Bethinking 2/6: John Lennox on Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design"

or welcome back to our second session of the day wonderful first session from Bill but many of you I'm sure John that it needs no introduction he's professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and fellow in mathematics and the philosophy of science at green Templeton College in addition drove with seventy published mathematical papers he's also co-author of two research level texts in algebra in addition to what I think he also seems to collect doctorates like Bill I think I counted three but my maths isn't as good as his and he also has a master's degree in bioethics despite all of that some of us might say he is again a great communicator of the Christian faith he's written and spoken extensively on the relationship between science and Christianity again his books are available on the bookstall God and Stephen Hawking a fairly small book great response though to the grand design Stephen Hawking's work and dealing with the topic that he'll be speaking on in just a moment and book published just this this year gunning for God why the new atheists are missing the target those first other books are available on the bookstall now if I may be so bold as to suggest that professor Lennox has achieved something that Professor William Lane Craig has not and that is a one-to-one debate with Richard Dawkins that debate during that debate Richard Dawkins conceded that a reasonable case can be made for a dais God and that's quite an admission coming from the author of The God Delusion you can catch it on YouTube if you want to or on be thinking in addition that discussion time between versa Lenox and Richard Dawkins seems to have convinced Richard Dawkins that he should not engage in further discussions with Christian apologists hence as we've seen over the lead-up to this tall and even over the last couple of days his continuing refusal to debate with Professor Craig John we are delighted to welcome you to the conference today and we look forward to hearing more on Stephen Hawking and the grand design please welcome professor John Lennox well ladies and gentlemen thank you for that very warm invitation now that we've settled the question of the existence of God I suppose it only remains to settle the probable existence of Richard Dawkins and I'm reliably informed that there's a bus running around Oxford suggesting that he might not exist it is a pleasure to be asked to be with you and to join in this fascinating week when Bill Craig has been touring the country talking about the existence of God and my brief is to talk to you about probably the most powerful scientific voice that has been added to the Atheist choir and that is the voice of physicist Stephen Hawking around the world the headlines were full of it Stephen Hawking says physics leaves no room for God and so on and on with many variations and these headlines were referring to the publication of his book co-authored with Leonard Noddin often titled the grand design the book went straight to the top of the bestseller charts and of course the public confession of atheism by a man of such high intellectual profile as Hawking had the instant effect of ratcheting up the debate by several notches what are we to think of it because it certainly has disturbed many people particularly young people what young man wrote to me and he said he recalls the shock of stopping at a filling station and reading on the hording physicist Hawking says physics has no room for God he was a Christian and he said to himself well what chance have I of entering into this debate and he said the chill effect of reading that was visceral and it seems to me therefore that it is enormous ly important at all levels to address these questions because whether we like it or not science has an immense cultural authority in our society today and I enter these debates with some reluctance because one of the characteristics of this whole debate is that we tend to be operating in fields beyond our own professional competence and I shall have to do that today I am a professional purim a petition that is my field but of course these things go beyond science as we shall see in a moment and that is why I made a small attempt to respond to Hawking if he pronounces that there is no God in the name of physics does it mean that all theologians should resign their chairs forthwith all church workers hang up their hats and go home is it really true that the Grand Master of physics has checkmated the grand designer of the universe now it is an immense claim to have banished God after all the majority I suppose of scientists particularly in the past have believed in him and many of us still do work Galileo Kepler Neutron and Maxwell to name just a few really all wrong on the god question now Stephen Hawking is without doubt the world's most famous living scientist he was a little ahead of me at Cambridge he is lightyears ahead of me in his intellectual capacity and he is recently retired from the Lucasian Professor ship in Cambridge a chair held once by Sir Isaac Newton his academic distinction has been stellar and he has been an outstanding symbol of fortitude having suffered the ravages of motor neuron disease for over 40 years during many of these he's been confined to a wheelchair with his only means of verbal communication especially designed electronic voice synthesizer and of course his voice is instantly recognizable all over the world he is explored with many colleagues and students the frontiers of mathematical physics and most famously perhaps the counterintuitive mysteries of black holes his work has led to the prediction of Hawking radiation and if that were verified experimentally he would probably win the Nobel Prize so we're talking about a very very intelligent person his runaway bestseller a brief history of time once described as the most unread book in history because many people did not succeed in getting beyond page 2 brought the recondite world of fundamental physics to the coffee table and that book was followed by several others in the same vein and of course these books as they deal with the origin of the universe inevitably consider the question of the existence of a divine creator and perhaps very cleverly in his book a brief history of time Hawking left the matter tantalizingly opened by ending with a much quoted statement that a physicists were to find a theory of everything that is a theory that unified the four fundamental forces of nature we would know the mind of God all that reticence has disappeared in the book the grand design he challenges belief in divine creation according to him it is the laws of physics and not the will of God that provide the real explanation as to how the universe came into being the Big Bang he argues was the inevitable consequences of these laws and the central statement of the book