Did Science Kill God? Dr. John Lennox

[Music] please forgive me for sitting down but the reason is that I'm old and secondly I've spent a lot of my time in Russia and when you lecture in Russia normally you lecture in the seated position and there's a table in front of you and as you speak people write questions and then they get up and they walk across and they bow and they put their question there and the longer you speak the greater grows the pile of questions so that's the way it's done I'm not suggesting that it should be done there tonight we've got much more sophisticated ways of doing it but I intend to with your leave to sit and talk to you on this fascinating topic now let me get some idea of who you are how many of you would identify yourselves as students of the Natural Sciences right how many of you would identify yourselves more in the humanities direction of the liberal arts roughly half and half as one might expect but that's enormous ly encouraging to me because it's sad when you just see an audience that's completely comprised of natural scientists the interesting thing is the title science and God means different things in different countries in the West the word science means Natural Science but when I'm doing these things in Germany this in Java means all knowledge whether it's history whether it's languages whether it's biochemistry physics or mathematics and in a way it's important that we realize that all of the sciences come to play because we're interested in the intellectual big world now just to tell you a little bit about myself because I am equally interested in the arts and the sciences because I started off wanting to be a linguist I wanted to be an expert on Greek and Latin and then I got more interested in French and then I decided this physics and mathematics were the thing and so I moved across to physics and mathematics I had a very good languages teacher at school so that when I was 15 or 16 I could speak French pretty fluently and I thought do I need to go to university to pursue this or perhaps I could do languages for fun and do the sciences as well and that is at the end what I decided to do and I ended up doing pure mathematics at Cambridge in the early 1960s not 1860s please and have enjoyed ever since the value of having the cultural interests that proceed from language interests to mathematics now they're connected because of course natural languages and pure mathematics of something in common both of them are a language and pure mathematics is in one sense the most refined language we know except I imagine that the computer experts among you might argue that computer languages are even more pure and more exact but I've always been interested in this notion that we can express ideas in language that we can read and write and communicate and so studying mathematics I was always interested in the bigger question word as mathematics fit in the bigger world of culture and history what is its significance for instance I don't know whether you realize that you had a near-miss today without lump of rock about a third of a mile across did you hear it whizzing past it mister 'the by about three times the distance from earth to the moon that's about 750,000 kilometers so you can breathe a sigh of relief because it's not good to come round for quite a long time and because of your wonderful skies over California which I envy I wish I had my telescope with me because at the moment you can see a marvelous Comet Lovejoy and it's fairly rapidly disappearing it won't be round for another eight thousand years now we sight these figures as if it's dead easy to calculate this kind of thing and if you were set to calculate when Comet Lovejoy would come round again you might have considerable difficulty if you have to do it from first principles the fascinating thing is that mathematics allows us to get a grip on the universe out there even as a child I found that staggering when I learned Newton's law of gravitation it's got eight symbols in it and when I first discovered that you could derive the elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun from those eight symbols I thought that was absolutely spectacular just without single bit of information you can land a person on the moon you don't even need i'm Stein's corrections i brilliant people have asked questions about that Einstein famously said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible how is it that we can understand the universe mathematically in 1961 the Nobel Prize winner I gain Vigna he wrote a very famous paper much-loved of mathematicians called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics how can it be reasonable that here's a map petition she's thinking in here she comes up with a set of equations and lo and behold they enable her to describe a phenomenon right there like the return of Comet Lovejoy in the next eight thousand years how does that work how is it that large parts of the universe are describable in terms of mathematics now that leads to all kinds of very interesting questions and the question before us this evening is the famous very old but very important question of the relationship of science to faith in God because there's quite a considerable body of opinion at the moment very vocal led by people like Richard Dawkins with whom I've debated publicly you can see that on the Internet if you like who feel that in science has abolished God effectively and indeed Stephen Hawking who's arguably the world's most famous living scientist he simply says look you've got to choose between science and god and as a result many young people undergraduates graduate students have said okay I've got to choose between science and God so I choose science now I want to investigate that a little bit because there's something odd going on here why I say that is because I just been talking to you about one of the most famous scientists of all time Sir Isaac Newton who discovered the law of gravitation pin he and Stephen Hawking have in common that they both occupied the same professorship at Cambridge and the interesting thing is that Isaac Newton was not an atheist according to Stephen Hawking Isaac Newton should have chosen between science and God but he didn't he was very famously a believer in God and what I want to investigate with you tonight I want to focus it on those two individuals to make the discussion easier to follow and I hope to provoke you to questions I want to take you on a journey that I've been on myself because I've been puzzled for a very long time how it is that the pioneers of science Galileo Kepler Newton Clark Maxwell Charles Babbage how it is that they were all believers in God and yet today people like Stephen Hawking say you've got to either believe in God or be a scientist so let's have a look at that and please note down your questions so that we can come to them at a suitable time I'm not going to cover all of this topic it's a huge topic and it's a fascinating topic but what I want to do is to try to clear up some fog because it seems to me that there's a lot of intellectual confusion around this whole debate and we can only navigate our way around it if we see what causes some of the confusion the first thing is that often people think that there's a conflict between God and science now that cannot be the case think of the Nobel Prize for Physics it was won last year by Peter Higgs a Scotsman and the Higgs boson and Peter Higgs is an atheist just a few years before that the same Nobel Prize was won by an American Bill Phillips and he's a Christian now they're no different as scientists they both won the Nobel Prize and you can get no better than that it can't be science versus God obviously because they're both brilliant scientists and what that tells us is this that there's a real conflict but it's not between science and god it's between their two worldviews Higgs is an atheist that's his worldview he takes a naturalistic perspective on the universe that's his worldview it conflicts with the worldview