Is Anything Worth Believing In? John Lennox at Yale University

welcome to the Veritas forum engaging University students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life welcome we're glad you're here we are ready for an interesting discussion my role is going to be facilitator and possibly playing a little bit of devils advocate known as we are going to ask professor lennox on some questions i want to report at most of the questions our country ell students most of them that we're going to discuss through base culture and other menus on the web and so these are the questions that the students have been asking but before we get to those particular questions I want to ask professor Lennox two questions to set a broader framework and the first one is could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your area of expertise is and how you got interested in these things well thank you very much Dave Leitch gentleman delightful to see you I come from the University of Oxford and as you may know our current vice-chancellor has been stolen from you because he was your Provost for many years so we are enjoying the benefits of his education at Yale and I delighted for the first time in my life to be here a little bit about my history I come from Northern Ireland which is a country with a reputation for sectarianism my parents were very unusual they were Christian without being sectarian the second unusual thing is they allowed me to think and they encouraged me even when I was still at school to investigate many different worldviews I remember my father when I was about 13 asking me had I ever read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and he suggested it might be good for me too demanded little realizing that I was going to spend a lot of time in the communist world in East Germany during the Cold War and in Russia in recent years I went to Cambridge not the one up the road I went to Cambridge in the middle of the last century to study mathematics and in my first week as a student one of the other students said to me a dinner rather too nightly he said do you believe in God and in said oh sorry I shouldn't have asked you that you're Irish all you Irish believe in God and you fight about us now that wasn't the first time I'd heard a statement like that but somehow it triggered something here I was at one of the best universities in the world could it be that my faith in God was simply Irish genetic my parents are believers their parents were believers and you saw on the screen as many of you think that a major influence is parental upbringing so it's simply Freud all over again so what I decided to do on that day in Cambridge and I remember very well was I wanted to befriend someone who'd never been to church whose parents did not believe in God who didn't share my worldview and I've been doing it ever since and that's as led me to learn several languages so that I could make myself understood in these countries and go in particular to Eastern Europe as an academic to see what systemic atheism imposed on the society meant and both in particular Sherman II Hungary Poland during the Cold War and then when the war and I started to go to places like Siberia but all my life had been an academic I'd been interested in pure mathematics but in bigger things where does mathematics fit within science and my branch of that buttocks is a group theory which consists in investigating the consequences of a series of four axioms and it raises all kinds of interesting questions are there axioms for life what is ultimate reality and I find myself asking these questions very early on and so I naturally got interested in the philosophy of science the history of science and I've been fortunate in the last few years to do it professor University of Oxford as well as mathematics but one big turning point of course was the fact that Richard Dawkins agreed to debate me in Alabama and The God Delusion debate rather catapulted me into the public eye in various places so I've had the great privilege of debating many of the leading atheists in the world dr. singer recently Kristin aide Christopher Hitchens sadly and been able to engage that that level so my motivation is very simple I believe there is a rational alternative to atheism I do not agree that naturalism is the default into that position more fairly I would say I think there is no default position but in the Academy today we tend to find the clash of two worldviews naturalism on the one side atheism and theism and all I want to do is to see that there's a fair public debate which is why I'm delighted to be here to see that Yael believes in having this kind of debate that is a tremendous thing so thank you for inviting me sir and I am delighted am a professional philosopher here to correct my mathematical plea teams just don't ask me to balance your checkbook or use mathematics you begin to allude to this in your remarks just now but perhaps you can expand a little about why do you think conversations about reason and faith and evidence are important well they're important because and I was fascinated by the definition of faith going over the board I'm very impressed with the end actually as a result of this survey because in Oxford many of my colleagues will tell you that faith is by definition a religious concept and it means believing where there's new evidence and I want to correct that it's wrong in many different senses which we can go into later and I want to point out that there's a real rational alternative to naturalism in fact let me be provocative I do not think naturalism is in the end rational in the sense that it undermines rationality and argument that we go into later and I think of myself as a student I was delighted to be exposed to different worldviews because I was forming my own and everybody in this room tonight is doing exactly the same thing you have your set of answers to the big questions in life and what we hope is that by injecting ideas from different perspectives those will inform you and I just like to do for young people was done for me perhaps that doesn't exactly answer your question I make it more precise and I'll try to be more precise well I think we can lead into the first question that has come in that this is actually synthesized for many questions that many students asks and we can frame it this way philosophers from Aristotle through Anselm Aquinas Descartes all attempted to prove the existence of God with a high degree of certainty some of them like Aristotle were looking for an unmoved mover not not a the theological concept of God that others were looking for but many philosophers think that these arguments do not stand up as demonstrable proofs so therefore because if these arguments fail as proofs do they have value and its religious belief simply a matter of faith without evidence could you comment on this alone yes I could I thought you might I'm interested that the first question is so philosophical and obviously the student that asked it is a bit of a pessimist because I'm not so convinced that all philosophers are convinced that the classical arguments for the exists of God fail I think there are so many bad versions of them that fail that sometimes people despair a little bit but let's clear up something else you use the word proof and I'm a bit allergic to the word proof because I will cure my petition ladies gentlemen and you only get proof and my subject that's all because the idea for rigorous proof based of axioms following a certain pattern of logic you only get in the mathematical sciences you