Atheism and Christianity - a conversation between John Lennox and CU professor Michael Tooley

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 well good evening ladies and gentlemen I see that I'm not like the bishop who turned up in a country church and he ascended the pulpit stairs of he looked over the Pope oddly so three elderly ladies sitting way down at the back and so he spoke to the minister of the church who was just behind him and said did you tell them I was coming and he said no but word seems to have got around I am greatly honored tonight to be invited for the first time to this University I'm even more honored to have such a distinguished discussion partner in dr. Michael truly I met him for the first time in my life this afternoon and we had a delightful conversation which was broken by having to come to this session tonight and I am so much looking forward to reading one of his books he's excited me so much about his ideas on causation that I wish I had read the before we had our discussion but anyway dr. truly I hope you will be patient with me now to every speaker that belongs a biography I come from Northern Ireland and of course Northern Ireland has not had the best reputation as an advertisement for the Christian faith my parents were very unusual they were Christian without being sectarian that was the first thing and it cost my parents quite a lot in terms of terrorist bombings and things like that so we know in our family what sectarian violence is all about and yet we remain Christian secondly they give me the greatest gift that any parent can give and that is they allowed me to think and so it was that I left Ireland in 1962 and came to Cambridge to study mathematics it was a wonderful time because some of you may have heard of CS Lewis he was still there and I went to hear the final lectures he ever gave so I'm a bit of a dinosaur in terms of antiquity but that's the case and I mention him because intellectually he was a wonderful mentor remotely through his books and through his writings but in my first week at university something happened that's relevant to tonight's topic in my colleagues at Cambridge one of the students had dinner rather too loudly said to me do you believe in God and then he said oh I'm so sorry I shouldn't have asked you that you're Irish all you Irish believe in God and you fight about it now of course I'd heard that before but it in a sense set a compass bearing for my life my parents are Christian believers so were my grandparents and so were their parents and so it's pretty obvious it's all to do with Irish genetics and that was something I wanted to be sure about because I knew that Christianity had at its heart truth claims Jesus Christ said I am the truth not merely I say true things and so it was important to me to do some practical experimentation and the sort of atheists we met in Ireland were either Protestant atheists or Catholic and so it was by great opportunity at Cambridge to be genuine atheists and befriend them that's the crucial thing I discovered very early in life that talking to other people and befriending them produced a lot more than fighting them I'd seen enough of fighting in my young days over ideologies and so I was determined to get to know agnostic San atheists who didn't share my world view and really enter try to enter into their world to discover why they believed what they believed what their claims were what the evidence base was for their convictions and I've been doing it ever since it became in a way a passion because I was advised after I done my doctorate that I ought to go to Germany to do some research and that give me the opportunity to learn the language and therefore I could speak and in the Cold War days still a very long time ago remember I was able to go particularly to East Germany the German Democratic Republic where I could pass unnoticed and therefore interact with people who'd been systematically exposed to an atheistic philosophy during those years I became interested because it was important for my failed in the Mathematics done by the Russians and I learned the language in order to translate it for the American Mathematical Society to whom I owe a very small part of my salary in those early days and so I was able when the Wall fell to start going to Russia as a guest of the Academy of Sciences my interest was still to talk to people who'd been absolutely suffused and permeated by an atheistic ideology and I made many friends in Siberia particularly they actually give me a two way ticket to Siberia which is not always the case and it was so interesting that even in the Universities when I'd finished my mathematics lectures they would start asking me about God because I was well one man described me he says you're like a green cow I said why well green cows don't exist and neither does your God so that was a very formative period in my life and gradually as I began to discuss more and more I began to talk more and more publicly about the relationship particularly between my passion as the scientist and belief in God because I discovered there was a whole big debate out there and in recent years I nearly said I made the mistake of debating Richard Dawkins because that changed my life very dramatically I had no idea that debating Dawkins and he hadn't debated for quite some time would lead to me being invited to places like your University tonight and I have enjoyed immensely the interchanges just since I've been here this week with the distinguished ethicist last night in the University of Utah and so on because I really do believe that what our terminus pointed it-- is very important we can all learn from one another one of my basic convictions ladies and gentlemen is that every man and woman no matter what they believe is of infinite value I believe it because I believe they're made in the image of God and therefore when we meet other people the least we can do is to show them respect even if we disagree with their worldview because in that way we can explore and we can research the big ideas and there should be no one in the world whatever they believe from whom we cannot learn something so I am immensely privileged to have this opportunity tonight and I'm looking forward to the discussion one last point it will come up again I'm interested in talking about reason and faith because faith is seriously misunderstood in our society and as a slightly provocative remark I want to point out that you have to add faith in what because faith is essential to any science or philosophy it is also essential in Christianity and the traditional question one of them will be asking tonight no doubt is this what is the evidence for what you believe is it evidence based faith or is it as Richard Dawkins says blind faith thank you ladies and gentlemen well thanks very much Matt for the kind of reduction and a lot of to say my special thanks to the Veritas forum for inviting me to take part tonight and especially in conversation with the professor John Lennox I very much like the idea of having a conversation where we can interact with one another I've been in a number of debates and the base can be very good but it can also be dissatisfying in various ways so I'm going to touch very briefly on my background so you know roughly where I'm coming from and in the discussion itself I'll attempt to treat the conversation with John as in genuine conversation so I'll try to interact with him in a way would interact with any of you if we were talking about these questions of atheism and Christianity so I promise not to lapse into long lectures of any lectures or set set speeches and so on and also when John raises questions I'll try to answer them a brief way and then he can follow up and I can expand on it and so I think that should make for a very good type of interaction so let me begin by saying a bit about my background again so you have a sense of where I've been where I'm coming from I grew up in a small rural community in Canada we're not only all the members of my own family were Christians but so it appeared absolutely everyone in the community which I grew up I started going to Sunday school which I did for a few years and then at the age of 12 I joined the church doing almost all my teenage years I'd be true to say that I never had any doubts at all about the truth of Christianity I also had quite a strong sense of sin on something I think at least at that time was not uncommon among adolescents and I had this together with a again a very strong conviction that I very much needed the assistance of God and especially of Jesus if I was going to be able to live a Christian life so that's how things were through high school I didn't went to university and I had some initial contact with religious ideas because I had a friend of mine who was Catholic and he was going to st. Michael's College University Toronto and there was a compulsory course called religious knowledge which you took if you were a Catholic and they were exposed to st. Thomas Aquinas as five arguments for the existence of God and so I often got together with Paul and discussed those arguments but though I did that I never had a me again never any doubts about my own beliefs at that point but then a good friend of mine we'd gone to elementary school together and I was a person with genuine interest in ideas suggest me at a certain point that there's a book that I should read and the book that in question was marriage and morals by the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell and reading that book changed my life forever when I finished the book I realized the first time my life that one can ask why do I believe that the one can ask what evidence do I have for those beliefs and when I asked those questions I concluded that I didn't have good reasons for believing God and that I didn't have good reasons for accepting Christianity so and this may be surprising the result in my case was immediate I no longer believed in God and I no longer accepted Christianity this experience has led to a lifelong interest in religion continuing through graduate school where at Princeton University I wrote my PhD dissertation in the area philosophy religion it was supervised by man named Walter Kaufmann whose writings and philosophy religion they would critique your religion philosophy and faith or heretic I found extremely stimulating today of them and still admire very much today then when I started teaching this be 1967 at Stanford University my main area concentration was again philosophy religion I didn't want to publish things in that area and the 2008 I had the opportunity