of Bill Phillips he's a Christian so let me say first of all that we need to reorient it ourselves in the debate if we're ever going to understand it the real conflict is between two worldviews which are obviously opposed atheism and theism so the question that we can ask now is the sensible one which way does science point does it point towards atheism or does it point towards God or does a point know her and so I want to amass the evidence for you tonight I'm not going to give you proof for the mathematical sense parent for the obvious reason that you can only give proofs in the mathematical sense for things in mathematics what I'm going to do is to do what we do in every other area of natural science and supply evidence so what evidence is there that there should be a positive connection between faith in God and science well the first thing is to go back to Newton himself and the pioneers of science it has been noticed many times that modern science as we know it grew up in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries its pioneers were old believers in God to such an extent that the most common view of this is in the words of CS Lewis men became scientific why because they expected law of nature why because they believed in a lawgiver now that is a fascinating claim it's saying that far from faith in God hindering science it was faith in God that drove science that was the motor that drove it and the connection is obvious because let's go back to Victor's unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics but it's not unreasonable if you take the theistic view and these early pioneers like Kepler they looked at the universe and they said what we're doing is studying the universe and the language God gave us mathematics were thinking God's thoughts after him and because they believed in a rational God an intelligent God it was that that motivated them to say science must be able to be done and it's worth doing if we human beings are made in the image of God then perhaps we can follow some of God's thoughts and so the enormous excitement when Newton discovered his law of gravitation and now here's the interesting thing the law of gravitation plays a very important role in the contemporary debate because it's Newton's reason for believing in God and His Hawking's reason for not believing in God the very same law of gravity Stephen Hawking says because there is a law of gravity the universe can and will created herself from nothing and therefore God is totally unnecessary and yet Isaac Newton who discovered the law of gravity when he discovered it he didn't say what Hawking said he wrote a book called the principia mathematica the most famous book in the history of science expressing it at the desire that a thinking person might come through reading it to believe in God so when Newton discovers the law of gravity he says wow what a fascinating God that did it that way and of course it's true isn't that the more you understand about mechanical engineering the more you could admire the engine of a Cadillac or a Lincoln the more you understand about art the more you can understand the genius of a Rubens not the less and so the more Isaac Newton understood about the universe the more he believed about God and yet the more Stephen Hawking studies about the universe the more he seems to be increased in his atheism and I want to investigate why that difference the first reason I think and I struggled with this for quite a while because I find it so strange that Stephen Hawking who is just a bit ahead of me in Cambridge and a long way ahead of me in his mathematical ability I remember him walking around Cambridge very well I just wonder what it is that really convinces these people well the first thing is that it's very common these days and many people pick it up from Richard Dawkins simply to make an assertion God is a delusion you've heard the title of the book The God Delusion and Stephen Hawking does something like that at an interview with one of our British newspapers he said religion well that's a fairy story for people afraid of the dark now of course that's the Freudian argument and often that's used some scientist says that religion is a wish fulfillment there's psychological science brought in and that's the end of the story it isn't the end of the story if we're going to be scientific then we need to take these arguments a little bit more seriously than that for instance the first things to notice is that not every statement by a scientist is a statement of science I'm making a whole lot of statements tonight that aren't statements of science but the difficulty is that once a person is a scientist and says something people tend to think that what they said is scientifically verifiable therefore it must be true and therefore there's great authority when Carl Sagan started his series cosmos the universe is all that his walls are ever shall be well that's a marvelous statement but it's not a statement of science as a statement of his metaphysical belief that's all so when I was asked what I thought of Hawking statement religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark I was very tempted to reply and I gave in to the temptation and said atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light now it's very kind of you'd laugh but it proves nothing but what it does is illustrate what happens would you really look at the Freudian argument because one of germany's most brilliant psychiatrists has weighed in to this about this delusion question and he points out look if there is no God then Freud's argument is wonderful showing that religion is a delusion and the idea of God is a wish fulfillment and so on a father figure in the sky that's brilliant if there is no God but of course he goes on to say if there is a God the very same argument shows you that atheism is an illusion the desire not to have to meet God ever not to have a to give account for the wrong things we thought and the way we've messed up and so on if there is a God and then he says the bottom line is this that the real question whether there's a God or not Freud can't help you neither can Jung neither can Frankel you have to look somebody somewhere else and the problem is before the discussion even gets started people think the god question has been sold by Freudian psychology it has not it's actually equally balanced in both directions and doesn't address this this substantive problem at all and the next thing I would want to come to is that to my great surprise I discover that many of my scientific colleagues their problem is not so much for science but it's with God they're confused about God and that's why they say you've got to choose between science and God now this was quite a revelation to me and it's relatively recently because when I was younger and I talked about God I could assume that an audience knew what I was talking about I was talking about the triune God of the Bible who created the universe and upholds it and has left his fingerprints all over the cosmos the heavens declare the glory of God but now of course I can't understand that because many many people now think look back over history there have been thousands of gods and when I was in this area last time I debated the editor of skeptic magazine Michael Shermer and he I think it was said to me or Dawkins or somebody but they all do it with me anyway said you know you're an atheist me with respect to Zeus and yes I am I'm an artist you're an atheist respect to Walton yes I am and our Walton US and so they went through a long boring list of gods and then they said and we just go one God more and we are obvious we don't believe the God of the Bible so what they're doing you say is thinking that the God of the Bible is just like the Greek god of thunder or lightning that's a profound mistake anybody that's read anything about the ancient Pali gods of Greeks Babylonians Romans and so on will know that the key difference between them and the God of the Bible is a very simple but profound