Is Anything Worth Believing In? | John Lennox's Fantastic Lecture at UC Berkeley

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 [Applause] life thank you very much for that warm welcome it is a sheer delight and honor to be invited to speak at this distinguished University and to be introduced uced by professor devis and I too don't normally Professor Dev talk to so many students in my mathematics classes a few days ago I was in Trinity College Dublin admiring the bust of the man after whom this illustrious University is named Bishop George Barkley of Clin an 18th century Anglo Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called immaterialism this theory contends that individuals can only know Sensations and ideas of objects not abstractions such as matter and that ideas depend on perceiving Minds for their very existence I'm interested to recall that his earliest Publications were in mathematics but perhaps he is most celebrated for a wonderful limeric that goes like this there was a young man who said God must find it exceedingly odd to think that the tree should continue to be when there's no one about in the quad Dear Sir your astonishments odd I am always about in the quad and that's why the tree will continue to be since observed by Yours Faithfully God I hope you're all aware that that celebrates your Barkley Bishop who gave his name to this University his famous thoughts on idealism it is also an honor for me to be invited to speak at a university whose motto is Fiat looks let there be light which parallels the motto of my own University of Oxford Domino illuminat Oma the Lord is my light and our question tonight is this is anything worth believing in well clearly practically all of you I suspect in this room have answered the question positively in the sense that you value an education at this University you believe that it's going to do something for you and you believe it so deeply I gather that many of you have been prepared to pay serious money to come here so you're already giving at Le least a partial answer to the question there are things worth believing in and one of them is the life of the mind and so it is no accident I think that here we are assembled many of us in a place that stands under the motto let there be light and what we celebrate tonight is the intellectual freedom to think about the Big Ideas in our universe now there's going to be a personal Dimension to this talk because I've been invited to give it a personal Dimension and because I think always it helps to understand where the person speaking to you is actually coming from in their thinking I come from the same country as Bishop Barkley we call him Barkley by the way I don't know how you change your name but that's probably a mystery and from my childhood I was fascinated by logical analysis and early on I came across ukian geometry where all the wonderful theorems like that of Pythagoras could be deduced by logical Wizardry from a very few postulates or axioms that is you start by accepting by believing the axioms and then you see where they lead what you can deduce from them and then people start asking fascinating questions do you need all the axioms and over the centuries attention concentrated on the fifth postulate the so-called parallel Axiom and people tried to deduce it from the others and they couldn't and then in a stroke of Genius in the 19th century Bala and lichi showed that you could construct geometries that satisfied the first Axiom and a denial of the parallel postulate and so non- idian geometries were born now ID's geometry was very useful it's still is for calculations involving fields and buildings but what about these new geometries it turned out that they were exactly what was needed to study SpaceTime and were crucial for Einstein's amazing work on relativity it was really heav stuff for a school boy to discover that kind of thing in the depths of Ireland and I fell in love with axiomatic systems I hope you've fallen in love with axiomatic systems too and I've spent my life trying to work out some of the inferences that can be built on the acceptance of the four axioms of the theory of groups I am interested Professor de that your attention was caught by the title of my book subnormal subgroups of books it usually gets classified under abnormal psychology the inferences from those four aums led to some of the most complex results in any science the longest being the classification of finite simple groups that initially took 10,000 pages of Journal articles to complete and was mastered and still is by very few people in the world just four axioms you accept those and you're led into an almost infinitely complex world of possibilities but that's boring isn't it group Theory you thought are going to get a lecture in mathematics you're not but you see I like to think laterally and I soon began to wonder even at school about science itself does it have axioms in any sense in the in in a more informal sense does science involve beliefs and if so what beliefs and which of them are fundamental scientists appeared to be interested in finding out truth about the universe out there hence the attempt to find axiomatic mathematical systems that somehow appeared to correspond with what was out there but then when I probed further I discovered that the concept of Truth was a bit difficult for some people there were different beliefs about truth itself I found some even who believed that there was no such thing as absolute truth perhaps you found some of those people I noticed it as a little bit odd because they expected me to believe that their axum was true I never forget sitting in my college at Oxford and I discovered a postmodern writer sitting beside me and they had his book on the desk and uh I'm interested in such things and uh fell to talking with him and I said what is the thesis of your book oh he said the thesis of my book is extremely important it is this there is no such thing as authorial intention oh I said really I don't think half of you are awake actually I said you mean if I read your book I will come to the conclusion that you cannot deduce authorial intention from any work of literature he said that's right so I said I'm not going to read your book he said why not and I told him and he walked up and left the room he'd never thought of it he had committed one of those errors that I find everywhere and that is to make an an assertion that appears to be universalized but it doesn't apply to the person making the assertion and therefore it's logically incoherent and I thought you can't build much on logical incoherence it's odd that I find similar things in the Sciences but we'll get to those in a moment I do notice of course that not many of uh such people were scientists at least they left their postmodernism at home and they didn't bring it into the laboratory at the opposite extreme to those people who denied the existence of any kind of absolute truth I found many scientists who belied that they were getting nearer and nearer to a truth was out there that's what they believe that's what drove them but then they took another step and they seemed to think that science was the only way to truth so one poll there was no truth this poll there was truth but science is the only way to it bertr and Russell expressed it this way what science cannot tell us man kind cannot know it's a clever sentence isn't it and I admire Bertrand Russell for his history of Western philosophy and his logic in general but boy did it depart him when he wrote this statement let's analyze it if it's not too late at night for a little bit of