to involved in a debate volume it's entitled knowledge of God with one of the very foremost Christian philosophers of our time Ellen planning out who was at Notre Dame at a time but had been earlier at Calvin College in that debate volume I really focused on why I thought was the most important consideration barring plottin existed to God what's no.1 is the argument from evil which I'll be talking about more as we go on so let me say a bit about why I think these sorts of conversations are important first of all I think it's important from a sort of societal point of view there are a necessity in most societies significant disagreements about how society should be organized but what laws there should be about what sorts of things are right and wrong these disagreements can in many cases generate into sideral stress within the society and can lead to rather unhappy divisions these differences are often rooted in religious differences and as a result it may be difficult to resolve these disagreements unless one is willing to look at the underlying of religious differences second reason these things are important is that amount of the significant services beliefs seem important one have beliefs that are reasonable beliefs in the light of the total evidence and so the question is to what extent do people have beliefs that are reasonable in the light of the total evidence and here's a way of thinking about it in the world there are many religions often putting forward incompatible beliefs and claims and so on and these are not just about trilliant matters but about some of the most important issues that there'll are but all of all these many religions only one at most and be the one true religion if such there be and or even the close approximation to the truth the vast majority religious believers John talked about so the genetic basis higher certain sorts beliefs and so on right the vast majority of leaders believe it's how our religious beliefs that are very closely related to beliefs their parents what does it mean what means if one is religious religious believer unless you've taken the time to look at the alternatives to consider alternative religions and also atheism right it means that unless one has very been very lucky indeed is actually likely that your religious beliefs are incorrect and that you're accepting the wrong religion just because of the number of religions there are in the world so it's important and once we just find accepting religious beliefs that one does to subject those beliefs to careful closed critical scrutiny and one of the things I think is extremely helpful in doing that is be engaging in conversations with thoughtful intelligent people who disagree with one okay I think that's absolutely crucial right I think it's very bad this is B isolate one in a circle of those who share one's beliefs right it's important step outside of that circle to talk to people who don't share your beliefs to ask them why they accept different Leafs and why you disagree with your beliefs so inclusion short is that what one believes the area religion I think is extremely important since the truth or falsity of business beliefs has enormous relevance as relevance first to how it's rational to live your life it has relevance to how one lots of live one's life as relevance to how society should best be organized and also as well as to how we can best live together with other people so I'm very much looking forward to tonight's discussion with John legs well and with that we will begin our conversation gentlemen the framework for this evening is to get a better sense of kind of your core beliefs and how they shape your life and your experiences our first topic is a focus on belief in God from a Christian perspective and from an atheist perspective begin our first question for professor Lennox can you tell us a little bit more about what it means to be a Christian we want to start our discussion by kind of defining some of our key terms and making sure we understand what we mean when we use these terms Christianity and atheism so can you begin by just sharing a little bit about what Christianity means to you what you mean when you say you're a Christian and in light of your personal view how does that shape what you believe about God well to summarize it as rapidly as possible Christianity is a worldview it is a monotheistic worldview in other words it does not believe that mass energy is all that exists it believes that there is a transcendent of personal God who created space-time who created the universe and who upholds it it also believes that God has revealed at least part of who he is in the natural world and that's why I'm particularly interested in the relationship of science to Christian belief but you are specifically about Christianity and of course the word Christian comes from Christ that this is geared into history so it's no longer a matter of thinking about science with its generalized laws and the universe as a whole it's talking about something very specific and historical and the claim is and it is a staggering claim that God has become human and Jesus Christ was simultaneously man and God and the reason for his coming is explained by his name Jesus you will call his name Jesus for he we'll save you from your sin now these are big concepts and they did on packing but I'm trying to summarize I believe that the evidence base is mainly but not only in the life the miracles of Jesus and supremely by his death and resurrection from the dead which I take as a fact of history for which I believe we can give substantial evidence but I would emphasize that being a Christian does not mean simply accepting these facts intellectually but it means entering into a real and personal relationship with God because God ladies and gentlemen is not a theory he's a person he's a person who can be related with and because we are created in his image we can have a relationship with him and I believe that the heart of it is that he died and rose again to give me something utterly unique I was very interested Michael it you're talking about these multiple religions and I agree with you and one of the utterly unique things to my mind in Christianity it doesn't compete with any other religion on this point because no other religion offers this is the knowledge of forgiveness and peace with God in this life that's based not on merit or performance but it's based on something God has done and is received as a free gift through repentance now I'm using technical terms like anything and you may resent that but you've asked me to explain it so it seems to me that that's a very short summary of it Michael I was I was really very interested in your story and thanks for sharing it with us I was most interested that Bertrand Russell played a key point and I can't help sharing this I remember walking around Cambridge and I came to a bookshop and in the window was a book by Bertrand Russell why I am NOT a Christian I thought there I read it and I've been taught to thinking I it's so echo what what Michael said I've been taught by my parents to criticize Christianity my father gave me a copy of the communist manifesto when I was 14 and said you better read that so I grew up with a very critical view of my face so I circled the bookshop and I circled it can i really afford the body to fight this are they bought it and i'm glad he did because it was one of the most profound confirmations of my Christian faith that I'd read so Bertrand Russell has played an equal and opposite role for the time well thank you professor to a similar question as we see on the screen atheism and Christianity we heard a brief explanation of how we are to understand Christianity for this conversation help us understand atheism how should we think about that term what does it mean to you well start with a term theism okay the term P ISM is sometimes used in a very gentle way to cover a belief in any old sort of deity be it good bad or indifferent right and I don't think that use the term theism is advised okay so I want to use the term theism to refer to a belief and a deity that has certain striking characteristics I mean first of all it's an all-powerful deity secondly it's an all-knowing deity and third it's a deity that has moral characteristics it's not bad or indifferent right it's good indeed perfectly good for moral point of view right now I mean Christians would want to include a number of other properties right but Isilon a minimum definition right and so theism is the view that there is say an omnipotent that is all-powerful omniscient that's all-knowing and morally perfect person in existence right atheism is the view that there is no such person there is no omnipotent omniscient and morally perfect person right and so what I'm making is Sam Nathan that's what I'm saying now there are conceptions of powerful deities that subs being create the universal and wander off deism is a label for these right and so the sort of argument that I would bring main argued over against theism known as the argument from evil which we'll talk more about later I just doesn't have much bite in the case of deism right because daddy being perfectly good is not built into a deistic deity right so that's essentially my take on atheism right and it's a my reason for being an atheist I know if you want me to go into at this point or we have a little time for that okay so I mean I mean for example quite recently there was a typhoon to hit the Philippines and the result was the death of 10,000 people and these were not ten thousand serial killers these were 10,000 ordinary men women children and babies right now suppose that you were all-powerful or even a few much much less than all power right you could have been reamed in the weather you could have done something to stop that typhoon and if you done so there would have been tenth hours and fewer reasonably innocent people who wouldn't have died in some cases quite horrible deaths and so on right and so it's quite natural to say if there is an all-powerful all-knowing and perfectly good being going why wouldn't he intervene in this sort of situation right and so arguments from evil are arguments that focus upon that sort of suffering horrendous evils in the world sometimes committed to by people like Hitler and Stalin and so on right and argue in the best form in the argument that that's evidence against the existence of God now what I did in the book I do the planning uh I tried to formulate the argument in a rigorous way I won't describe it here because we don't want people falling asleep right but I tried to show they could actually calculate