one the gods of the ancient religions are all I quote descended from the heaven and the earth that is their products of the primeval chaos primeval soup mass-energy call it what you like their material gods they come from the universe the God of the Bible created the universe that's a vast difference but the difference is more profound than that you see and the Greek god of lightning disappears when you do your first lecture in atmospheric physics at you as UCLA Physics Department because you discover how lightning works atmospheric discharges starting electricity all that kind of thing pressure gradients oh I don't need the god of lightning anymore exit that God the god of lightning is a god of the gaps the Greeks couldn't explain lightning therefore God did it now what I have discovered relatively recently is that many of my colleagues think that that's my idea of God there's something in biology I can't explain oh that's where God works God did that you say and a little bit more science that gap is closed and God gets squeezed out and disappears you understand the argument don't you now try and follow the logic of this if you define God to be a God of the gaps like that then you have to choose between God and science because that's the way you've defined God . and that explains to me a long way what's happening with many of my friendly atheist colleagues they think that I believe in a God of the gaps and they rightly say look you have to choose between that God and science so what would you do because that's the definition of that God but that's not the god I believe in at all I don't believe in a God of the gaps the bible does not start with the words in the beginning God created the bits of the universe we don't understand that's what we have very curious start wouldn't it in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth that is he created the whole show and of course that's what Newton believed and so when he discovered his law of gravity the more he understood the more he admired the genius of the God that did it that way because it's not a God of the gaps have you got that now that's crucially important because you're a long way of getting out of the fog if you understand that now when Newton discovered gravity he was getting towards a scientific explanation now this is one of the words I'm interested in most from the humanity side and from the science side what do we mean by an explanation I wonder do we discuss these in university classes but I hope to provoke you to think about things that perhaps you don't often think about in your classes what do we mean by explanation what do we mean by scientific explanation so I go to school very long time ago and the teacher comes in and writes down the law of gravity and says that's an explanation of what do you know what I thought I thought it was an explanation of gravity it isn't you know do you realize that no one knows what gravity is still today and if you don't believe that you better read Richard Feynman and he worked in the University of California so you better check before you disagree with him you see we make them a stake and it's a profound mistake of thinking that the laws of nature are explanations in every sense let me just explain a little bit more what I mean by that the law of gravitation is brilliant eight symbols it enables us to do brilliant calculations make predictions send men to the moon and so on but even Newton realized that didn't tell him what gravity was didn't explain gravity and in fact it's the famous philosopher Vidkun Stein that put his finger on it brilliantly and he said this he said the chief deception of modernism is that the laws of nature are explanations of the phenomena of nature they're not their descriptions with predictive power so even within science itself when somebody says oh we got a scientific explanation you've got to be very careful it will be very very limited even within science that's point number one point number two is explanation comes at different levels and kinds why is the water boiling well as boiling occurs heat from a Bunsen burner is being transduced through the base of a copper kettle and it's upsetting the molecules of water they're getting very agitated and they're moving faster faster faster faster and that's why the water's boiling no it isn't the water is boiling because I want a cup of coffee now your laughter shows me that you understand the difference between two kinds of explanation and two ative Lee my statement was foolish which statement the statement no it's not it's boiling because I want a cup of coffee oh yes it is both explanations are perfectly valid aren't they there's a scientific explanation of what's happening and then there's the explanation in terms of agency and intention and desire now would you ever dream of saying that the scientific explanation conflicts with the human explanation or the agency explanation of course not well let me put it to you like this very bluntly suggesting that God is in conflict with science as an explanation of the universe is like saying that Henry Ford is in conflict with the law of internal combustion as an explanation for the motorcar let me say that again saying that God is in conflict with science as an explanation of the universe is exactly like saying that Henry Ford is in conflict with the law of internal combustion as an explanation for the motorcar what we need to get clear ladies gentlemen to get out of this fog is God and science are not the same kind of explanation they don't conflict they don't compete they complement science tends to deal mainly with the HO questions the God answer deals with the Y questions the bigger questions and so there's zero conflict and that was seen very early on but because people have become confused about the nature of God and simultaneously confused about the nature of explanation they have got into a terrific tangle and therefore are no suggesting that God and science are alternative explanations that's exactly what Richard Dawkins believes so what I'm suggesting to you is this watch out for false alternatives God or science mechanism or agency these are false alternatives and they lead us away from very rapidly from the central questions and you see for instance think of Stephen Hawking's dismissal of God by using gravity because there is a law of gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing that is the heart of his book the grand design and when I read it I was staggered because there is a law of gravity because there is something the universe will create itself from nothing that's a contradiction a flat contradiction secondly because there is a law of gravity doesn't say because gravity exists but what would a law of gravity been if there was no gravity if there's no gravity a law of gravity is totally beaming us and what that exposes is a very strange idea that laws are creative but they're not are they laws do not create anything the law of gravity never created any gravity it describes gravity when you've got it let me illustrate this another colleague in Oxford a very famous atheist his professor Peter Atkins and I once asked him after a lecture Peter what created the universe and he said mathematics and I'm afraid I was so taken aback I started laughs rather uncontrollably and with much embarrassment and he said he was very angry he said why are you laughing well I said Peter I'd be honest that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life he said why well I said I am a mathematician and let me keep it simple for you one plus one equals two did that ever put two dollars in your pocket in fact it's interesting just out propose that I do you all remember the financial crisis yes I think we do do you know why that happened precisely because people thought that by doing mathematics didn't create money we call it creative accounting it's a very odd belief that by manipulating ideas and symbols you can create a reality Newton's laws of motion not only never created the universe they've never moved a