is about God's speech acts is that they have creative energy and power and I think you're hitting on something very important there because the Bible says relatively little about the high of creation but what it does emphasize is this concept of speaking of the word in the beginning was the word all things were made by him so that speech word logic information command is primary and the mass-energy is secondary so there is a very real sense of which I think you are running parallel to what is actually being claimed except there's a vast difference between God's speech act and my speech act he is God the Creator this speech has got Kriya torial power now if God is eternal then things that are not created exist so we don't know whether the universe is created or not but that is not the common view of any physicist I made the convergent view of our physicists is the standard model and you may well know that I mentioned Alan Guth but there are three there's a trio of the board and Vilenkin and they have proved what are called the Guth board Vilenkin theorems not surprisingly and the argument is that even if you've got a multiverse the universe is past finite in time and these theorems demanded and in fact Alex Vilenkin puts in his paper that cosmologists can no longer hide behind the idea of an eternal universe so I'm only going on the basis of the science your argument seems to me to not affect the science that we're approaching simply by saying that God is eternal and he exists means that we can immediately think the universe is eternal but half a minute I thought we were scientists here and we were going basis of the science as to what we thought the universe was okay now language infers intelligence yes before Darwin nature and played intelligence and afterwards nature doesn't apply intelligence half a minute half a minute Darwin dealt with life the biosphere the physicists have done phenomenal work and cosmologists on what's called the fine-tuning of the universe and I'm sure all of us in this room are aware that whatever you think of evolution or not you need a fine-tuned universe to get the carbon on which life depends and it's very important to realize that the fine-tuning argument is totally independent of any arguments about evolution so I would say no after Darwin there are many scientists including the two Nobel Prize winners as I mentioned who in fair are designing intelligence from nature because they're thinking first of all of the laws of nature where did they come from that this is a law like universe secondly they're thinking of the fact that there was a creation thirdly the thinking of the fine-tuning all of that long before you get to Darwin so I simply think that your premise is incorrect as to worshipping a sandwich I think that's a very silly question if you don't mind me being honest about it I thought we were in Georgia Tech where you decide things on the basis of evidence and it's like God and Santa Claus there's no competition between God and the sandwich because ladies and gentlemen you see I can reduce from science as I've tried to some of the evidence why I believe in a creator but it's not the only evidence looking of nature and I'm an amateur astronomer I love looking at Andromeda and all this kind of thing this year beauty of it overwhelms me with the majesty of God but you only get so far looking at nature that way there are other things because you see if I had read a little more or quoted a little bit more beyond where I went earlier in the beginning was the word I would come down to a stunning statement and the word became human and dwelt among us now that's coming down to the specifics of Christianity I don't simply believe that you can trace the fingerprints of God of the physical universe and it it's law likeness I believe that God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ by coming into this world so that opens up the possibility of having a relationship with God and my evidence that God is not a sandwich comes mainly from there and I don't know of any scientist and his or her right mind who would think that the universe is produced by a sandwich that's that's just simply frivolous thinking to be honest now the very first question was to do with the cruelty of evolution how can we believe in a good God now of course there's a prior question the prior question is an electrifying question and of course it is how much weight can the so-called evolutionary hypothesis bear I didn't give you the subtitle of Thomas Nagel book perhaps I ought to give it to you now just so that you know the subtitle of the book mind and cosmos is this why the neo-darwinian view of the cosmos is all certainly false that is staggering because as I say Nagel is one of the top philosophers in this country is also an atheist there are serious questions in my mind as a mathematician as to how much weight the evolutionary hypothesis will bear clearly bears some weight as as as Darwin saw but that it's a universal creative engine for the reasons i partly given to you for from information theory it cannot even begin by definition to account for the origin of life because evolution depends on you having life for it to start so it cannot be an explanation for it but I can leave that aside everything a book about it so I'll shamelessly advertise the book it's called God's Undertaker but I take your point now about looking at the universe whether its evolution or not it's full of horror and cruelty isn't it we all see that and the question is how do we come to terms with it either as an atheist or in my case as a Christian and it's a hard question it's a very hard question now we regard it as evil and that's interesting because and this is a topic for another Veritas forum excuse me yes however our dwell the Gibbs free energy of the universe is the derivative of energy with respect to the constant age of the existence of thought did any of you understand that I believe you did no I didn't well i hypothesize then that the Gibbs free energy in any system of energy is the probability that we'll be able to produce a self-replicating concept of itself I think there would be many people that dispute that well I know you can I know that we cannot we cannot turn this into a physics seminar but it's not secondly it is not the convergence of mathematics and religion I don't understand how it could possibly be discussions of Gibbs free energy lie perfectly validly within the scientific sphere they do not answer any questions about the existence of God or not because in the end you know as well as I do