the probability that when these are media tees existed and so on given the number of evils in the world right so I think the evidential idea from evil is a very powerful objection to believe existence of God and the Christian God has conceived it was having these properties so it's a very powerful objection to the Christian God okay thank you both would you like to before we move on to our next question do we have perhaps some clarifying questions for each other about anything that was mentioned well Michael let me hasten to agree with you in the sense that this is the hardest question I faced as a Christian without Eddie without any hesitation I arrived at New Zealand two days after the earthquake and I had to beat people had lost their husbands or thought and it said everybody lips that I confess right away that this is the hard question I think there's a series of deep issues behind it I wasn't aware you'd written on it without and I shall certainly have a look at your detailed argument not tonight it seems to me that we set up concepts of omnipotence all-knowing and so on I notice that none of those words are used in the Bible even though they are legitimate deductions to define God but sometimes I think we make a set of assumptions and deductions from them that might not actually represent the truth now I don't know how much we want to discuss this question now I'll make one point and we can continue because it is the vital problem and my first reaction is a philosophical one and it'll raise some of the questions down the line and it's this we are all outraged by these things by both as you say the problem of natural evil earthquakes tsunamis and moral evil the Hitler's and so on and I have enormous sympathy for people who turn to atheism because of that problem I've been in Auschwitz many times I've wept every time and I have many friends who've lost all their relatives but then I begin to think and can I just say cancer looks very different to an oncologist than it does to a young mother has just been told she's 2 months to live and many of you sitting right there you may be interested in this problem philosophically but you may be deeply hurting and it's very difficult a conversation like this to handle both but then I think if there if you turn to atheism and say there's no God in one sense you've solved the problem but in what sense because you haven't removed the suffering it's still there what you have removed of course completely is any ultimate hope because the atheistic view denies that there is any life after death in which there could be any credible compensation and thirdly and this is the big philosophical one as you know I have a question I as you know have debated and interacted with Dawkins Dawkins atheistic reaction and I'd be interested in your take on this is to say look the universe is just like we'd expected to be at the part of there's no good no evil DNA just is and we danced its music so he's removed morality and it seems to me there's quite a strong argument around there that says if you deny the existence of God you remove morality but then where does the outrage where does the concept of evil come from so that would be my first but not my last comment of this right so can I comment yeah I mean I think we have some time to camp on this issue for a little bit we certainly wanted to get to deeper issues of morality I don't a your Michaels response yes so why don't we call an audible here and keep this part of conversation going you've heard some thoughts all right about this why don't we engage that idea well there's some points that come up that we can pursue further later on okay but one thing the claim that you know if you're an atheist that removes value from the world I mean I have two colleagues who have written books and meta ethics one is gray Maudie who wrote a book value of reality and desire another is mic humor wrote at book on ethical intuition is Emre and I believe that both of them are atheist Graeme was a Christian and so on right and so their number of philosophers who are moral realist and so on and who are atheist and Mike humor in his book takes a very strong look a very extended look at no one's divine command Theory morality right and argues that it doesn't provide a satisfactory basis for objective values the other question in concern is a relation between atheism and belief in the life beyond the grave okay right now I'll be quite frank I don't think the chances of a life beyond the grave are very good okay but not all atheist agree I mean think about what isn't for example the Buddha was an atheist right and yet he believed in reincarnation right so it's possible being atheist and have a different view in philosophy of mind than I have to believe that we have immaterial minds or souls one might think as I don't as good philosophical argument for that the third point I wanna make is that I mean if atheism is the case and if as I myself think there's no life after death right then you have the situation where people suffer horribly and you know that so speak that's never going to be recompense and so on right but the question is whether your view puts things in a less bleak light okay right and so the point is it's not that you know when you die there's life beyond the grave and that's great right I mean Christianity of the heart of Christianity is the idea of salvation the idea that Jesus died for our sins right there's an alternative salvation right in Orthodox Christianity the alternative is eternal punishment of hell right and moreover their passage in the New Testament many are called but few are chosen bottles the way and so forth and so on right that suggests that majority of the human race are going to wind up in the wrong place they're going to wind up in hell right and so the question is is that a brighter picture we'll take a vivid example I mean take the Holocaust where six million Jews were killed right now if I say you know it's very unlikely that those who are to a Jewish survival grant likely your friends and family are going to ever live again right deaf is the end right again that's not a nice message right but if on the other hand I were to say look there's a heaven in hell right and so you know maybe your family wound up in Hell in heaven right but again if you accept the Christian message I mean Jesus said those who believe in me and are baptized will be saved and so on those who do not believe me will be condemned right I think it's a bleaker message that you would be conveying to survivors of the Holocaust then I would be conveying which part there do you want me to respond to because there's so much there that's of importance let me say a couple of things because it's very important because I am so sympathetic to this reaction because it's the reason many of my colleagues and friends have turned to atheism so let me say just a couple of things firstly you rightly say the heart of Christian gospel is salvation now I look at that cross nature said this God who's on a cross that he was mocking but I say God on the cross if that really is God what's he doing there and my response is at the very least he has not remained distant from the problem of human suffering but as himself become part of it that's number one now I take your points at the end but I think there is a little bit of a danger of caricature this business of heaven and hell and reward we need to look into it a bit further because if you look at what the New Testament says about these things it will come back to a concept that I have not yet used but you will immediately pencil it we know music and that's the notion of free will it seems to me that we say could not a good God a powerful God have made a world in which these things weren't possible but it seems to me that the existence of choice which renders moral evil possible is an original good God has created men and women after his image there is such a thing as love that's only possible if there could be such a thing as hate now the sad thing is we have rebelled against God and if we say couldn't a good God have made a universe where these things didn't happen of course he could but there would have been no humans in it there would have been robots now when I had a child my first child I remember holding the little girl I'm thinking this child could grow up to rebell against me that didn't stop me having children and it seems to me that God takes a great risk in creating humans now on your point I would never talk in those terms to my Jewish friends because at the end I cannot tell the final dealings of a screaming person in the gas chambers and I think God loves people much more than I do actually and he will save all he can but if someone having seen all there is revealed in Christ of his love and says no I would agree very much for CS Lewis what is God to do is he to force that person you can't force people to love you so God has to accept the person who says no now we can dramatize all kinds of middle-age notions of Hell and all the rest of it but surely in one way the grimness about it is that God honors the choice of the people who say no to him and I do not see any alternative to that but it's not the way I would talk to people I noticed that Jesus talked about Hell to religious bigots which is quite a striking thing and he did warn and the biggest statement of God's love I know of for God so loved the world oh sweet Oh in John he gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish in that very maximal statement of the love of God there's the possibility of perishing but it seems to me the logical concomitant of my saying no to God if I say no to God I expect of that is a God he honors my choice otherwise he's simply forcing us into belief so that's the way I begin to approach that can I comment just very briefly and your thoughts on on freewill the freewill argument that Professor Lenox has talked about I mean the thing is that I mean our powers are limited okay right and so even someone like Hitler could so to speak couldn't impose great suffering on the whole human race okay his evils were lived in a certain sort of way and so my view would be that one should ask whether there shouldn't be somewhat stronger limits on what one is capable of doing right and so the idea is that you don't have to create a world with no free will in it right you can just limit the harm that will can inflict on other human beings right now you would perhaps agree is Richard Swinburne that what I want is sort of a toy world white where we can speak inflict horrendous evils and other individuals right and it's true that's the sort of world I want but