Cosmic Chemistry: Do Science and God Mix? | Dr. John Lennox

[Music] many she would not know me and every speaker has a biography and my biography in brief is that I come from a very small country for that had a period of extreme sectarian violence and my parents were very unusual in that they were Christian without being sectarian and got bombed for that stance my father ran a store and he tried to employ equally Catholics and Protestants and for that reason he was bombed and my brother was nearly killed but he did that because he believed that every man and women no matter what they believed was made in the image of God and therefore infinitely valuable and that's something that I got from my parents and has accompanied me all through my life the second thing that they did which was perhaps even more unusual in a country where there was a lot of religious prejudice or bigotry they allowed me to think and encouraged me to read very widely including worldviews that weren't my own and as a boy I got very interested in the big questions of life and the various answers that were offered and I went to Cambridge in 1962 just in time to hear CS Lewis of whom some of you may have heard and almost immediately got involved in serious discussion because you know in Ireland you'd made Protestant atheists and Catholic atheists but there weren't many real atheists and in Cambridge that the opportunity to befriend and I emphasize that word people that didn't share my worldview and I've doing it for a lifetime because I'm interested in the truth and I want to understand about this world in which we lived and his significance what our place in it is so I spent a lot of time traveling around the world and in particular during the Cold War I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain and then when the Wall fell I've been a lot in Russia and Ukraine because I've been very interested to study cultures where atheism had a profound integral part of the culture because one of the things and it will come up tonight is the whole question of worldviews and there aren't very many families of worldviews in fact you've got 80 ISM on the one side believing there's no God theism of the other side believing there is a God and in the middle pantheism which believes that there is a God but God of the universe tend to be merged into one impersonal being and most people sit somewhere in there even if they've got a strong degree of skepticism and so what we're going to do is have a look at the whole question that I've called cosmic chemistry do science and God mix but there's a rather provocative subtitle because we need to ask this question the other way around do science and atheism really mix so the popular impression here is that science and God do not mix and science and atheism mix so perfectly that really atheism is the proper background for intellectual endeavor and I want to challenge that and what I want to share with you because this is a vast topic are some of the things that I feel are important to think about this is a kind of preliminary so it would be unsatisfactory but if it prompts some of you and stimulates you to do your own thinking then I shall be very encouraged knighted for immensely to your questions so let's start off an observation of one of the most brilliant American philosopher still alive today Alvin Plantinga the alleged conflict between science and theism is superficial there is real Concord the alleged Concord between science and atheism is superficial there is real conflict now how do you set about thinking about these kind of questions well I've always been interested in serious history and I worked for a while with Professor John Hadley Brook at Oxford the officers first professor of science and religion who was said is a brilliant historian of science and he taught me the way to go about these things is first to see them in their historical context and then look at the philosophical details so if we follow that and have a look at some of the pioneers of modern science we can think of the obvious names Galileo Kepler Newton and Maxwell and of course as a mathematician I have to quote Kepler who said that the chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics and it's very interesting when you study these pioneers to see what their worldview was now one of the most interesting studies has been done by the historian Rodney stark and he lists 52 stars of modern science starting with the publication of Copernicus book in 1543 and dealing with scientists all of whom were born before 1680 and looking at that list he discovers that 60% of them were devout believers Christian believers 38% were conventional Christian believers and one of them edmond halley of Halley's Comet was a skeptic and an atheist and because he was an atheist Oxford would not give him a chair so you can see that there's a very strong background of Christian belief behind the rise of modern science that is extremely important because philosophers and historians of science are agreed that there's is a connection and let me quote you'll never have heard of this person but I want to introduce him to you for a very simple reason he's the only Irishman who ever won a Nobel Prize and he split the atom with copper oh so it was a fairly serious Nobel Prize one way to learn the mind of the creator he wrote is the study his creation we must pay God the compliment of studying his work of art and this should apply to all realms of human thought a refusal to use our intelligence honestly is an act of contempt for him who gave us that intelligence a Nobel Prize winner from physics who was a believer in God not in the 16th century but in the 20th century and what that brings us to is the fate of scientists now this is a very important thing I was introduced as speaking to you on science and faith but that is an ambiguous suggestion faith in what you see all scientists in order to do their science have to have faith not in God but in the rational intelligibility of the universe and one of the main points I'm going to make to you tonight is everyone without exception is a person of faith they have basic faith commitments they believe certain things and the issue to be raised as one of the grounds for those now look at Louis's summary of North whiteheads work men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law of nature because they believed in the legislature that is there's a strong connection with worldview there is an intelligent creator therefore we ought to be able to do science because if our minds are rationally made in the image of that intelligent creator at least in part we can unlock some of the mysteries of the universe and that makes contender's point very powerfully the alleged conflict between science and theism is superficial but people are not happy with that because they sense there is a conflict somewhere and they're exactly right there is a real conflict and the real conflict is not between science and God it's between worldviews namely in the West particularly the worldviews of theism and atheism they clearly