don't get it in the Natural Sciences you don't get it anywhere else which is why we do get a bit confused here people say to me can you prove that God exists in the mathematical sense no but there's an informal sense in which we use the word proof lawyers use it historians use it and what it means is can you establish sufficient evidence that you can place a lot of confidence in this particular thing and if you mean proof in that sense then I think that you can give pointers towards the existence of God and the classical arguments I think are useful except that we must realize that by themselves they are limited I speak tonight as a Christian and if you look at say the five classical arguments of antiquity what they can give you are pointers to theism but I'm not sure that they go much further than that now what shall I say let me shall I pick one of them and just base different problem Oh entered by the ontological argument the idea that God is that than which no greater can be conceived as one of those delightful things that philosophers have wrangled about for centuries and there are all kinds of bad ways of putting it I don't count myself an expert on it but what I'm very interested in are two things first thing that a very eminent American philosopher from Notre Dame Alvin Plantinga has reformulated in fact he did it in the 1970s in the book of necessity a reformulated the ontological argument using modal logic in a way well you said the arguments have failed of the students suggest well I know at least one atheist Terence Daugherty who is convinced of theism on the basis of planting this version of the ontological argument so it can't be that way but I want to come to the one whether to that play a big role in the contemporary discussion there are various versions of course of the cosmological argument and the crude version is that um everything that exists has a cause and therefore there must be a first cause now that was never the cosmological argument because it leases of wide open to the major argument of Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion you know if everything is a cause at the universe's of cause that's God then God isn't cause and the cause of God who created the creator of the created of the Creator you know the way it goes on and it leads to an infinite regress now what I find in my little studies of this question is the actual original cosmological argument denies the infinite regress is the exact opposite of what we're saying let me bring it up to a little bit of a story because I noticed in The God Delusion that this is one of the main arguments if you say as I do that God created the space-time continuum and opposes then you've got to magically ask whom created the crater and so it goes on forever ad absurdum therefore there's no God so let's go home and watch football you know that that that kind of thing so when Dawkins faced me with this I said that let's analyze this carefully if I say who created X that question actually has got an inbuilt assumption and that is that X is created let me put it this way of Richard Dawkins have written a book called the created God's delusion they suspect nobody would have bought it because I don't need him to tell me created God's or a delusion usually call them idols of course they're a delusion so the point is and I believe you philosophers call this a complex question because it's got hidden assumptions that actually close down the discussion before you start you see the question who created the Creator which I never believed I get from Richard Dawkins and even more I never believed I get from Peter Singer but I did it assumes the Creator is created but what if he is me but in the question of most of the pie and I know of no monotheists Jew Christian or Muslim who believes in a created creator you say but there's a sting in and you see because when Richard Dawkins come from with a unsuited singer I said well let's try this question art because it works with created gods you say so I said you believed that the universe created you so let me try your question who created your Creator I'm still waiting for the answer now it seems to me that there is something in that the idea of cause and effect and there being not a self cause cause but an uncaused cause but the other argument which is actually very important is the so called design argument can I say something about that sir sure you've got the microphone go for I have very well I don't want to bore you see because you're an expert philosopher but I have let me come to this because it is actually important does nature point in any direction Dawkins and goes claim it points toward atheism I claim it points in the opposite direction and for various reasons I was having a discussion in front of some very bright philosophy students at Oxford I did the gob debate a few weeks ago and Richard Dawkins didn't agree to debate but he came along to cheer on the opposition having tough there was Michael Shermer there whom you may know from skeptic magazine and there was Peter Milliken a professor of philosophy at Oxford delightful chap he invited me for dinner afterwards and he said look I've got fifty of the brightest philosophy students that you'd care to make can we grill you one evening so I said I love to be grilled for dinner and tub so I went round and it was very interesting because in the middle of and they said Peter take my seat take my seat for a minute you're an atheist I'm a theist but what would you be your best argument for the use of as an atheist we said without hesitation the fine-tuning army without hesitation because the fine-tuning of the constants of nature and I was debating this in Harvard MIT faculty Club not long ago with a ton good who's they as you know the author conflation theory this has got real substance because it is an argument flowing from accepted science it's not one of these god of the gaps types of arguments and it raises very big questions and he says there is your best argument now of course if it is true that the fine-tuning argument gives you reason to believe that the universe has a purpose which includes humanity that gives you a dimension of teleology of the designer but to conclude this little letter even more important for me is the variant that has to do with the rational intelligibility of the universe for me one of the most powerful evidences coming from science that there is a God is that we can do sighs I'm Stein saw this he saw that there's something utterly mysterious that incomprehensibly put it this way the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's compatible how is it that the human mind in here can understand the universe out there and fit equations to it and it works how does that work we're so used to it we never think about it but think about it now for a moment I asked my atheist friends tell me about the mind that does the science what is my mouth oh they say it's your brain because there's there's no mind that's so you know Descartes and that's all dualism and that's all gone it's not quite all in each other but that's another matter if you have that's nonsense the mind is the brain what is the brain I say well the brain essentially is the end product of a mindless unguided process that didn't have it enough how do we get rid of that side place right there we're done I think it seems as somebody up above objects to my arguments can you hear me alright now I think he wants you to hold want me to use this one okay gosh this makes me feel like a pop star I don't like this where were we we were talking about the rational