billiard ball in the history of the universe they can describe its motion but it's people accused move it there's a great deal of confusion in the status of the laws and I was very amused having redness and Hawking's book to read his first example of a law the Sun rises of the east and sets in the west well that's a very sensible law but it doesn't create the Sun or the east or the west it's simply a description and descriptions do not create realities objectives realities so there's immense confusion lurking underneath and one of the reasons I believe is people aren't taught the philosophy of science they're taught narrow ways of calculating and so on and understanding and taught a great deal of facts but they're not ever taught how to stand back from those facts now I want to give you plenty of time for questions but I want to come to something else that's right at the heart of everything at the moment and it's absolutely fascinating to my mind and it goes back again to what I was saying about history these early scientists believed in God and so they looked at the universe they said why don't we have a look and study it they believed science could be done now sometimes I have fun with my colleagues and I asked them questions I love asking questions and playing Socrates so I say to them tell me colleague what do you do science with they say well I've got a wonderful million dollar machine no no I don't mean that I mean oh you mean my and they almost say mind and then they remember their current philosophy and they say brain because they're not quite sure that there is a mind as distinct from the brain well okay let's let it leave that Stan I do it with my brain so I say okay tell me about the brain you do science with well they say do you want the long story no I want the short story okay tell me right down to its absolute minimum the short story of the brain well they say something like this ultimately they say the brain is the end product of an unguided process that didn't have it in mind and I said you trust it say that again to me if your computer you knew it was the end product of an unguided process that didn't have it in mind would you trust it for a moment no why do you trust your mind to do science the early pioneers knew why because they believed that they mind was a creation of God that it was made in His image but now let's come to the current set of atheists of which many of my colleagues are that's exactly what they believe the brain is the end product of a mindless unguided process and yet they trust it and you say oh well that's the kind of argument a Christian would come up with no it isn't it's the kind of argument that Charles Darwin would come up with this might surprise you now but listen to Charles Darwin with me the heart of dirt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals are of any value or or are at all trustworthy would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such mind it bothered Darwin on the basis of his theory which I'm not going to discuss tonight because these are the implications of that theory how can you possibly trust anything that is produced by an organ which does not seem to have a solid base like this story is shifting into center stage of the debate today John Gray who's an atheist professor of the history of European thought at London says modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free now this is an atheist speaking it's not me if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible the human mind serves evolutionary success not truth in other words you cannot expect anything like truth to come out of the human mind now one of the top philosophers in the world is Alvin Plantinga of not a day just retired here's his view of this if Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes then he has given a strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including Dawkins own science and his atheism his biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that is nothing at all to do with God but now there was an explosion in cyberspace a year or so ago when Thomas Nagel a leading American philosopher in New York wrote a book with the most provocative title I've ever seen it starts off very innocently mind and cosmos and then it says this why the never the neo-darwinian view of the universe is almost certainly false now this is an atheist philosopher who's at the top of philosophy in the USA today here's what he writes and it's all to do with this doubt about the validity of human rationality here's what he says if the mental is not itself merely physical it cannot be fully explained by physical science evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends that is a fascinating statement in other words what these people are saying is that if you follow the atheist logic and apply it to the very reasoning you need to develop any science any philosophy anything you discover that it collapses into chaos CS Lewis put it years ago he got it clearly he says if all that exists in nature the great mindless interlocking event if if all that exists is nature rather then the great mindless interlocking event if our own deepest convictions are merely the byproducts of an irrational process then clearly there's not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves our convictions are simply a fact about us like the color of our hair if naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that nature's uniform it can be trusted only if quite a different metaphysic is true if the deepest thing in reality the fact which is the source of all other factors is a thing in some degree like ourselves if it is a rational spirit and we derive a rational spirituality from it then indeed our conviction can be trusted our repugnance to disorder is derived from nature's creator and ours to put that much more succinctly shooting yourself in the foot is pretty painful shooting yourself in the brain is fatal and what is happening here I believe is that people are just beginning to say that if you follow the extreme reductionist route which insists as a paradigm of how science must be done that everything is reduced to physics and chemistry you end up destroying science in other words what I'm suggesting to you is a very provocative thesis it's not that science is very god the exact opposite it's that science is burying atheism that you can't logically have both science and atheism in other words science itself is indicating to us that there must be some transcendence within human rationality now you'll notice what Nagel said if the mental isn't purely physical but we all know that if you go down in the Bates in California you've got some beautiful beaches and you see your name written in the beach may will be only four letters Jo HN like mine you immediately recognize intelligent input don't you immediately you know there's been intelligence there even though you didn't see it done you infer upwards because it's a linguistic phenomenon the fascinating thing is we've lived to see the discovery of the longest word in any language the DNA code three and a half billion letters long what about that then and I find it very strange that many of my colleagues I run them through the illustration of the beta they say yes of course you recognize mind if there's language and I say well look here's another language the DNA code the human genome we use code language all the time and I say to them what's the origin of that oh they say chance and necessity I say what chance in the laws of nature but even your own name seen written you won't do it that way there's something odd going on here and of course it's the paradigm pressure in the West of insisting that you are not allowed to even consider that there might be some transcendence what I want to argue ladies and gentlemen it's beginning to appear totally unavoidable and my final point is I began with two worldviews on the one hand there is the worldview of naturalism that starts off with mass energy or the multiverse or something like that