conflict they're incompatible but the point to be raised as their scientists on both sides of that conflict so it cannot be a conflict between science and God think of Isaac Newton don't doubt the Creator he said because it's inconceivable that accidents alone could be the controller of this universe Stephen Hawking the late Stephen Hawking occupied Newton's chair Cambridge God did not create the universe so there are two geniuses both brilliant scientists so science doesn't divide them what divides them is their worldview and it's very important if we're going to understand what's going on in the culture in the debate it's not God on the one side and science on the other side it's eight years I'm on the one side and theism on the other side and they're scientists on both sides and so the real question you need to ask is where does science sit does it point towards atheism or does it point towards God or is it neutral but unfortunately it is such a widespread impression that science and God are at war that I want to raise a series of questions as to what fuels that conflict why is it we got to this situation well a couple of little things that are worth bearing in mind firstly statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science when Carl Sagan began his famous television series with that statement Ruth brown like this the cosmos is all there is was and ever shall be that's a statement by a scientist it's not a statement of science it's a statement of his philosophical belief but the trouble is that scientists in our contemporary world they have such authority that any scientist who makes a statement people tend to think it's got the authority of science behind it and we need to learn to distinguish and Richard Feynman who won the Nobel Prize for Physics made a marvelous statement that we need to listen to I believe that the scientists looking at problems out of their field is just as dumb as the next guy now that applies to me because you see I'm not talking about pure mathematics I hope you've realized that already and in that sense in order to have a dialogue in public we gotta go outside our fails but there are certain things we've got to do if we do that everybody has to do that otherwise life would be very boring but we've got to check if I move outside my field and make a statement then I gotta check that it's got some sort of authority and I want to illustrate this by the book title Richard Dawkins The God Delusion which is a best-seller the word delusion is a psychiatric term now when I first read the book and I've read it many times in several languages in order to debate Richard I I noticed the word delusion is a psychiatric term and Richard is not a psychiatrist and that's very important to realize that he's making a statement that God is a delusion and I'm not a psychiatrist either so what do I do I decide to read what psychiatrists say about this and I discovered when I read the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at the time and his sentence that he doesn't regard God as a delusion at all and Dawkins is ignoring the actual scientific psychological epidemiological studies of the connection the correlation between belief in God and human well-being now that's very interesting because Dawkins is claiming to be a scientist when he says these things and many people were quite angry actually in their writings when they discovered that his work on this is not scientific at all it falls apart similarly Stephen Hawking their statement by a brilliant scientist he was just ahead of me at Cambridge all those years ago I remember him and he's like years ahead of me and his mathematical ability but he said religion is a fairy story for those afraid of the dark that's a statement by an astrophysicist but it's not a statement of science that I was asked to comment on it by one of the newspapers I think in which it was published one of our daily newspapers in the UK so I asked them did they want a one-liner and they said we'd love a one-liner I said okay atheism is a fairy story for those afraid of the night now you see you're clapping and you shouldn't really do you know why because the point I've been making is that these are statements by scientists but they're not statements of science and behind them of course is the Freudian argument and it's important to say something about that because many students when they read The God Delusion they think that's it this is just Freud again religion is a virus of the mind we invent a father figure in the sky and so on and so forth and it sounds very impressive but many of them just walk away from the whole issue they shouldn't do that too quickly because the Freudian argument works in the other direction as well and one of Germany's most brilliant psychiatrist Manfred lutz has written a little book well it's a big book actually it's very wittily written called eine training he shifted this crest in a brief history of the great one and in it he says this if there is no God then Freud's argument is brilliant showing that religion is a neurosis and wishful thousand dollar estimate it works if there is no god but of course if there is a God the very same argument shows you that atheism is an illusion and a wish fulfillment or the desire not to have to meet God and given an account for the mess you've made of your life and of others so he then gives the bottom line the substantive question is is there a god or not freud can't answer that an orchid jung or any of the other psychiatrists and so it's very important to realize that this argument just Falls it doesn't deal with the question of Paul so having cleared a bit of the ground let's look at three major areas that lead to the country first confusion about faith secondly failure to recognize that science has limits and thirdly the confusion about the nature of explanation so let's look at faith the New Atheists so-called but they're not new anymore there are new New Atheists these days but I'm not going to talk about them they got into such a muddle about the nature of faith that they started rioting sheer nonsense atheists have no faith says Dawkins did The God Delusion and yet the whole book is about what he believes and he doesn't see the irony of that Peter Singer atheism is not a faith when I did my debate with singer I told the audience at Melbourne huge audience what I told you at the beginning my parents were Christian he got up and he said well there we are that's my big objection people remain in the faith in which they were brought up so when I got a chance to speak I said Peter you haven't told us about your parents were they atheists he said yes they were all I said you've stayed in the faith in which you were brought up oh but he said isn't the faith oh I said Peter I'm really sorry I thought you believed it and cyberspace went mad here's one of the world's leading philosophers from Princeton and he doesn't realize that his atheism is a belief system that is intellectually very serious and that's common because what has happened is this when you use the word faith people think