Is God Relevant? Oxford Professor John Lennox Discusses Science and Faith at Tulane

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 1962 and it's the English faculty lecture room and it's about this size that it's packed with people on the floor exactly like this and I'm sitting over there in the front row and the door bursts open and in walks CS Lewis and he's dressed the big man like me he's dressed in a winter overcoat to the hat to the scarf or these starts lecturing the moment he comes through the door and he picks his way among the students said he comes up to the podium and by the time he's got to the podium he's got his hat off at his scarf off but his coat not quite off and he's lecturing at full blast and that goes on for 50 minutes wordperfect no notes and then he reverses the process so still lecturing he puts on his hat that he whines off his scarf or he picks his way through the students and these last words are delivered as he goes through the double doors no time for questions so it's really lovely to see so many of you here at this famous University it's my first time at this part of the United States and you've asked me to talk to you about the question is God relevant that brings back another very vivid memory of Siberia where a number of years ago I give the very first lecture in 75 years on the topic a mathematician discusses belief at a creator and I remember in the mathematics Institute in a key didn't go to dock at Novosibirsk I started to talk to some of my academic colleagues and I said you ever talk about God here and they grinned at me and they said do you talk about green cows in your department and I said no I don't talk about green cars and they said why don't you talk about green cars I said because they don't exist he said that's why we don't talk about God and it is extremely interesting isn't it to see that today particularly because of the dominance of naturalism in the Academy God is deemed to be irrelevant of course the word relevant raises questions relevant for what and to whom and I would explore this a little bit with you I wish had time to ask you what you thought was relevant how many if you're doing science put your hands up okay how many of you are doing the humanities and how many of you are doing something else okay well we're roughly equally divided that means that there are certain things you've decided are relevant to you now but one of the very interesting things in life is this and many of the things that you learn now they're relevant for a very short space of time some of you might be honest enough to say well I want to get my class grades and then I forget all about this stuff I'll never use it again isn't that true and then there are hidden things that you don't know are relevant for example I wonder if I were to ask you how relevant to you is the square root of minus one how many of you have a smartphone put your hands up come on be honest how many of you lose your smart phone most of you well of course the electronics in any smartphone depend critically on complex analysis which involves the square root of minus one and yet too many of you if I asked you is it relevant no it's not relevant but it is relevant and so the moment we begin to probe into this notion of relevance it raises all kinds of questions now let's start up lowest-level really those of you who recognize my accent will know that I come from Ireland and immediately people say when of course God's relevant to you Irish and you fight about God all the time and really what it boils down to is you need some sort of little crutch to support your lives on you know Freud explained you Irish a long time ago and he communicated the idea that your God is relevant to you because he's a kind of wish fulfillment but he doesn't actually exist that's worth exploring because there's been a recent book by one of Germany's most distinguished psychiatrist manfred lutz the book is called a declining ishita disco stone and you could work out what that means it means a brief history of the great one and what he says is this if there is no God if there is no God then Freud gives you a brilliant argument to tell you that God has been created as a wish fulfillment for people who want a crutch in their lives but then he gives the twist and he said of course if there is a God Freud's argument will give you an equally good reason for atheism being a crutch but on the crucial question as to whether there is a God or not Freud can't help you young can't help you Frankel can't help you you'll have to look somewhere else now we're going to be in a very short lecture like this discussing things at various levels simultaneously but coming from Ireland with Christian parents and Christian grandparents the relevance of God to me was first demonstrated in the reality of God in my parents lives I've got to be open with you about that because each of us have a biography we have a story where we come from and of course the moment I mentioned that you'll say well of course God's relevant to you but that's just the problem I debated Peter Singer not long go in Australia and I started very much like this and he said of course there goes my biggest objection to religion people usually stay in the religion at which they've been brought up like you so when I got a chance to speak I said Peter we'd better clear the air a bit here and see exactly where we're at tell me about your parents were they atheists and he said yes they were all I said so you stayed with the faith in which you grew up oh but he said it isn't a faith oh I said sorry Peter I thought you believed it now that little interchanged with one of the world's leading philosophers ladies and gentlemen points up a whole lot of things that we need to explore tonight because he thought that what I believe is a faith system but not what he believes it's not a faith system and yet it is as many philosophers who listened to him were utterly amazed that one of the world's leading philosophers from Princeton didn't recognize that his naturalism is a