Creation - Evolution Debates - Dawkins Vs Lennox at Cambridge

welcome to the city of Oxford on this glorious fall day [Music] over the centuries this museum has seen any number of famous discoveries lectures and even debates within its hallowed walls but one debate in particular remains a grained on the public memory and that's the encounter between the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley who met here in 1860 one year after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species to debate man's common descent from the animal kingdom and now in the 21st century religion and especially its relationship to science is a topic that is hotter than ever in just a short time 500 people fortunate enough to have tickets will cram into this Natural History Museum to witness a historic debate on science philosophy and God the protagonists are well suited to the task professors John Lennox and Richard Dawkins John Lennox is a mathematician and philosopher of science and Richard Dawkins until recently Charles Simoni chair for the public understanding of science [Music] good evening welcome to Oxford University's Museum of Natural History tonight features a discussion between professors Richard Dawkins and John Lennox both of the University of Oxford this is not the first time that these two men have met indeed they debated one another last autumn in Birmingham Alabama in that encounter The Wall Street Journal said that they displayed rhetorical skills in the best British tradition the theme this evening is has science buried God now there are three topics of conversation first is the issue of science itself gaps and faith and evidence and so forth and then finally they will move into the topic of morality and purpose if there is no God where does that leave us now we'll give this discussion roughly 50 minutes and then there will be a QA we will be collecting questions from the ceded area right here and then submitting them to the two men on stage this will take about 20 minutes or so and then we invite the media to withdraw to the lecture room upstairs where these two gentlemen will meet with you briefly before coming down for a book signing so this will give those of you here in the audience an opportunity to purchase a book to queue up and to meet these men who are on the stage now we do apologize for a lack of seating you will agree with me however that this is a wonderful venue in terms of its beauty and its history I should also note that there is there is no unauthorized photography or filming of any kind and indeed tonight's event is being filmed so your presence is an acknowledgment that you understand that and that you are okay with that we do encourage you to move around the gallery there's still some places behind us here that you can see and perhaps here also in the gallery so do not crowd in these spaces here we thank the Museu we thank Richard Dawkins and John Lennox for their willingness to participate they're both very busy men Richard has this week his Simoni valedictory lecture which is a very important lecture for him this takes place on Thursday night at the Oxford Playhouse would you like to say a word or two about that I've been in the Simoni professorship for about 12 years for the last 10 years I've had an annual lecture by a distinguished scientist which I have organized and that is coming to an end this year because I'm giving it myself no longer distinguished and that's this Thursday it'll be my farewell it will be the 10th of these Simoni lectures and I hope it'll be a grand gala occasion unfortunately it was sold out about two months ago so I don't know what I'm logging it really but well that sounds very exciting and and and John Lennox you are have been busy preparing a new edition of your book that's right the books called God's Undertaker has science buried gob which is in fact the title of our discussion this evening and I'm trying to respond to comments people have made and to extend it a little bit it'll come out with Lion hubs and I hope in the New Year well very good well gentlemen we will begin here but first I want to remind you that um that we have to stay on schedule and the t-rex is actually mechanized so if you are if you get out of bounds we we do have men who will operate that so we'll begin with with Richard Richard the question as we begin is has science buried God well which god I mean we could take in Stein's God which is not really a personal God at all but which is a sort of poetic metaphor for the mystery that which we don't understand about the universe we could take a deist guard a sort of God of the physicists a God of somebody like Paul Davies who devised the laws of physics God the mathematician God who put together the cosmos in the first place and then sat back and watched everything happen and that would be over the dears God would be one that I think it would be one could make a reasonably respectable case for that not a case that I would accept but I think it is a serious discussion that we could have the Third Kind of God is one of which there are thousands and thousands of varieties use and Thor and Apollo and a menorah and Yahweh and we don't actually need to go through all those because I've as Larry has said I've encountered John Lennox before and I know what he look at the God he believes in which is the Christian God so we only have to talk about the Christian God John Lennox is a scientist who believes that Jesus turned water into wine a scientist who believes that Jesus somehow influenced all those molecules of h2o and introduced proteins and carbohydrates and tannins and and alcohol and turned it into wine he believes that Jesus walked on water I had been accustomed to debating with sophisticated theologians and I come across John Lennox who is a scientist who believes in all those things in particular he believes that the creator of the universe the God who devised the laws of physics the laws of mathematics the physical constants who devised the parsecs of space billions of light-years of space billions of years of time that this paragon of physical science this genius of mathematics couldn't think of a better way to rid the world of sin than to come to this little speck of cosmic dust and have himself tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself that is profoundly unscientific not only that unscientific it doesn't do justice to the grandeur of the universe it's petty and small-minded and that's the God that John Lennox believes in the world Richard thank you for explaining so clearly at least in part what I believe I'm glad to hear you say that you feel a good case could be made out that there is rationality behind the universe you said it's not something you personally accept so you believe that this universe is just a freak accident there's no mind behind it and yet here you are with one of the best minds in the world so you believe a number of things that I as a scientist find very difficult to believe and we can certainly talk about my specific Christian faith later but I confess to it absolutely I think that there is a creator of the universe he created it but he's not just a force he's a person and we are persons created in His image and you say that God becoming human and Christ dying on a cross of rising from the dead is petty I think the exact opposite it's not petty because it deals seriously with the fundamental problem that I don't think atheism even even begins to deal with that is the problem of our alienation with God of course that makes no sense unless we believe in God so I don't know how we should proceed perhaps the best way to start would be this as a scientist we both believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe I believe the universe is rationally intelligible because there's a creator god behind it not how do you account for the rational intelligibility of the universe well John you said that I believe that the university is a freak accident which is the opposite of int of what you believe for many years for many centuries indeed it seemed perfectly obvious that it couldn't possibly be a freak accident because you only had to look at living creatures the sort of magnificent diversity we see in this in this museum and everything looks designed