logical analysis what science cannot tell us mankind cannot know is that a statement of science no so you cannot know it so if it's true it's false it's logically incoherent it goes too far it's not a statement of science it's simply a statement of belief now that's extremely interesting because sir Peter medir the Nobel Prize winner he saw the danger of this kind of overreach of science now I am a passionate scientist I love love it and I'm thrilled a bits to hear of some of the science that's done here in UC Berkeley the last time I was here I was at a mathematical Congress but we do science no service said sir Peter medir in a book that all young scientists should read the limits of advice to a young scientist has called we do science no service if we think it can answer all questions and soon will do because it's so obvious that science has limits in that it cannot answer the questions of a child where do I come from where am I going what is the meaning of life and he adds interestingly it is to religion and imaginative literature that we must turn to answer such questions now another very closely related idea is the notion that science is coextensive with rationality now if that were the case half the faculties in Berkeley would have to close tomorrow science is not coextensive with rationality there are other rational disciplines by definition like history art all the rest of it and they are not in the narrower sense Natural Science so that led to more questions what about the reality that science studies were there axioms here were there assumptions that people bring to bear to the universe or do we approach the universe totally dispassionately detachedly and neutrally and I discovered that no one did that every single person in this room is a worldview it may be very deeply thought out it may only be being formed that's what universities are for and we have already got a set of partial answers at least to the very big questions in life and one of the biggest of course is what is Ultimate Reality it's not a new question and I always found it helpful to realize that Al low in one sense there are many answers to it in another sense there are basically two that war in the academy and they come up to us certainly from as early as ancient Greece on the one hand you had the ancient atomists like democratus and luuk kipus Brilliant men who had the notion of the atom the indivisible thing but they believed that atoms and the void were all that existed they were materialists in that sense all that is is is matter as Carl San put it in his famous Cosmos series the universe is all that was is or ever shall be and therefore explanation by definition was exhaustively bottom up because there was no Transcendence there was no ultimate top down for causation and then there were other people like Plato Socrates Aristotle and virtually all the great classical thinkers including Bishop Barkley of course who believed that this universe is not all that there is there is Transcendence there is the gods or God and these two views come barreling up through history to us today and so in my own University of Oxford we have brilliant scientists who are materialists and we have brilliant scientists who are theists and that should show you instantly ladies and gentlemen that this idea that there's a fundamental conflict between science and belief in God is a myth think of the Human Genome Project its first director Jim Watson with whom I discussed the issue Nobel Prize winner a thoroughgoing materialist and atheist its second director Francis Collins now director of the National Institute of Health a Christian both top scientists so it's quite clear that science and belief in God don't conflict it's also clear that science and belief in atheism don't appear to conflict what I would want to say to you tonight and I found it so Illuminating on my journey through life is this that there is a conflict but it's not at the level of s science versus religion it's deeper it's a world view conflict it's a conflict between materialism or naturalism on the one hand and theism on the other and there are scientists on both sides so that then leads to the next fascinating question at least I find it fascinating as a scientist on which side does science sit of any is it neutral in the middle or is it like Richard Dawkin says is it does it lead inevitably to atheism or does it as I would say does it lead or sit more comfortably with theism that's why I find the god debate in the academy today fascinating and that's why I get involved in it so we're going to approach some of these things but having mentioned worldview then the thought struck me could it be that these worldviews influence the way we do our own academic subjects or are they completely separate and here the sociological critique of science is very important I was knocking postmodernism a bit earlier let me not come a little bit of a corrective because one of the things the sociological critique of science has shown as clearly is science is something that people do so it's got a human and a personal element and because it's got a human and a personal element it involves commitments it involves world viw that is not of course to go to the extreme to deny truth but it is to say that I may not be as disinterested and dispassionate and neutral as I claim to be so I've got a world viiew yes I have let me tell you where it started it started not surprisingly in Ireland and you might say that's a bit tough isn't it because you come from Northern Ireland just imagine it and Northern Ireland hasn't got exactly the purest Christian reputation has it we have a reputation as a sectarian and violent country fortunately things have cammed down quite a bit so I grew up there but I was very fortunate I had parents who were Christian and not sectarian very unusual even more unusual I had parents who loved me enough to let me think and when I was a boy my Christian parents encouraged me to read the Marxist Communist Manifesto they wanted me to be aware that there were other World Views so long before I left the Cradle of Northern Ireland I was aware there was a big world out there of people who didn't share my worldview now I got excited because my father who was not an educated man came across the writings of a man called CS Lewis and I started to read these as at 12 or 13 year old and I found their logic utterly compelling and I thought you get logic in literature as well as in ukan Geometry isn't this marvelous and I discovered that there was something that bound together the humanities and the Sciences you saw from my sort of CV that I'm a person of many parts I'm fascinated by language mathematics is a language but the thing that really unites the lot for me is the fact that all of us in our academic disciplines are interested in one very important thing and that is to learn how to logically analyze something so I got to Cambridge not Massachusetts the other one and in my first week as a student another student said to me do you believe in God and then he said oh I'm very sorry I forgot you're Irish and all you Irish believe in God and you fight about it well that was a great start I'd heard that argument before but then I thought I need to take this seriously I'm at one of the top universities in the world mathematics claims to be a a fairly pretentious serious subject could it be that I believe what I believe and feel it's worth believing simply because my parents believed it my grandparents believed it and their parents believed it was it just Irish genetics and that's why I believed it now notice if we go a little bit deeper