I don't think it's fair Swinburne too characterizes toy world right I think that we can still do any number of things that are very nasty to other people and so on right we can still be quite vicious individuals right or we can quite loving individuals right so I think this that can be enormous cope for good and evil choices and so on in a world where our ability to inflict horrendous evil on people is limited but I want to dress one other point and so I mean you talked about respecting the individuals choice right but I mean this ties in with another Christian relief that I think it's really very important that really needs to be thought about very carefully right and that's the idea that you know at some point in the future and so on there's going to be a final judgement right and the crucial thing is it's a final judgement right and so God has set up the world in such a way that you have a limited amount of time in which to make your choice for Jesus or against Jesus right and when the bell rings and so on when you die right there's no or there's no further opportunity right I I prefer God who didn't have such an early final examination basically right who allowed people to live longer to grow to think about the alternatives and so on right the situation is you know I reject Jesus and so on right I'd I wind up in hell right and I get that I may say gee this is not a great place and so on right but it's too late right and so the question is why should you self the world like that where when this fate is the certain point determined in a way that's absolutely flying that doesn't seem to me to be the best way to set up the world why don't we hold off on furthering that topic we'll probably circle back in some of our final statements and I imagine our audience will have some questions about that topic as well why don't we transition to another big question that consistently comes up in this topic of atheism and Christianity and that is the relationship between science and religious belief professor Lenox why don't we start with you you raised this issue previously can you share a little bit about your thoughts on the relationship between science empirical evidence and religious belief are those things in conflict is there a complementary relationship we should explore how can we understand this this relationship well they're clearly not written conflict that ought to be obvious at the deepest level Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize two or three weeks ago in Scotland the Scots are all excited for the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN he's an atheist Peter few years back bill Phillips what exactly the same prize and he's an evangelical Christian in the United States both Nobel Prize winners in physics so what separates that their science no it's their worldview the one is an atheist the other is a Christian theist and I think the most important thing to realize in this debate it's not science versus gold its theism and atheism as to worldviews and their scientists on both sides and each side attempts and different ways to harness science for its argument Richard Dawkins claims that his biology makes him an intellectually fulfilled atheist I take the exact opposite view and if I've asked for evidence I look back at the history of science it arose in the 16th 17th centuries under people like Galileo Kepler Newton and so on Clark Maxwell Babbage coming up into the modern times they were all theists they all believed in God and that didn't hinder their science and Alfred North Whitehead and so on and Merton and various other people of this present day the general consensus I believe among philosophers of science that I've read is and I could see as Lewis to summarize it men became scientific why because they expected law of nature why because they believed in a low Giver so the motor that drove science in the 17th century was belief in God now the odd thing is now we're in the 21st century and people like Stephen Hawking most recently in his book claims you've got to choose between science and God and if I could just take a moment to explain why I think that has happened partly its sheer confusion about two things one about the nature of God and two about the nature of science because I used to think when I used the word God and Michael has made the point for me that people thought of the God of the Bible but they don't you see Stephen Hawking for instance and Lawrence Krauss think that I believe in a God of the gaps I can't explain it therefore God did it and their science advances the space for God disappears now if you define God to be a God of the gaps of course you have to choose between God and science because that's the way you've defined God but the God of the Bible is not the God of the things we don't understand he's the god of the things we do and with the things that we don't and of course the pioneers of modern science saw that very clearly and that's why they didn't push God out of the picture the second point is this that the nature of explanation I'm sure this is a field that Michael knows much more about than I do because philosophers have helped me greatly on this we often think that science explains me we may want to discuss the limitations of science but you know suppose let me cut it down to the absolute basics let's have a rolls-royce turbojet engine here and I offer you two explanations of it one is aeronautical engineering and the basic laws of thermodynamics and turbo propulsion another explanation is rolls and rice chews well everybody can see that's an absurdity there are two different kinds of explanation the first is in terms of law and mechanism that's the scientific one and the second is in terms of agency and the confusion that I think is very deep in the minds of people like Richard Dawkins and so on is that if you've got the scientific explanation you don't need explanation at any other level but that simply is false and so my view of the universe is to say well to quote Richard Swinburne and I agree with you at the point Jubei but - cool - positively he said science explains I believe it explains but i postulate God to explain why science explains so that there's a confusion about the nature of explanation now finally and this is the big thing if I'm asked what's the one main reason as a scientist I believe there's God it's the fact they can do science because the fundamental faith of any scientist notice the word faith as Einstein saw is the belief that the universe is rationally intelligible in terms of mathematics no I asked my atheist friends and I'm not presupposing what Michael will say to be abyss I asked by atheist and up to this point in my life tell me about this mind that does the science well the mind is the brain and what's the brain well it's the end product of a mindless unguided process and I say pardon if you knew that your computer was the end product of a mindless unguided process you wouldn't trust it for one minute would you and yet you're telling me that this instrument is reliable no this argument isn't new to me Darwin used that and it bothered him extremely and the most recent work on it is by a brilliant American philosopher at least I've loved the book by Thomas Nagel in New York mind and cosmos listen to the subtitle it is electrically provocative why the neo-darwinian view of the universe is almost certainly false now Thomas Nagel is an atheist he doesn't want there to be a god but he's pointing out that science done in a reductionistic basis has been successful precisely because we've left the mind out and he makes the point if the mind is not reducible to physics and chemistry then we'll have to do an enormous amount of revising and that is my instant response ladies and gentlemen we live in the information age and the irony of the whole thing is that physics now many physicists are regarding information as a quantity and entity that is not reducible to mass and energy it's not material of course it isn't it's couriers or material but it is immaterial and if it's immaterial that immediately raises the possibility of an immaterial world and materialism as a philosophy if not atheism begins to crumble so the very fact that we can do science seems to me to be a pointer that there's an intelligent God and from the Christian perspective finally one can simply say this atheism to my mind gives me no grounds for trusting my rationality Christianity gives me limited grounds possibly because it says the reason I can partly understand the universe by my mind in here the universe itthere is that the same Galt is ultimately responsible for both okay so certainly a lot to respond to can you take some time to share your thoughts on the relationship between science belief religious faith but also perhaps respond to some of the things we heard about materialism reductionism etc right okay so there are questions here that it's important to distinguish right and so this question or not for example science disproves the existence of God and I don't think that science does as they say it seems to me that what's relevant is this key philosophical argument the argument evil but you can ask the question when the science bears upon Christian beliefs right and I believe that science interpreting that very broadly to include historical science including history bears very strongly upon Christian beliefs right now I realize that Christians have very different beliefs and so on right and so I'm going to refer to some beliefs and some Christians will say that's irrelevant that's not part of what I believe right but let me just mention something okay right and so I I view Genesis 2 as along with some other things as providing a pretty good reason for thinking that what it's revealing to us is that God so to speak intervene in the world to bring in existence human beings by means special creation now I realize that many Christians don't believe that they may accept evolution especially in theistic form okay right but suppose that one does accept the ID of a special creation right then one thing you're on a collision course with is the idea of common descent and so I think actually there's very strong evidence that humans are descended from another primate species now in his book of seven days that divided the world and so on John has a great brief discussion of common descent and what he says is that you know that the commonality so speak between humans and chimps can be explained simply by design right you know if you're trying to create no cats and dogs and so on their four-legged right and so you've got a way of getting cats right why not use it to get dogs as