a it's a religious term and it means believing for there's no evidence faith is not a religious term it's an ordinary word in English it comes from the Latin three days from which we get fidelity and when I say I believe X or I have faith in X you have the right to immediately say on what grounds and if you have no grounds then it's blind faith and the mistake that's made all the time is people have redefined faith as blind faith it's even got into Webster's dictionary faith non believing where there's no evidence and that just brings utter confusion and leads to statements like the statement of Christopher Hitchens our beliefs are not a belief that is just nonsense and we need to get back to the fact that faith let me repeat it is an everyday word it means trust and we all know what evidence-based faith is since the financial crash we thought we could trust the bankers and we find we couldn't and it took a long time for trust to be built up in the markets you all know that so we need to get rid of this idea the faith of some vague sort of concept and that means believing where there's no evidence in religion it's an ordinary word and of course you get into the problem science uses reason and Christianity uses faith that is absolute nonsense and dawkins saying that faith being belief that isn't based on evidence is the principle vise of any religion well other religions must speak for themselves but it isn't the principal vise of every religion so if you go to the Oxford English Dictionary you'll see things like I've said what faith is the fourth one confidence reliance of belief proceeding from reliance of testimony or authority and the trouble is that this word is used in various contexts it's used as a substitute for religion the Christian faith the Muslim faith the Jewish faith but it also used as my subjective response to something I have faith I believe etc so science involves faith as does every area of life and if you don't believe science involves faith read Albert Einstein look at the highlighted bit I cannot conceive in the genuine scientists without that profound faith faith and what faith in the rational or mathematical intelligibility of the universe you can't any physics or science were they believing the universe is rationally intelligible why would you there's no reason to so it's very important to see that that's an essential part now science of course claims evidence-based and that's absolutely right but let me speak as a Christian for a moment Christianity claims to be an evidence-based faith you can see that very easily from the statement at the end of the fourth gospel Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book but these are written so that you may believe sign Semyon and Greek a pointer an indicator and John lists them as evidence on which faith can be based so that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah the son of God and that by believing you may have life in his name science claims it's faith is evidence based Christianity claims that faith is evidence based in that sense there's no difference except of course the issues are bigger they standing in the way of this you can have too much faith in science what do I mean by that now I'm using science in the anglo-saxon way to mean the natural sciences if I was speaking as I was last week to a German audience I need to be careful because in German the word vision shaft means the Natural Sciences and the humanities it is effectively rational thought full-stop and that's part of the confusion in the anglo-saxon world that people will use science when they main rational thought and we'll come to that in a moment but scientism is the idea that science is the only way to truth Bertrand Russell put it this way whatever knowledge is attainable must be attained by scientific methods and what science cannot cover mankind cannot know that's a very foolish bit of logic isn't it because of too late at night for logic is that statement a statement of science no it isn't it's a statement of what he believes so you cannot know it if science is the only way to truth so if it's true it's false so it's logically incoherent Russell was quite a philosopher and a petition but his logic left of when he made that statement you see but it could mean something else it could mean rational thought is the only way to truth but that's a very different thing from the Natural Sciences I want to go into that in a moment I'm going to leave Christian de Duve out because we need to ask what do we being by scientific explanation everything is explicable in purely natural terms secondly and that was part of the previous quote so I'll just quote it again Christian de Duve who's the Nobel Prize winner says that that should be abandoned only a face with facts that defy rational explanation look at that very carefully science for him equals rational explanation but that's completely wrong if you mean the Natural Sciences because history is a rational discipline philosophy is a rational discipline languages and literature and a host of other things if you were to say that in this university here the set of colleges that the Natural Sciences the only way to truth you'd have to close most of this place time and I don't think you want to do that because I think you believe you're engaged in rational activities that's very important to cling on to that Sir Peter Medawar was a very clever brilliant Dobel quiet Prize winning science and he says 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 and what is the point of living and he goes on to say you can only get at these questions through literature philosophy and religion he's right and every scientist I believe should read his little book on the limits of science so here's a scientist who says that the Natural Sciences are limited but now we come to a very famous book the grand design stephen hawking leonard nodding off and i was intrigued by this book because he starts off for this list of big questions how could we understand the world at which we find ourselves how does the universe behave what's the nature of reality where did it all come from why do we exist all this kind of stuff and Hawking claims that science can answer all of these well he's wrong as far as I and others see science could only answer the second one if you mean the natural sciences and that's a very odd thing and I got to come to that in a moment but let us listen to Hawking on the second question how does the universe behave what is science show us and one of his statements in the book is this our universe and its laws appear to be designed that is both tailor-made to supporters 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 at least 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 so notice that he's impressed cause the book the grand design so he sees he perceives design and he explains it away by appealing to the multiverse but please notice the method of argument the old idea that's what CS Lewis one's called chronological snobbery if it's old it's wrong well I'm old so I must be wrong I mean this is