intelligibility of the universe now if you take the naturalistic view which is by definition reductionist thing if there's no transcendence if mass energy is all that exists then explanation must ultimately go from the simple to the complex so everything must be reducible to physics and chemistry if that is true it destroys all rationality as people have seen for years you know at JBS Haldane the famous Cabot's put it this way if the thoughts in my mind or simply the random motions of elementary particles in my brain why should I believe in elementary particles and why should I believe in anything my brain tells me at all now one of the most interesting books that's come out in the last few months is by Thomas Nagel who is an eminent philosopher in New York and he's written a book with a very provocative title it's this mind and cosmos why the neo-darwinian view of the universe is almost certainly wrong now what he takes up in the book is precisely this argument that if there is no mind involved in the processes whatever physical processes there are of course are obviously our physical processes but if mind is not involved then you are undermining the very rationality you to do science Plantinga develops this argument in a book recently as well which is well worth reading called where the problem really lies and it seems to me really as a mathematician ladies and gentlemen I want grounds for trusting at least to a certain extent my mind as it investigates the universe in fact I go further than that that brings me back to faith every scientist is a person of faith they believe what they believe that science can be done they believe that the universe is rationally intelligible you can't even begin science unless you believe that but why do you believe in what I'm arguing is that naturalism gives you no grounds for believing and whatsoever and therefore I think naturalism shoots itself not in the foot but even worse in the head Christian theism of the other hand tells you the reason that the human mind in here can in part understand the universe out there is because both the minded here in the universe out there are ultimately traceable to the same intelligent creator final point ladies and gentlemen we forget in this 21st century for naturalism rain we forget where modern science came from it exploded in the 16th and 17th century under people like Galileo and Kepler and Newton all of whom were believers in God now historians and philosophers of science like Alfred North Whitehead the Thomas Merton like my colleague and Oxford John Hadley Brooklyn and many people have thought about this and I know it needs to be nuanced the general consensus I think can be put in the words of CS Lewis men became scientific why because they expected law in nature why because they believed in the law here's the irony of the 21st century where enthroning naturalism to account for a science which is been given to us essentially by the judeo-christian tradition and one of the reasons i'm not ashamed to be both the Christian and the scientist is that Christianity arguably gave me my something it gave you your University as wellas the people have founded Yale and Oxford and Harvard and Princeton were believers in God they weren't irrational nutcases they saw no conflict between belief in God and science and the humanities in literature and that reasons that they questioned what on earth has happened to us okay so I'm going to recapitulate in about four sentences everything that you just heard professor Lennox talked about three major arguments the cosmological argument which it explores why is there a universe at all secondly the design argument which explores the question why is the universe the way it is so that life can emerge and then the argument about mind and rationality how is it that our minds can investigate a rational universe what is the best explanation for that so the question started with the point about proof which we bring from the mathematical sciences and as a philosopher I might say maybe the logic also cannot spring us that kind of proof and absorb mathematics say yes we can fight about whether logic is based on math or math is based on logic but we won't do that today so in logic and mathematics you get the kind of proof that delivers certainty and in every other academic discipline we're talking about reasonability assessing evidence where are the pointers so our investigation of worldview is much more like a detective stopped with trying to solve a crime picking up bits of evidence and seeing what explains this evidence the best which theory some evidence points in one direction some evidence points and another so I want to raise a question that might be a bit of evidence that points in the other direction and this came from some students and it was reflected on one of the surveys it seems that most people's religious beliefs correspond to the culture or family in which they grew up what bearing does this fact have on the reasonability of thinking one's own religious beliefs are true I instantly think of a packed whole like this in Melbourne Australia and I was facing Peter Singer for the first time in C and at the beginning I told them what I told you my parents were Christ to their grandparents so Peter came up to the stage and he said well he said really we've heard essentially what my major objection to religion is people stay in the religion and the culture in which they've been brought up so I waited my turn and I said Peter I said we'd better you know get it all out into the open tell us about your parents so were they atheists and he said yes they were I said that's very interesting you remained in the faith in which you were brought up and he said but it isn't the faith I said oh I'm sorry I thought you believed it now that was intriguing to me because the cyberspace and Twitter space went alive at that point because singers a professional philosopher ladies and gentlemen and for a professional philosopher not to understand that his worldview is a belief system beggars my imagination I can forgive Richard Dawkins almost for not understanding it but not Peter Singer but you see all those prejudices are expressed in that know one of the very interesting things that happened after that interview was that someone went up to talk to singer who was from a similar background to Peter singer intellectually and so on and as they talked this man suddenly told singer how he changed his worldview now I think without background to come to the question of course our backgrounds play a profound role the first I learned of God was through my parents but I found them credible so when they introduced me to the Bible and explained it and got me to think about it as seriously as I did about my mathematics it opened up a whole wonderful intellectual world so my association with Christianity from the early days is intellectual freedom adventure the very opposite of what many people think so of course that includes me but now let me go back to what I've already told you that wasn't enough for this reason I thought to myself suppose I was brought up in in Uzbekistan or somewhere like that would I simply believe what my parents believed or probably to start off with so the key question for me of Cambridge when that chap said you're Irish of course you was is it possible for someone to change their worldview I've seen that happen so many times that my response to it is this that although culture and background religion have a huge influence we are still beings with the self-respect of the capacity to make decisions for