well but this isn't the crucial point about the evidence for common descent there's an excellent book by Daniel Lewis Fairchild called the relics of Eden where he sets out that evidence right and part of it involves were called retro elephants and this is a matter of DNA that's not part of the genes I mean their genes make up only a small part of the DNA right and so once you move outside the genes you're playing a different ballgame right but the first chapter is one of most interesting it's called fusion and it's focused upon the fact that other primates have 24 pairs of chromosomes and we humans have only 23 and I wish you might think gee that looks like it's good news for the creationist right but what did they find what they found was that chromosome 2 is closely related very closely need to two chimpanzee chromosomes and there's an extensive mapping there are things like centromeres and telomeres right no longer functioning is that right but the right sort of DNA right and so I think that if you read that chapter on fusion the relics of Eton I predict you'll think there's a very strong case for the view that humans have a primate ancestor right so I think I was I think that's very strong evidence secondly point out is that the God of the Bible is sister on degree a God who intervenes in the world right and so you can focus on these interventions and some cases you can ask how likely is it that they really occurred and so one intervention was the great flood at the time of Noah which was a worldwide flood the water is above the mountains according to relevant text and so on right I don't exactly when Noah lived but a Wikipedia article not necessarily most reliable and place to look suggested me about 2500 BC and so look suppose it was a worldwide flood in 2500 BC that killed all the animals and so on except that those those that run the RF there should be a significant fossil record of that right there isn't right one other miracle famous miracle of the Battle of Jericho right joshua fought the Battle of Jericho anyhow God's assistance Yahweh's assistance and what do you want y'all way to do is to stop the Sun from moving too quickly across the sky right and so Yahweh help and fix the Sun Moon position for something up to a day now if that happened of course if you're on the other side the world you would notice right and so you would expect worldwide records of this occurrence but there aren't any right another thing Jesus put forth certain views I mean friend line said the other day Jesus was basically a apocalyptic rabbi that's what he was okay right and Jesus had views about what was going to happen in the future and one of the views was that he would return to Earth in the company of God the Father and the angels to judge all men and so when did he think this would happen well I read your only one quote I have a number for the song man is to come with his angels in the glory of his father and then he will pay every man for what he has done now I suggest that it's a historical fact that that does not occurred right he goes on to say truly I say to you there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom and another one saying that this will happen before the disciples have gone through all the towns of Israel and so on right this will happen before this generation is perished right and if you look at other books of the Bible you'll find that there was a you constantly see references to the idea that the the second coming of Jesus is something is going to occur soon it's now about 2,000 years later and it hasn't occurred so Jesus is wrong about something and something that rather means something trivial is really crucial for the Christian vision the world one last thing another miracle sin Testament and John referred earlier to the importance of those miracles are cases where Jesus is casting out Devils right and we're told that these Devils in some cases were responsible for blindness and deafness etcetera right now is it a case that when you go to medical school what we say is look you're going to learn how to deal with injuries are going to learn when to deal with things and quality things the body breaking down and so on you'll learn that their illnesses which are caused by bacteria and viruses but there are certain sorts of illnesses and conditions medical conditions that you won't learn to treat and that's because they're caused by demonic possession and what you should do there is go to your telephone directory and look up a phone number for nearby Exorcist and that will do the job right if there were demons and possessed people there'd be excellent evidence for that but I haven't seen any such evidence there's probably a whole lot we could talk about there but in need in the interest of time I'm going to make a very human intervention and move us on to one final question before our Q&A time and we will have time for some closing remarks right I see a great opportunity to wrap a bunch of things I think though we need to there's about 200 allegations there I don't know 10 or 15 I would like to say a little thing about the pilot perhaps we can roll that into kind of earth but I pick one of them oh my god keeper there you should give an opportunity why don't we uh why don't we sneak in so yes I'm getting your thumbs up yes because the first of all I'm interested that you're thinking about evolution when I'm reading people like Nagel who are questioning the neo-darwinian synthesis but we can't go into that I just got to take one thing because it's very important Jesus claimed that he would return and you coated the statement there are some of you standing here who shall not taste of death until they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom you did not put what follows that after six days Jesus took Peter James and John up at a high mountain apart and was transfigured before them and that is the fulfillment of it notice what he says there are some of you standing here who will not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God the normal way to realize that the kingdom of God is real is to die nobody will be any doubt about it then but the point was to convince them of the reality of the kingdom of God before he died and he did it immediately he took him up a mountain and he was transfigured they saw the power of God descend upon him and a Peter recalling this said this is what convinced him that the eternity was real and that Christ would come again in other words it was a foreshadowing of what would one day happen so I think he wasn't wrong the second point is you said that they expected it to happen certain the answer that the Bible gives is yes or no there are two strands of the New Testament the one emphasizes the Souness and the day you think not and so on the other is it won't happen you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars but the end is not yet it will not happen until and the reason for that is pretty obvious we move don't we at two speeds towards eternity I might die tonight and as far as I'm concerned that is me into eternity but then there's Earth history moving on and Jesus did not want people to live oh he's not coming for 2,000 years so I needn't bother because when we die that will be in one sense the end of that opportunity so the two strands are there so I simply think your interpretation is wrong on that point I respond I mean I have other 500 I've either 500 passages let me read to other passages right when they first queue in one town flee to the next for truly I say to you you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man here's a longer quotation in those days after that tribulation the Sun will be darkened the moon will not give its light and the stars be falling from heaven and the power of heavens will be shaken and then will they see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory and then he will send out the angels and gathers elect from the four winds from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven from the fig tree learn its lesson as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves you know that summer is near so also when you see these things taking place you know that he is near at the very gates truly I say to you this generation will not pass away before all these things take place that's mark 13:24 30 it's a similar passage in Matthew 24:29 34 so I think we take all those patches together my interpretation is more plausible one well actually that is to happen in the future and you probably know that the consensus among New Testament scholars is this generation in the sense of this kind of generation not this actual generation because it's quite clear for the later apostles that the coming of Christ and power and great glory is coming in the final time so again I don't think that Jesus was wrong on that but this is turning into a theological discussion well we certainly have a sense of where the were the debate is so we've covered a lot of territory this evening we've talked about our big understandings our concepts of Christianity and atheism we've talked about the problem of evil and our different perspectives on that we've looked at this relationship between science faith empirical evidence and belief as we get to our Q&A time and we will get there can you briefly make a statement about what it might take to change your mind so am I going first on this I've just heard from Professor Lennox why don't just to kind of provoke us a little bit as you think about we've got some strong beliefs and ideas give us a sense if anything is there counter-evidence you would consider are there things that might persuade you to change some of these poor beliefs that we've been talking about okay so they're two different very different things here one concerns atheism and the other concerns my rejection of Christianity right and as regards atheism a as I've said I think the crucial thing is the argument from evil right and the Argan from evil has often and formula in a way that's unsatisfactory right some people claim for example that there was a logical incompatibility between the existence of evil and big systems are perfectly good deity right I view it as an evidential are permeable so free to give up atheism would be involved my being convinced that it turns out there's no satisfactory version of the evidential pardon for evil and that's not unthinkable but I think it's really not very likely what about what would take for me to accept Christianity well that would be a rather longer and more arduous journey and one is that on the one hand there are these beliefs about the occurrence of miracles and so on demonic