is there because there is a law such as gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing now the very title the grand design of course suggests to us the existence of a grand designer which is actually what the book is designed to deny Hawking's grand conclusion then is that spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing why the universe exists why we exists it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going I want to make it clear ladies and gentlemen that I do not wish to engage specifically with Hawking science that is beyond my range of competence and I'm very pleased that bill Craig led you into some of the mysteries of the multiverse m-theory string theory and all the rest of it so that relieves me of the need to attempt to do which I would in any case find impossible what I'm interested in is what he deduces from his science and that of course is the thing that affects us all and the book tantalizingly opens with a list of the big questions that people have always asked how can we understand the world in which we find ourselves how does the universe behave what is the nature of reality where did all this come from did the universe need a creator and when you read a list of questions like that written by such a distinguished scientist you get as I did very excited here we're going to listen to a world-class mathematical physicist give his insights and some of the profoundest questions of philosophy and metaphysics now if that's what we expect were in for a shock because in his very next words Hawking dismisses philosophy referring to his list of questions he writes traditionally these are questions for full Sophy but philosophy is dead it has not kept up with modern developments in science particularly in physics as a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge now this is an incredible statement for anybody let alone a scientist to make because you only have to read the book to see that it is a book about philosophy and a book about philosophy and metaphysics that states at its beginning that philosophy is dead immediately sets alarm bells going if you have any notion of the basic philosophical issues it is of course unwarranted hubris dismissing philosophy which is a discipline very well respected and represented at Hawking shown University of Cambridge and I presume at nodding offs as well and I wish to suggest that this book constitutes very disturbing evidence that at least two scientists Hawking and Laden off not only have not kept up a philosophy but they do not appear to understand much about it barring out Einsteins very perceptive comment that the scientist is a poorer philosopher I'm well aware that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and that that epithet and descriptor may apply to me but that's for you to judge but I shall proceed at the level of the public understanding of science which if you recall was Dawkins chair at Oxford what are we the intelligent public to make of this kind of thing but first to comment on that remark that scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery that's very close to the view that we call scientism the notion that science is the only way to truth and that conviction really characterizes many of the new atheist particularly Richard Dawkins are now apparently Stephen Hawking Nobel laureates Peter Medawar pointed out some time ago the danger of this scientistic view in a wonderful book called advice to a young scientist he said there is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and upon his profession then roundly to declare particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for that science knows our soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking and that questions which do not admit a scientific answer in subway non questions or pseudo questions that only simpletons a scan of the gullible profess to be able to answer Medawar goes on to say this the existence of a limit to science is made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things questions such as how did everything begin what are we all here for what is the point of living and he adds that it is too imaginative literature and religion that we must turn for the answers to such questions Francis Collins is equally clear on the limitations of science science is powerless he says to answer questions such as why did the universe come into being what is the meaning of human existence what happens after we die now it is clear that Medawar and Collins are passionate scientists so that there is no obvious inconsistency involved in being a committed scientist in the highest level while simultaneously recognizing that science cannot answer every kind of question including some of the deepest questions that human beings can ask so Hawking appears to be unaware of this and I want to go straight to the heart of the book the grand design with this central claim because there is a law of gravity the universe can and we'll create itself out of nothing now perhaps the first question to ask is what is hawking mean when he uses the word nothing the universe can and will create itself out of nothing because notice the assumption in the first part of that statement because there is a law of gravity that is an assertion of existence because there is something the universe will create itself out of nothing it's a very odd way to start isn't it Hawking assumes that there is a law of gravity but one might want to be generous and presumed that he also assumes that gravity exists for the simple reason that an abstract mathematical law on its own would be vacuous with nothing to describe a point to which I shall return but the main issue surely is this gravity or a law of gravity is not nothing if Hawking is using that word in its usual philosophically correct sense of non-being if he's not he should have told us so the heart of this book appears to be an assertion that the universe is simultaneously created from nothing and from something which I do not regard as a very promising start now of course I am aware that when physicists talk about nothing they often appear to mean a quantum vacuum which is manifestly not nothing and Hawking alludes to it later in the book we are a product he says of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe I'm tempted to suspect that a lot of this is a bit too much ado about nothing now I know it's late in the morning for logic ladies and gentlemen but I just pointed out you what I think is the first level of self contradiction in Hawking statement but I believe there to be three and I have subsequently tried to invent a sentence in English that also contains three levels of self-contradiction and I haven't been able to do so so my challenge to you is to try and copy hawking by producing something parallel to it let's analyze it a bit further the universe can and will create itself now if I say X creates why I'm