and then everything is derivative it comes bottom-up emergently until you get mind and language and so on and the idea of god because there isn't a god the biblical worldview is the exact opposite it says in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God all things came to be through him in other words word logic information languages primary and mass-energy is derivative and you see here's the fascinating thing if the mental is not purely physical says Thomas Nagel exactly information is not visible information is often visible but it's not material we live in the information age where physicists have discovered that information is a fundamental quantity and it's not reducible to physics and chemistry that's the end of materialism I'm afraid so I believe we're at the start of a fascinating new era were very slowly but very gradually we're going to have to reorient ate ourselves the key to it all that I've been trying to say this evening is this science is wonderful and I'm passionate about it science comes about by thinking about the universe but the bigger issues start to fall into place when we begin to do what CS Lewis suggested in the 1940s we need to do and that is we need to begin thinking about thinking we need to begin thinking about the status of our thinking and to ask ourselves why it is we believe that thinking gives us valid answers and it is my provocative suggestion to you tonight that ultimately the only answer to that question is God so science has not buried God but science and thinking about thinking is in process of burying atheism thank you very much is there any remaining scientific domain for which the existence of God is relevant to its advancement if so can you name one is there any remaining scientific domain for which the existence of God is relevant well I'm absolutely delighted that we have the skeptic Society on board so if they're listening thank you very much for joining us oh good the real there he is up there that's it's very nice to have you have you with us well the questions very interesting because it reminds me immediately of something Lawrence Christ wrote to which I replied he said neither we've got the Higgs boson we don't need God the Higgs boson is arguably relevant than God okay to which I replied more relevant for what if I'm giving a lecture on atomic physics I won't mention God at all God isn't relevant but if I was giving a lecture and why there's a universe at all in which atomic physics can be done then of course I'd have to mention God and the point is it's not that are the remaining scientific areas for which God is relevant God is relevant to the whole lot just as if you might say are there any remaining elements of the science of motor cars that made Henry Ford well they all do but you'll never find Henry Ford in a motor car of course not but his genius is stamped all over it and the point I'm making tonight is is is is cuts it under what you're saying because it's saying that the whole of science the very fact that we can do science the rationality we need to discuss all these topics ultimately requires God to underpin it when I'm teaching algebra in Oxford I don't mention God at all in that sense he's not relevant to the teaching of that discipline God becomes relevant at the higher level up so thank you for that question but I don't think it does anything and get written getting rid of God let me say one more thing about it though because very often because I'm a mathematician people come to me and they tell me the story of Napoleon and Laplace you know the story of Napoleon Laplace don't you you don't goodness me what do they teach these days Napoleon came to Laplace who was a famous mathematician and the plas had written this fantastic book on projectiles which was relevant to ballistics in the army you know what elevation do you have to have the gun to hit the enemy at this distance and so on so Napoleon looked at all these equations and said and where is God in your equations and appo and Laplace is famous answer was juniper birds weren't a set people days I don't need that hypothesis and how many people say there you are that's what I think about God I don't need that hypothesis but Laplace was completely right I just said exactly the same thing because it was a book about calculating ballistics you don't need God for that we got to realize the ladies and gentlemen the 99.9% of all science has been done in this university at the the moment this moment doesn't raise the question of God of course not you're finding out where this bit fits how this bit works what this drug does and so on so forth the god question comes higher up when people start saying as we argued from the beginning that if you've got science you don't need God that begins to be where the problem lies we mustn't think and some of the questions do imply that we're thinking of God as a bit of science he isn't another question most of the scientists you have references believers in God live a long time ago has a modern science gave us fresh evidence that contradicts believe in God Oh mostly they lived a long time ago yes and probably I'm a dinosaur too but the reason I used those scientists was not because they lived a long time ago but because they are connected with the rise of modern science that's why I reference them and what we're establishing is the thesis that's known as whiteheads thesis or Mertens thesis and so on that there's an intimate connection between the rise of science and belief in God now of course there are many scientists today who believe in God of average scientists in America's whose average working scientists in universities about 40% believe in God now what was the last twist to your question because my mind didn't retain it have you know got it in writing yes our last question was you tell me again has it modern science given a fresh evidence that contradicts belief in God oh I don't think so I think that contemporary science is increasing the evidence to believe in God no unfortunately because of our limitation in time you'll have noticed that I've concentrated on the philosophy and history of science more than on the results of science one of the very interesting results of science in recent times and people are fascinated about it and so am I is the whole idea that space-time at a beginning now I'm old enough to remember when that first came in because believe it or not if you go back before the early 60s most scientists did not believe that there was a beginning to space-time and when the evidence say of the hot Big Bang Arno Penzias the microwave background Hubble expansion and so on began to come in there was fierce resistance in the British Academy against this development and it went right up to the top level the editor of Nature wrote in his newspaper nature and said we must not go down this route of believing that there was a beginning why because it'll give too much leverage to people who believe the Bible isn't it astonishing that the biggest advance in astrophysics in the 20th century was resisted because it appeared to converge with the Bible that had of course been saying for centuries in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth and indeed and the most famous laboratory in the world which I mustn't name because it was a secret meeting I was out which I mustn't tell you about I said to people I said you know they said to me look the Bible's totally irrelevant to science and I said half a minute I said you guys for centuries believed that there wasn't the beginning to space time because you you listen to Aristotle when in fact the Bible for centuries had been saying in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and perhaps if you'd taken it more seriously you'd looked for the evidence earlier no where I going from that is to more contemporary science is that since there was a beginning that raises the question beginning from what and the current answer is nothing and so I give a lot of lectures about nothing nothing turns out to be absolutely fascinating