ourselves about our worldviews and they do change and they can change now what interested me and this is a word I haven't used yet tonight what I was concerned was not does your faith help you and does it give you a nice prop and comfort you but is it true as a scientist I suppose you would call me a critical realist that I believe there's truth out there we don't quite grasp but we're approximating towards it so is it true what is the truth about reality and to my encouragement I find that in one sense there aren't so many possibilities the two major ones at least in the Western Academy are theism and atheism you might include pantheism as a third particularly in the Eastern world but the families of worldviews are relatively limited so I started asking myself the truth questions now I've seen so many people in my life shift from one camp to another now that means of course that some of my friends that claim they were Christians became atheists the shifts occur in different directions so the way it influences me is that we must take it into account and as scientists of course the big danger until the sociology of science came along the big danger was that we thought that here is science utterly unique it's dispassionate it is unbiased it's completely objective at all this kind of thing now one good thing that the sociology of science has shown us is that that simply isn't the case all of us bring something to the table and there are some very honest scientists there who will tell you for instance richard lou anton of harvard is one of them he says look he says you know science doesn't compel us to have a materialistic view of the universe it's our a priori commitment to materialism that says that we look for material answers no matter how counterintuitive etcetera etc because we must not allow a divine foot on the door and I think it's very important ladies and gentlemen you've seen it already I am biased so are you so are you we all have our prejudices but let's get them up there let's have a look at them and some of them may need to be changed so one side I admit of course and rejoice in the fact and I've learned a lot from my fellow men and women who do not come from my cultural background but it is possible to change it is possible from where I said to answer the truth question for yourself at the end you have to decide on the basis of the evidence my light your analogy and it's an important one when you said we're doing a bit of detective work because of course often we brought up in the idea that science is inductive it's to do with the repeated experimentation that's a large part of science but it's sometimes not the most interesting part because you can't repeat a murder to see what happened you can't repeat the history of the cosmos to see what happened so it's more an abductive kind of inference that that a detective uses and that's my attitude to it well you you used a word that is worth following up on and I'm going to take the liberty to branch off of this question you brought up the truth question and so there are I believe a lot of people either who do not believe there's a truth about anything that's objective that's that's independent of our beliefs but there are also a lot of people who think that there are many areas of inquiry where there is no truth so there might be truth about empirical facts facts that we can have a third-person perspective on but but issues such as moral claims or esthetic claims or religious claims are not in the domain of truth and falsity so how would you respond to someone who's going to be skeptical about truth especially in these other areas I remember once at Oxford having lunch those about sitting beside Bailey in his book sitting here and an intriguing title so I said what's your member like he said this book is dedicated to the thesis that there is no such thing as authorial intention so I said shoot oh that's very interesting I said you mean if I read your book I will know that there's no such thing as authorial intention he said that's exactly right so I said I'm not going to read it so he said why not well I said if it's true there's no point in reading he haven't seen this is one of the most interesting things this is an extreme example of post modernist and that's why it's dying ladies and gentlemen I hope it's dying in the Yale it's certainly dying in Oxford even in the literature faculties because it's going it's going the way and I love literature by the way I've worked with a classicist all my life and I'm as keen on literature's I have in mathematics but that's another story it seems to me to be very important to realize this that the problem with these kind of claims and the first one you quoted there's no such thing as truth but the person that says that expects me to believe it's true and that is simple logical chaos it's meaningless and we must beware of statements that exclude without explicitly saying so the person who's making the statements now postmodern relativism is it the opposite extreme of complete scientific objectivity truth the answer normally lies in the middle and I'm grateful to my postmodern friends for pointing out just how much we're biased by our prejudices and so on but it is very important to realize I've got a friend he's not quite right I think but I was a very bright ancient historian but what he says this people are usually only postmodern in the areas of no importance to them think about it if you're climbing Everest you're not postmodern about the strength of the Rope you're using if you go into your bank tomorrow in New Haven oh they're probably not open on something but if you go empty your bank and say well I would like two hundred thousand dollars because I've got four hundred thousand dollars in the bank and the bank teller looks up and he sees red figures five hundred thousand dollars owed to the bank and he shows you the red figures you say if that's your truth that's not my truth you'll get no fur and anyway I know I'm not in a room full of postmoderns why did you come here at 7 o'clock because you believe the truth that there was going to be a session at 7 o'clock so there's some truth you all believe in isn't that and anyway I'm in Yale ladies and gentlemen I seem to recall the part of your motto is very tough act looks so I don't need to go into this once further ado I guess except to say the very important point that often people say yes there's truth facts but values are a different matter there's a certain relativity look around the world well I've looked around the world because I take this question very seriously and what is fascinating is this is the evidence for a common moral core believed by almost everyone in the 1940s CS Lewis whom I had the pleasure of listening to when I was a student CS Lewis wrote a brilliant book called the abolition of man had in an appendix to it I pointed out this fascinating thing that if you investigate all religions from pagan religion Confucianism Islam Christianity Judaism no religion at all all philosophies you will find in every single one of them the golden rule system issue in other words it looks as if and there are psychologists who are saying in these days morality is hardwired into human beings of course there are variations but you know it's very interesting if this very calm looking philosopher suddenly hit me in the teeth in front of you with its facilities a big burning Chapel to do some damage I would immediately say you shouldn't do that what would that mean of conversation it would mean that I expect him to add ear to the same moral standard as I adhere