presupposing the existence of X in order to bring Y into existence that is what the word means so if I say X creates X I am presupposing the existence of X to account for the existence of X well this is obviously self contradictory and it's logically incoherent even if we put X equal to the universe to presuppose the existence of the universe to account for the existence of the universe sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland not science well that's a second distinct level of contradiction the first one you will recall is the universe is created out of something which is nothing the second is it creates itself but then the notion that the law of gravity that a law of nature explains the existence of the universe is also self contradictory since a law of nature by definition surely depends for its own existence on the prior existence of the nature purports to describe and I shall come back to that later so I would submit to you however provocatively it may seem to you that the main conclusion of the grand design turns out to be a triple self-contradiction philosophers just might be tempted to comment so that's what comes of saying philosophy is dead oxford chemist Peter Atkins whom I believe is to be the subject of a debate later believes I quote that's facetime generates its own dust in the process of its own self-assembly adkins dubs is the cosmic bootstrap principle referring of course to the self contradictory idea of a person lifting himself by pulling on his own bootlaces well our oxford colleague Keith Ward is surely right to say that Atkins view of the universe is as blatantly self contradictory as the name he gives to it pointing out that is logically impossible for a cause to bring about some effect without already being in existence Ward concludes between the hypothesis of God and their hypothesis of a cosmic bootstrap there's no competition we were always right to think that persons are universe's who seek to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps are forever doomed to failure what this goes to show ladies and gentlemen is that nonsense remains nonsense even when it's talked by world-famous scientists but what it serves to obscure what serves to obscure the illogicality is the fact that the statements are made by scientists because it seems to me in the whole contemporary debate one of the dangers a real danger is that we confuse a statement by a scientist with a statement of science not all statements by scientists are statements of science and therefore they do not enjoy whatever authority you ascribe to science itself immense prestige and authority do not compensate for faulty logic now the worrying thing about all of this to me is that this illogical notion of the universe creating itself out of a nothing which is or something by a law of gravity which appears to exist without gravity itself possibly and is not a peripheral point in the book the grand design it's the key argument and if the key argument is invalid and since there's little left to say however since the laws of nature play a major role in Hawking's argument it might be important to comment on them as well because I detect some what looked like at least some very serious misunderstandings regarding the nature and capacity of the laws of nature and to approach this I'd like to draw attention to another feature of the book which really is relevant to the issue that's faced by many particularly young people today and that is the mistake made by Dawkins Hitchens and all the rest of them in presenting before the public the choice between God and science and saying that you have got to choose between the two in Hawking specific case it's between God and the law of gravity but you will take the point talking about M theory for example Hawking rights and theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or God rather these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law so the opposition that's being presented is God or a law of nature and then he talks about the intervention of a supernatural being and what I observe about all of them is this it's not that I have problems with their notion of science though I have those it seems to me that a systemic problem in this whole debate arises from the New Atheists having espoused a false concept of God and it's well worth while when reading their books to ask what sort of God are you actually talking about let's listen carefully to Hawking's concept of God ignorance of nature's ways he writes with blood enough led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life they then suggest that this began to change with Greek thinkers like follies of my leaders about 2600 years ago the idea arose that nature follows consistent principles that could be deciphered and so began the long process of replacing the notion of the reign of the Gods with the concept of the notion of a universe that is governed by laws of nature and created according to a blueprint we could someday learn to read in other words if you update that a little bit Hawking's notion of God is of a God of the gaps who can be displaced by scientific advance now the importance of this cannot be overestimated and emphasized for this simple reason if you conceive of a God of God as a God of the gaps then of course you're going to have to choose between God and science by definition because the God of the gaps view is saying I can't explain it therefore God did it and the more science fills the gap the less space that is for God so you have to choose between the two that is logical it took me a long time to realize that this is what is going on it's a false concept of God that they're tilting at and so their appeal to the thinking public resonates because many people have bought into the very same idea that people like you and I at least speaking for the Christians here believe in a God of the gaps but we don't of course we believe in a God who's not only a God of the gaps but God of the whole show he's not of course merely the god of the deists who lived the blue touch paper he both created the universe and constantly sustains it in existence without him there would be nothing for physicists like hawking to study so that God is according to the Christian faith at least the Creator both of the bits of the universe we don't understand of the bits we do and of course it's the bits we do understand by definition that give us the most evidence of God's existence and activity and the logic of that is very simple my admiration of the genius behind a work of engineering or art increases the more I understand the difficulty of the competences that lie behind it so the more I understand science the more my worship of the Creator increases and what Hawking and not enough are doing here is to make a classical category mistake by confusing two entirely different kinds of explanation explanation in terms of physical law and that's odd mechanism