and so it was clearly preposterous to suggest that it was due to any kind of freak accident Darwin came along and showed that it's not actually a freak accident but nor is it designed this there's a third way which in the case of biology is evolution by natural selection which produces a closed imitation of something that is designed it's not designed we know that now we understand how it how it happened but it looks very designed now the cosmos hasn't yet had its Darwin we don't yet know how the laws of physics came into existence how the physical constants came into existence and so we can still say is it a freak accident or was it designed the analogy with biology might discourage us from being too confident that it's designed because we had our fingers burned before the 19th century of the king that that biology which looks so much more obviously designed that we got our fingers burned there now in the case of the cosmos freak accident or design the point that I've made over and over again is that even if we don't understand how it came about it's not helpful to postulate a creator because the creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation and although it's difficult enough to explain how a very simple origin of the universe came into being how matter and energy how one or two physical constants came into existence although it's difficult enough to think how simplicity came into existence it's a hell of a lot harder to think how something as complicated as a god comes into existence difficult enough to think of how a deist God comes into existence and even more difficult to think of how a Christian God who actually cares about things like sin and gets himself born of over well there are three or four different issues there hunter there's the question of what Darwin did and so on and so forth but of course as you have yourself admitted as I understand that Darwin didn't explain either the origin of life or the origin of the universe and I would want to start there you say we don't know how it came to be but as scientists and cosmologists physicists were studying it and that very study and your own science assumes that the universe is rationally intelligible now correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that atheism is saying that the thoughts in our minds are in the end only the results of a mindless unguided process now that is the case it seems to me that it's very difficult to see how they could tell us anything that is true about ourselves and I think of a Steven Pinker who said wasn't that that that evolution has to do with reproductive success and nothing to do with truth and John Gray who's also an atheist they understand made the point not long ago that the problem with Darwinism if you take it in its ultra form it really undermines the notion that we can give any credence to what we think so it seems to me that your atheism undermines the very rationality that I assume and you assume when we go to study the universe so that's the first point I would make let me answer that it seems to me a quite absurd thing to say that because we are saying that our minds are produced by brains and brains evolved by evolution by natural selection therefore that somehow undermines our ability to understand anything why on earth should that be I mean natural selection builds brains which are good at surviving and brains that are good at surviving our brains that are surviving in the world but where does the concept of truth how do they come to recognize things like truth if those thoughts are simply reducible to physics and mystery neurophysiology how do they serve truth truth is what happens an alum all that that was attempting to survive and that didn't recognize truth or falsehood in some sense of whatever level is appropriate for the kind of survival that it has it wouldn't survive I mean truth just means that you're living in the real world and you behave in the real world in such a way as things make sense in the real world when you see a rock in your way you don't go charging into it you'd die if you did that if you jumped over a cliff you die that's truth it's perfectly obvious that natural selection would favor in any animal a brain that behaves in a in a way that recognizes truths and acts upon it well I can't help I can't resist a little quip but I noticed many of my fellow human beings doing very well through telling lies I can't for the last a point it's a separate point but I can't see how natural selection would would produce this produced this truth but coming back to that in itself you say this illusion of design and of course I find your writing so fascinating because of the metaphors and images you use I do envy that capacity and you said somewhere that it's terribly terribly tempting to believe that it has been designed but the Darwin has shown us that this design is an illusion but I've been very interested in the kind of thing that Simon Conway Morris has been saying recently that if you take the evolutionary pathways they're navigating through an informational hyperspace with phenomenal precision and therefore there is the impression of design at that level I mean if this mechanism that you talk about which doesn't account for the origin of life at all but let's leave that aside if it is so phenomenally clever then it itself is giving evidence that there's a mind behind it the whole point of Darwinian natural is that it works without design without foresight but that's another no it's not an assumption that is exactly how it works before before Darwin came along it looked perfectly obvious that even if evolution happened there must be some guiding force to tell animals or plants how they ought to evolve natural selection is a blind force the things that survive survive with hindsight we can see that the ones that survive are the ones that are good at surviving they have the genes that make them survive Simon Conway Morris would not deny that he's got some kind of well actually I rather share his his view of convergent evolution we both of us are perhaps on the extreme end of Darwinian zin that we emphasize the power of natural selection to homed in on particular ends particularly if you look around the museum you'll see animals marsupial animals from Australia that uncannily resemble non marsupial animals and Simon and I are both extremely keen on that but that's produced by natural selection as he would say natural selection is a mechanical blind automatic force it is it's not I can't say it's not guided but there's no need for it to be guided it the whole point is that it works without guidance but it could be guided or do you completely shut that out I mean why bother when you've got a perfectly good explanation that doesn't involve guidance I mean words like you know you use words like blind and automatic this watch is blind and automatic but it's been designed the words themselves do not shut out that notion and and it seems to me that the impression I'm getting is that what's coming through is that the whole process is so sophisticated it itself is giving evidence of a rational mind behind it but am i understanding you right that you say you deny that because you have an in-principle reason for denying it that is everything must as far as you're concerned go from the simple to the complex and therefore your major argument in The God Delusion if I understand at the right is that God is by definition more complex than the thing you're explaining so he's got to be explained well that is a major point that I that I want to make but let me go back to what you were saying before about about guidance when you drop a stone it falls to the ground and and you as a scientist will explain that by gravity you you wouldn't dream of saying oh there must be a God pushing it down that's exactly what you're in effect saying with respect to evolution because because we understand evolution in just the same kind of level as we actually rather better level than we understand gravity no I and this is a very important point because I detected in many of your writings that you oppose God and science as explanations when uten discovered the law of gravity didn't say marvelous now I can know how it works I don't need God God is an explicator at the level of