faith system he believes it and so we could look at it this way here we are tonight and we come from different backgrounds and we have different worldviews but really in the room what's at stake is the question of which world view not is simply relevant but it's true and there really are only two major ones or maybe three and that can help us focus the discussion a little bit the ancient Greeks you know were very clever people and some of them had the idea of the atoms something that cannot be cut and they came to the conclusion that the universe is made of atoms and the void that's all there is mass energy as we would say today they were the atomists they were the materialists they were the forerunners of the Richard Dawkins of the Peter Atkins of this world and that's the dominant philosophy in the Academy that this universe is all that exists there is no God there's no transcendence and therefore the nature of explanation is such that you've got to explain everything bottom up or reduce it to physics and chemistry there is an alternative and in the ancient world there were people like my intellectual hero Socrates who went around asking questions until they forced him to commit suicide Plato and Aristotle who believed with the majority of great thinkers throughout the ages that there is transcendence that there is a God who created the universe and who upholds it now so we have coming up through into our Academy today through history those two dominant world views though there are others but we haven't time to look at them tonight and the question is yes which one is relevant but as you get older and get more involved in things intellectual in your University I hope you are asking the truth question which one is true I happen to believe that the Christian worldview is true and by saying that I know I'm a man in a minority certainly in the Academy where I work at the University of Oxford so what I want to do is to discuss with you some of the ways into this very question the relevance of God well people say to me look you're a scientist do you talk about God when you're teaching algebra no you don't do you know I don't well you don't need God there too do you and they often remind me of the famous encounter between Napoleon and Laplace the mathematician and Napoleon was reading Laplace's book on ballistics and mechanics and he said to Laplace wish you Laplace where is God did your equations and Laplace famously answer Genet as winter set in four days I don't need that hypothesis and if you consult many scientists today they'll say exactly the same we agree with her plus we don't meet the hypothesis of God is totally irrelevant to anything that we do now I want to challenge that and I want to challenge it in several of various ways but first of all let's get another little background picture from history one of the very odd things is that university students and the rest of us indeed are being forced by people like Stephen Hawking Lorentz Christ at ASU Richard Dawkins to choose between God and science as if there was some hostility between belief in God and the scientific endeavor and yet when you trace back the origins of science modern science it's utterly fascinating because modern science exploded in the 16th and 17th centuries in Western Europe and philosophers and historians of science have asked the question why did it happen then and why did it happen there and although there this has to be nuanced a lot has been written about it by and large the consensus of opinion is this CS Lewis put it very well when he was summarizing the work of Alfred North Whitehead the famous philosopher and he said this men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver in other words far from the notion of God being irrelevant to science it was the motor that drove science in the first place now that is simply a fact of history but it's a fact of history that a lot of people don't realize going back to my lecture in academic got a doc in Siberia all those years ago I remember I came to a point in the lecture where I was talking about the rise of science and the remarkable fact that Galileo and Kepler and Newton and Clark Maxwell and so on all believed in God and I noticed the professors in the front row getting very angry and I don't like people getting very angry so I stopped and I said to this professor in the front row I said sir excuse me I can't help noticing you're angry and he stood up and he said I am angry but not with you I said why are you angry he said why have we never been told that these men believed in God he said I think I speak for everybody here that this is the first time in our lives we've ever heard that Kepler Galileo Newton and Clark Maxwell believed in God and I'm afraid I couldn't resist saying to them can't you guess why you were never told you see historically this is a legacy and the irony of the contemporary situation is that science gives the impression to the public that it has turned its back on God now of course people will say yes but you see in the 16th and 17th century everybody believed in God and now those were the infantile stages now we've outgrown that chrysalis of the butterfly can fly and we don't need concepts of God at all and so it was simply an infancy stage and in fact we've discovered that God is not relevant and so you have to choose between you'll have to choose now between God and science now there is such pressure I discover in this choice and Stephen Hawking has really ratcheted it up in the last couple of years that I began to think why is it that they are so convinced that it's God or science and I've come to the conclusion that it's actually very easy to understand and the reason is this it's not so much although we will see it does depend on some false ideas about science but it starts with a false idea of God you see ladies and gentlemen if you're going to say God is not relevant you better start by asking what you mean by God and what do we mean by God now what I discover from many of my scientific colleagues is they think I believe