in this little interchange that happened in my undergraduate days I didn't realize it but something was being explained to me that was immensely important of course you believe in God you're Irish and I was introduced to something I didn't then understand but it's called the genetic fallacy that if you can give a causal explanation for something then that undermines its truth you all know what that means have you ever heard I'm sure you wouldn't in this University but have you ever heard somebody say to somebody else you say that because you're a woman have you ever heard anybody say that lots of you women have I've not often heard it said the reverse you say that because you're a man but I have heard it said ideally said by my wife but I shouldn't say that but you see the point if you say to someone you say that because you're ah you're giving a causal explanation to deny the validity of what they say just think about this before I come to it think about the causal descriptions of human rationality that are offered to us today and think of their implications for the validity of belief well we'll come back to that so what did I do about it I started to look for people that didn't share my worldview and now I've got a confession to make you could say well we all start off naive don't we so here I was in Cambridge trying to find an atheist and I imagined that an atheist would probably be someone with a beard please forgive me gentlemen because I since discovered that some of the most delightful people in the world of beards and I had won myself until my wife Rebel but that's another story so I looked around and there lo and behold there was a mathematician with a beard he wasn't an atheist he was an agnostic he'd never been into church his parents didn't believe in God and so he started to talk and after 2 years something very interesting happened he changed his world view and he became a Christian he's now a world famous Professor of mathematical logic but that's irrelevant to the point I want to make I discovered that it's possible to change world view and the interesting thing is on what basis was this change affected it had to do with something that is very closely related to belief is anything worth believing and that is the matter of evidence I've always been interested in languages after all what are languages they compressions of ideas into symbols that's what mathematics does par excellence and my interest in German led to me having a funh humbled Fellowship in Germany and I learned the language so that I could talk freely with the people particularly in Eastern Europe and particularly in the German Democratic Republic as was then called because I was interested to see what effect did atheist philosophy had on the intellectual life of a country on his education now I look around and I see most of you weren't born when the the Berlin Wall fell could you imagine me coming into a home as I did and a girl comes crying home from school she's 13 and of course being a visitor I was very concerned why are you crying Esther she said I can't study anymore she was the brightest girl in the school grade A all the way through absolutely brilliant why can't you study anymore well the teacher tells me that we're having a parade in a couple of weeks time and you have to stand beneath the Colossal head of KL Marx in KL markat cabinets as it's called today and swear a public oath of allegiance to the atheistic State 13 years old I won't do it her then you'll have to work in the slipper Factory I stood and wept with her because I call that intellectual murder ladies and gentlemen and on my pathway those images from the past have made our very deep impression so that I get alarmed as I see some times in our Western free world as it's called the stealthy but sure indications of another totalitarianism of mind that doesn't really allow people to think they Mark you and that's why I'm explaining to you where I am coming from of course the wall fell and I helped to knock it down actually very gently but but I did then I started going to Russia for many years I'd been a translator of mathematical Russian unfortunately I never heard the language so my knowledge of it was passive until suddenly I'm taken to Siberia on a two-way ticket but I'm taken to Siberia and I was forced to learn it very rapidly and that was fascinating I want you to imagine this happening in your campus at the mathematical Institute Professor Lennox gives a lecture on subnormal subgroups of groups and the Learned professors there ask some polite questions which I try to answer and usually can't and then they say excuse me can we ask other questions certainly be delighted we hear you believe in God why does that happen every week in your mass department and and hour after hour every time I gave a mass lecture those were the questions they wanted answered so I very rapidly found myself in amongst the dissidents fascinating I met one man he told me he'd been seven years in the gag and he seemed quite cheery about it and I said you know how could you be cheery about it oh he said you got to understand that the gag was the best university there's ever been all the most brilliant people in Russia were there but he said don't go there now it's full of criminals and I was amazed at this his tiny collection of books which he called his treasures we talked night after night after night after night for two months and what did they all want to talk about God why was one of of my questions why do you suddenly get interested in belief in God well one reason they explained to me was this was the devaluation of human beings they'd experienced the failed attempt to construct a new man and I can remember one distinguished professor of mathematics saying to be John he said it's very simple we thought we thought that we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings and we discovered we couldn't DOI you know is right he said if God does not exist everything is permissible and dovi of course in the brothers karamazov did not mean that no atheist could be ethical my atheist friends frequently put me to shame in their care for other people he was talking at a deeper level he was saying there's no rational justification for Behavior if there isn't a God and he said we experienced it massively that's what he said not me and I heard it again and again and again hence their interest how was it possible for me as a maeti of all people to believe in God because to them they had an axiom it really was an axiom because it was an unquestioned postulate that there was no God I remember many a conversation went like this you believe in God and that's right I said I do well I don't why don't you well there isn't a God okay uh why do you believe there isn't a god what do you mean by the question why well I mean what is the evidence that there isn't a god evidence it's not a matter of evidence there just isn't a god well I said that's twice youve made the same assertion but what about evidence and then it was very interesting to watch the light Dawn and they said you don't Goodness Me do you mean to tell me that your belief in God is based on evidence I well I was amazed at this the first time I met it I said well of course I'd be an absolute idiot to believe in God if there wasn't evid that confusion ladies and gentlemen is at the heart of much of the modern debate the idea that faith is a religious concept that means believing in something for which they is no evidence the inference is there's no need to discuss it and I discovered it most signally of all in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher hitson I would point out that not all atheists are aggressive as those two secondly I'd point out that I had very interesting debates with the two of them but many of my atheist friends in Oxford and I want to be distinguished from their aggression because they are men whose atheism is held with the same respect for me as a non- atheist as the respect in which I hold them as atheists one of the vastly important things is that if Humanity means anything at all and is valuable that we learn to respect the views of other people and then we can debate them in a friendly way Richard Dawkins thinks and I mention him because of his influence it is colossal Faith being belief that isn't based on evidence is the principal Vice of any religion scientific belief is based B on publicly checkable evidence religious faith not only lacks evidence he claims its independence from evidence is its Joy shouted from the housetops but faith that is not based on evidence is what most of the rest of us would call Blind Faith very dangerous it can be it's the kind of blindness that causes people to drive aircraft into tall buildings and we've seen enough evidence of Blind Faith to sicken most of us for a lifetime but faith in its principal meaning is not blind at all as a glance at the Oxford English Dictionary forgive me if I quote the Oxford English Dictionary but there according to it at least the word faith toise from the Latin fides from which we get the word Fidelity so its basic mean meaning is trust or rely on here are the principal senses according to the dictionary belief trust so faith belief and Trust are synonyms two that which produces belief evidence token pledge engagement trusted its objective aspect and so on so it's obvious isn't it that the validity of any faith or belief depends on the strength of the evidence on which it is based and that of course is our Common Sense view why did you come here this evening I think it is because you believe there would be a lecture at 7:30 why did you believe there would be a lecture at 7:30 because you had sufficient evidence for it otherwise you wouldn't be here unless you're a lunatic of course so this is a very interesting thing in ordinary everyday life we know exactly what it means that normally faith is evidence-based and if you don't know what it means you'll discover the first time you go to get a bank loan because the banker will want to know if there's enough evidence to put trust in you to lend you the money of course some of the problems in our world today are the reverse it's a question can we trust the bankers but that illustrates the same point in Reverse doesn't it once credibility went in the financial system it collapses and it can only be got going if the financial systems can build up sufficient evidence that they can be trusted and if ever there was a time when it was very clear what's the difference between evidence-based faith and Blind Faith it ought to be not I tried to make the point to Richard Dawkins in our debate by asking him was there any evidence had he any evidence his wife believed in him and he said of course I mean you look there are things a husband notices little nods and glances and all those kind of things and so on also I said so you do believe in evidence-based Faith but he said it isn't Faith but it was too late we all know what that means don't we we know how to distinguish between Blind Faith and evidencebased based Faith so the next logical question is is atheism evidence-based Faith or blind faith is Christianity I cannot speak ladies and gentlemen tonight about other religions it's only fair that they speak for themselves so as a Christian let me ask the same question to be fair is the Christian faith evidence-based or is it blind of course Richard Dawkins claims atheism is not a faith until I said to him why don't you believe it people are so convinced that faith is this special religious word that they end up with all kinds of curious statements like Hitchens our beliefs are not a belief well that's the end of all logic and indeed I had a wonderful interchange with him in one of our debates where I discovered that he said if you have to have faith to believe anything then that diminishes the likelihood that it's true so I said Christopher do you believe that you exist of course he did well if he asked her faith to believe he exists that diminishes the likelihood that he does exist doesn't it it's silly actually we all know the difference so let me start with the Christian faith first here's a fundamental statement related to this now Jesus did many other things in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book but these are written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah the Son of God and that believing you might have life in his name in other words here's the evidence I've collected it it is the evidence on which Faith the commit can be based atheists and Russia and elsewhere sometimes claim that the Christian faith is a delusion you remember the book The God Delusion definition of delusion in that book is a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence well I want to claim that the boots on the other foot it is the widespread concept of Faith as blind that is a delusion a persistent false belief that is held in the face of strong contrary evidence do atheists have faith well the notion of that Faith as a special religious concept leads to another error and that is that neither atheism nor science involves Faith what about science well science proceeds on the basis of the belief that the universe is rationally intelligible Paul Davis a brilliant physicist at ASU says that the right scientific attitude now listen to this Paul Davis is not a theist the right scientific attitude is essentially theological science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an Act of Faith the existence of a lawlike order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us Einstein no less said I cannot imagine a scientist without that profound Faith note the word so here we reach a very interesting situation indeed faith is a essential to science as well not simply to Christianity faith is actually essential to every part of life is there anything worth believing in if you believe science is worth doing as probably half of you do here at least perhaps the other half are generous to think so as well then you accept the fact that there's a fundamental postulate that underlines every scientist thinking that that Universe out there can be accessed by the human mind now on what basis do you believe that and here's the interesting thing let's take the materialistic explanation the mind is the brain what is the brain the brain is the end product of a Mindless unguided process the causal Links come bottom up remember the genetic fallacy if it is true that my mind is my brain is the end product of a Mindless unguided process why should I believe anything it tells me that's a very important question that increasingly philosophers are asking the chemist JBS halade put it beautifully years ago he pointed out that if the thoughts in my mind are just the Motions of atoms in my brain why should I believe anything it tells be including the fact that it's made of atoms you believe in God because you're an Irishman you believe in science because it's caused by the random motion of atoms what's the difference ladies and gentlemen one is sophisticated language the other is unsophisticated but I would make the same point they both actually undermine the validity of what's said my main point this evening ladies and gentlemen is this my problem with atheism