an agent not a mechanism so that we can study mechanisms and biology the more sufficeth sophisticated the are the more that might well point towards an agent you don't argue away the existence of an agent by showing that there is a mechanism and I don't quite understand how you managed to get if I understand you right God and science as alternative explanations I think you do get rid of an agent if the agent is superfluous to the explanation that when when you're studying something that's happening there may well be an agent and it and it may be if you're watching a a car driving along and avoiding obstacles and turning left and turning right you say there is an agent controlling that car certainly there is there's a driver but if if you don't need an agent to explain what's going on and we don't in the case of biology we don't in the case of gravity of course I accept that Newton was a theist he lived in the 17th century and everybody was but you don't need an agent an agent is a superfluous explanation it's a gratuitous grafting on of something that you don't need well I find that unconvincing because even if you accept the whole evolutionary paradigm well it depends on there being a fine-tuned universe and that fine-tuned universe raises in itself very big questions as to the origin of the universe evolution doesn't deal without really nor does it deal with the origin of life there's a separate point those are separate points but they're vastly major points yeah yes as long as we were dealing with evolution I was talking about evolution if you want to move on to talk about well I very happy to move on but the the notion of things in principle going from simple to complex and they must go that way that seems to me to be your belief your faith what things must go from simple to complex yes I mean if things go from simple to complex we we need an explanation there we actually action is an explanation for that it's the amalgamation in the case of biology well let's go back to the level of the origins of the universe and the origin of life my life as we both know has got this digital database it's got a language all of its own now the only thing we know of capable of producing language is mind and yet you reject that by definition as an atheist you must reject that there's no button on you behind this language I do reject it when you say the only thing we know that can produce language is mind I mean we know that what produces human language is mind of course we do because that's human language but DNA is not human like a very sophisticated very sophisticated but it doesn't follow that it has to be generated by mind but we know of no other conceivable way of it being generated you see because it seems to me from the mathematical point of view I think you said there's somewhere in a different context junk in junk out here we have this phenomenally sophisticated information processor which is the cell am I really to believe that that information processing capacity simply came about by the laws of nature and random processes with out of mind yes well I find that impossible to petition I know you do this is called the argument from personal incredulity but I could just reverse that and says your position is the argument from personal incredulity the rationality comes from irrationality that mind comes from matter to me the biblical explanation in the beginning was the word the logos that makes perfect sense and it makes sense of the of the fact that we can do science itself but you haven't explained where the logos came from in the first well of course not because the logos didn't come from anywhere within in what sense is it an explanation because the notion that you say you have to ask who created the logos that says that you're thinking of a created God the whole point about the God revealed in the Bible is that he was not created he is eternal he is the eternal logos and I asked myself as an inference to the best explanation which makes more sense that there's an eternal logos and that the universe its laws the capacity for mathematical description and so on that these things are derivative including the human mind from the logos that makes very much more sense to me as a scientist that it's the other way around when there is no explanation for the existence of the universe do you just believe the universe is a brute fact the universe is an easier brute fact to accept than a conscious creator well who made it it's you who insist on asking that question oh no you asked me who made the creator the universe created you Richard who made it a God is a complicated entity which requires a much more sophisticated and difficult explanation than a universe which is according to modern physics a very simple entity it's a very simple beginning it's not a negligible beginning but it's a very simple beginning that has got to be easier to explain then something is complicated as a god yeah you can't explain the existence of God but I think you may have missed my question my I'm drawing a parallel you see you say that it's at least if don't know put words in your mouth of course because that would be unfair but I'm getting the message that it's ridiculous for me to believe in a God who created the universe and me because they have to ask who created God all I'm doing is turning that question round and saying the universe you admit created you because there's nothing else well then who created it I understand you'll put you perfectly I'm making that we both of us are faced with the problem of saying how did things start yes I'm saying it's a hell of a lot easier to start with something simple than to start with something complex that's what complex means but I don't think so if I pick up a book called The God Delusion it's a pretty sophisticated book that's got lots of words in it but actually as I look at page one I don't even need to go beyond page one I conclude that it comes from something more complex in that book itself namely you yes I mean obviously complex things exist and brain Z well look at the universe the whole show which includes dolphin planets tell you why because my brain that produced a book has an explanation in its own right that explanation is evolution we go back and back and back to the origin of the universe that provides an explanation for complex brains and complex brains produce books and museums and cars and computers of course we have complex things that produce other complex things but science has an explanation for where complex brains come from in terms of simple beginning I don't think it has at all at the level of the origin of life reading the the literature even the recent literature the word miracle comes up probably far too often for your liking anyway that they're just going from say the self organizational properties of low-level molecules that you got in some kind of primeval situation to the phenomenal self organizational potentialities of macromolecules there's just no way you can get there well you think you're asserting that there's no way we don't yet know what it is because there's a lot of work yet to be done science doesn't yet know everything there are still gasps yes but I'm not ruling out the fact that there there's a physical side hood and so on but it seems to me that the fact that the basic description of this ancient language and it's a very ancient language of DNA points much more arguably to the existence of a logos a divine logos who started it than the notion that it's going to be exhaustively explained in purely naturalistic terms because I would still go back to the point I made earlier although I don't want to harp on it this extreme reductionism removes from me the very rationality which we use to have the discussion so that I'm not simply terribly tempted to believe it's all been designed I believe it's all been designed but that doesn't and here's something else that I'd like to bring up in this that doesn't stop science I fear sometimes that your dichotomy either God or science might put some people off science because they'd prefer God and that would be a pity well you're hopping around and what yeah topic to another but so we could do the origin of life we could do the idea of miracles the idea that somehow my approach to science