in a God who is a God of the gaps that is I can't explain it therefore God did it now if you believe in a God of the gaps like that it's clear you have to choose between science and God because God by definition is the explanation for the things that science hasn't yet explained so in the ancient world when they didn't understand atmospheric physics they thought the Thunder was a roaring of the gods and then you do a little bit of atmospheric physics and you discover it's got nothing to do with the God so God exit from that space do you get the idea if you believe that God is simply I can't explain that God did it then you must choose between God and science because the more God the less science the more science the less God but you see I've never met an intelligent Christian Jew or Muslim who believed in a God of the gaps God is the God of the whole show the bits we understand and of its we don't underst and of course that kind of argument does not apply to the god who's revealed to us in the Bible but we need to think a bit harder about this because there is such a pressure to say well it's either God or science so I want to give you a second reason why this has come to be and now it's a confusion on the scientific side as to the nature of explanation explanation is something that I hope you study in all of your disciplines because very frequently we have the impression science explains putting God up just says well God did it and there's no explanatory value there don't let's explore that a little bit explanation has different levels when Isaac Newton discovered his law of gravitation he didn't say I've got a law that explains that therefore I don't need God what did he do he wrote the most brilliant book in the history of science principia mathematica expressing and at the hope that it would persuade the thinking person to believe in a creator that's worth following his logic because this is not god of the gaps thinking this is the exact opposite what Newton is saying is look I've discovered something of the way in which the Creator works isn't it brilliant and his additional scientific knowledge increased his faith in God now you think for a moment that's the way it works at all levels the more you understand of mechanical engineering the more you can admire the genius of a Rolls or a rice the more you under stand of how difficult it is to paint the more you can admire the genius of a Rubens or a Picasso it's not the less it's the more in other words Newton and Kepler and Galileo and so on as they unraveled the levels of understanding of nature the greater grew their admiration for God because they could see what I fear many people cannot see today that God and science do not compete as explanations because they're not even in the same category now let me illustrate this because this is so important I find kids at school can understand it and some professors at university can't but that's just how it goes so those we got a ford galaxy motorcar you know what a ford galaxy is and it's sitting here and we look at its engine I lift the hood I think you call it the hood here we call it the bonnet I lift the hood and you see the engine they set up ladies and gentlemen I want to offer you two explanations of this engine firstly I want to offer you an explanation in terms of law and mechanism the law of internal combustion and engineering design of an automobile engine that's the one explanation the other explanation is Henry Ford will you please choose between the two now some of you laughed so you got it I find kids laugh they roar and they say sir but that's silly I say exactly it's silly but why then do people like Richard Dawkins still insist on this kind of silly argument Henry Ford is an explanation of the existence and origin of the vehicle he doesn't compete with the explanation in terms of law and science at all because one is an explanation in terms of an agent the other is an explanation in terms of law and mechanism now that is very simple stuff you know but it's immensely important and it can immediately take the sting of this whole problem God doesn't compete with science as an explanation at all the more that science reveals the more I find myself worshiping the genius of the God who did it that way but there's more to be said ladies and gentlemen Vick enstein whom I hope you raid when you can't sleep vet ghanoush Stein once said the greatest deception of modernism is the idea that the laws of nature explain the phenomena of nature you see we've got the impression because of the sheer power and success of science which I admire as much as anybody else I'm passionate about my science but we are deceived into thinking that we've got explanations for instance the law of gravity does that tell you what gravity is no I wish I'd been taught that at school the law of gravity tells you how you can calculate accelerations and what happens with moving bodies as they go towards the center of the earth and massive bodies as they are attracted to one another it doesn't give you the remotest idea of what gravity is nobody knows what gravity is nobody knows what energy is nobody knows what time is and yet we find Oh science explains it does it a certain level so we need to become a little bit more humble because there's another thing lurking in the background of our discussion and that's an epistemological notion how we know things and many people are being persuaded by the lorentz crisis of this world and the Richard Dawkins that in the end science is the only way to truth well you better pack up your history in your languages and your literature's faculties are Tulane then if that's true science is not only not the only way to truth it's not the way to the most interesting truths of all and that are those concerned with meaning and significance of human beings and yet we're told science is the only way to truth which is a very odd statement because that statement science is the only way to truth is not a statement of science so if it's true it's false that's too late for logic like