to in other words in our human behavior with one another and this isn't new the New Testament pointed at item and so did CS Lewis in our behavior with one another we behaved as if the standard transcends ourselves that's a good pointer to follow and therefore I feel that allied to those arguments for the existence of God that the moral argument is a very important one and it's very interesting to my mind these days how the moral argument is coming back into play the fact that we are moral beings where does it come from you see I want to argue as I did before that you can't give rationality for irrational and David Hume unless his heart I disagree with them about so much but anyway I do agree with them about this that you cannot get aught from is that is a huge problem in moral philosophy Sam Harris thinks he sold it and I delayed the publication of the book that was mentioned coming for God so that I could deal with him you cannot get Orton us from isness and one of the big difficulties is this if you abolish the transcendent that there's no God from whom we traditionally have got our moral axioms then we've got to find a morality down here in there where you going to find it going to find it in animal behavior when you can create any morality you like by studying different groups of animals and that's why there is so much confusion and that's another big topic but it seems to me to be a very important one I believe there is moral truth just as much as I believe there's rational truth although on the edges of course you will find people who have different levels there's a fuzziness around the edge well the topic of moral truth raises what for many people is the most difficult or most powerful objection against the truth of theism which is the existence and the distribution the amount and the kind of evil in the world and probably this is the number one argument that's discussed among philosophers against the existence of God and it's also one that has broad intuitive appeal we experience evil and and we think here's a clue that seems to point in the other direction so I want to ask two questions about the problem of evil the first one might be more philosophical which is do you think the amount and the kind of evil we experience and we witness is strong evidence against the existence of God I'm not asking for a proof but strong evidence and then the second question is how do you talk to a person if who is in the midst of suffering about God and evil because a person who is experiencing suffering is not looking for a philosophical argument so first I'd like to hear what you think about evil as evidence against the existence of God and then how do you think about engaging someone who's in the midst of suffering oh this is the hard question ladies and gentlemen it's by far the hardest question I think and I speak of someone there's been an oceans many times and I've wept every time and you're right if we step back from a Damone there are two aspects to it an oncologist in your University Hospital sees cancer in a very different way from the young woman and 23 just been told she's three months a minute so there's a philosophical question looking at them from the outside and there's the pastoral question how do we face it from the inside the audience society the size were bound to both our people her to here and many of my colleagues will say to be honest and I respect them the sage on that okay maybe there is evidence for some kind of God of the scientists designed the universe remote the laws of nature but please please don't insult me and don't talk to me about a personal God because you cannot possibly if you'd think at all reconcile the notion of a personal God who loves with the pain and the moral evil we find in the world there are two separate problems again we usually call them the problem of pain that's that tsunamis the cancers the earthquakes I arrived in New Zealand two days after the Christchurch birthday I had to meet people who'd lost their husbands of their ways I have to speak to the biggest audience for many years on the Sunday after that earthquake and incidentally if you want a bit more detail on how I responded to that problem just google my name and New Zealanders somebody has put up a webpage with a lot of the television interviews and radio interviews and student meetings and so on so there are these two problems and for some people it's a short circuit it's just the quantities too much I mean at the lower levels we can see purpose and pain I've tried to understand the mysteries of what you call football and I don't understand football except that I've got a definition of it I watched game once Inc of the city of Franklin struck me was one of the people whose day was up in the Hall of Fame you know the Hall of Famer program so he tried to explain it to me and after an hour he said you understand it perfectly I said American football is a series of prayer meetings interrupted by war so there you got it those big guys that play football I hope you've got a good team in jail they'll put up with that they'll put hourly not they will they will put up with any amount of pain will they because they can see the pain is a good thing to strengthen your muscles if you don't exercise them dusty etske one said that he could not imagine any truly great person that hadn't suffered but your question is about this year quantity of it so let me come to and I'd really rather have an hour for this because I made so many hurting people ladies and gentle you know and those of our us who are Christians are very simplistic sometimes that let me be personal for a moment because that believers will communicated far better than all the philosophy in the world a little that's very important a few years ago I nearly died surgeons intervened at the last minute and seconds from dying they saved my life and you say well you thank God for that yes I do but I'm very careful because in the same year my sister her daughter 22 just married had an earthquake in her brain and she lasted about six weeks and she's gone it's alright for me to thank God but what about her what are you going to say to her so without his background let me just come to this many people feel that atheism is the only honest solution to the storm and they feel they've solved the problem by the rate is listen to the extreme version of it the dawkins espouses it's useful because it's so explicit start this universe is exactly what you'd expect it to be if at bottom there is no good there is no evil there is no justice some people get lucky some people get hurt that's just how it is DNA just is that we music now that's the extreme materialistic view would you please notice what he does he destroys the categories of good and evil there is no good there is no evil and therefore I want to object to his talking about a problem of evil at all - Christopher it's and say God is not good when he's abolished the category of good so there's the theoretical side which I believe is very important that if you destroyed by your naturalism the very categories of good and evil then you have to stop talking about all this evil but atheist still do why do they still do that cause like every man and woman whether we believe in God or not we've made it as images moral beings it's only moral criteria so now we must pursue that well if I can play devil's advocate right at this point yes please mom it is also possible for an atheist who may be as conscious of the fact that in in her worldview she doesn't have much grounding for goodness and evil maybe she accepts this still she