puts people off but okay let's do the last one then when when you feel like it you will cut you will smuggle in magic you will smuggle in magic for miracles in the Bible you'll smuggled in magic for the origin of life I don't I can't explain the origin of life at the moment I mean nobody can people work you believe that it will have a naturalistic solution yes I think that it is a cowardly cop-out to suggest that just because we don't yet understand something therefore it magic did it no well I would agree with that I I mean the God of the gaps idea well but you that's exactly what you're putting forward the God of the gaps you're saying you're pointing to the origin of life you're pointing to the origin of of DNA and saying oh well okay we darlings done everything after the origin of life but he hasn't done the origin of life no oh my god of the gas I think what I'm saying here is that there may well be two kinds of gaps that is there are bad gaps at science closes but could it not be that science can open some gaps now what I mean by that is this your assumption as I understand it is that there's going to be an exhaustive reductionist naturalistic explanation of everything in scientific terms I don't think so no if there is a God and if he created this universe and if as I believe he is personal then I would expect certain things to follow one that I would see evidence not proof but evidence in the universe that God existed I feel I see that in the mathematical described ability of the universe in the fine-tuning of the universe and so on and in the marvelous sophistication of the world I'd expect to to see God as traces there I would also expect that there may be occasions when God speaks in special ways and therefore the more we try to analyze those things in terms of purely reductionist science it'll get more and more difficult instead of more more simple I wouldn't expect there to be many of those places I think the origin of light might be one of them and certainly when it comes up into more recent history you mentioned miracles the thing that is central for me is the fact that what you call petit and I feel is is vastly significant because it's touching on something that affects every human being the question of death now if Jesus really literally rose from the dead as a matter of history that makes an enormous difference to our view of the world and so far from being petty if this is God speaking to us then I want to take it extremely seriously why do you think it's so close of course it makes a huge difference if it's true yes exactly but you've suddenly left from sophisticated discussions of the origin of the universe where one can have a proper discussion about whether some sort of cosmic intelligence could have set forth the laws of physics and you'll suddenly jump to a man who lived 2,000 years ago was born of a virgin rose again from the dead well I know right because you mentioned it well I think ma petit I think that's petty by comparison with the grandeur of the universe I mean to put my point again do you really think that the the creator of this magnificent edifice of the universe these the expanding universe the galaxies he really couldn't think of a better way to get rid of the sins on this one little speck of dust than to have himself tortured he's the one who's doing the forgiving after all couldn't he just have forgiven because this is a moral universe Richard and just forgiving doesn't make sense I mean he has to kill himself in order he doesn't kill himself get himself killed God God God sends his Son into the world to provide forgiveness and to provide a basis on which he can justly bring forgiveness to me no he has to get himself killed half a minute we need to step back from this a little bit because it's actually a highly relevant in your world where is justice just to be found well it's at justice is a human construct of great importance in human affairs and it's something that we have most of us have a sense of which I think probably can be given some sort of Darwinian explanation but I don't see where you're taking this well my question is is there any ultimate justice you see you say this is petty I'm saying I find myself in a world which is a broken world I find myself in a world where there's massive injustice where many people won't get it we are so privileged we live in Oxford and so on we've got enough money to live on etc etc but if there is no God then there's no ultimate justice and one of the things that the resurrection transforms for me from pettiness right into center stage is if this is true then there's real hope that there'd be a rational evaluation and fair justice at the end of the world but atheism doesn't give you that okay suppose there is no hope suppose there is no justice suppose there is nothing but misery and darkness and bleakness suppose there is nothing that we would wish for nothing that we would hope for too bad if that doesn't make it true just because God would make us feel good well of course it doesn't well then why do you make bring that argument up because I believe that there is evidence that it is true I don't believe in the resurrection just like that because faith is based on evidence I've James around again what what you said before was that there is no hope without God and it sounds true that's absolutely true he just admitted it so I haven't admitted it I said if that's true you know what I didn't say it was true but anyway and but the first question to be decided then is is there a God and has he revealed himself and that's where again I think this pettiness needs to be pushed aside because I can't get to know you as a person you're not just a scientific object I can look at you through a telescope or a magnifying glass I could even dissect you and so on and so forth but because you are a person I cannot get to know you unless you're prepared to reveal yourself to me so the fact that the claim of of Christ to be the truth to be God incarnate that makes perfect sense to me because if there is a God who invented this wonderful marvelous universe with all its science and all the rest then he has taken the initiative in getting to know us and revealing himself to us and he's revealed himself to us at the level we can understand where persons he's a person that at least makes sense so one of the very important questions to ask is is that really true or is this simply myth and fantasy well myth and fantasy for me yeah well you know that disturbs me for the following reason reading your book The God Delusion you say that it's under scholarly dispute among historians that Jesus actually existed now I checked with the ancient historians that is not so and it disturbed me history is not natural science but what I don't understand is this why you would write something like that I don't think it's a very important question whether Jesus existed there are some historians most historians think he did some they certainly do I couldn't find an ancient historian the didn't part well there are one or two but I don't really care actually because it precisely because it's Betty I mean I cannot I mean if you could you could possibly persuade me that there was some kind of creative force in the universe there was some kind of physical mathematical genius who created everything the expanding universe devised quantum theory relativity and all that you could possibly persuade me of that but that is radically and fundamentally incompatible with the sort of God who cares about sin the sort of God who cares about what what you do with your genitals the sort of God who who is interested to have the slightest interest in your private thoughts and wickedness is of the things like that surely you can see that a God who is grand enough to make the universe is not going to give a tough knee cuss about what what what you're thinking about him and your sins and things like that so you think that morality is not important of course I don't think we're at it is not important about human seems like you're saying I'm a human being and I live in a society of human beings and within a society of human beings morality is of course important but we are one of billions of planets on a huge scale and a cosmic God who bothers about this kind of human