possession etc but I think there are good scientific and historical reasons for rejecting right so I we need to sort of speak become convinced that I was mistaken on those sorts of matters right but my rejection of Christianity also involves moral factors right and so I have to think for example that the moral teaching the one finds in the Bible is actually satisfactory right now we have had a chance to talk about that okay right I mean in the Old Testament you get the death penalty from teen things not being a virgin when you're married having sex with another man and so on being a rebellious son so once you have children think me that's not so bad right and so on right but leave leave the Old Testament aside right and so you get I mean in the in the New Testament right Jesus takes the view that divorce is only acceptable on the grounds with alter right I think of your spouse is beating you up badly all the time that's ground divorce right it's also morally wrong to a very divorced woman and so on right but the really crucial thing is concerned these sensual ideas that you have in Christianity right is the idea of a final judgment there's the idea of hell there's the idea of a sacrificial death right and that particularly doesn't seem to me to make any moral sense at all right and simply for original sin right me I don't see how what someone did in the distant past I mean the you know first human being right should speak are me and especially I don't see how you know I can agree with Paul that in Adam all may not sin right if you send him Adam that skill right I don't see how I can be guilty for what someone did a long long time ago right so it's those sort of special features of Christianity features that are not present in this long by the way right that I find particularly problematic right and so it'd have to be a very serious change my attitude there and I don't want sound close-minded right but I really can't quite imagine myself coming to believe that even a single very evil human being like Stalin or Hitler Pol Pot right deserves to suffer eternally for something done in finite period of time let alone but that's what's going to happen majority of human race and professor Lenox to you a final thought before we turn it over to our audience and just I just as I might change your mind I spent my life asking myself that question and I think that I would change my mind if you could convince me that Jesus did not rise from the dead that God's interaction with Israel did not happen that many fulfillments of Hebrew prophecy the timing of the birth of Christ the place of his birth were just coincidence that the rise of science had nothing to do with Christianity that the naturalistic view of getting a universe from nothing was not nonsense that the warrant for reason and morality can survive the demise of God I would perhaps change my mind if you could convince me that my experience of God did life is an illusion that the stability of by 45-year Mary has nothing to do with prayer and God but by sense of fulfillment and peace and forgiveness through Christ is an illusion that the transformation I've seen and hundreds of people's lives through trusting Christ are changing their worldview is an illusion those things would begin to make me change my mind I listen to Michael say certain things I think that part of the problem and what you were saying at the end is misinterpretation of Scripture but ladies and gentlemen the final point I want to make is the what you mentioned at the end Michael the biggest problem the suffering and evil we see a rugged world and we see a mixed picture it's like Coventry Cathedral there are traces of beauty and their traces of horrible bomb damage we can argue to Kingdom Come what our concept of God might have done with it but I ask a different question I say is there any evidence anywhere in the universe that we can trust God with those ragged edges one of my answers is the existence of a final judgment which is a glorious thing because it means that fairness will one day be done throughout this universe and be seen to be done and that our moral conscience will not turn out to have been an illusion and I firmly believe that if we could now see what God has done with those millions of people who'd never get justice in this world who perished innocently if we could see what he's done with them we would have no more questions and I trust God with those rugged engines not because I've got simplistic answers but because I see the reality of what it means for God in Christ to die on a cross and rise again well thank you both for this discussion why don't we take some time now to transition to our attentive and patient party thank you okay so now things get really interesting we've heard from two people now we're going to try to hear from a lot of people let me stand up for this just to direct traffic just a little bit I imagine so many of you would love to sit down for hours and have a coffee talk with either of our professors of course Lenox is heading out on a flight and professor Cooley has limited office hours on campus so we are going to do our best to accommodate as much as we can here's the format we have our two microphone police up front here I would ask that you form two basic lines for those who would like to ask a question and I would beg that you would write something down they are going to look and see do you actually have a period or a question mark at the end of what you're writing and here's the one unique thing we'd like to do we are actually going to get several questions on the table before we have a response this is a upon request from both our participants and we've had great experience with this in the past so we're going to alternate we're going to get two or three questions perhaps even three or four from each mic we're all going to kind of take some notes and then we're going to invite our participant participants to respond to the broad themes that we hear in these questions it also gives us an opportunity to hear from each other about what our questions are and we get more voices in the conversation so if you are interested in participating further we're going to go for about 20 to 25 minutes if we can why don't we start over here and we will just alternate it will take about four or five questions once we've hit that we're going to stop our mic police are going to be very attentive to that and we'll turn it over to our participants to address the theme of questions that we've heard please go ahead okay so my question is about the resurrection and it's mainly directed to dr. Lennox what is the point of being redeemed for our sins by Jesus's death if Jesus was simply resurrected doesn't it seem meaningless for our salvation to have him died for our sins but then come back to life isn't it like a easy cop-out okay so we have a question about the resurrection on the table let's add another one to our conversation um thank you both for have your conversation in front of us today I have a question for dr. Lennox dr. Tully briefly mentioned the divine command theory which I take it to be something like what makes an action morally right or wrong is God having us having commanded us to do it or forbade us from doing it so my question for dr. Lennox is why does God command us to do the things that he commands us to do okay thank you we have divine command theory as part of the conversation let's hear from a couple more um so I've got a question I've never really been explained where God really came from that he's like always been there and always will be almost so I kind of want some elaboration on that and additionally um if he did kind of like I want to see sprout out of nowhere but sprout of nowhere how we know in your words if he's the result of a mindless unguided process okay where did God come from yeah how about one more question on the table before we turn it over to our participants my question is for dr. Tulley and it is how actively have you sought to find that demonic possessions and miracles don't occur today okay why don't we pause there microphone police thank you we have some ideas about the resurrection about divine command theory about where God came from and contemporary issues of the demonic activity and miracles so why don't we have both of our participants kind of jump in perhaps even with each other on any one or all of those topics uh Leo dross the the last question right and so yes I have none careful research on demonic possession right but the point is that if there were a case of demonic possession they could be scientifically investigated religious things can be signed to be investigated for example this question of whether prayer for the healing whether is efficacious and the been experiments done on that including the one called the step which are generating negative results right and so I mean if you think they're a case of demonic possession then you should bring them to the attention of scientists so they can be verified right because that would be striking evidence I mean it would be evidence against a certain sort of naturalistic conception the world right it's quite decisive in my opinion right I mean again there's a tendency to accept these things on critically so you go back historically you can read about cases where it appeared that you were demonically possessed but some people formed experiments and one experiment involved giving them some water to drink and they drank it on refine right although you know they were now exhibiting these symptoms and then there was another the second part of the experiment was taking some water which was described as holy water and throwing in their direction in which case all hell broke loose but they've been tricked of course what they had been drinking was holy water which they had no reaction to it all which according to the the fear in the church at the time they showed it right and they're reacting to what they thought was holy water right so I I would bet quite heavily that one cannot come up with a case that's case of demonic possession but I say I haven't investigated carefully my I I think Michael I would agree in the sense that there's an enormous not a lot of spurious claims that their people had saved to heal all kinds of things and they almost generate what they're doing but my skepticism was reduced greatly by visiting wonder and I talked to some very serious minded medical doctors there's no direct evidence but I talked to many of them who hadn't the slightest doubt that these things were absolutely real but that's anecdotal may I have a look at the second last question which I get a great deal and