foolish actually to suggest it's a pejorative use of the word old this is not the answer of modern science no it's not the answer of some modern scientists modern science doesn't have a unified answer to this question there are several answers and so on well let me quote someone who did win the Nobel Prize astronomy leads us to a unique event a universe made out of nothing with the precise fine-tuning which is necessary for life and which has one might say an underlying supernatural plan Arno Penzias who discovered the Microwave Background that gave a lot of evidence for the idea of beginning to space-time in the universe so science what I'm summing up here and I'm just giving you one example of it science contains certain pointers Natural Sciences do not contain any proofs in the mathematical sense only in pure mathematics you get rigorous proofs but in the sciences you get pointers and they can be very strong let me give you an example I've been married to the same woman for 51 years I can't prove to you mathematically that she loves me but I'd stake my life on it because I think there's enough evidence to believe it do you see that so evidence even though it's not mathematical proof can strong enough to risk your life you do that every time you get in the motor car or of an aircraft you trust the aeronautical engineering so we're well used to that kind of thing so what I want to do is to come back to Hawking's big questions and when I read them first all this list of questions I thought this is going to be fascinating to read how he answers them but then comes the great letdown traditionally says Hawking these are questions for philosophy but philosophy is dead philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science particularly physics scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge now that last statement is scientism essentially science is the only way to truth but when I read that and then read the rest of the book I started to laugh to say philosophy is dead in a book which is all about the philosophy of science seems to me to be very curious indeed and of course the auxin the Cambridge Department of Philosophy were very cross at this statement as you can imagine the loss of the isn't dead it may be dead sadly as far as Hawking and laden offer concerned but it certainly isn't dead so we're dealing in an area where well this shows that Einstein was right I always remember Einstein he got a little voice in the back of my head the scientist is a pure philosopher and many scientists know very little philosophy and yet talked a lot about philosophy but they don't realize they're doing it philosophy is dead and the whole books about the philosophy of science they just don't see it so let's focus this there was Newton believer in God law of gravitation one of the most brilliant scientists of all time without question and there's Stephen Hawking Newton believed in God an atheist is it just time and the advance of science that has led to the change or is there more to be said well I think there's a lot more to be said the problem is three things false logic false ideas about God and false ideas about explanation and I wanted trying to do it all but let me have a look at false logic here is the central statement of the book the grand design because there is a law like gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing what because there is a law like gravity because there's something the universe will create itself from nothing what's that a flat contradiction because there is a law like gravity doesn't say because gravity exists but what would the law of gravity mean if gravity doesn't exist and if there is no material in the universal which gravity acts and behind that there lies a huge problem it's a confusion that laws are creative but they're not you know the laws of nature that we formulate mathematically are descriptions of what happened but they're not causes and they don't create anything Newton's laws of motion never moved a billiard ball the history of the universe they describe the motion once somebody were the cue causes it and this is a huge confusion I once talked to Peter Atkins after a debate they said Peter I'd never met her before he said atheist physical chemists at Oxford I said what created the universe he said mathematics and I I'm afraid I was rather rude I could test that I started laughs he and he was angry he said what do you laughing at well I said I really I'm sorry Peter but that's the silliest thing I've heard for a long time he said why well I said I am a mathematician let me put it this way two plus two equals four does that ever put four dollars in your pocket you see Peter I said the financial crash was caused by some people who thought that mathematics can create money you may have met people like that it's called creative accounting so we need to be careful about these things the idea of laws creating the universe is just sheer nonsense but it's worse till the universe will create itself well effects creates why what does that mean roughly speaking if you've got eggs you'll get why if I say X creates X what does that mean well it means that nonsense remains a nonsense even if scientists talking you see this statement of Hawking's is not even scientific in the sense of being rational it's the heart of his argument for getting rid of God and that's serious intellectually when brilliant people write nonsense in order to get rid of God that bothers me intensely because people accept it and they think that's it there is no God and I wrote my little book God and Stephen Hawking because a young man wrote to me he'd been driving his car past a gas station there's a big placard saying Stephen Hawking says there's no God and he was a Christian and he started to shake a young man without much formal education and he wrote to me and he said Stephen Hawking says there's no God Who am I little me to say there is so I wrote a book time sir because this is nonsense but because he's brilliant and he was brilliant people accept it now contrast that with the biblical view the universe made from nothing well the biblical view is that the universe is not made from anything physical but it's created by God who's not nothing but God is spirit and ladies and gentlemen what we're faced in contemporary society is the choice between God and nothing I give lectures these days or nothing because we got to that position where nothing becomes the source of everything and Lawrence Christ is one of the people that did this in Arizona State University and I read his book the universe from nothing some of you may have come across it surely nothing he writes is every bit as physical as something especially if it is to be defined as the absolutes of something pardon if you go in the internet you'll hear me debating this particular phrase that's your nonsense and if that's the way you're getting rid of God there may be no God of course but that's not the way to get rid of God and it bothers me now the next problem is the question of God you see many people I talk to think that my gods