scale is not the kind of God that is is that is compatible with a scientific view of the universe it's a medieval view but do you think that size is the measurable incidentally on a logarithmic scale you are about halfway between the outer than the universe so if God thinks in terms of logarithms your point Falls I think I mean listen is in a sense an emotional argument we've come into now and I don't think so I I want to I want to risk if I were going to respect a god it would be the kind of God who the sort of God that Carl Sagan might have might have worshipped not the sort of medieval God who fusses about sin the obsession with sin and and righteousness and sort of I keep coming back to this word pity and I stand by it well it's a it's an image of God that I find strange in a way I gather from the BBC today that you're promoting some advert of London buses which is going to say something like there probably is no God so don't worry and enjoy your life now I was very interested in that why don't worry do you associate the idea of God worth warning you I fought for a better slogan than that this was this was this was something that was that was devised by by a woman on that on the Guardian and she wanted to raise money from five pounds here five pounds there to put this advertisement on the London buses I offered to match donations and I said I'd rather change the slogan to I'm not from there probably is isn't is no God there almost certainly is no God and I didn't want to say don't worry and enjoy your life I wanted to say something like live your life to the full but it was too late to to change it and I'm since then the money has been raised in the first day something like twenty three thousand pounds already being been raised and she was only hoping for five thousand five hundred I'm going to get some say in what the next slogan is and it's not then just hey what the present alum does but from where I sit do you see the thing that my relationship with God is the very thing that stops the word and gives me the fullness of life and we're back to the pettiness because if God is real and has revealed himself then it's it's through a relationship with him that we really can enjoy a full life science included I find that so unconvincing yeah I think there's something wonderful about standing up and facing up to a universe where we are increasing our understanding and we throw away childhood obsession as we throw away the sort of imaginary friend that comforts us when we're children and we we feel the need for some kind of parent figure to to turn to I think when we when we grow up we need to cast that aside and stand up tall in the universe and it's cold and they're not going to last for it with me and we're going to die and we face up to that and I think that's a nobler way of getting through life than to pin your hopes on childhood illusions but that all rests on the assumption that there's no God and their childhood delusions yes well we heard I could invert that that's a typical Freudian explanation yet one's atheism could be exactly that yeah a flight away from the reality that there is a God so we're back to the question inevitably we need the evidence we need the evidence and what I'm suggesting to you is that we do have evidence we have it in science part of God's revelation and I believe this building was probably dedicated to the glory of God it wasn't alright okay rather the reverse well oxford university where we get back a few says yes the the Lord is my light my illumination is is is the base of it that there was that wholeness of life and it seems to me that by truncating everything and putting it into the science basket so to speak that I get the impression that you're not taking history really seriously otherwise you'd interact with it and I'm trying to get to the basis of why that is so because you regard what Jesus has done and who he is as petty and I find the contrast between standing tall in the silent and cold universe with no hope believing that your moral sense must ultimately be illusion you're crying for justice because most people will never get it because death ends everything the contrast between that and enjoying the friendship the personal friendship of God and knowing that ultimate justice will be done is immense well the basic question is is it true or not yeah and that is the basic question it is completely irrelevant if it's comforting if it gives you hope if it gives you happiness that has nothing to do with whether it's God I agree with Luke tyranny so we need to know whether it's true yeah now when you look at history and let's let's leave aside maybe I I alluded to the possibility that some historians think Jesus never exists I take that back Jesus existed however if you're going to say that Jesus was born of a virgin that Jesus walked on water he turned water into wine that is palpably anti-scientific there is no evidence for that and if there were you would be welcome in there simply isn't any evidence for that and those no scientists could possibly take the idea seriously I can make it worse for you I know you can because Jesus actually came to be the logos that created the whole universe and if this is the Creator incarnate making water into wine and so on is really a triviality the the the more fundamental thing is the fact that he claimed to be and gave evidence that he was God when you say it's anti-scientific I don't think it's empty scientific at all science cannot say that miracles do not occur can say they're highly improbable but nobody is claiming that these things occurred by natural processes they they occurred because God fed his power in nor did the whole universe if we look at occur in that sense by natural processes God created we study all the natural processes within it so when you say it's anti scientific I think it's not anti scientific what I mean by that is that if and when doing science we constantly have to keep in mind that at any moment there might be a little magic trick slipped in that would completely nullify the whole enterprise of so I agree with that but no no no I'm not allowing that at all because in order to recognize what the new testament calls miracle a special act of God you must be living in a universe that has regularities and have we recognize them I agree with you entirely otherwise I was worried if the miracles if that's exactly true I wouldn't recognize and dead people were popping up all over the place you wouldn't think it was very special but the fact is you need two things not one you've got to have reiki array regularities which we call the laws of nature although they're not causes they're in a sense descriptions that we can use you also need to be able to recognize those so that for example when Joseph discovered that his wife-to-be Mary was pregnant he simply didn't believe her story he was going to divorce her he knew exactly where babies came from he knew the regularity it took very special convincing for him to realize that something extremely special had happened but science cannot stop that the question is of course did such a thing ever and the center of focus in the New Testament is not that which is not so readily accessible to evidence the Virgin Conception but the resurrection of Christ and ancient historians and that is fascinated me recently going over ancient historians whose discipline is very venerable and I'm not talking about Christian ancient historians ancient historians many of them even at the skeptical end of the spectrum say that the evidence for the resurrection of Christ is very powerful the explosion of the Christian Church from a non proselytizing group of Jews than the first century the empty tomb and all the rest of it has even led gaze over mesh is one of the most distinguished ancient historians an Oxford to say yes this tomb was empty and hallucinations of this kind of explanation do not wash so we have to ask ourselves are we prepared to believe in historical testimony or not well you must talk to different historians in the one I talk to but than the ones I talk to but but in in any case I still come back to the point that you cannot do science if at any time you you remember that famous cartoon of I mean that is that is deeply against the spirit of science