can look into the Christian worldview and say you are the ones who believe in goodness and your and a good God and you're the ones who believe in evil so there's a tension in your worldview absolutely right so that would be a different challenge that's my next point okay very good I must have been following very carefully is absolutely on track with that and it's very important let me put it this way let me put it this way because this is a big argument and I do not want to trivialize it it's a very big argument it hurts me and secondly I have no simplistic solutions to it either but let me give you what I think is a way in modesty as I can atheism solves the problem that's the way the universe is in a sense but I notice it doesn't remove the suffering that still exists I do notice also that it removes and I remember putting it to Richard Dawkins as I said your view is very bleak he said yes it is but that doesn't mean it's false I said it doesn't mean it's true either we'll have to decide that another runs so therefore the tension as you say quite rightly that tension exists in an extreme within me because I still believe in God and people say well how can you still believe in God and I'll try and tell you why we can argue for the next thousand years they've been doing it for thousands of years we put up a definition of God we put up a definition of goodness and then we say if God is good and all-powerful then he should code might probably must etc set to do this and he doesn't therefore God doesn't exist yes we're all used to that kind of argument I find it interesting but I've never found anybody that sold it that way so I asked a different question because I like Socrates and I think that if you can't answer one question try to print this and my question says granted that that's the way it is this world is full of ragged ages it's full of suffering it's full of evil it's full of pain are there any grounds anywhere that give me confidence and trusting God with it none let me come to the heart of this really it's a big story but you know that the heart of Christianity is a cross now you may find this very difficult and you may find it utterly incredible that a professor from Oxford but ladies and gentlemen as I sit here as a scientist I believe that Jesus was actually God incarnate he encoded himself in humanity he ended on the cross now what does that tell me if that is God and across at the very least what it tells me is that God has not remained distant from the problems of him but himself as the components and that to me is the beginnings of something of not the end of the next thing to realize is this that the only reason that crosses any significance whatsoever as the state from the thousands of other crosses that were put up under the Romans at that time in history is that the person on the cross was buried and rose again the third day I believe that as a fact of history I think David Hume was completely wrong about it which is another story but it be just related to this the fact that death is not the end ladies see what does atheism have to say to the young women who's just been told she's got no hope but it's worse than that think of the word that the Dawkins uses just this the human heart cries for justice all of us do now those made of any perceptive remark many years ago he said it would be very odd thing if we found ourselves with that first and there was no such thing as water if we find ourselves with an appetite for sex and there was no such thing as that if we find ourselves hungry and there was no such thing food it would be very curious but then he comes this next thing and we find ourselves with a finely-tuned sense of justice and there's no such thing as ultimate justice but as ladies and gentlemen if death is the end the vast proportion of people who ever have lived or will live will never get justice they don't get it in this life and there's no next life together we're so fortunate we can sit in this lecture theatre tonight we've got an education at the top point naught naught 1 percent of the world's and eat intellectually gifted people the vast majority of people are not and of our philosophy only deals with the brilliant the elite the well-off it's a kid's philosophy and it'll let us down catastrophic Lee when we enter into real suffering and problems and here's where it really bites for me and makes sense it's precisely because I believe that Jesus rose again but I believe the central claim he made to the Philosopher's incidentally another that there is a God who is creator but more than that he's the moral governor of the universe and he's going to judge the world one day by the man whom he has appointed by raising him from the dead and thus giving evidence to all men it's that confidence that enables me to trust God with the outcome atheism is literally hope less I believe as a Christian I have hope that is grounded because it's grinded both in history under and there is going to be a moral judgment and therefore to get back to where you started this I almost hesitate to say this you know but I'm going to say I firmly believe they didn't gentleman that if you could see what God does with the innocent who have suffered you'd have no more questions ok I'm going to ask one more question briefly but I would like if you have a three by five card and would like to submit a question we have people who will pick these up and we have some other questions coming in that have come in from tweets but we'll have about 15 minutes to talk about a couple of questions and but first I want to ask you kind of as a wrap-up here before you turn to this in two minutes what would you say to this group of people as they're exploring their worldviews you know how how would you encourage them to proceed and give us about two minutes on this and then we can begin to turn to some of these questions raise your hand if you've got a card that you've written something down on and they'll pick it up yes and I'd take two minutes then to say well I think you've got it all in your motto Veritas that locks that seek for the truth and be ruthless in your questioning the way in which we grow intellectually is by asking questions and what are the reasons I come and do things like this is I'm not the slightest bit afraid to say I don't know because I work with people who are more brilliant than I am and they come across almost every day the way things I don't know but I can ask questions and I would encourage you to do that and if you have a particular worldview your big chance at university is to get to know someone who doesn't share that worldview so if you're an atheist here tonight grab one of these funny Christians and have a word with them give them a hard time and get to know them as friends and you share your worldview with them and they can share their worldview with you I find that so enriching I want to emphasize ladies and gentlemen I count it an honor to a friends from virtually every religious group in the world atheist non atheists and so on because every one of you is of infinite value from where I sit you're made in the image of God so we can learn from everybody so you've got a unique opportunity at Yale in addition to studying your own discipline I know you all spend 14 hours a day at your textbooks that's clear I know that but it's a great pity if you don't spend time asking these deeper questions and seeing where your intellectual discipline fits in to the bigger picture of reality where it is not that expected into science where it is science fit in with a search for truth because you know there