just think about it you see if you believe there's a beginning to space time and everything started from nothing you've now got to be able to solve the biggest problem in philosophy why is there something rather than nothing now as a Christian I've got a straight and simple answer to that at one level the universe didn't come from nothing it came from God but God is non-physical but now dismiss that and put yourself in the position of modern cosmologists they've got to get the universe from nothing because that's all there was or wasn't nothing so how do you do it when I listen here's Lawrence Christ a universe from nothing and on about page three he says this night just think about this if you were given this whatever subject your study suppose you were given this sentence and asked to comment on it I wonder what you'd say here it goes because something is physical nothing must be physical especially if you define it as the absence of something what because something is physical nothing must be physical especially if you defined it as the absence of something what would you call that utter nonsense but this is this is a world-famous astrophysicist he's desperate to get something from nothing so what does he do redefine nothing that's what they all do hawking does the universe can and will create itself from nothing but when you investigated you discover that nothing is a quantum vacuum it's not nothing at all and if you want a really amusing send-up up the whole thing read David Albert who's a philosopher in New York it's hilarious and his comment about nothing now this is serious stuff to my mind because its scientific advance but it's bringing people to a full stop now I'm a very fortunate person because I get invited to your wonderful country many times and I get to meet fascinating people and I was at Harvard and MIT simultaneously and invited to the Faculty Club and to my amazement I was invited to have a public debate with Alan Guth who's the most brilliant cosmologists in the world he's the father of the theory of inflation and he's a very nice man and he and I debated the god question and he gave us a brilliant lesson in physics and then he said if you want to add God to that well I don't mind but I don't so his atheism was pretty mild so we had a discussion and I couldn't resist because I was would never be in this position again I said Alan listen you're the expert on nothing and there's there's there's great confusion out there about nothing in fact there's much ado about nothing I said tell us when you as an astrophysicist use the word nothing you don't mean what we mean by nothing I went down into the middle of UCLA and I met nobody doesn't mean I met somebody called nobody it means they didn't meet anybody yes you don't mean philosophical nothing the ordinary sense of nothing absolutely he said absolutely not so what we're faced with ladies and gentlemen is this just for your information there are many books on the shelves in your book shops here claiming to prove that the universe has come from nothing they've all failed now that to my mind is a very fascinating indicator that they're failing and entering into very foolish statements because the one obvious answer that's staring them in the face they reject our priority and that is that the universe comes not from something physical but from an intelligent God and I find again and again the more that science reveals the information base for so many of our sciences the more that speaks to me of a word based universe it makes sense it makes much more sense than its opposite I could say a lot more about that but I'm not going to because there's another question the second question is the Bible says that the first man is Adam and from him came the genealogy of David to Jason to Jesus however this contradicts conventional understanding of evolution which says that the earth is millions of years old what are your thoughts on that oh I have a great deal of thoughts of that that's that's almost another full lecture you know and the last bit of it you see there are several elements in that in fact there are three completely separate vast questions in there there's the question of the age of the earth there's a question of the descent of all human beings from Adam and and so on and so forth and there's the question of the age of humanity so let me put it to you which of those would you like me to talk about the age of the earth the the question of Adam which of those two I'll give you the choice the age of the earth okay I'll go for that one and it's not that I will don't want to deal with the other one because this is a huge and very interesting subject and I'll let you into a secret afterwards but let me just tell you this when it comes to the Bible and the age of the earth the very interesting thing is the Bible says zero on that topic now there's a shock for some of you you say but what about the seven days at the beginning of the Bible I'm very well aware of those seven days indeed ever written a book on those seven days called seven days that divided the world and if you want to follow what I think about them but let's think logically suppose we pick up a Bible we've never seen it before it's very easy to make assumptions and then dismiss the old thing let me give you an example of that what does the Bible say in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth that's what it says that then in the beginning when was the beginning well there is now a sequence of days day one two three four five six and God rests and people say there you are it's a short time ago because we got all these genealogies that you mentioned you've got six days and then the beginning but they make a mistake they don't look carefully enough at the literary form of Genesis one because you see the beginning is not part of the sequence of days that's obvious to scholars of Hebrew it's obvious to when they look at the grammar because the first statements in the Bible in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth is in a different past tense from the sequence of days now there are all kinds of controversies about these days I've written about them but what I'm about to tell you has got nothing to do with what you believe about the days it's simply this that the statement in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth is not part of the sequence of days it's referring to events before the sequence of days how long before the Bible doesn't say so neither do I so I haven't the slightest difficulty with the current age given by the standard model thirteen point whatever it is three seven or four eight billion years I don't think the Bible makes any comment on it whatsoever that's an example of over reading what the Bible says now the days are fascinating but as I say it would take up far too much time and I've written a book about it and you can look that up on Amazon and so on so we'll go to the next question okay so the next question is just to clarify please ask Slowking that's not the one he's a question three how would you respond to sam harris and those scientists who believe that solely solely neuroscience can explain morality well I'm very interested in what Sam Harrison & Co write I have responded to him in my book gunning for God actually I delayed publishing it when I came across this book the moral landscape and of course the problem lies in your formulation of the question that neuroscience can explain morality here we go again what do we mean by explain now I want to amplify what you're saying to make the claim more precise the contention is this and it's a very important one for many years centuries in fact in Europe and in the West morality has been dominated by the God concept the Ten Commandments have been the basis of many legislations and and so on civil rights everything else and in nineteen mmm wells a 2006 just up the valley here somewhere in La Jolla at the Salk Institute there was a major discussion on atheism and the first question was should we get rid of religion and the