and I I don't think I could do science if I thought that at any time something like the resurrection something like the virgin birth was going to be smuggled in by a godly Caprice let me let me stop you right there gentlemen we we need now to move on to the last topic and we we've haven't left ourselves a great deal of time here and that's the issue of meaning human life and meaning and purpose and morality you've kind of touched on morality just a bit but it was only briefly so let's let's move the conversation there and then we'll have our Q&A these problems to a complete stop as today the t-rex is warming up yeah well well we have talked a bit about we have talked to a bit about meaning to have a really well meet meaning is is something which obviously scientists like to find and we like to find meaning in things we like to add to understand things and as I said before brains are selected to be functional to work well in the real world and one of the things that makes them work well from a survival point of views to find meaning and correct meaning to ought to interpret the facts of the world in a way which fits in with what's going to happen next for example so you you don't jump over a cliff because you understand the meaning of jumping over a cliff is that you're going to die so meaning is something that human brains appreciate and meaning is something that scientists appreciate in a more sophisticated way so what is the ultimate meaning of life for you the ultimate meaning of life depends on what you mean by it obviously each one of us can make an ultimate meaning we each one of us can can have a private meaning a purpose in our life what we hope to achieve in our life or a biologist might say the ultimate meaning of life is the propagation of genes that would be a very different kind of meaning and they're both true mmm-hmm I suppose the basic question for me here is what is the nature of ultimate reality if ultimate reality is simply the universe in some sense or multiverse that's one thing and I am at a loss to understand how you get from simple atoms elementary particles and so on to a brain let alone a mind the I the person and we don't understand what consciousness is and so on I don't begin to say and I don't think scientists begin to see how you can get to something that even understands the concept of meaning but I can understand it if behind the universe the ultimate reality is not impersonal matter and energy that somehow has produced all this stuff bottom-up I can understand it if it's top-down as well as partly bottom-up and that is that there is a God who is personal who is good who is the source of life and meaning and who reaches out to me as a person and who in fact far from stopping me doing science encourages the development of the mind that he has given me and so meaning to me has all kinds of dimensions as you would agree with in my family with my wife and my children and my work and so on but it's not bounded by the threescore years and ten it's not bounded by the the death of the universe either it's got an expanding horizon of hope and that to me is the only thing that is worthy of the God that created this vast cosmos that our lives are not going to be extinguished just like that there is a beyond and I can walk with confidence into that beyond because I have a real relationship so it's got a firm basis with the God who invented it all and therefore it seems to me that the the meaning given by atheism and reductionism is very very tiny now of course you'll come back and rigid and say it's a question of truth of course it's a question of truth but at least we can have a look at the different kinds of worlds that we represent because that business of it's tempting it is terribly tempting do you ever get terribly tempted to believe that there is a God and that the kind of anything I'm saying is led to you already that it there are many things that would be very nice about it but as you've just repeated it doesn't make it true no it doesn't I mean you think you're going to survive your own death I gather yes I do yeah I mean but so you think that even though your brain die is something I mean at what point in evolution did that remarkable faculty emerge well I haven't a notion as part of the the God has created human beings in His image and earth does that mean in His image he looks like us no no what they have personality that it's an anthropomorphism but we are persons God is a person and therefore we can relate to him that's what I was Homo erectus a person well I can't decide by looking at fossils whether it was a person but usually do you think has happened gradually or was there a moment when a child was born it was a person and his parents weren't I my own feeling is that there was a point when God did something special but I'm very hard to detect that from any scientific investigation so god suddenly kind of dived into the evolutionary process and said right from now on they're going to be persons well whether he dived into an evolutionary process or did it specially I do believe at evolution as far as Darwin thought the variation and modification that we've been talking about I'm not actually sure but this is a vast topic now to begin John I think we I think we digress yeah the issue again is its purpose I want to hear that ending I want I want to hear whether he believes in evolution well I've said that I believe in what Darwin observed but I'm not sure that the mechanism of mutation and natural selection can bear all the weight that's put on it or huh for example producing consciousness and so on I think there may be several points in the history of the universe where God did something special but I'm not going to be over dogmatic on that tonight because those aren't the places where I rest my faith in God sorry mr. Church no I again we still have a few minutes but we're discussing this issue how do you feel that you've discussed sufficiently the issues of of purpose human purpose you're actually giving a lecture on that in a in two days and also the issue of myrrh are you comfortable that you've discussed that yeah I think we should go to questions okay well very good yes yeah okay the first question is for is for dr. Lennox and it is excuse me professor Lennox how do you explain the similarities between organised religions and why do you feel that the Christian faith is in some way more viable than the others that's a question for me yes indeed how do I explain the similarities between organized religions I think that when we look around the world there are various aspects to any given religion and one of the very important ones is the moral aspect and as has been pointed out by many people if you look around the world you find a common moral pool in fact you mentioned this in your book a common moral pool that people of all faiths or none will respond very similarly to the same kind of moral questions now to me the explanation for that is the one I've just given that each person is a moral being made in the image of God and therefore as I look around the world I would expect where the people believe in God or not that they've a roughly similar morality so there are similarities at that level but then you will get very big differences when it comes particularly to the question of the basis for a relationship with God and that tends to diverge there are some religions that's that say that a relationship with God must be based on human merit and as many probably know Christianity says the exact opposite that the relationship of God comes through trusting Christ because of what he did through his cross and resurrection and is not merit but is a gift I don't know whether you want me to expand further than that but that's you've got you've got a bit of time both of you do if you you want the second part of the question again just special about Christianity yes what what distinguishes Christianity what what excuse me why do you feel that the Christian faith is in some way more viable than the other religion I see well I think for me the question is very aware of Richards that they here to my right is is whether it's true or not and Christ claimed to be the way the truth of the life and either that's absurd nonsense or else it's true now I'm convinced