are kind of Greek of the god of lightning do a bit of atmospheric physics you don't need that God anymore and they think that the God of the Bible is like one of the ancient Greek gods well there's a lot to be said about that but let me just say that God is not a God of the gaps like that but the important thing is and I didn't understand this in the debate for a long time Hawking particularly saying you've got to choose between God and science and I couldn't understand that until I realized that the God is talking about is defined to be in competition with science you see if you define God to be the explanation for what science has not yet explained then you have to choose between God and science as a matter of logic and I usually point out when that is said that the book of Genesis hiders that began in the beginning God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand well not quite he created the heavens and the earth that's the whole show the Vettes we do you understand that the bits we don't understand and the interesting thing about Isaac Newton Arnold Penzias Kepler and all the rest of them it was the bits they did understand the pointer towards God and that is extremely important but let's move on to the notion of scientific explanation why is the water boiling well because heat energy is passing through the base of a kettle agitating the molecules of water in this point yes well it's also boiling because I would like a cup of tea that's a very simple example but it's very important it shows that there are different kinds of explanation there's a scientific explanation of the boiling water and there's a personal agent explanation they don't compete they don't conflict they complement and I just wish I could get this across to many of my fellow scientists let me put it this way Newton's law of gravitation no more competes with God as an explanation of the universe than the law of internal combustion competes with Henry Ford as an explanation of the motorcar they're different kinds of explanation and Dawkins is wrong when he suggested the God explanation is equivalent to the science explanation absolutely not God as creator of the universe is the grounds for any explanation whatsoever we wouldn't have a universe to try to explain if God didn't invent it but science didn't invent it so there's a lot of stuff that dates to be separated now the time is rapidly disappearing and I want to just make a final thing that goes back to the sciences scientists faith and often I challenged by fellow scientists and I say what do you do science with I do it with my brain I do not believe the brain and the mind are the same but that's a debate for another time let's say let's agree with them we do it with our brain so I said tell me the brief history of the brain and often they'll say something like this the brain is the end product of a mindless unguided process and I'd look at them and they'd say and you trust it and I've done this with many people I said look at this computer if you knew that it was the end product of a mindless unguided process would you trust it and I always forced them to announcer I've always without exception got the answer no and I said I say you have a problem a real problem you see this has now moved into mainstream of the philosophical argument so let's go they often ask me where I get the argument because they say I'm not bright enough to think of it for myself but that's ok so I said I got it from Charles Darwin actually now that surprises them with me he wrote the heart of doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals or of any value or at all trustworthy and that leads to an Tinga and we were back to him two point eight the deep conflict between science and atheism if Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes that he's given a strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties this is Darwin and therefore inevitably divided the validity of any belief that they produced including Dawkins Oh theism one of the reasons I'm sitting here as a person who believes in God is not because I'm a Christian but because I'm a scientist I find it impossible to a spice of philosophy that essentially reduces given rationality with which I need to do science the meaninglessness and what is most interesting is Thomas Nagel take honest the philosopher science in New York we wrote a book with an explosive subtitle I could scarcely believe it when I first saw it mind and cosmos why the neo-darwinian view of the world is almost certainly false and if you google app and see the debate it is unleashed in cyberspace is really fierce and his point is this if the mental is not itself merely physical it cannot be fully explained by physical sciences evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our conviction seriously including the scientific or picture in which evolutionary naturalism itself depends and this is so important because you and I are living in the so-called Information Age and the one thing that's true of information is that it is not material it's often carried as you see on a material base and the moment you see something information which is hard to define but just let it stand for the moment the moment you see a word you immediately know that whatever natural processes are involved in putting this picture up on the screen there's a mind behind it you immediately interior that it's a perception that's automatic and universal and Roger Sperry another Nobel Prize winner said the meaning of the message will not be found at the physics and chemistry of the paper ink and I've often confronted people with that question and held up a menu and when they tell me there are materialists they're reductionist everything must be explained bottom-up in terms of physics and chemistry and that must be true there's no God you know option so I say to them look at that menu and if it says roast chicken I say look how do you know it's roast chicken well I've learned English ok are aware see five letters there's semiotic they carry meaning now you explain to me if you're a reductionist you explain to me that word and its meaning in terms of the physics and chemistry of the paper nobody is able to do it they can't do it because they have to postulate mind now if you have to postulate mind to explain that even though many physical processes are involved with a five letter word what are you going to do with this which is just about 3.4 billion letters in the right order if you take the reductionist materialist atheistic view I will say to you you have a huge and this is one of the reasons why I'm fascinated by the Genesis account simple account but it's brilliant it talks about a word based universe created in a sequence of speech acts and God said and God said and so on this is profound stuff and I wish I had time to explain it to you you may want to ask questions about it but the critical thing that's being explained is that our universe is not a closed system of cause and effect it's an open system into which God speaks there's an informational input from the mind of