here is not because I'm a Christian at all it's because I'm a scientist I'm not convinced of the truth of a worldview that undermines the very thing I count most worthwhile in my career the pursuit of the understanding of the rational order in the universe that might surprise you but it is absolutely true on the other hand could I point out or suggest to you that biblical theism is completely coherent in its explanation of why science can be done it teaches there is a God who is responsible for the universe and its maintenance out there and is responsible ultimately for the human mind in here and because God is intelligent logos the two things can come together at a certain level and now I notice another thing it now doesn't surprise me that there's a close link between this belief and the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries I never forget giving a lecture on this in Siberia first lecture incidentally that had ever been given on this topic in the university in 75 years we were given a room that's hardly bigger than this platform and 500 people came 20% of the entire University never forget it and I started to tell them I said it's very interesting the rise of science Galileo Kepler Newton CL Maxwell babage and so on were all believers in God and when I said that this serious senior scientist in the front row started to look really angry and I stopped and I said excuse me gentlemen I noticed that I have Disturbed you somewhat and I would rather like to know why and one professor said why were we never never told that any of these people believed in God well that's the easiest question I've ever been asked in my life but isn't it interesting their anger at discovering a bit of History because history had been revised history is enormously important and that is why I am honored and I mean it seriously that it is a historian that in uced our lecture tonight because of all the disciplines that is needed today it seems to me history is one of the most crucial and I have found it of immeasurable benefit sitting at the feet of some of our historians as they go through the rise of Science and why it happened you see ladies and gentlemen far from god- hindering science belief in him was the most that drove it at that same conference a bit later there was a professor got very angry with me some people do you know I don't I can't imagine why but some people do and he went to a Blackboard and he drew some lightning flashes and he said this man is dangerous well I'd never been described as dangerous before this man is really dangerous you see the ancient used to believe that lightning was caused by God God and then science came along and explained it in terms of climatic changes air movement static electricity and all kinds of things and God disappeared and after I had argued for about 20 minutes to get the right of a two-minute reply to his 1hour trade against me I said I only want to say two things I said number one is this the god you don't believe in I don't believe in either a God who disappear when you discovered how lightning worked would hardly be worth believing in would he and secondly on the same analogy but in a slightly different context I suppose that you would stop believing in a watch maker once you discovered how a watch worked he said we need to talk and we did until far into the night when he told me he said I've been burned by seriously defective Christianity I was ashamed really but that's another story this other argument is very common Hawking in his recent book and I've just written another book and it's going to be available afterwards months before it will appear in the bookshops in America God and Steven Hawking it is a response to the recent book The Grand Design in which Hawking now follows Dawkins to offer us the choice between God and science and it's either or in his case it's God and the law of gravity I find that staggering in the 21st century after all the thinking that's gone through the centuries that a man of Hawkings Eminence and he's brilliant the greatest living scientist he was a couple of years ahead of me in Cambridge and he's light years ahead of me an intellect I have no quibble with his scientific capacity but philosophy you see ladies and gentlemen if you believe that God is a god of the gaps who disappears as science advances of course you will say there's a choice between God and science but what if God is not a god of the gaps what if he is the god of the whole show when Newton discovered his law of gravitation he didn't say gosh now I understand how it works I don't need God no he didn't he wrote pipia Mathematica the most brilliant book in the history of science expressing the hope that a thinking man would come through it to believe in the existence of God that is he made the simplest philosophy 101 distinction between mechanism and law on the one side and agency on the other side asking people to choose between God in Sciences an explanation is like this here we have a Ford Motorcar engine and I say choose between the following two explanations one the laws of internal combustion and mechanical engineering to Henry Ford choose I'm glad you're laughing why is it that some of the brightest people on the planet cannot see the difference Henry Ford is an agent explanation the law of internal combustion mechanical engineering is a mechanism explanation and a law explanation they don't conflict of course they don't they are complimentary and both are needed for a full explanation and I'm staggered and I repeat it utterly staggered to find people like Richard Dawkins constantly saying that it's either or indeed is it not true that the more you understand of engineering ing the more you can admire a Rolls-Royce engine the more you understand of art the more you can admire the genius of rembrand and ladies and gentlemen the more I understand of Nature and Science and the complexity of the mathematics even that's needed in its intellectual description the more I'm amazed at the genius of the god that created it and so I come to the close is anything worth believing in well we answered the question in the first couple of minutes why did I go on because it seems to me it's good to remind ourselves that one of our biggest problems in dialogue is the very concept of belief and so many young people are being told that belief is a religious thing it does not belong in the academy why is the motto of Berkeley Fiat Lux written beneath what looks to me like an Open Bible why is the motto of Oxford Domino illuminat Oma because the people in the ancient world were dumb and they' no idea they were some of the finest brains that have ever been we need to get God talk back into the academy ladies and gentlemen don't we let there be light not let there be dark does I travel around the world I fear sometimes but I discover that young people are not allowed to articulate their faith and nor are the professors because some anti-intellectual political correctness has paralyzed the debate serious stuff isn't it very serious stuff I finish with this there are two World viws each of us circles around somewhere in the one pool the other pool University is the great opportunity to discuss with others who don't share your world view I've been doing it all my life and here they come in the beginning was mass energy matter in the void and as the particles poured through the void they fell together they formed galaxies and planets and eventually they produced human life and they produced the human mind and they produced the idea of God because there isn't a God or in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God