are many people today that say that science is the only way to Detroit that would mean half of your faculties would have to close over night including philosophy um you see which is absurd so you can get a picture of these epistemological tools how do we know anything how do we get to know things in our fields how do other people get to know so I would simply encourage you to seek answers to questions I've been doing it all my life and it's been so enriching and I believe jesus said if after all that those who seek will find ok we're going to take some questions that have come in through the texting and then a couple of questions coming from the floor and professor Lennox is going to look through them and read the interesting ones out and take you through them very briefly he'll give you two minutes and 12 seconds for each one so you can set your watch now I just made that up so shall I start you can start when you're ready just white you're bringing these up when there's a question here that says hydras naturalism contract reason what I'd say is that it gives no grounds for trusting reason that's the technical point I'm making I'm not saying that naturalism hasn't got a rational structure of course it has because it is created by minds whether they believe in God or not are made in the image of God so we are in a rational universe what I'm saying is that the deeper level that it does not give us a reason for trusting reason that's all so that's that and by the way this is a Q&A and he wants me to limit the answers and therefore they're going to be we're just little suggestions of how to start thinking about things and how is it a powerful argument that science originated from religious man what everyone that period of history was religious well that's a very good question which is the thing I vowed never to say that's a good question because that just bend your biding time and he can't think of an answer I'm happy let's look at the flip side of it which I didn't that question occurred to me a long time ago is there a flip side and there is because you see there are civilizations that existed at that time where modern science did not develop technology developed in China and one of the most famous psychologists was a scientist at Oxford called Joseph Needham he was a Marxist and for years he tried to explain the lack of the development of abstract science rather than technology in China on the basis of Marxism and he failed to do so and after many years study and he is the author of the definitive work on the history of Chinese technology after many years of work he came to this conclusion he said I think the difference is this that the Chinese lacked the unified concept of a single creator who created the universe as an intelligently caused entity so there is the flipside of that it is true that at the time people were religious but the point is that is when it happened and it happened because you can analyze it much deeper than this of course there are doctrines within the biblical world that facilitate science one is the notion that God created I'd sight of it itself so the universe is not a collection of God so you can study it secondly it's contingent it could have been otherwise so in other in order to study it instead of coming like Aristotle didn't apply to external principle to it like perfect motion and circular if you want to understand a what's out there in the universe you go and look at it thirdly and perhaps most interesting science started in the Bible God commanded it and this is a wonderful mandate you remember the story in Genesis which a lot of people don't take very serious I do it says that one of the first tasks that God gave to human beings was to name the animals in a bit that's what you're all doing part of your intellectual discipline until university is to learn new words and if you're studying philosophy he is a whole lot of terms that he could rattle off and you wouldn't know what the half of the meant I could rattle off a whole lot of terms in mathematics you wouldn't know what half of the man and all of you could do that because taxonomy the discipline of placing names on bits of the universe or an abstract ideas is the heart of the richness and intellectual God said you do it I'm not going to do it for you that is a mandate to get on with science so it seems to me for those and other reasons that this is actually a powerful argument now let's see are there any others is this a lot I have to content myself or this is really um over two more coming let's say there will be the end of them I think this will be the end road right okay right we're not going to be able to deal with them all because some of them demand about half an hour so let me just pick because there are five or six still left what are the bays can our morality be considered a naturally both Trey professors at Yale such as Paul bloom have made this argument quite strongly and many other professors have done exactly the same thing and no wonder because if naturalism true that's the only source you got you have to be able to explain it in this way now if you want any detail on why I think it doesn't work I'm afraid I'm going to do a shameless bit of advertising if you're really interested have a look at my recent book gunning for God which is all about these moral arguments I just simply going to make two points if you're a kind man like Charles Darwin was and you study hands you see them cooperating and you say good there we can deduce altruism from that as a your Wilson is done and so are many other people but if you're Spencer the contemporary of Darwin you see nature read and 2004 and you see it as a survival of the fittest ethics has been based on that within the last 100 years of the problem ladies and gentlemen is this that you can develop any morality you like by studying subhuman animals the problem comes and if you read Peter Singer you know what he thinks about it he thinks our major problem is speciesism treating humans are special because they're created in the image of God I think the problem is the exact opposite that we haven't taken seriously the fact that humans are special made in the image of God and therfore we've treated the lower species of the shameful way the procedure is a great animal rights personal you've done a lot of good for I applaud a lot of what he writes so it seems to me that I haven't I must read Paul bloom that said you offer to me but I've read dozens of authors of this and I get more and more convinced that what they're trying to do is for Jack mono who won the Nobel Prize long ago said they're trying to get from is to off and the thing is impossible mono was an atheist Bergman and the more I see of the attempts to go from is to art the more I fail it cannot be done but you see if you are a naturalist you've no other option the interesting thing about Christianity belief of God is you've got lots of options you can work with what happens through physical processes and you can work through what input comes from transcendent God excited you could have a mixture of the two it's far richer in its intellectual potentiality so of course they argue strongly and the stronger the the argument and the more I read it the less convinced I am but you have to decide for yourselves of course now maybe this should be the last one okay well if it's to be the last one given you you believe in God why do you believe in Christianity not Islam Buddhism or any other religion and that relates to another one at Jesus is at the center of Christianity what you find telling about and that's a extremely