God as you see that means that as a scientist one of the most resonant statements that makes sense of the world as I see it the world of science is this in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God all things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be if something comes to exist we always asked for a cause the universe came to exist you came to exist and what we've got to look for is an explanation that makes sense and I believe that the word based universe idea makes perfect sense but then that raises an even bigger question because the biblical claim is that the word became human and dwelt among us that raises a series of huge questions it's the reason I'm a Christian but then my talk tonight was on science and God but you can ask questions about either of these two things thank you very much indeed what kind of evidence would you have to see in order to give up your belief in God well I'd have to see reputations of everything I ain't said tonight that was the first thing I'd have to have better explanation say for the fine-tuning of the universe but my belief in God and that's getting to the Christian bit really it depends on on several factors it's cumulative science helps rationality helps and all of that but I would have to have it proved to me for example to go right to the heart of it that Jesus didn't rise from the dead at my experience of God over well nearly seventy years nearly is simply a figment of my imagination but I might come to some more evidences of that later when we see what the rest of the questions are but the point behind the question is the pop Irian thing is my faith in God falsifiable of course it is of course it is there are things that could block but you see the reason I'm sitting here is I spent my whole life considering this question so what you're saying is the fruit of years and years and years of making myself vulnerable to attack and some of it if you watch the Internet is pretty fierce stuff so I may pick that into some of the others Mary if you don't mind how do you view well let me just say one or two things because often people regard evolution as an engine of atheism well the first thing to settle is what exactly do you mean by evolution because they're at least five meanings of the word as I understand I'm not a biologist but I do read a lot of biology and I tend seminars in biology because I I meet people that find this a real problem so let me say one or two things only the beginning I assure you we're dealing with life and two things about life its existence at its variation and Richard Dawkins at a very famous book the blind watchmaker said and I quote he says natural selection the blind automatic nakedness of the Darwin discovered is the explanation for wait for it the existence and variation of all of life half of that statement is absolutely false and Dawkins admitted it but only after many years let's get it straight once and for all evolution whatever it does or doesn't do cannot explain the existence of life and the reason is obvious evolution depends on the existence of life to do anything so it can't explain the existence of life so the problem of the origin of life remains scientifically even harder than it did in 1953 for a Miller and Urey won the Nobel Prize because they claimed to solve the origin of life by producing amino acids or some of them in a test tube so we got to separate those two things because they're crucially important now it's quite obvious that natural selection explains something just look at us in this room why do we not look the same because there's been selecting there might even be some selecting going on tonight but that's another matter I'm not going to that and mutation has done something I think it's about a third of us suffer from a mutation that'll probably kill us at the end so it's quite clear that what Darwin observed brilliantly observed particularly in his studies of Finch Peaks and the Galapagos Islands was that the world's a big place and you can get variations because of isolation all this kind of stuff so natural selection mutation clearly does something and I accept that because you can see it happening there is a more difficult question though and it would take me a long time to go into this because listening to some of the leading biologists in the world I see them asking questions about whether it does everything bobby's in terms of variation does nothing in terms of existence so the first thing we need to get absolutely clear is evolution has nothing to do with the existence of life in the first place and the origin of life is not quite equivalent to but the origin of information is part of it the DNA molecule and all this kind of thing and that has to be gone into because that interest me is am a petition and I have developed quite a lot of argument about that and I go to shamelessly advertise a little book I wrote some time ago gods Undertaker's science berry God where I go into the arguments from the theory of information which lead me to believe that the origin of life must involve a mind and it's a question not of the mind of the gaps that's very important when you look up there and see those words and postulate a mind behind them it's not a mind of the gaps it's the only explanation that makes sense of what you're looking at and that's exactly my position when it comes to the origin of information now another little thing evolutionary theory is biology believing in God that's a worldview and you cannot deduce a worldview from biology let me put that a bit more simply are a bit more clearly they do that you see the existence of a mechanism that does something is not in itself an argument for the non-existence of a creator of that mechanism well people say evolution whatever does or doesn't do involves randomness in the generation of mutations okay so it can't have been designed but just a minute on my arm I have a watch that involves randomness so self-winding watch one of the old-fashioned one random motions of my arm winded up therefore this watch has not been designed really it's actually more cleverly designed than Norden and watch the point being this we need to be very careful when we think that these mechanisms are so sophisticated and I'm not making any comment here beyond this that the existence of a mechanism is not in itself an argument for saying that there was no designer no evolutionary thinking splits essentially into two there's a Dawkins variety or the Dennett variety where they say ah haha but evolution is clever it designs without itself having been designed but people like Francis Collins the director of the National Institute of Health here who's a Christian he would disagree with that and he would say this is a process that has been supervised by God so there are two views of that and you will find that there are many Christians who ascribe to certain levels of belief evolution I started the base level as I've said I think it accounts for some variation my skepticism as a petition rises as you go up and I've written about that in my little book seven days