answer was yes and we should use science to do it and hence our question tonight flowing into that conference but they had a third question what are we going to do about morality because morality generally speaking is based on religion if we get rid of religion we're going to have no base for morality can science give us morality that's where sam harris comes in because for many years it had been believed and still is by many of us that you cannot go from an is to a naught that's what David Hume said you can't just describe a situation and is what it is and then suddenly say therefore you ought morality needs something transcendent Einstein realized that science couldn't produce morality and of course we realize that too science can tell you if you put if you put strychnine in your granny's tea it will give her more than a painful day but science can tell you whether you ought to do to get your hands on her mummy science doesn't tell us about ethics richard fineman here said exactly the same thing that nature doesn't come with a prescription how you ought to use it and David Hume said you can't go from is to all sam harris says you can't in other words he's saying you can get a base for morality within science now i disagree because i think that when you investigate and other people have done the same some Harrises arguments they appear very plausible but how he gets his heart from his is to put the author at the beginning and of course he then gets a naught from an is because his is contains alt now that's a big story at its own right and i think that we need to be very careful because this is a hugely important topic i see two topics that concern me one the stages of the universe created or not we've been talking about that tonight the second is the status of human life made in the image of god or not and that's one of the most contentious discussions in our age and harris is making a contribution and the attempts are being made to bypass god and to try to get an ethics and morality from either social evolution genetics and so on there's a long history of the failure of that scheme and some of it is of course as you know horrific but it's very important that we realize just what is going ahead but i I think your science is one of the most interesting topics and I encourage Christians to get involved in it understanding consciousness is a very very important thing but I don't think a neuroscience is going to explain the morality next so here's the next one how would you explain fossil evidence that contradicts the idea that humans are made in the image of God for example the Australopithecus fossil woman named Lucy or any other hominid fossils that have been found that's the question I said it wasn't going to say any more about you think that then you sneaked it back in again well from where I said and again it's a huge other topic telling what is human or not from fossils is extremely difficult because the image of God is not measured by fossils I mean if you look at us in this room if you fossilized the whole lot of us it is amazing what vast differences there would be it would be fascinating to see to what branches we were all assigned the image of God is God as a rational spirit and just within the human race without even involving hominids and all this kind of thing the fact is that we all bear something that is a rational spirit you can't tell that from bones so I'm not sure whether you know it's worth pursuing that any further so let's go to something else with so many contradicting religious claim what makes me believe religion as an answer to the why question and change my lifestyle according to a religious claim rather than believing Stephen Hawking who says that there is no God and live my life the way I wanted I wouldn't believe Stephen Hawking because of the vast and ludicrous claims that he makes and logically contradictory statements so let's come to the serious part of your question which is the first part now you're asking a question let's put it in context you brought the science in quite cleverly at the end of eventually Hawking but actually your question has nothing to do with what we were talking about tonight your question about different religious claims and so on but it's it's a different question but since you look so nice I gonna have a go at answering it alright because I I think it's an important question but do you realize ladies in general it wasn't the question on our topic because addressing the question of other religions is is a major question in its own right and we need to take it seriously but would you like me to say something about it okay let me have a go at least briefly and in honoring your question the first thing to say is this before we start investigating this question we need to realize something about other religions or all religions I'm a Christian I have friends and virtually every religious group and none and you know what I discover that roughly speaking all of them have the same kind of morality have you noticed that and in fact research has been done around the world in all faiths none Roman pagan religion Confucianism Islam Judaism Christianity everything and they've all got the Golden Rule have you ever noticed that every single one explicitly has got it a version of it do unto others as you would be done by now when I learned that and I learned it from CS Lewis that there's a little chapter at the end of his book the abolition of man which is well worth reading on this I thought that's very interesting and second day I thought that's exactly what I would expect is a Christian that since everybody's made of the image of God we've all got similar moral concepts but what does that mean practically it means and I pick it up from the previous question but in a very different way that as I look at you I'm looking at someone made in the image of God who's got infinite value I'd need to be very careful what I say to you and how I treat you didn't I now it's so important before we entered the debate on various religions that we establish that base of mutual respect because otherwise it just degenerates no once we've got up my atheist friends could sometimes put me to shame you know because they're mortal beings and sometimes their standards are better than mine shame on me okay have you got what I'm saying it was very important to me and you'll understand then what comes next once you've got that you then realise there are many other religions that disagree with each other leave Christianity out Islam is never going to agree with Hinduism about the number of gods is it obviously not and what I discover is that with people of other religions that I've friends and all around Oxford it's mostly the atheists that are worried about raising the question about different religions not the religions themselves because they recognize their differences and are very happy when other people recognize them and don't blur them altogether now it raises a very big question why then would I be a Christian because that's really what you're asking you know why why not go with Stephen Hawking just blow the lock and why would I be a Christian now this is a different kind of question what I mean by that is this Christianity makes very specific claims within history studying the universe which I feel is very important gives me certain pointers towards God and part of my reason for believing in God is what I see in the universe but it's not my full reason for believing that God not by any chok because I can't get to do God personally through studying Andromeda through a telescope and I mean that sincerely the Central Christian claim is that God has actually revealed himself God has become human the word has become flesh so that we can get to know God at close quarters and that's the claim and we must take these claims listen to what they say and decide whether they're true or not now I have to cut a very long story short here because otherwise we'll be here all night and I haven't the energy to stay all night even if you have so