for good measure and personal agency so inviting us to choose between God and science not only depends on a false concept of God it depends on making a profound mistake in what constitutes an explanation God is an explanation of the universe but not the same type of explanation as that given by physicists supposed to make it clearer I replace the universe by a jet engine and we're asked to explain it well we could explain it in terms of the laws of nature mechanical Aero engineering and so on all we could explain it by saying it was the personal and attention of Sir Frank Whittle it would be utterly nonsensical to ask an audience to choose between the two do you accept that the arrow engine came about by I suppose unguided natural processes arising from the laws of physics or by sir Frank whittles inventive genius and you would say that's absurd to give a complete explanation which is not merely a scientific explanation your course need both I find school children can follow this I find Dawkins cannot I wonder why there is a difference perhaps I'm scared now that he's descended to writing books for schoolchildren but anyway this seems to me to be immensely important that God as an explanation is not the same kind I think it was Richard Swinburne who once said I do not desert deny that science explains but i postulate God to explain why science explains God is in that sense the ground of all explanation and so at that level the explanations are complimentary and it is noteworthy that this category mistake that Hawking following Dawkins makes was not made by Newton at least and not in the context of the law of gravity because we Newton discovered the law he did not say now that I have the law of gravity I don't need God what he did do was write principia mathematica the most famous book of the history of science expressing the hope that it would persuade the thinking man to believe in God but there's more to be said the laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works but not how it came to exist in the first place it is self-evident that jet engines could not have been created by the laws of physics of their own that task needed intelligent input creative engineering the worker Frank Whittle but not even the laws of physics plus the creative genius of Frank Whittle could produce a jet engine there needed to be some material stuff subject to those laws that could be worked on by wittle Mathur ladies and gentlemen may be humble stuff but it isn't produced by laws now the jet engine can help us further because it helps us to see where some of the possible limits of science are and as one of the general points is often made people say that science generally speaking asks the HOH questions how does the jet engine work or the why question regarding function why is this pipe here and and why is that one there but it doesn't ask or answer the why questions of purpose and of course that is why Whittle himself will not normally appear in any lectures one might give on aerodynamics you see as an a petition I'm often faced with Laplace's famous state bird to napoleon when Laplace a brilliant French mathematician had presented his book to Napoleon and Napoleon said to him and where is gold in this and Laplace s reply was June a Pappas went to set in four days I don't need that hypothesis and of course he was dead right if I'm explaining how a projectile moves in a parabolic orbit in a vacuum under gravity I don't mention God either but if I were asked or if Laplace had been asked why is there a universe at all which evades these laws he might have had to mention God might contain he was answering the right question of course with the right answer as to its relevance the existence of God it has of course none and of course that is what many scientists and others do with God they define the range of questions which side is permitted to ask in such a way that God is excluded from the start and then some of them go on to claim that science proves that God is unnecessary that is very curious a bit of logic isn't it and they often fail to say that it is their assumption their Atheist worldview not science as such that excludes God I hope you've noticed by the way ladies and gentlemen that the scientists didn't put the universe of there indeed I'm often tempted to reflect because it keeps one humble that any scientist studies are given with a given the universe is a given the human mind is a given so we ought to be humble enough to realize that what we're doing is studying a given with a given but as scientists didn't put the universe there neither did their theories nor the laws and yet Hawking seems to suggest they did is the unified theory so compelling he wrote in a brief history of time that it brings about its own existence there's the self contradictory self reference again now much as I find it hard to believe Hawking claims that all is necessary to create the universe is the law of gravity and when he was asked on Larry King Live which I believe is an American TV program where gravity came from he answered n theory so gravity comes from theory that's where it comes from well to say that a theory or a physical law could bring anything into existence is surely to misunderstand what theory is scientists construct theories involving mathematical laws to describe natural phenomena but on their own those theories and laws cannot cause anything let alone create it it's delightfully ironic isn't it that it was done other than William Paley who pointed this out a long time ago he's speaking of the person who just stumbled on a watch and the Heath the famous story he says it's such a person would be not be less surprised to be informed that the watch in his hand was nothing more than the result of the laws of metallic nature it is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient operative cause of anything a law presupposes an agent for it is only the mode according to which an agent proceeds it implies a power for it is the order according to which that power acts without this agent without this power which are both distinct from itself the law does nothing is nothing and surely that is obvious from Hawking's own examples the very first example he gives us of physical law is this the Sun rises of the east and sets of the west that is a law it is an observed regularity in that sense it is descriptive and predictive but the law that the Sun rises in the east are sets in the rest doesn't move the Sun and it certainly didn't create the Sun did it so the very example the man gives Newton's law of motion have never in the whole of the history of the universe calls a snooker ball to move over a table it's a person with a cue that does that the laws will describe at least for the first couple of bounces before chaotic effects set in what's going to happen but laws don't cause anything nor create anything so what can Hawking possibly mean by saying the