it's a very important question where does God come from because it is actually the heart of Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion and I reformulated in the way I normally get it if you believe in God created the world well then who created the creator or where did the Creator come from an becomes a reduction observer who created the crater the crater the crater zone well my approach that is seer logic if you ask the question who created God that question presupposes that God was created but I don't know any Christian Muslim or Jew that believes that God was created God is utterly eternal so the question who created him or where did he come from is actually meaningless because it doesn't apply so the question is what some philosophers call a complex question in that it conceals an assumption that really rules out understanding the question in the first place but Dawkins has faced me with this publicly and so I said your question is valid for created creators but it's of no interest of the guard to God because created gods we don't need you to tell us that they're there uninteresting because we usually call them idols but I said Richard you believed the universe created you so if your question is valid let me ask it to you who created your Creator I'm still waiting for the answer to that question now the serious point and I'm sure Michael will agree is that we're really asking about ultimate reality do these questions go back infinity in both directions and I find that most of my friends whether they're Christian or atheist they stop the Christian stops with God is the ultimate reality and many of my colleagues stop with the universe the multiverse mass-energy or something like that it's not that they go on forever so I just feel that that's one approach to your question it doesn't it's not valid for the God of the Bible because he is eternal I comment briefly on that these yeah please do guys right thank you so our degree of John there's nothing intrinsically problematic about the existence of something it's eternal yes it could be god it could be a physical universe and so on but think about the following thing imagine that we had reason to believe that the earth had been around forever and ever and anon changing right and so what we had would have there we'd have you know house as far back as you wanted to go right and that would be what might be true would be a very unsatisfying sort of view because you have these extremely complex things right them developed by evolution I'm assuming there's always cows always cats and dogs right so you have these complex organisms right that if they haven't developed it with simpler things ones claims say gee it's enormous accident that you have these sorts of things right so I think I think a theory which enables one to reduce complexity and go back to simpler and simpler things is other things being equal intellectually more satisfying right and so I think that that's an aspect this doesn't show evolution is true but it's it's a plus factor of evolution right that you so to speak by getting rid of things that are extraordinary improbable in terms of things that are less and probable so I think the question that Dawkins should be asking is whether or not it's reasonable think that God is complex or simple right so he does have stop question Boise does so absolutely okay right now that you could be a chance to say something about it he does ask that question because the two questions are related or the one is who created the creator the other is look of introducing God at any point as observed because God is by definition more complex than the thing you're explaining and therefore is no explanation at all now that is actually the more interesting question and I agree with you that's the question should be asking but he does ask it and here's my answer to it I say reductionism works very well but of his limits and of course it's satisfying to be able to give simpler elements that generate the more complex thing but there's one notable exception and I put it to Dawkins directly I said Richard that works very well but there are certain things that doesn't work for I picked up a book and I Frederick was called The God Delusion 400 pages long that's pretty complex so I asked what was its origin and I discovered its origin was at the infinitely more complex mind of Richard Dawkins so I dismissed that since the explanation was more complex than the thing I was explaining now the serious point I'm glad you laugh you see the point and the serious point here ladies and gentlemen is the one immediate exception we make to reductionism all of us whether scientists or not is the moment we see something with the semiotic dimension like writing on a page you've only got to see a few words up on the screen if there is one over there and you immediately and fair an intelligent input a top-down causation whatever the mechanical automatic processes that have gone on to produce that on the screen you know intelligence is involved you always do that with the semiotic dimension and one of my arguments which I haven't used tonight but it's a very important argument as we've lived to find the longest word that we've ever imagined possible it's the human genome 3.5 billion letters long in a four-letter genetic alphabet with a semiotic dimension it codes for the proteins we see our single word up there very task we in fair intelligence we watch 3.5 billion letters and what do we say chance and necessity there's something very curious about that very curious indeed and that really brings me back to the difference between our worldviews as a scientist I believe the worldview that starts with in the beginning was the word makes more sense than the one that starts in the beginning was mass energy so that's how I'd respond to that yes I agree but there's one notable exception and it's at the heart of the discussion today can I comment on the first question actually or sure let's get one more response if we can get some other okay topic soon so means guys your first question focus upon the sacrifice of Jesus and part of it was that didn't look like a very great sacrifice because you know you're on the cross and died and then it resurrected and so on right but I think there's a more important moral problem here that needs to be brought out and I can do in terms of an analogy okay so suppose it bruce's a school boy and he steals the teachers apple right and herald his teacher finds out that he stolen the Apple and I'm thinking back to maybe 1950s in England and New Zealand Australia where if children got caned in school right and so Harold says Bruce you're going to have to be caned for stealing my Apple right but Bruce has a friend let's call her Ally right and Ally says please don't came Bruce right you can cane me instead right and the headmaster say a great idea only that works okay and so Bruce so to speak has escaped from the punishment he do otherwise deserve because of a sacrifice that someone else makes now sees the human level right in terms of this example that's just morally pretty crazy right but it's at the heart of Christianity the idea that if this innocent person who is both God and man died in the cross and if we then freely acknowledge its occupies and so on then we're in good shape okay but it seems to me that the basic idea is morally very problematic I don't think so let me give you another that's I have he's pretty sure turn the mic over arguing at a few more analogies found the tables I only need one sentence all right this this question is for dr. Lennox dr. Tulley briefly mentioned the problem of common descent so how do we simultaneously look at the science of common descent and understand the belief that God created us in His image okay so we have a topic of common descent in relation to God's creation why don't we get another topic on the table here my questions for dr. Lennox the question is what is the Bible and do you think it's infallible and literal or do you think it's possible that it's fallible and figurative okay phal ability of the Christian Bible I would ask both of the men here if we reject the existence of God do we not create a crisis in meaning and if so then why don't we see more philosophers like Nietzsche Sartre and Foucault and those types okay crisis of meaning and the question behind that and how about one more dr. Lennox my question is for you it's about relating to the conversation you two had about the hurricane why do you need life after death in order to find validity in your own life does that make life meaningless if there is no life after that okay thank you so some questions about life after death crisis of meaning the fal ability of the bible and common descent how much time do we get Oh five minutes okay let's see so please ever would like to jump in on either those topics well I mean I think there's a lot of evidence for the fell ability the Bible something that hasn't come up is that there's good reason for thinking for example that Genesis is a combination of at least two sources some scholars think many more okay right and you get the so-called higher biblical criticism but if you look at for example the story of Noah and if you keep track of the word that's being used to refer to God whether it's Yahweh or something else and so on right and this will appear in the translation right you can actually separate the story of Noah out into two stories which are on their own perfectly consistent and straightforward stories right but you find that they just read with one another right and one things they disagree about is the number of an of certain sorts be taken on the ark okay in the one story it's a pair of each type of animals and the other story it's for example in seven birds and so on right so there are contradictions in the story of Noah and they're nicely explained by the fact it's a combination of two stories and so on right I also mentioned that you have these claim to be Rickles and this is quite crucial because John wants to appear he'll to the miracles the New Testament especially the great miracle the resurrection of Jesus right but what you need to do is you need to ask another question you need to ask is about the reliability of the Bible as a whole when it puts forward miracle stories right and again I think that various miracles that describe the Old Testament that the worldwide flood the slaughter that all the firstborn Egyptian children and so on right the son standing still Joshua Jerry like there are excellent reasons for those event that those events did not take place and so it seems to me that if you look at more of those things