it is true why is it true well if we take the three great monotheistic religions and their attitude to Christ we'll find that one of them believes that he died and didn't rise the other believes that he didn't die and Christianity believes that he will died and rose again now that's something that I feel that we can access by history the second point is this and it's probably the most important point it's that it seems to me in a way that Christianity is not competing with other religions let me try and explain that because as I understand the New Testament what Christ offers me is something that no other religion offers me many religions offer me a very a path of moral paths to follow which may be excellent but what Christianity offers me is a radical diagnosis which some people react against the the fact that I find myself disjointed I find myself I don't even keep my own standards and so on and I find also that the relationship of God has been broken and there is need for repair there's need for forgiveness now in Christ in his death and resurrection I find that there's an adequate basis for forgiveness so that I can be certain of my relationship with God and know it now I don't find that anywhere else I find wonderful morality and all the rest of it and I think it's very important that we respect people of other faiths but if you ask me what makes the difference that's the central one there are many others okay - professor Dawkins you think that there is no purpose in religion no purpose in religion well as I said before individuals have purposes and many individuals have purposes that are deeply shot through sometimes literally with religion they are there are people in the world very large numbers of people whose entire life is guided by religion everything they do is guided by religion so the answer of course is yes there are purposes in religion I think that it is a tragedy that people waste their lives devoting it to such fanciful imaginary purposes but I can't deny that they do over to professor Lenox if we accept that an omnipotent designer is responsible for our existence then how do you explain the deficiencies in our design well of course the question assumes that there are deficiencies or all design involves compromise with all kinds of different constraints and so on and so forth so I think before I rush to say there are deficiencies in our design I would need to know what the ultimate purpose of the designer walls and all the rest of it so it's very difficult to respond to that I believe myself that the ultimate designer is God but I also believe we live in a damaged universe and so we see around us alas all kinds of things that are result of well human evil as a result of the disjointedness of creation and so on and so forth but that would lead us into a very much deeper question of the problem of moral evil and pain - professor Dawkins how do you explain the origin of the laws of physics I do not know the origin of the laws of physics as I've said again and again what I do know is that whatever they are and I've said this again and again whatever they are it certainly doesn't help to propose that they were designed by a conscious intelligence because that simply makes a bigger question than you've solved now the laws of physics but to break that down a little a little more it has been suggested that the laws of physics are extremely fine-tuned and that if they were any different the universe as we know it wouldn't exist stars wouldn't exist chemistry wouldn't exist biology wouldn't exist and we wouldn't exist and theists are tempted to say therefore the laws of physics must have been designed in such a way that they are exactly fine-tuned to bring us into existence once again that is the non explanation because it leaves open the explanation for the designer there are many physicists who explain that by saying well of the so called anthropic principle saying that we could only exist in a universe which has the the right laws and the right constants to bring us into existence and therefore the fact that we're talking about it determines that we must be in such a universe that's the anthropic principle there are versions of it which make it a bit more plausible for example the multiverse theory that there are lots of different universes that we live in a kind of bubbling foam of universes and each bubble in the foam has a different set of laws of physics the vast majority of those laws of physics are not conducive to giving rise to us a tiny minority are conducive to giving rise to advanced life forms and once again the anthropic principle comes in we could only exist we could only be in one of those bubbles that has the necessary laws of physics to bring us into existence and therefore obviously since we do exist since we're talking about it we must be in such a universe I haven't answered the question but what I hope I have done is to show that whatever else the answer is it cannot be God okay gentlemen now what what I would like to do I want to give you ample time for your closing remarks and so we will begin with professor Lenox you may take five minutes no more than five minutes and then we will conclude with Professor Dawkins he will have the last word has science buried Goblin I think not science arose in the 16th and 17th centuries a meteoric rise that historians of science have looked at and come to the conclusion that one of the main motors driving the rise of science was faith in God so far from belief in God being a science stopper it was the thing that caused science to rise in the first place understandably so because people had a basis for believing that the universe was rationally accessible and so they could do their science which is apparently one of the reasons given by Needham the famous psychologist and Oxford when he looked at China and asked the question why did science not develop in this way in China and in the end or Louisa Marx's they came to the conclusion that it was because of the Christian background so I'm not ashamed of being both the scientists and a Christian and I suppose that the major argument that points doesn't prove but points towards God is that this universe is a universe in which science can be done the fact that the laws are there Richard honestly says he doesn't know where they come from they come from the logos the mind that is behind this universe that has created it by his power and for his glory and therefore doing science like Galileo and Kepler suggests that doing mathematics is to discover the secrets of the universe in the language in which God has written them the other reason why I reject atheism as an explanation is it doesn't even to my mind begin to rise to account for the rationality which lies behind science also I think that the Christian faith which I unashamedly aspires is not empty scientific and I would plead for the same attention to be paid to history as is paid to science itself I find very unconvincing arguments that tripped very lightly over things that historians do except which mean that we should take the scholarship that has to do with the rest of the existence and the resurrection of Christ very seriously indeed the other big area which we didn't discuss in great detail tonight is that if science has buried God it seems to me there's something else that lies before us and that is where are we going to get our morality from because Richard is written in one of his books that the universe is just like we'd expect to find it if at bottom there's no good there's no evil there's no justice DNA justice and we dance to its music that seems to me to be a frightfully deterministic universe and it it troubles me to this extent because it seems to me that on the one hand the New Atheists of which Richard is a leader in the world are trying in a way to hold on to the values that were given to them by Christianity actually and I would like to emphasize that because in many of these books nothing good is said about religion but jürgen there's not a Christian of course recently said that the foundations of our legal system and our education under morality in Europe are based on Christianity everything else is postmodern chatter what worries me is this that can you really retain these good moral values