the same was in the beginning with God all things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be do you see the difference in the first world view mass energy is primary mind is derivative in the second worldview mind is primary and mass energy is derivative and as a scientist and as a Christian I think you can see where I feel the answer lies is there anything worth believing in oh ladies and gentlemen I'm an old man let me speak to you directly in all my life studying different philosophies and ideas and Mathematics and the sheer fun of it I've never come across an idea that remotely touches this one the word became human and dwelt among us but that would be a story for another time thank you ladies and gentlemen okay let's let's start here then we'll go to the next mic and back and forth all right start yeah so you you see that you know there's some kind of battle going on and it's it's over the thing science and I'm totally with you why are we fighting over science which really doesn't say anything about these bigger World Views um I'm really wondering about agnostics though we've got we've got these Believers on one side we've got the anti-b Believers on the other side which are naturally in conflict with one another but then there's this other group which doesn't fit into that and I'm just curious how you see that thank you I'm not a scientist and I think my mind is about this big compared to what what I'm seeing on stage but um I did not hear from you what the evidence for God is um and I also wanted to know if um you could describe God thank you okay here um as the per the person before me said the question of Science and religion yeah I I see that it's uh not necessarily contradictory but um towards the end in fact the last point you made was the what came first the chicken or the egg argument um you said that on one hand mind uh preceded matter and on the other hand uh matter preceded Mind by which uh you imply that um mind needs matter to exist uh but if one believes in a first cause you necessarily believe that that mind did not have matter did not need matter to exist how do you face that okay uh thank you for your time in coming here Professor Lennox um during your talk you mentioned a uh sort of Prevailing Faith in Academia and um and its uh invalidity and do you believe that has an implication on responsible Christian intellectualism thank you my question is actually very similar to the lady who asked the question over there um uh what would you say is the primary evidence for God's existence and then also I would be interested in getting your take on who does the burden of lie on does it lie on the atheist to provide evidence for God's non-existence or for the theist to provide evidence for God's existence thank you okay one more here yeah no just keep asking the questions and then I won't have to answer any of them I'll keep this one short um being a Christian um and you've been arguing for religion why discredit all other religions that's my question thank you okay on the right yeah um why do we why do we necessarily have to believe in Christianity to reach this Union of scient scientific and theistic or science and interface scientific and theistic interface what if this weirdly Democratic amib boid hyper intelligent super organism called everybody what if that God and we don't we no longer need like uh uh religious toage or Antiquated rituals and all the stuff that you know go along with religion thank you okay can we take one more or I'm very happy to take one more yes um oh so if you assert that uh God can be proven then doesn't that uh place the uh um gu the proof system to be above uh I guess more primary than God can you repeat that that sounds very interesting to me but I didn't quite catch it can you just say it again uh if you assert that God can be proven then that doesn't that elevate the proof system over a God because then the uh I guess the proof system is acatic and God is merely a theorem of oh do you mean the kind of thing if there's a God who created then we have to ask the question about God himself and you go back no I mean like um I mean basically your higher standard is not if you prove God then you have some other higher standard that you take on faith that okay I've got it yeah one more hi professor lenx um my question is a bit mathematical so um so recently uh a group of us had a discussion about uh how do we classify science and Faith um would would science and Faith belong in the same Universal set that's the first question uh if so is it um exclusive of each other or intersecting or faith is a subset of signs or signs is a subet of Faith yeah and why wonderful thank you we'll have another round of these questions you're hopeful well thank you very much it's now you can all see what's going on in people's heads that's why I do it this way so that we get a range of questions and I will respond to them now let me say a couple of things I don't know everything you see that already and this is a Q&A and I don't want to keep you until tomorrow morning so my comments will be brief they will not necessarily be satisfactory but that's a good thing you can start researching these things if they're serious questions by talking with your friends about it okay the first and I won't necessarily go through them in the order in which they were asked um the first questioner though rightly said there is a battle and raised the question does science say anything about World Views now that's a question you can approach in several different ways in the earlier ages science was part of what's called natural philosophy and though whole thing was dealt with the whole question of World Views and science was dealt with in a sense as one now it's pretty clear that when I'm teaching algebra in Oxford it's got zero to do with World Views except in the sense that the fact that I stand there talking about it show that I believe in rationality so the question of world viw and belief comes at The Meta level that is the second level why do you believe believe that it's a valid thing to do to do that it doesn't come at the top level and a lot of science is like that but then there are some people that say explicitly that their science impinges on their worldview when it comes to certain types of science for instance the geneticist Richard Leon I think he's in Harvard said look science doesn't Force us to accept materialistic conclusions it is our a priori conviction of materialism that forces us to accept materialistic conclusions no matter how counterintuitive they are he was ferociously honest I admire him and then he added why he says this in other words he's a materialist by conviction a priori that affects His science and then he says the very revealing statement we must not let a Divine foot through the door now that's interesting because there is someone explaining their commitment to worldview and science now I'm not suggesting every atheist is like that not at all but I'm just saying there is an area that you might to look at in that connection now several people asked me or suggested I hadn't said anything about the evidence for god well that shows that I've been very unclear because I thought I had one of the most powerful evidences for God to my mind and let me repeat it because I said it before is the fact that we can do science that this is a rational Universe it Bears the whole marks of rational intellectual input we cannot deduce much about God from the universe Christianity incidentally admits that quite openly the Apostle Paul says that what we can deduce is first of all that there is a God and