universe arises naturally from physical law Paul Davis with whom I had a very interesting debate which you can hear and be thinking says there's no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws could be so clever as to bring all these things into being well I've never liked divine tinkering is not exactly a scientific evaluation I have not liked and incidentally sir Martin Rees who was quoted earlier he says people like John Polkinghorne liked the explanation of a creator I prefer the multiverse we're out of science here ladies and gentlemen we're talking about preference and you will notice that Paul Davis said I don't like the idea of divine tinkering so you described the thing in such a way as to make it sign pejorative and negative and trivial and then you dismiss it this isn't science but it's amazing because he says he likes the idea that a set of mathematical laws could be so clever once I had a little conversation with Peter Atkins I'm sure he wouldn't mind me telling you if you want to see a lengthy debate between me a napkin zits on YouTube somewhere it's called dueling professors and I said to Peter Peter tell me what do you think created the universe and he said Oh mathematics so I started to laugh and he said why are you laughing he was a bit put out I said well Peter I'm a mathematician and that must be the silliest statement I've ever heard in my life and he said why well I said Peter one on one make two did that ever put two pounds in your pocket now of course I'm not sever enough to thought of that myself I got that from CS Lewis and CS Lewis saw this with characteristic clarity of the laws of nature he writes they produce no events they state the pattern to which every event if only it can be induced to happen must conform just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions with money must conform if only you can get hold of any money thus in one sense the laws of nature cover the whole field of space and time in another what they leave out is precisely the whole real universe the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history that must come from somewhere else to think that the laws can produce it is like thinking that you can create real money by simply doing sums for every law in the last resort says if you have a then you will get B but first catch your a the laws won't do it for you and he finishes that wonderful description by saying bookkeeping continued to all eternity could never produce one farthing so I submit to you that the world has strict naturalism and which clever mathematical laws all by themselves break the universe life into existence is pure science fiction and of Hawking were not so dismissive of philosophy they might have come across the King Stein statement that the deception of modernism is the idea that the laws of nature explained the world to us when all they do is to describe structural regularities Hawking's book purports to answer the question why there is something rather than nothing it seems to me that that is precisely the question that he does not ask or it does not answer now his book is called the grand design and what I found so interesting in it is that he finds the impression design to hold someone else is so powerful that he spends a couple of chapters on it and then decides to explain it away our universe and its laws he writes a peer to design that it both is tailor-made to support us and if we are to exist leaves little room for alteration that is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is that way the discovery relatively recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead utley some of us back to the old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer that is not the answer of modern science our universe seems to be one of many each with different laws now the interesting thing is that Hawking spends a lot of time giving evidence of the grand design and he calls it an old idea and of course this is a very simple philosophical trick because it's old of course it's irrelevant and false but that's nonsense he doesn't even consider it's truth he simply calls it old and he says it's the answer of modern science now that is going miles too far what he might say that is not the answer of some modern scientists because so far as I can see science has not got a unified view on the matter now a bill Craig has done me a great favor in going into the multiverse thing in detail and one of the very interesting things is that Hawking advances the multiverse and M theory and all of the rest of it as an alternative to God and he falls into the very same mistake he did at a lower level earlier God or the multiverse but if there is more than one multi universe is that an argument against the existence of God God could create a multiverse couldn t in fact there are rustling hints in a book that I am moderately familiar with called the Bible that this might not be quite the only realm of existence how is that possibly in itself an argument against the existence of God again it's a little bit of a con trick now of course all this M theory and multiverse theory is fascinating I am NOT an expert in it but just to be slightly flippant to wake you all up for a moment I'm tempted to say that belief in God seems to me to be a much more rational option if the alternative is to believe that every other universe that can possibly exist does exist including one in which Richard Dawkins is the Archbishop of Canterbury Christopher Hitchens the Pope and Billy Graham has just been voted atheist of the year now in the times when Hawking's book appeared there was a letter from a very distinguished student of his called Dante's who is a professor of theoretical physics has written a number of papers with Stephen Hawking and no teachers at the University of Alberta and I wrote to him because he distance himself from Hawking's conclusions and Don page is actually a Christian and he wrote this to me and he has given me permission to quote it to you I certainly would agree that even if M theory were a fully formulated theory which it isn't yet and we're correct which of course we don't know that would not imply that God did not create the universe so arguments about the status of M theory are in a sense irrelevant to us this morning the only thing I would point out is that roger penrose an equally distinguished mathematician working at Oxford said that M theory is very far from any testability it's a collection of ideas hopes aspiration and referring directly to the hawking blood book he says the book is a bit misleading it gives you this impression of a theory that's going to explain everything it's nothing of the sort it is not even a theory indeed in roger penrose estimation M theory was hardly science and perhaps you should note the pen rolls is a member of the British Humanist Association there's a wonderful review of Hawking's book given by Tim Radford goes like