that you've got to explain the existence of any energy at all but I think we'll continue with the questions I was I was asked because we must know I can't give you a guarantee that I will contest you on the theory because I don't think there's a contest so can I just continue with my answer please do you know this is the first University in North America where this has happened so I just continue with the answer to the other question if you don't mind ladies and gentlemen the question of of cruelty and the question of suffering is one of the deepest questions all of us face and we regard it as evil and one of the first issues that arises is this where do we get our concepts of good and evil from if there is no God now that's a hugely contested area and I would want to argue with Dostoevsky is that we cannot have a rationally grounded concept of good and evil if there is no God of course because I believe that every man and women is made in the image of God I believe that we all do have a concept of good and evil and can behave morally now I can go into this a bit more but I'm very conscious that we've run over the time allotted to the four men at the front and can I with your permission just leave that question of suffering and evil in the air and go to the audience and collect a few questions and if some of you want me to go on without a will but in the audience section but I would like to get a few questions from the audience is that Alright okay so fire away let's get a few questions from the audience put up your hand and I recognize you there's one waving fiercely at the back and here's a man here ok you go because you're here come up the microphone would you that would help this is not a question but on behalf of Georgia Tech dr. Lennox I would like to apologize for thank you for coming and I hope we can have you back listen listen don't you worry about the Georgia Tech is not one individual okay next in line please okay so he said earlier that thinking Christians don't believe in this god of the gaps do you have a rationally self-consistent and falsifiable definition of God that you could give okay definition of God falsifiable in the papyri insensate take it okay - so so my question revolves around moral relativism we grow up getting different pains growing up you know I experienced different pains and somebody else somebody else experiences different pleasures and my concepts of morality and thus concepts of a God or a God or centering on that I'm curious on how you sort of address that in your Christian framework specifically if somebody has different sets of experiences and has a different concept of God how do you sort of merge those views together if the experiences are different that's okay thank you very perceptive question yes please yeah so you talked a little bit about the cosmology of men like Krauss who have the idea that the universe came from a quantum vacuum and you introduced some concepts such as the board youth and blinkin theorem and I was wondering if you could explain a little bit more how we can for sure arrive at the idea that there was actually nothing like a negation of anything as opposed to Krauss his idea of a quantum vacuum and kind of connected with that why do the Lincoln and I guess you said Guth has debated you on this why do they have different philosophical interpretations of the science they give and you use the science for your interpretation and they use it for another why is there that discrepancy Thanks okay number four hi dr. Lennox just want to reiterate what I do have a question but I did want to reiterate with the first gentleman said I do apologize on behalf of I'm Georgia Tech in the recipe I'm actually a former engineer and a law student and I was interested in how you opened your talk with a discussion of how mathematics is at one point your talk you mentioned how rationality perhaps probably mathematics itself requires mind and open open causal universe I was wondering if you might be willing to expound a little more on the idea of mathematics or the problem of mathematics and applying it to the real world when we don't have apart from a theistic worldview where I basically see three prerequisites for mathematics to be useful there has to be a rational order to the universe there had and are we have to have minds that are rationally capable and then there has to be some sort of correlation between the two that were justified and relying on in order to apply math and I was wondering a few - as a Christian mathematician expound on that idea a little okay I'll take one more and then I there was simply time for some more hello dr. Lennox I want to ask earlier on doing the talk you said that you consider mathematics a subset of science however earlier um well they give you they give you a Cambridge a BA in mathematics however you said that pure pure mathematics you separated pure mathematics from evidence however pure mathematics comes from intelligence itself which is which you said is the greatest connection to God so wouldn't your mathematics then be greater than science itself well you flatter mathematics thank you very much so let's let's have a look at these questions and then every time we'll go into them the first question was thinking Christians don't believe in the God of the gaps I ought to add there that unfortunately some Christians do believe in a God of the gaps and they give that impression they let their faith depend on some surely God is behind this little bit of biology or something like that and in effect they are believing in a God of the gaps and what I want to stress here is that we need to be clear what God were talking about your question is quite right can we give a definition of God now here of course you run into difficulty because the big things in the universe in science we can't define them we can't define gravity we can't define energy we don't know exactly what they are and yet we find these concepts very useful now the interesting thing about the question of God is how can we give a definition of God well we can extrapolate from our experience of the universe and we could argue that God is powerful we could argue that God is intelligent God has created the universe with laws but if we really want to get to know God you see the crucial step here in logic and in thinking is that God is not a theory he's a person now we are all persons so how do you get to know a person how would I define you for example well let me the word definition isn't totally appropriate but get to know you and what you're like how do we get to know