and dispose atheism hard atheists like Nietzsche and come who would say you can't eventually it will lead to madness and some people are suggesting that that is actually what's going to happen and I have a question for for Richard Dawkins is his world the world of Peter Singer where in the end moral values get so eroded by a naturalistic framework that Peter Singer can say a newborn baby is of no more value than a pig or a dog or a chimpanzee is that the world to which the New Atheism is leading us Peter Singer is one of the most moral people I know and when he says something like that it is based upon a very rigorous moral philosophic reasoning he's interested in suffering and his point is there that a newborn baby or certainly a human fetus may be less capable of suffering than say a full-grown Pig that seems to me to be an entirely rational point of view at least an entirely defensible point of view over it was tossed in at the last minute and I don't want to take all my time dealing with that John who quoted me as saying the universe has a bottom no god no evil and you said it has exactly the the properties we'd expect if there if there was nothing there you said that sounds horribly deterministic what another way of putting that would it would be to say that the universe is horribly irrational horribly intelligible and one of the main points you've been making is that is precisely that that we have we live in an intelligible universe and that's one of the things that we need to explain and you think it needs a God in order to explain it what I would like to know is what would an unintelligible University look like how could any creature live as we live how could any creature have evolved and survived in a universe that didn't have that kind of mathematical intelligibility is the anthropic principle again just as we could only be living in a universe that has stars because you need stars to make molecules so we could only have survived in a universe where there is rationality I cannot conceive of what an irrational unlawful universe would look like now science doesn't know everything so it's one of the glories of science that we know what we don't know and we work on what we don't know try to shrink what we don't know it's hard work we don't cop out by saying well if you come to a difficult problem magic must have done it or God must have done it no we don't say that we say right that's a problem to be solved it may not be solved this century it may be solved in the following century or the one after that but we don't just lie down and give up and say oh well it must be magic because we don't yet understand it I would hold up Darwin as a model for the whole er science because before Darwin came along the whole of life the complexity of life the beauty of life the elegance of life the apparent design of life looked like magic and everybody thought it was magic everybody thought that God did it it's so complicated it's so elegant now that was the really big problem that's a that was a far bigger problem than the problem of the origin of life than the problem of the cosmic of the origin of the cosmos Darwin solved that problem all scientists now know that Darwin solved that problem and in so doing he provided us with a sort of parable that don't even think about giving up because if ever there was a time to have given up it was in the case of biology because biology really was a difficult problem a hard problem Darwin solved it now we have one or two other problems remaining like the origin of life like the origin of the cosmos the origin of the laws of physics no doubt though there are physicists here who could point to yet other ones Darwin provides us with a lesson that says don't give up because if Darwin could solve it for the really difficult problem which was life then we have every hope that science will solve it for the other problems in the end and even if it doesn't even if science doesn't solve all problems ever that is still no grounds for saying oh well magic did it well gentlemen thank you so very much for providing us with a very elegant model for engaging on these very difficult issues ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking them I I don't know about you but I am exhausted I have been riveted listening to the two of you and now what we're going to do we invite members of the media to retire to I believe there's a room up here where these two men will meet with you briefly we invite the rest of you to queue up if you'd like to buy a book and have it signed by the two of them I don't think there will be time to have all books signed nonetheless they will sign is as many as they can before they go to a prior engagement thank you so much for coming [Music] I think it was really good have a really engaged with one another so quite often with debates like this you find like whether it's not really a kind of clear conclusion you find that I'm kind of just discussing at each other alongside each other but they really engage which I thought was really good well I think it was really balanced I honestly could say I don't think there was a winner in it I thought they both brought really great arguments and I thought they both put forward their arguments very well very coherent they both respected one another which is brilliant and I mean my mind was made up before but I was open to suggestion my view is still the same fixed and I just really enjoyed it [Music] with her I think they both were both pretty coherent there are a few contradictions here in Ephraim from both sides but on the whole is very good debate and both both sides of the argument I felt were put forward and I'm the strongest way they could have been well I found interesting was that when actually despite all these kind of scientific arguments a lot of it comes down to like whether Jesus existed or not and actually I found interesting how dawkins went okay yeah okay Jesus did exist like that's quite that's quite a retreat from his previous position you know and so I think that's quite significant in itself that he said that [Music] I think it went well I think it was great that they both had a good opportunity to talk but I do think that from my perspective that we have to look at who Jesus is and look at the resurrection in order to really be able to think is there a god out there clearly convinced of Dawkins view but tonight helped to take a few minutes [Music] yeah I thought in staying as well I was a bit disappointed by the arguments that Lennox put forward because I was hoping for a bit more challenging from the Christian perspective I'm since a lot of his arguments I've seen elsewhere that been refuted and things and I thought they both relate maybe I didn't really get down to it but it's still really entertaining and it was you know great to see Dawkins especially now he's such big sort of TV personality I think John Lennox really had a very good answer very strong message based in lots of truth and facts and I think that he came over as the more authoritative person as evening really enjoyed it okay absolutely you need to discuss this kind of thing because you know if you don't you know you need to you need to think about these things to stop you getting lakhs in your you know in your own views I mean that that works on both sides I think I'm you know you can't just go around I'm not I think taking a stance but not thinking it through properly and that works whether you're coming from a little bit for an irreligious one you have to back up what you say with evidence and you know things that you've actually thought about I heard golfing history doesn't mean I frequently meet on that day thank the great thing about the to us is that we can at least talk because neither of us is a postmodern relative [Music] it's actually a very important is ever ever in your life ever once just wanted to answer them it would be them it would be great there was a girl maybe I have but if my absolute doesn't make it true no I mean that's what matters [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Christopher Coutant

Views: 67,031

Keywords: Creation, Evolution, Heaven, God, Science, Dawkins, Debate

Id: MEf6mKZqJZs

Length: 81min 52sec (4912 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2017