that divided the world but the point is you cannot get atheism out of it and I stick there because the details although they're interesting to some people they're not interesting to others my faith and God doesn't rest in the solution of a biological theorem although I have few survival so we leave it there before any more people to peers the emergence of artificial intelligence is the emergence of artificial intelligence emergence is the word that bothers me what are you mean by emergence did human intelligence emerge because you see the word emergence in science covers a whole lot of things did it emerge naturally did it emerge for the catalyst did it emerge through the application of hate did it emerge through the application of an intellectual input etc etc well coming back to the genesis accord real human intelligence emerged in the sense of it emerged by a creative act of God but that's not the question of course artificial intelligence is it predicted in the Bible now I'd be cautious in this because everything it took about it the first no question the next question to ask is what do you mean by artificial intelligence and there are mainly two kinds there's narrow artificial intelligence which is the kind that we're using all the time these days and it has a lot of plus signs particularly medicine for rapid diagnosis it has downsides in the surveillance economy and all the problems that are coming about through facial recognition being imposed on people and a lot of ethical questions need to be thought about but that is Naro AI which is really hefty computing power working on big data to do something that normally requires human intelligence some single thing but then there's AG i/o artificial general intelligence and the idea there if you've read for example the book by Yuval Noah Harare Amadeus where he sends that the 21st century the two big things that are going to happen are one we're going to solve the problem of physical death as a technical problem that's all it is secondly we're going to enhance human happiness by re-engineering human beings either by silicon implants by turning us into cyborgs or by upgrading us in some way and some of our leading scientists are taking this seriously now the title of that book Amadeus the man who is God is very suggestive and the irony to my mind of this could lead to hours of lecturing which you're not going to get the irony to my mind is this they are striving to produce a god-like human with super intelligence many of them are atheists they don't realize there is a man who is God has already been on this planet but he's not artificial intelligence ladies and gentlemen he's real intelligence the intelligence of God made incarnate so what interests me about this whole thing is what people are moving towards is a parody of a scenario that is embedded in scripture that could be developed considerably but read might them let's go to another pair actually you don't have so much time bass number one here even if I accept your arguments as to the existence of God for what reason should I believe it this is a Christian guy well the question is perfectly justified and I was asked to speak on science of God so that's what I done but you have perceived and I have stated so that I am a Christian well I approach this in exactly the same way as I approach everything else it's a question to my mind of evidence now let's do a bit of thinking at several different levels take the three major monotheistic religions the Abrahamic religions Judaism Christianity Islam they make statements and claims let's take the central issue the thing in which my Christian faith dependence is not science but it has to do with history and experience and if we're going to get to grips with this question we must realize that the world is bigger than natural science can reveal to us that's the point of in making the whole evening natural science is wonderful but it's limited and I cannot answer these questions but fortunately we have more tools at our disposal and one of them is history ancient history and the other is experience so let's have a look at this taking those three religions the central claim of Christianity is that about 20 centuries ago Jesus rose from the dead physically and has therefore broken the death barrier and sold her Ari's problem which is very interesting see the problem death has been solved those need to be solved but it sold the very different way from what the current AGI gurus expect he rose from the dead nine as a Christian I believe that Jesus died and he rose again my Jewish friends believed he died but didn't rise my Muslim friends believe that it he didn't die it can't all be right it's a question of evidence they differ and we've got to face that and we've got to decide individually how we respond to that evidence and so for me Christianity I first met it and my parents and here comes singers objection of course you believe your parents were believers and your grandparents and all the rest of it that is why I spent my entire life checking it out cuz I don't want to be fooled I have taken the Freud argument very seriously indeed my whole life now that's why I've talked to people in different religions and so on and so forth so there's that evidential historical site and history is very important what do I mean by that well going outside one's field is am a petition or physicists or scientists we've got to give credibility to people in other disciplines and when Dawkins says in his book forgive me for using him again but he's such a good example of this he says a good case could be made out that Jesus never existed although to be fair he says I don't accept that case and he quotes a professor but I looked up this professor he's a professor of German not a professor of ancient history you know there I couldn't they could scarcely name a single professor of ancient history in the world who doesn't believe Jesus existed and if you start to read if you're a skeptical person and I hope many if you're skeptical because I'm a born skeptic to read what the ancient historians some of them atheists have to say about the reliability of the stories about Jesus we have in the Gospel it is mind-blowing it really is mind-blowing the evidence that's a mass there so we can get evidence from these people not in our own disciplines if we're scientists but who are rational thinking people who may not even share a Christian worldview so that's very important to me but there are two other factors that help me answer this question you see there's the question of what we mean by religion and that's a very important question because I often ask people what is a religion and generally speaking they'll say something like this well our religion has got a part it's got a way and it's got teachings and there may be an initiation ceremony something that you get on the path and then you have gurus priests Imams all kinds of people that teach you etcetera etc and then in the end you face some kind of assessment there's a final judgment or something like that where you're how you behaved is