God and what he's like well I will never get to know you simply by studying you scientifically if I put you into an electron tunneling microscope here and I'm sure there's some very impressive ones I don't get to know you in fact I'll never get to know you unless you reveal yourself to me as a person the Greek word sceptile from which we get skepticism means checking something out from a distance and that's a very healthy attitude and these things we check them out from a distance but if you want to get to know a person well you'll have to give up your distance some of you already know that it's extremely important to realize it therefore how can I give a definition of God I would reword it I believe we can get to know God because God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ and Jesus came as a person a human being God incarnate into this world and shows us what God is like and we can get much closer in that sense to what one might approximate to a definition by looking at Jesus because he claims that he is God so God is like him so that would be my approach to that and I'll stir falsifiability I think it probably comes at a different level I do believe Christianity is falsifiable at its heart there stands the claim that Jesus rose from the dead as a matter of history now that is a falsifiable thing and the reason I believe it is because the historical evidence the historical evidence supports it but now I must go on to the next one and I'm going to take the scientific thing first and that is the cosmology and nothing you wanted me to say a bit more about it and go to do another shameless bit of advertising I've written a book called God and Stephen Hawking and analyzed what he says about nothing and it does concern me you see the noting that most of us think of as nothing is the absence of anything if I say I went turn the road in Atlanta and met nobody it doesn't mean I met somebody called nobody at Maidan means it didn't meet anybody right so nothing is the absence of anything no laws no physics no atoms no electrons no particles popping in and out of existence nothing now you see the physics forces them to believe that the universe came out of that but they can't get a universe out of that so they redefine nothing they do it in a spectacularly interesting way listen to Hawking do it because there is a law of gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing well when I first read that I thought what because there is a law of gravity because there's something the universe will create itself from nothing that's a flat contradiction and he says because there's a law of gravity doesn't even say because there is gravity and what a law of gravity would mean if there's no gravity I wouldn't know because laws are descriptions of something that already exists so it seems to me you've massive problems there now if you step back to the biblical view the very interesting thing is they discussion I've quoted at once but sometimes we're so familiar with this that we don't realize how powerful it is in the ancient Greek world because the Greeks were interested in the differentiation between the eternal things that did not come to exist and the temporal things that did come to exist and let me quote it to you again so as you see the power of it in the beginning was the word that is was in Greek is also a statement of existence the word already was that is the word exists eternally all things came to be through him but no there's an extra clause and it's the most interesting of all and without him that is without the word nothing came to be that came to be so if you're talking about things that came to be the claim is that nothing came to be that came to be without the word so the first logical thing is the word didn't come today and the universe came to be that is it came to be there was nothing in the philosophical sense before so it seems to me that the biblical view makes perfect sense because the universe has a cause but it's not physical God is spirit the primary stuff in the universe is not mass energy anyway it is spirit now that's a different category altogether mind as primary mass energy derivative so it seems to me that the Bible is talking a lot of sense whereas the physicists are wandering outside their own sphere are talking well what Hawking says about the universe creating itself is nonsense isn't it if I say X creates Y those words bein that if you assume X you get Y if I say X creates X it means if you assume X you get X and what does that mean that means that nonsense remains nonsense even if high-powered scientists are writing it so that's what I'd say about that what you said about mathematics I largely agree with that mathematics used to be regarded as the queen of the sciences and it's the mathematical describe ability of the universe that's a staggering thing that caused Einstein to say the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that is comprehensible I gained figner who won the Nobel Prize for Physics said he wrote a famous paper in 1961 called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics well he's right if atheism is true it's utterly unreasonably effective he's completely wrong if Christianity is true because the reason mathematics is effective that something I think of in my head here applies the universe out there is because the same Creator is responsible for both now the mathematics point I separated maths from evidence I didn't separate mathematics from evidence mathematics is evidence of something what I said is that the processes of doing mathematics in pure mathematics are axiomatic and deductive and give you a logical proof that you do not get in any other branch of science that's all I was saying at that point now the final question in this group was moral relativism different people of different experiences and so on and so forth now I'm well aware of that but there's another sight to put to that and it's the side that I find very striking CS Lewis brought it to my attention many years ago when he points that if you go around the world every philosophy every religion every absence of religion every worldview no matter where it is you will find the Golden Rule do unto others what you would that they do to you everywhere you find it and from where I sit that is fascinating there seems to be a common core of morality now there are variations of course but there is a central core which is one of the reasons that society doesn't completely collapse now what's that traceable to I believe it's traceable to one of the most profound things that