secondly that he's powerful you can't deduce a lot more than that but that's a very big issue I notice with the vment with which it's debated in the world today and it's a big enough piece of evidence that it drove the rise of Science in the opinion of what I seem to see of the majority of historians and philosophers of science so at that level we have evidence from God about the natural from the natural world but that's not the only evidence for God how far from it you've asked me in one sense a more personal question what do you feel is the big evidence for god well I would start with science but I wouldn't stop there because the whole question of the existence of God raises the question of has God spoken one of the final questions was if you prove God you'll prove them by a higher standard that you'll take on faith and so on but half a minute the claim ladies and gentlemen is not that God is a theory the claim is that he is a person now think if I want to get to know Professor de well I could put him in the best tunnel scanner that Berkeley knows and I could watch his brain patterns and so on I could investigate him uphill and down Dale and all the rest would I get to know him no how could I get to know him if he reveals himself to me that's how I get to know him isn't it simple isn't it and will you please notice the elementary fact that if he reveals himself to me I use my rationality to understand his Revelation I don't shut down rationality when he begins to speak that is an absurd notion and yet I meet you laugh but I meet dozens of people people that when I claim that scripture is revelation they say oh that means it's anti-reason I've never met a person in my life that can read the Bible without using their brain have you the issue at stake is that there maybe and this is something to open your mind to at University of course you can come with a closed mind if you like but this is Berkeley we' got open minds s great you can start by assuming that the whole thing is a closed system but then you'll never rise above it if I invent a machine in the Livermore laboratory that can only see visible light it'll never see x-rays but you cannot use that machine to conclude that x-rays don't exist can you and so Revelation doesn't oppose reason so my answer to both of those questions would begin to be we can ask the other question is there any evidence around in history that's serious evidence that God has spoken and if so what has he said and could it possibly be that since we are persons God has spoken in terms of a person because he is a person so that we can get to know them him well I don't need to tell you do I that incredibly 20 centuries ago a person stood on planet Earth and claimed to to be God incarnate I am the truth he said he didn't claim to speak true things although that's true he said something infinitely more profound I am the truth well that's either the most ridiculous abserd nonsense as CS Lewis pointed out long ago or is it true well you can test it you don't have to start by believing it is there any evidence that this is the truth let's start reading and now you have to go into history again you can't avoid it because there are two kinds of evidence for the existence of God there's objective evidence if you like in terms of nature history but then there's subjective evidence in terms of experience and all of those things have to be added together I might just come back to that but I want to uh Shun in another question and that's this just to change the atmosphere slightly um which came first the chicken or the egg I'm glad you asked me that it's a wonderful dilemma especially for Irishmen you know was it the chicken of the egg that came first but you said that I implied that Minds need matter to exist I hope I didn't because I agree with you entirely sir and this is the very interesting thing what I understand the situation to this is my belief for what it's worth that God is Spirit he created matter he is not dependent on it and as you say the first cause is immaterial wow that's a word to use in Berkeley isn't it immaterial does the immaterial exist oh I'm tempted to give you a lecture but then I've written a book about it so I'll have to leave it there I find it utterly ironic really ironic almost hilariously so that we've had several Generations now of Fairly Hefty applied materialism and what have they come up with as one of the fundamental concepts of physics information and is information M material no it isn't isn't that fascinating and some physicists are even talking about it as being independent of matter these are questions of course that interest me greatly for very obvious reasons but there are lots of fascinating things to be thought of there so who is the burden of proof let's divide it ladies and gentlemen that's the fair way to do it atheism is a worldview theism is a world view one of the things that disturbs me is the default of assumption in the media for instance in my own country England I can't speak for North America that the default view is atheism and every other worldview must justify itself at the table that's nonsense there isn't a default worldview all World Views should be free to come to the table and offer their evidence you can talk about burden of proof until the cars come home but what does that actually solve if you go into the bank and say I'd like $10,000 bank manager says you owe us $115,000 what are you going to say who's the burden of proof well you're going to have difficulty how aren't you and it seems to me the only fair way to do is to investigate the evidence that's why I've spent most of my life taking serious seriously very seriously the evidence that the atheist my atheist friends and I count dozens among my friends I want to know the truth so I've got to take their evidence seriously all I ask for is a little bit of reciprocation to dispel the idiotic myth that faith is a religious notion as I said and it means believing where there is no evidence now someone asked about set Theory science and Faith are they like two circles and a v diagram that are separate do they intersect and all the rest of the thing but look at the question science or faith you see it presupposes the very thing that I've spent an hour talking about what if there's faith in science if you're going to oppose science to something else in a V diagram then you have to oppose it with something that fits in the same category science is a set of intellectual disciplines so the nearest thing on the other side is theology not faith faith is involved in every discipline now I know what of course what the person means so they must not take that as a personal criticism but I am constantly asked to give lectures in science and faith and I say to people what do you mean because you're giving me a title that I'm going to have to spend an hour pointing out is a category mistake and I prefer a title that wasn't a category mistake but what's behind the question is very important Stephen J gold very interesting writer used to believe or did believe in Noma non overlapping magest area he noticed that about roughly half his scientific colleagues were Believers and roughly half weren't and he said the obvious way for the two to coexist is to keep them separate lock the science up in one room lock the faith and God up in the other room and the religion over there and you'll be very happy that sounds a terrific solution doesn't it until you read the subtext what's the subtext science deals with reality and religion deals with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy that won't do with it oh there's overlap the