this in this very brief history of modern cosmological physics the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered out but widely accepted just like biblical miracles M theory invokes something different a prime mover a baguette er a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere this force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction and yet it contains all possibilities it incorporates omnipresence omniscience and omnipotence and it's a big mystery remind you of anybody I want to make two further points we started late so I shall finish late much of the rationale of Hawking's argument lies in the idea there's a deep-seated conflict between science and religion I don't recognize that discord what I do recognize is the sheer importance of not forgetting history because the notion of a grand designer far from being some peripheral freakish idea is actually the notion that gave us modern science as we know it now I'm talking about modern science CS Lewis summarizing it said men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a low Giver one of the reasons I'm not ashamed of being a Christian and a scientist is Christianity give me my subject ladies and gentlemen it gave me my subject and it was that conviction that there is a God behind nature that drove science and to say that the two are incompatible in essence I simply fail to understand Hawking of course towards the end of his book undermines it completely when he goes into the nature of the apparatus that does the science science is a rational human activity but Hawking now reduces biology to physics and chemistry and concludes it's hard to see how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law so it seems we are no more than biological machines of that free will is just an illusion well of course if the book the grand design is written by two determined free and determined biological machines it has no significance whatsoever and we could dismiss it at once it is amazing to me how the reductionism off the New Atheism undermines not Christianity of course it undermines that but it undermines the very thing we need to hold on to to do science and that is the object of belief of the rational intelligibility of the universe out there and secondly the belief that rational intelligibility exists that is that the human mind in here can to certain extent understand the universe out there Einstein said he could not imagine any scientist without that faith physics doesn't give it to us as John Polkinghorne points out physics is powerless to explain the rational intelligibility of the universe for the simple reason that you cannot do any physics without believing it in the first place so ladies and gentlemen my chief objection to the New Atheism is not because I'm a Christian in a way it's because I'm a scientist and by reducing thought as it must do because there is no transcendence by reducing thought to the firing of synapses in the human brain it demolishes the very rationality on which it depends to exist and to formulate its own theories in other words it's guilty of the ultimate in self-contradictions my very last thought is that I was amazed to discover that Hawking is picked up in Dawkins I was even more amazed to discover when I debated Peter Singer just recently in Melbourne on the existence of God that he comes up with the ultimate defeater for believing in God as an explanation if you say that God is the explanation of the universe then logically you've got to ask the question who created the creator and then you end up at an infinite regress and so that's absurd end of story now that is Dawkins chief argument and The God Delusion I can't believe that ladies and gentlemen let's analyze it the final bit of logic for this morning if you ask the question who created the creator you presuppose the creator is created by definition philosophers have a name for that they call it the complex question in that it constrains the possible range of solutions without you realizing it who created the X presupposes that X is created so it has no relevance to an X that is not created of course not so you see the question is in Dawkins words unknown question because the Christian claim is of course that God is eternal he never came to exist he caused all that exists to exist but he himself never came to exist and if there is a God like that he falls for Dawkins question indeed I put it to him that if he had written a book called the created God's delusion nobody would have bought it because we've known for centuries that created gods are a delusion we often call them idols but the question has a little twist ladies and gentlemen as I put it to Richard in one of our debates you believe it's a valid question and indeed in your universe it probably is because you believe that the universe created you now let me ask you your own question who created your Creator and still waiting for the answer so I leave you with this Stephen Hawking was interviewed by the Guardian and he said heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark I was asked to comment I did atheism is a very story for people afraid of the light thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you very much indeed John that wonderfully helpful exposition of to get us help us to get to grips with Stephen Hawking in his grand design now John has a rather unique way of addressing his question-and-answer session so I'm going to leave that to him if you would like to go to the microphones if you have a question and then I'll leave it John to conduct that well now ladies and gentlemen what I like to do is this in a room like this there's so many questions and what I like to do is to try to give as many as possible a chance I collect the questions before I answer any of them so as we've some idea of what's going on in the room so formulate your questions succinctly so that I can understand it and I will write it down and then when I've collected enough I will have a go at responding to you okay so off we go I've immensely enjoyed your lecture and the books as well and the question our head really is many sciences and many atheists in particular have the ideas of God which are totally at odds with the patristic literature with the conception of God Christians usually have and generally what we think called is or who is he how do we get around that problem they seem to be attacking something which we don't actually believe in and they think they are succeeding but that's pretty relevant isn't it how I can get around that problem thank you I think I've got that yes some atheist would assert that scientific discovery and propagation of knowledge during the period of history when Christianity was more strictly implemented as it is today what can you comment on the issue sorry say that again it was more what some of the atheists would assert that during the period of history when the Christianity was more