legitimate thing to ask and it comes back to where we started so it's a good one to benefit look after all your brought of a Christian you're a Christian lots of other people and other religions why would you bother to be a Christian and in addition some of the arguments you develop tonight are essentially arguments from theism but you're actually a Christian how do you move from those arguments to Christianity and I understand all of that and Christianity of course is highly history specific it makes historical claims it's not simply a philosophy indeed let me remind you God is not a falsity he's not a set of propositions as a person so there's this central claim that God has encoded himself in humanity that Jesus lived died rose again and he is able to offer us a relationship of God that is eternal and permanent now these are called muscle claims let me just underline one of them in the interests of your motto Veritas and the name of our forum you will recall that Jesus said I am the truth not I say true things although he did I am the truth that is a far reaching claim it states well of course it's crazy or message truth I am the truth 9 what do we make what do I make of other religions first of all I respect them and those who believe them I want to make that particular legend general let me bring you back to the Moran question one of the very important things is to distinguish two things the morality people believe in and how they think about God why do I say that because once you begin to see that there's a common essentially common code of morality around the world and once you discover that your neighbors of different religions or atheist could put you to shame sometimes by their care for other people that humbles you and you learn to respect them now I find in my dialogue that if I show that kind of respect for other people then we can talk about the obvious glaring differences leave Christianity outside Hinduism versions of it with hundreds of thousands of God's will never agree with Islam some religions like versions of Buddhism of no God at all and so on they won't agree with each other so how do you decide well I love to cut a long story short let's take history first of all my Jewish friends are who made many believe that Jesus died and didn't rise my Muslim friends believe he didn't die I believe he died and rose again those three views are mutilation so how do you decide them the only way I know to the side of is what is the evidence and a lot of that evidence is historical and brings you back to the original documents which is why I wrote a whole chapter in Mike and the book I've just mentioned coming for God on this how do you design so there's that historical thing and one of the reasons I'm a Christian is I believe the evidence points towards the fact that Jesus rose from the dead but finally and this is all far too brief but I've been asked this question what is special about Jesus to me well let me try him Yale is a wonderful University very similar to Oxford it was hard getting in was there was that hard getting in you had to pass exams and tests but you got in there was an initiation process now you're in but you're going to meet the final judgement one day aren't you at the end of your course and you wonderful professors like adopt against me here but even they can't guarantee you a degree coming however nice your professors are they cannot tell you right now that you're going to get through at the end why not because the foundation principle of education at Yale is married it's the same at Oxford now because so many things in life are like that people begin to think of religion like fact I need many Christians you think that's what Christianity is I make many Muslims who tell me that's what Islam is Hindus Jews and so on there's a gate at the beginning some Rite of initiation that gets you in then there are all kinds of priests Imams and people that will help you but there is a judgment of some kind to be faced at the end and none of them can guarantee that you're going to be accepted are that judgment for the very simple reason that the principle is married you've got took pile of your men yes we all understand that and I've had so many people I've made sure I bet representatives of every religion including Christianity if you think of it as a religion to say exactly that to me but that is not what Christ told me Christianity is not in competition with any religion I know because Christ offers me something that none of the others day let me put it to you ladies my first day of Cambridge I saw beautiful girls she was such a vision jeans blonde hair she was only 16 but there's another story and I fell in love with her and we got married we've been married 44 years now let's suppose in those far-off days when I first saw her I bought her a beautiful cookery book you know mrs. Beavan's could read you know so I present the turn I say Sally I would just love you to be my wife now here's a cooking book and it's full of rules here's the rule for making apple cake thou shalt take so many grams of flour and so much sugar thou shalt use them together and a pop thou shalt cook it at the thousand degrees centigrade and ourself in this or this advanced novel cake now and say here's there's the thing you see I'd love you to be my wife but I couldn't accept you now of course not but if you for the next 30 or 40 years keep and I'm back to a high standard and so on and keep me in the manner to which other custom then I might think of accepting you will you marry me why are you laughing the crew sets away millions of people think about gold exactly that legend when it boils down to it they're thinking exactly like that you would never insult another human being by taking about here so what is the thing that makes my marriage valuable that she for some reason accepted me at the beginning uncondition I did the same that's what set her free to live because she cooks not in order to gain my acceptance but because she's gone and ladies and gentlemen I travel around the world just to make it personal talking about God not in the hope that one day you say the good boy well done thank you very much no I do it because I've got acceptance years ago because this is the staggeringly wonderful thing about Christianity let me repeat he's not competing with any religious leader or any other religion because none of them offer this and he says that he that hears my word and believes in him that sent me already has eternal law and shall not come into judgment but has passed from death to life and I remember talking to one of the Supreme justices of the European Court who was of a different and he listened to be say this and I said mr. judge if you heard my case and you decided that I could go free would it be right to trust you that he was insulted he said I am the highest judge if I say you're free you're free I said the governor the Bartle governor of the universe has died for my sin and risen again he says I'm afraid there was a long silence on any sickness he said I thought it all depends who Jesus Christ is yes it does ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for more information about the veritas forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at Veritas org

Channel: The Veritas Forum

Views: 24,209

Rating: 4.8819671 out of 5

Keywords: veritas forum

Id: 665e36yMI-I

Length: 77min 51sec (4671 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/NoSheDidntSayThat]

great video. thank you so much for posting this.

[u/TooManyInLitter]

Almost 78 minutes long and no textual summary? :(