you find in any literature it's the biblical statement that human beings are created in the image of God and it's the foundation of all the ethics of Western societies leading atheists like Jurgen Habermas admit made in the image of God gives human beings infinite value now there will be variations as you suggest but I think it's worthwhile emphasizing that common core because one of the best ways of discussing but those who disagree with us is to respect the fact that they are made in the image of God and therefore they are by definition equally valuable to us and I do feel very strongly that if we believe that others are equally valuable to us then we'll treat them in a very different way from what we would if that were not true I have we time I don't see the directors of this perhaps they've gone home already have we time for a couple more questions or not sorry three minutes or so okay the first one there so one of the things I would like to remark you make it sound a bit ridiculous that things can come out of nothing so I would like to share a quantum fluctuations with people so for a very short time you can violate the conservation of energy and you can create a particle in an anti particle and they come out of nothing and and the way we can observe that is close to a black hole one of the particles can fall into the black hole and then the other particles keeps existing and it's called Hawking radiation okay I understand that but a black hole is not nothing a quantum vacuum is not nothing Alan Alan Guth told me himself that they are not talking about nothing in the philosophical sense I agree with you quantum fluctuations fine but they're not nothing in the philosophical sense whether the particles come from nothing there is a vacuum there is something there it's not nothing in the absence of everything well I suggest you write letter to Alan Guth and say he because he assured me that that's not the case we've time for one more very brief one hi you began by saying that you need God in order to do science but there's two assumptions in science where that the laws of science are our inductive and sense that you know they are constant through time that there are uniform through space and that the argument from from religion is that God maintains the laws of universe by his his power where are some responses from scientists when you say that you can't prove that the laws of science are to science that our inductive because and outside of God oh well I think I understand what you say what what I'm claiming here is there's no rational justification for having a universe at all which is low like without God that is the laws of nature pointers towards God and we do our inductions within the universe that exists so the kind of response I I get to this kind of thing is that the laws can account for it without God but they're not raised as a question where did they come from in the first place these universal laws so it doesn't solve the problem at all I will have to leave it there the one question I left unfinished was the one that was asked by the for there and it's the the suffering thing I got to say just a few words that if I may very briefly because we need to hate face the hard questions now if I take the Atheist route many of my friends do they say I cannot believe in God because of the suffering well that appears to be a solution until you realize that they haven't solved the suffering and still there but they have got rid of all hope I have a problem with suffering because I still believe in God and the thing that helps me to cope with it is not the philosophical argument because we've all engaged on it and loved doing it if the word a good God is all-powerful etc he should he might etc etc and none of us have ever find that kind of argumentation satisfactory so I ask a different question granted that they're suffering in the world and granted that there's a lot of good I was debating this at the Oxford literary festival just a few days ago it was Stephen law who's an atheist there's a lot of good and there's a lot of evil so what I can we come to terms with that and sometimes it reminds me of Coventry Cathedral if you've been there you'll see immediately when you go through the door that a bomb hit it but you'll also see traces of beauty and that's what life is like we in this university here we are unimaginably privileged since I started this evening how many thousands of infants have died unnecessarily you see that puts the balance how do you cope with that well since I can't cope with it philosophically I ask yourself a different question and it's this granted that there's goodness and granted that there's barbed wire terrorism pain catastrophes tsunamis and so on is there any evidence anywhere in the universe that there is a God who can be trusted with it and my answer to that goes to the heart of Christianity because of the heart of Christianity there's a cross the claim is that the one on the cross was God incarnate so it raises a very big question what is God doing on a cross and at the very least ladies and gentlemen it seems to me that that tells me this that God has not remained distant from the problem of human suffering but has himself become part of it Christ did not remain on the cross he died and he rose and that gives me the Gateway to true ultimate justice you see atheism has no ultimate justice Richard Dawkins said to me when we discuss as he said I fight for justice and the earth I said that's marvelous Richard but the vast majority of people have ever lived won't get justice at this life and you believe there's no other life so they won't get just as they're either it's a hopeless philosophy but I said because I'm a Christian and believe that Jesus rose from the dead and believe that that is the evidence that he is going to be life's ultimate judge I do believe there's ultimate justice that the terrorists aren't going to get away with it simply by blowing their brains out when they've ruined the lives of millions of people and so Christianity faces this question and it also opens up those major possibilities that would have to be the topic of another time and that is through the death and resurrection of Christ there is the possibility of receiving the thing I desperately need as a human being that is forgiveness and love but that's for another time thank you very much for your patience for more information about the veritas forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at Veritas org

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Published: Wed May 14 2014