strictly implemented was stagnation of this scientific discovery and propagation of knowledge what can you comment on on that okay three hi hi a number of people trying frame a science or the Genesis texts and actually that happened about yesterday those scorn poured on me on the flood accounts Genesis six and nine there's also probably power Genesis two and three and possibly 11 in terms of Tower of Babel I know in a previous debate you've actually described the Genesis text is very sophisticated in nature but could you give us some examples of that sophistication to help us in those conversations particularly with reference to Genesis 1 to 11 okay for are you very eloquently explained how the multiverse doesn't get rid of the need for a God but I'd like to see what your thoughts aren't in terms of the fine-tuning argument and how the multiverse theory affects that okay five okay and my question is how would you respond to atheists who don't believe you have to be philosophically sound and just believe that you can you should go on with Sciences and because it's a model of utility and it's the best practical way of doing things respond to atheists who think science is just a pragmatic approach yes I wouldn't say yes rather than a philosophically sample rather than philosophically sure oh it doesn't necessarily need to be force on medicine okay nice and simple if this is the biggest are you sure well I'm I'm nice and simple so signal starts upon vacui not if this is a one big design and we were designed were we designed as Apes and if so does that make a monkey out of curly you can see my taxes ladies and gentlemen if I go on writing these long enough I won't have to answer any of them okay that's it good well that gives us an idea of what's buzzing around in your heads thank you for these questions you're now about to plumb the depths of my ignorance as I seek to have a look at them now many see atheists as attacking something we don't believe in what do we do about it this question actually is immensely important and relevant to what we're doing today because it seems to me that there are several areas where it's very easy for me to assume what they are using a particular term to describe that I have given you one example today is that the Atheist concept of God is totally inadequate and it tends to be a God of the gaps and I'm almost tempted to suggest that the idea of a created God is not far from most of their imaginations in the more sophisticated Freudian sense and we need to have tact those kind of arguments incidentally there is a wonderful book been written on the Freudian argument which all the New Atheists used by a man called Manfred Lutz I hope it gets translated into English it's called eine kleine initiated this curse in a brief history of the great one and the point he makes is this and I've used it and find it very helpful if there is no God Freud will give you a brilliant explanation of why religion is in vented as a wish fulfillment if there is no god but then he says of course if there is a God Freud will give you an equally brilliant explanation of why atheism is a wish fulfillment of the desire not to meet garden to have anything to do with him and he goes through the major psychologists and psychiatrists and his bottom line is on the question whether there is a God or not Freud can't help you and I find that useful in discussion another example of this and possibly it's the most important one it's the redefinition of faith that the new atheists have been very clever in putting around in Oxford I have a constant discussion with my colleagues and what has happened is this faith has been redefined in two directions direction number one is that it's a peculiarly and solely religious concept it's got no application to science secondly it means believing where there is no evidence now if you want to do an interesting exercise look up the OED and Webster's dictionary and you'll see a difference between them because Webster's dictionary I was amazed when I discovered this now as an entry faith believing well there's no evidence and yet of course in English and in the company languages faith comes from fides Trust reliability and we all know that faith is connected with evidence if you don't believe that think of the banking crisis when we thought we had a basis for faith in certain bankers and we discovered we couldn't and the whole market froze until confidence is built up everybody in Britain at least and in America in Europe understands what evidence-based faith is now this is extremely important that we emphasize this because the atheists think that their belief system is not a faith in Peter singer in my recent debate with them it was I can heart this exchange took place he said of course my big objection to religion is that people remain in the religion that they were brought up with I just told him honestly that my parents were believers from a sectarian country but they weren't sectarian and they'd allowed me to think so I was the prime example so I turned him and I said Peter tell me about your parents what were they were they atheists yes oh I said so you remained in the faith that you were brought up in oh but he said it isn't a faith I said really don't you believe it right that little interchange gives the whole thing away doesn't it look at the concepts of faith and belief that lie behind that now this is one of the world's top philosophers I was just staggered by this you see so we have a job to do to explain what John does in his gospel so brilliantly that faith is not something that just happens to people it's a response to evidence these things are written and I think you get a good insight into this this afternoon from my friend professor Hamas these things are written in order that you might believe here is the basis and faith is based on evidence otherwise by definition you wouldn't need the New Testament if faith is believing where there's no evidence then the greatest faith is shown by the people who'd never read the New Testament because it is evidence I'm sorry to say but I'm not sorry to say you see there's immense confusion here the other side of that of course is that faith is essential to science and what the New Atheists have cleverly done is redefine faith so they don't realize that theirs is a faith system and I explained where faith is involved in science but in their system you see dawkins accused me well he quite rightly he saw stirred that I am an hour Zeus's and I confess it to you I don't believe in Zeus I am an atheist with regard to Zeus whoa town and a whole lot of other gods so he said I'm just an AR theist then there's no big deal so I said Richard half a minute I noticed you haven't written a 400 page book on our Zeus ISM but you have written a 400 page book on half theism why is that because although our theism includes a negative it involves a whole positive philosophy which we may