it comes down to this why would I believe that Christianity was true with all respect to other people well no let me make it very practical and blunt I have Muslim friends they believe that Jesus did not die I have Jewish friends they believe he died and he didn't rise I'm a Christian I believe that Jesus both died and rose those three things are mutually exclusive historically you see that their claims about history and therefore I know no other way about going about this than to investigate their history what does it tell me and I can only tell you so I don't expect you to accept it because of me it would be very silly on investigating the evidence of this central claim of Christianity that Jesus rose from the dead thus demonstrating that he is God incarnate which is utterly crucial and is the central message that's been preached for 2,000 years I am convinced by two things one by the historical evidence I just written two chapters on it in a book called gunning for God looking at it very critically through the eyes of David Hume who set up criteria for witnesses why I believe that the resurrection actually occurred but then secondly in my own personal experience it's a very personal question but let me tell you straight Christianity is falsifiable Jesus claims that if I trust him with my life and I have done things will happen to me he'll give me forgiveness he'll give me peace with God he'll give me new power to live I've experienced that now for 60 years I've seen it happen and many other people in other words there's evidence that actually works now I myself I people can show me if they like that coming to believe what Hawking does transforms their lives I've not met many of them and I mean that seriously I would challenge someone okay it's Stephen Hawking's right let's meet again the year's time bring 50 people here that whose lives have been utterly transformed from the good through coming to be atheists and I'll bring you 50 or 500 or 5,000 whose lives have been completely transformed through comment through becoming Christians in the end for me the evidence that it works is very important I've seen so many marriages saved so many people rescued from drug abuse and all kinds of substance abuse and when you see that again and again you begin to add one on one and say look there's something in this business now you may not have got that far which is why you've got this great opportunity in a very fast group to speak to many of your contemporaries who are here and ask them does this really work why does it make sense for you but do you see the bottom line from a an answer to your question is that I don't feel Christ competes with any other religion for the very simple reason that he offers me something that they don't forgiveness and certainty right now peace with God now it's not a religion of Merit that I have to wait until the day of judgement until I know I've accepted I can no acceptance right now I find that nowhere else so in that sense I would submit to you that Christ is competing with no one else okay how much more time have we got so actually we are heading into our last question of the night the next question is as a scientist what do you think motivated atheist scientists to be atheist and what made you choose to be a Christian well I guess oh right that's a very interesting question what motivated atheist scientists to be atheists what motivated me to be a Christian well it's not usually science that motivates people to be atheist I find talking to them well one of the then some are more honest than others as is true of Christians as well Richard Lewin was a very interesting case in point he's a professor at Princeton I think of genetics a world famous geneticist and he says look II said let me be honest with you it's not our science that commits us to devise experiments that give only naturalistic answers it's not at at all it's our prior commitment to naturalism to atheism that leads us to devise and operators however counterintuitive and so on that simply delivers naturalistic answers because he says we must not allow a divine foot in the door that is his eight years of comes at the start now let me be completely open with you I find some people say that science has led them to atheism Richard Dawkins does I'm not sure that that's the case but it isn't fair of me to second-guess him I think he must have had a very negative variance of some aspect of Christianity earlier on he seems to indicate that sometimes but for me I didn't start the science at all I started with what I saw at home which is where most people start my parents were Christian so you say ah there you are you see you come from Ireland your parents are Christian I bet your grandparents were a Christian yes they were and I bet your great-grandparents were a Christian yes they where well as Irish genetics end of story now I grew up in that environment and you say well look honestly you tell us this at the end of all this evening and really that's why you're a Christian well to start with yes but let me explain to you that I grew up in a very unusual family precisely because it was a very sectarian country there was a lot of narrow-minded bigotry and religious violence my parents had nothing to do with that they so believed and what I told you earlier that every human being is made in the image of God that they employed equally across the religious divide and were bombed for it they really put their faith in God out in public and lived according to it that's point number one point number two they encouraged me to think they didn't just feed me with Christian books in fact my father fed me with all kinds of literature so I grew up in a Christian home which was so open for intellectual discussion about everything I never met anything like it I thought everyone was like that you see now when I got to Cambridge in my first week a student said to me do you believe in God and then he said oh sorry you're Irish I should never have asked you that all you Irish believe in God and you fight about it I don't heard that before now let me explain to you that my whole life since then has been based on this I want to know whether my faith in God is the truth or not not is it helpful but is Christianity the truth so what have they done I spent my entire life exposing my faith in God to its opposite I learned German I spent a lot of time in East Germany and I was able to study the effects of atheism systematically exposed in a society I learned Russian I spent a lot of time in Russia talking about these things at the level of the Academy of Sciences all of it interested in answering that question is it just a matter of my background the Atheist will stay an atheist the Christian will stay a Christian kind of thing and what has been very important to me has been through life to see that it is possible to change your worldview people don't have to end up where they start and the university like this one is a marvelous opportunity to explore your worldview of course we're all prejudiced we all start somewhere but one of the most marvelous things of a group like this is as I suspect there people from many different worldviews here get to know each other I sit alongside people and have a little rule I will keep asking them questions until they ask me one that's a pretty difficult thing to do you try it and see but you learn a great deal about the other person and I have spent my time really answering trying to answer that question for myself is this delusion is it deception is it simply a matter of heredity and environment or is it true and my conclusion has been increasing as I've gone around the world and exposed my faith to questioning else tonight my faith in God gets stronger and stronger because I see the evidence growing so that's my final personal response to you all thank you very much indeed you [Music]

Channel: The Veritas Forum

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Id: Y6SaNaiW0Jo

Length: 88min 47sec (5327 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020