you can build up a strong case for the FAL ability the Bible in its unreliability when it Dale deals with miracle stories some thoughts on the conversations on the table for this room well this would require an entire evening the fact that there are different sources is not an argument of FAL ability for example Luke says explicitly he researched many different sources that doesn't mean that his book is full of error and the arguments from the old source criticism that you quote if you read say Jack Collins who's one of this leading Hebrew scholars in America I think you find serious disagreement with your interpretation of the Noah narrative but I'd like to just concentrate on the let's see which which one of these because there were so many and let me have a look on the literal side by the way somebody asked about taking the Bible literally nobody takes it literally Jesus said I am the door I think the word literal I videos quite seriously the word literal is hopelessly inadequate because you see when Jesus said I am the door he's not a literal door but he's a real door he's literal one level up and the Bible like any other work of literature is full of metaphor so if you say as many people ask me do I take it literally yes I do at that base level whatever is literal Israel was a land flowing with milk and honey do I take that literally that the Israelites were they came into the land Betty met a great sticky mass of milk another route taken down the main straight no no y-you take it spiritually Israel was a land full of the milk of the word of God no honey of the Holy Spirit nonsense Israel was around that's literal the milk and honey were literal the metaphor is flowing but it's standing for a reality so we must treat the Bible not as less than a book but as more than a book but let me just make a comment on on this issue of the crisis in meaning rejecting the existence of God and does life after death its absence empty life from meaning of course it doesn't empty life from mating because we humans are inventive we can create meanings for herself but at empties it of ultimate meaning and I'm very interested in the earlier writers like nature and Sartre and Camus because that's in a way where I learned my atheism and I still have no reason to doubt that Nietzsche was right that when you if you reject God in the end he said people will discover that they've rejected all values and they've destroyed humanity they are what's called hard atheists I called Richard Dawkins of soft atheists he wants to retain the values of a Western liberal democracy and at the same time as far as atheism and yet he himself says that his atheism leads the saying there is no good there is no evil there's no justice DNA just as and we - its music but if that's true the Bombers that flew the planes into the Twin Towers were dancing to the music of their DNA that's an end of all morality and that's it that is an example of contemporary hard atheism but because Dawkins is a moral being from my perspective made in the image of God he rejects that and he says but we must rebel against our selfish genes which makes many of his atheist colleagues laughs who are philosophers and said if we are our selfish genes what non-material principle have we got to rebel against them so I think there is a crisis of meaning and I think it'll grow worse any thoughts on this idea of crisis of meaning ah yeah I don't agree with it I mean so I've read Camus and Sartre and other people with enjoyment right but not generally with much illumination right and so I mean the thing is if you look at contemporary philosophy look at people who working in the area of ethics specifically in the area of meta ethics right and what you find is that there are enormous number of excellent philosophers who are defending sometimes different views on speak what account has be given of objective value right and so I mentioned earlier I like Holly Grimaldi who has this book by you desire and reality right I realize I always have trouble to order the title but anyhow he takes the view that that desiring things is so to speak a perception of maybe an erroneous perception right of goodness right and so he is the count of what goodness is and how we can come to have knowledge of the existence of good things and it's sort of I say a perceptual model but it's the idea is that desire is some speak a form of perception by the colleague who some extensive work miss Aries mike humor and he defends ethical intuitions and lists a theory that again I'm not expert on Greek philosophy right but it seems to me that it's rather related to the views that Plato put forward and historically there have been a number of defenders of including a che Pritchard for example gee more the beginning of the 1900s and so on and WD Ross right and the idea is that ethical truths are necessary truths just to say the truths of mathematics and arithmetic you are right and the idea is that one can so to speak in contemplating those propositions when consumers become intuitive insight into the truth of them right and I think that's perfectly interesting and promising theory right and it if it's right it gives you a very strong objectivity because the idea is that the basic ethical truths it can be something to drive like basic ethical truths are necessary truths right and one of the problems with a theistic approach to value is that I think there are reasons for thinking for example that the existence of an omnipotent and morally perfect being is not logically necessary if it were logically necessary then it'd be reasonable thinking that something like on sums on logical arguments should be available right but no one I think has found a satisfactory version right so seems to me that there are good reasons for thinking there are possible worlds where there is no omnipotent omniscient and morally perfect being right but if values were based upon God then moral principles of speak would not be true in all possible worlds but only in some right and so I think that's a serious objection to a theistic approach the value I'm looking at my handlers here do we have time for one more round of four and I'm getting the note so my apologies you can blame me I'll be the bad guy those are you who are in line give your name to the program directors in the back when we come back here in a couple years and do this all again you'll be the first at the microphone for the press with that we have we are going to invite our participants to give a brief closing statement on their reflections of this evening the topic and really what you should take away from our conversation together I don't know that we had chosen who would like to go first but perhaps we'll start up it okay okay well um one of meetings I would hope is that people will leave here feeling that the question that John and I have been discussing not always agreeing on the answers but are really very important questions and that as a result that one should devote time oneself an attempt to get to the bottom of these issues now we live in a world where there are many things that compete for our time I'm thinking of social media like Facebook for example I think it's very easy to get caught up and spending one's time in ways that are not really very valuable so I think it's important to say to oneself these questions about the nature of reality and these choices such as that between atheism and Christianity are really absolutely crucial choices I need to make sure that I set aside time to think seriously about them it's important however not to cast one's net too narrowly John and I and our conversation tonight have been focusing on atheism and Christianity because one of us is they theists and is a Christian so it's very natural focus but especially in a society where most people are Christians it's very easy to think in terms of just those two options but the world has many religions other than Christianity I think it's very important to have those other alternatives on the table as well addition however it's natural living in the Western world to think in terms of the great monotheistic religions Judaism Christianity Islam this I think is a mistake it seems to me that the great religions of the East are very worthy of serious examination indeed Buddhism is religion as often struck me as very appealing in many ways and if I had to recommend historical religion I prefer not to but it would be Buddhism how does one think about the alternatives in a productive fashion well first of all one needs to learn about different religions to do that one needs to read some good books parody religion now these are not I think that easy to find since many books suffer from serious biases or an outlook that's insufficiently philosophical or insufficiently critical this book that I would recommend was written by floss with a verifying critical mind and that was a book written by one of my own teachers Waldwick open religions and four dimensions secondly there are truly extraordinary books that deal with religion many of which were written actually in the 19th century in comparison which I think a lot of contemporary books are rather thin indeed everything in books such as the history of European morals written by WH lucky history of warfare science with theology and Christendom written by AD white so don't confine your reading in short to today's often the ephemeral offerings seek out truly great scholars of the past thirdly both science and philosophy are usually very relevant to many philosophical views so you should try to expose yourself to the crucial scientific and philosophical ideas and bring those to bear in a serious way upon the questions you're thinking about finally I know from my own experience that the idea of thinking critically about when those religious views may not seem like an easy step since it's possible you may come to feel as I did at one point in my life that one's current views are problematic and if you follow through on that feeling you may find yourself traveling along a very different path from the one that you have been on but if that happens to you as a result we think critically about the issues that we've been discussing tonight I want to say do not fear I'm confident you will find that the journey however unnerving it may sometimes seem will be very rewarding in the end for more information about the veritas forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at Veritas org

Channel: The Veritas Forum

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Keywords: veritas forum

Id: bO6TPRblE3U

Length: 98min 27sec (5907 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2013