way too measured and if you pass the test then you're welcomed into heaven or davana or whatever it is and if you don't pass then you're not and you lose somewhere else and I generally find that that is what people think religion is in fact it's like Claremont University you got in here you students you probably have to do some kind of and even though all the professors are as delightful as Mary here they cannot guarantee you a degree you know why because it depends in your merit I want you to listen very carefully because it's failure to understand this that turns many people away from Christianity they think that Christianity is a religion of Merit and they're thoroughly fed up with it that it's giving them a set of rules that are impossible to keep a set of laws that just crush them into a kind of religious slavery and dangling in front of them the fact that one day they're going to be assessed on those rules now it just has a student in mid course here cannot be sure of a degree however kind and nice the professors are so in many religions and most as far as I can say enough is told me by their adherence they cannot be certain of the relationship with God why because that relationship is based on merit but this is where Christianity is utterly unique ladies and gentlemen let me say something that might provoke you a little bit Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion because it offers me something that none of them do it offers me a relationship with God not at the end of the way but at the beginning of the way let me illustrate that I mentioned my wife Sally who sadly not here but when I met her my first aid university and eventually decided she'd make a good wife I came to her and I gave her a present that was a big cookbook and I said to her Sally now look I would like you to be my wife now it's going to be like this let's have a look at page 303 year's recipe for apple strudel now this is an example my dear if you keep the rules in this book thou shalt take so many ounces of sugar thou shall take so many kilos of flour I shall take so many and thou shalt do this and this and this if you keep that lets say for the next forty years then I will accept you of course she threw the book back at me I'm glad you're laughing folks I don't know why you're laughing because that's how millions of people think about God that breaks my heart you would never insult a fellow human being by making a relationship depend on American performance I be careful my wife has several cookbooks but what sets are free to enjoy cooking is because she knows that even if she makes a mess of an order apple strudel I'm not going to send her back to her mother because my relationship with her doesn't depend on Mary that's what Christianity says and the thing we'd never do to our fellow human beings millions of people without thinking base the relationship with God on a merit system that they can never keep and therefore they never have any certainty and I meet many young people and they're uncertain they're feeling lonely they want a real relationship well the wonderful thing and you asked me why I'm a Christian this is why I'm a Christian because Christ offers me something nobody else offers me but in order to get there I have to face the fact straight that I've made a mess of things like everybody else I haven't even kept my own standard let alone God standards so what Christ asked me to do is to repent and face the mess I've made of my life and other people's lives and to trust him as the person who's done something now this will sound like gobbledygook to you but you know ultimate reality is very complex we don't understand what energy is we don't have a clue what consciousness is so if I say to you ladies and gentlemen that twenty centuries ago God incarnate died on a cross to do something to enable you to have a relationship with God that's unbreakable and eternal and goes beyond death don't knock it too quickly because reality is always more complex than you think does they sit there that is what I believe you see I do these lectures not to gain brownie points of God says Oh Lennox is a good champion lose another Veritas I don't do them to gain acceptance I do them because they've got it because it doesn't depend on my merit and that is why I'm a Christian I'm not involved in the philosophic system or a religious system that bases everything on my merit when I know I could never achieve it anyway so the final point here is this I'm often asked as a scientist and said look you can't be in Christian because in science everything is testable you test things you test hypotheses you can't test Christianity well who told you that of course you can of course you can I give a lecture at Harvard when I'd finished a couple of thousand people there's a big balcony and when I finished a Chinese student stood up some years ago nigh and shouted look at me and of course we all looked and it was obvious he was talking to be and I said why should we look at you it was a very tosser he said just look at me since six months ago and I don't remember the exact details but he was in a mess he was absolutely down he had no way out and he said somebody brought me to listen to your Penn State University and he said that night I decided to start a quest and he started I believe reading a gospel or something he said just look at me he was radiant and it was such an obvious expression of the fact that Christianity works in transforming people's lives no I'm in my mid 70s now I've watched people come from say narcotic dependence alcohol dependence broken relationships feeling suicidal even many students I love students have been with them all my life I'm a perpetual student but the point is that I'll see them and then I may not see them again for a year and I meet them since there's something different about you what's happened and they'll say something like this well I became a Christian or I met Jesus or I had an experience of God they'll put it in different ways but instead of broken relationships they're mended instead of alcohol drugs there's food on the table they got meaning in life when you see that again and again anybody's capable of adding two and two and getting four it actually works and that is one of the most important things the existential thing the intellectual arguments are very important they're necessary the historical arguments are important but the most important thing of all is does it actually work and I sit here and I tell you my experience is that it does work but please check it out for yourself you've got a great opportunity in this university to do that there are Christians in this room grab ahold of them squeeze them and get it I don't mean literally um get information out of them find out what makes them tick and I just wish all of you all the best but thank you so much for coming in this [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Veritas Forum

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Id: m4149ZPgRM8

Length: 78min 16sec (4696 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019