circles intersect certainly but they don't overlap and they're not completely the same why not for a very obvious reason when I teach algebra sorry to come back to that but when I teach algebra in Oxford I do not teach it from The Book of Leviticus now why is that because the Bible is not in that sense it takes of science that's the one side of it but careful the other side of it is the Bible says things about the real Universe it says it had a beginning how fascinating took science till the 1960s to catch up with that it's not bad is it although Richard Dawkins wouldn't agree with me and when I put this to him he said uh what's the big deal it either was a beginning or there wasn't a beginning of 50 50 chance but uh I made two points one the Bible actually got it right and secondly it took massive argument by people of the distinction of arop penus and so on to get people to shift from the old Aristotelian notion it wasn't a matter of Simply choosing on the flick is it so or is it not and so all I would say is this that we need to take the Bible on its own term and when it talks about the real Universe we can legitimately look for convergence of what it says with any particular Epoch of scientific understanding now somebody asked the question and I'm getting towards the end sir we got a couple of minutes have we yeah um what are the implications of the fact that there's a dominant and I would say at Oxford it's the same I mean I have no experience here so I can't say but at Oxford the dominant worldview is atheism what are the implications for Christian intellectuals well they're obvious get into the debate that's the that's the way to do it stand up and be counted get discussions going and that's the reason I debate with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens don't misunderstand me I don't go into those debates to win them not a fool all I go in to do is to try to State amongst the static of the noise and all my mistakes and that there is a credible intellectual alternative and I hold people to be worthy enough and dignified enough to make their own choice and I will honor that choice even if they disagree with me that's what I want to do to get the debate going so that it helps us all to think and so the implications are very clear let's get into the debate with great respect for those who do not share our beliefs that's what I'd say to that and then finally why do we have to believe in Christianity what if we are all I forget the marvelous phrase you came out with sir uh supercell or something all of us collectively what if we're all God well what if we are are we you got to decide how are you going to decide whether we're all God or not what the only way I know of deciding anything is on the basis of the evidence if you feel that's where the evidence leads go for it in the end we've all got to decide but there was another question question came in at the side there and that is why talk about Christianity and downgrade other religions I didn't downgrade other religions ladies and gentlemen I have a great respect for the things that people believe and immense respect agnosticism was mentioned by the first question question ER I have talked tonight quite deliberately of course about two polls but not everyone is at either of those two poles there's a very honest position along the line that joins the two poles or the geodesic if you want to call it that if you're on a Surface but that doesn't matter to the point I'm going to make of agnosticism there the Greek word of course means I don't know I'm agnostic about many things many many things I just don't know of course sometimes agnosticism gets another definition and it's this I don't know and you can't know well if somebody doesn't know how they can know that somebody else doesn't know I don't know one of the things about a university is Fiat looks we come all of us sitting in this room we agnostic about many things some of you in seconde physics are agnostic about fourth year physics but that's going to change isn't it we're getting to know oh but it saddens me when it moves to that other phase I don't know and you can't know and it's an assumption of absolute knowledge on the part of someone who claims not to have it it's a logical contradiction it doesn't make any sense at all so let me get back to the question there are different religions in the world that is the fact and I've told you I am a Christian I've also said I hope you noticed it and I meant it it is important for other religions to articulate publicly what they believe about these things things and of course much of what I've said tonight is common at least to the great monotheistic religions of the world Judaism Christianity and Islam and I find my friends from each of those religions agreeing with a great deal of what I say but there are differences and it would be silly to pretend that those differences don't exist but it is important to notice where they are and when you talk and the question is a valid one and I as I say I take it seriously why you don't look down on other religions is this as far as morality goes you will find in every religion and philosophy around the world you'll find a common core of morality that truth is a value Integrity honesty and so on these are values that are shared in fact from where I sit as a Christian that is to be expected because everybody whether they believe in God or not is a moral being made in the image of God and therefore capable of the distinctions between right and wrong which are deep in the heart of each of us and which enable at least in some sense Society to function having said all that there are differences and we should discuss these things but let me just explain to you this as I stop I'm a Christian I believe that Jesus Christ is God but Jesus Christ doesn't compete with any other religion ladies and gentlemen no he doesn't because he offers me something that no other religion offers me forgiveness that is known and certain he doesn't offer me simply a prescription of a moral code many religions offer that many philosophies too but Christ offers me a relationship with God forgiveness of my sins perhaps I haven't looked hard enough but I think I've looked pretty hard I've never found that anywhere else certainly not with evidence to back it up and I really mean very honestly what I say I do not see Christ as competing with anybody it is no arrogance to take from him something that is on offer nowhere else ladies and gentlemen thank you very much indeed for more information about the Veritas Forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at veritas.com X's upcoming book which has been released in the United Kingdom as I understand it but not yet in the United States as well as a place for truth a collection of veritos lectures similar to these additionally you'll find a free giveaway with C with CDs uh by Pastor Timothy Keller from New York all right and so I'd ask that we could once again show our thanks to professor John [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Lennox I hope you have a good evening this concludes our program e he

Channel: The Veritas Forum

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Keywords: veritas forum, christianity, columbia christian, generous dialogue, harvard christian, intellectual humility, mit christian, theistic evolution, yale christian, john lennox, veritas forum john lennox, john lennox lecture, john lennox debate, uc berkley, uc berkley christian, belief, is anything worth believing in

Id: ZUOAKyTK6JY

Length: 89min 40sec (5380 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2011