call naturalism or materialism and you believe it it is a belief system it is very difficult to get this across I find even in my own University now the second question was about when Christianity stagnated a bit and what happened to scientific knowledge I suggest you read TF Torrance on that and he points out of course that there were serious problems the treatment of Galileo by the Catholic Church although when you investigate that the irony of it is marvelous because of course the reason Galileo was attacked by the Catholic Church was that the Catholic Church had bought into Aristotelian ISM Galileo was attacked by the Philosopher's first they all believed in a fixed earth and the church had the Catholic Church had bought into it and the irony is that there was Galileo who believed did the Scriptures when he started and believed in them when he finished it was actually a believer in Scripture was challenging a reigning scientific paradigm that has lessons for today but I'm not going to go into those because they've gone into them elsewhere but Torrance would admit that there of course there have been difficulties but nonetheless he argues that a magisterial work that mertens thesis stands out for North Whitehead actually wrote about this and so do many other people and I worked in Oxford with Professor John Hadley Brook who's an expert on it and he's very cautious but he would say generally speaking the fact is that find modern science there is this conviction of an orderly teacher living at it from the flip side joseph needham who is the very famous chemist and an expert in China Scientologist he was a Marxist that he tried for years to explain the non emergence of modern science not technology the Chinese had a lot of technology but modern science and it's abstract conceptualising form why did it not emerge in in China and he struggled for years to try and bring this into a Marxist framework of explanation and he failed and in the end he admitted the Chinese lacked the unifying feature of belief in a creator who'd created an ordered universe according to certain regularities so there's a very interesting side comment on that now somebody said what do I make of the fine-tuning argument against the multiverse well what I observe since I'm not an expert physicist is the vast array of disagreement among the physicists particularly people who for whom I have a great respect Penrose and so on but of course we're talking about we need to be careful what we're talking about we're talking about a fine-tuning that is observed within this universe and Bill Craig points out in one of his books somewhere that if you argue within this universe and think of it within a multiverse then the whole question arises as to whether the multiverse is fine-tuned what I will add to all that I'm not going to go through what bill said again not that I could but what I'm going to do is suggest the genesis suggest this very powerfully one of the most striking things about the Genesis text which is a subject of the previous question which I haven't answered yet is that it states whatever you believe about the Genesis days that God did not create everything at once that's fascinating isn't it you've got a sequence which starts and it stops that's even more fascinating and whenever you see a sequence of things whatever they are one two three four five six seven you ask where is it going and of course the genesis answer is that the pinnacle of God's creative activity was human beings made in the image of God and I hope you've noticed that that statement is made of no other bit of the physical universe the heavens declare the glory of God they were not made in His image so what we're getting is that step by step God speaks and codes information and from the outside and stepwise builds up a universe that is a suitable home for life that's the biblical version of fine-tuning so it doesn't surprise me therefore from that perspective to find it in physics as well and of course thy son biologists are beginning to raise questions as to whether it exists there now how do I respond to atheists who think that science is a pragmatic approach rather than a philosophical doesn't need to be philosophical well I feel sad when people take that kind of you aren't they interested you know Paul Davis makes the very valid point and he says we're interested in cause-and-effect and we go back and back and we see an effect that we look for a cause how is it we become very shy when it comes to the whole show and we say oh it's just a brute fact let's treat it in a pragmatic way that strikes me as a little bit Antti the spirit of science but of course if people want to lock themselves up in that kind of a worldview they're entitled to do it but it seems to me they're shutting themselves in a wall castle of their own making now science and the Genesis text designed Apes all the rest of it Genesis two three six nine eleven and all the rest of it and I've got exactly 60 seconds but I've got two answers you see for you on this one is Peter Williams who's sitting there who is infinitely more competent than me to talk about these things but but I have taken a risk ladies and gentlemen I confess it to you are you'd ask these questions so often about Genesis 1 and science that I have written a book on it I don't know whether it's back there it's just about coming to this country and it's called 7 days that divided the world from the bookstore there it's on the bookstore so since the time is up ladies and gentlemen in order to in order to hereby absolutely question I have only one thing I can say to you thank you very much Richard Dawkins put up on the Guardian online his newest reason for not debating William Lane Craig which is that he's an apologist for genocide because Bill Craig has spoken about the Old Testament and argued that's what God commanded was not necessarily unjustified it fits into a wider narrative that we have in our culture about religion and violence so what we're going to do is we can look at the general narrative that we have of religion in violence in our culture morality in the nature of the universe and then finally look at the Old Testament story of the destruction of the Canaanites you

Channel: ReasonableFaithTour

Views: 96,392

Rating: 4.7354779 out of 5

Keywords: John Lennox, Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow, Reasonable Faith, Reasonable Faith Tour, apologetics, bethinking, conference, Bethinking Conference, Christianity, God, Theism, Atheism, arguments, The Grand Design, M-Theory, Law of Gravity, gravity, philosophy, philosophy is dead, science, scientism, nothing, create itself, create itself from nothing, multiverse, law of nature, C S Lewis, UCCF, Damaris, Premier Christian Radio, Westminster Chapel, Jesus, youtube, logic, Richard Dawkins, New Atheism

Id: 6eHfhbP1K_4

Length: 73min 11sec (4391 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2012