that at this time of night is that but there we are but this seems to me to be immensely important I'm passionate about science ladies and gentlemen but we do it no service as Sir Peter Medawar said Nobel Prize winner by thinking that science can answer every question he says it's so easy that to see that science cannot answer the simple questions of a child where do I come from where am I going what is the meaning of life and students today I discover are looking for those connections are looking for that bigger picture into which they fit science will not give it to them because it cannot give it to them again I wish I'd been taught that at school but I wasn't and it's immensely important to see that a lot of this pressure to say that you cannot do science and believe in God is actual logical nonsense there are still Nobel Prize winners you know who believe in God and their Nobel Prize winners it don't and that should make it clear to us ladies and gentlemen that the problem is not that science and belief in God are an intrinsic conflict what is in conflict are the two big worldviews that I mentioned earlier the belief that this universe is all it exists or theism the belief that there is a God that created and maintains it those world view views clash and their scientists on both sides and one of the things you do at university is you ask yourself what are the pointers what direction does science point in now Lorentz Christ's may be known to some of you because he's a particle physicist from ASU who's written a book called a universe from nothing and he has pronounced on various things but he wrote an article in Newsweek not long ago saying that the Higgs boson is arguably more important than God now you've all heard of the Higgs boson I preserve this is the so-called god particle although professor Peter Higgs doesn't like that term and nor do i and orders Lorentz Christ so at least we agree on that but it's the particle that's been discovered in CERN in Geneva and I was there recently at a conference talking with people including Christ but the very interesting thing was he writes this article the Higgs boson is arguably more important than God it's relevant God isn't so I'm afraid I have enough of the Irish blood in me to want to respond to that so I wrote an article for the London Times you can see it online and I raised the question the X boson is arguably more important than God for what well certainly for particle physics if you're explaining how particle physics works talking about God won't help you talking about the Higgs boson well but if you're talking about why there is a universe at all in which particle physics can be done I would want to argue that God is arguably much more important than the eggs both on you see again this confusion either or God or science when there is simply no need for it alright having said something about explanation I feel I ought to say just a little bit more because very frequently at this point Richard Dawkins will come in with his book The God Delusion and I was astonished to discover that its major argument is something that I used to hear a great deal in Russia but very little in the UK and the argument goes like this look in the end let's face it if you believe in God how can God be relevant to anything because God is by definition more complex than the thing you're explaining if you say God created the universe you're really postulating a God who's more complex than the universe to explain the universe that's not an explanation is it because there's more complex than the thing you're explaining and in fact the logic cannot stop there can it if you claim that God created the universe then you have to ask who created God and then you can't stop there logically you'll have to ask who created the creator that created the creator of the created the creator of the day so on ad absurdum the whole thing's irrelevant forget God let's go back to science well I was astonished to meet that utterly astonished I tried it on Richard Dawkins in one of her debates I said let's take the first bit of the argument the explanation is more complex than the thing you're explaining okay I pick up a book 400 odd pages long it's called The God Delusion it's quite complex so I ask what is its origin and I discover its origin is in the I presume infinitely more complex mind of Richard Dawkins so of course I dismissed that explanation since it's more complex the other thing I'm explaining some certainty ladies and gentlemen where do we get the idea from that explanations go from the complex to the simple that's something you need to investigate it's wonderful when they do do they always this is a very very important thing because it could give us real insight in what's going on when we study particle physics we come down to things like quantum electrodynamics they're not simple ladies and gentlemen I don't understand them and Richard Fineman one of the finest brains that's ever existed in the world in physics Nobel Prize winner in American scientists said don't let anybody kid you nobody understands quantum mechanics so there's no point in having quantum mechanics and is there it's so complex half a minute who told us that explanation has always got to be go from the complex to the simple we're bamboozled into thinking that and yet you know it isn't true on the very simplest of examples that I gave you of Richard Dawkins 15 I'll come back to that at the moment but let's take the other thing with it while we're at it we might as well in for a penny in for a pound who created the creator sounds wonderful this argument doesn't it but let's analyze it logically suppose I say to you who created X what does that mean well it assumes that X is created doesn't it who created X you see this is one of those questions philosophers have a word for it they call it a complex question which has hidden in it assumptions that closed down on possibilities who created God hidden in that is the assumption that God has created but what if he isn't the question doesn't apply to something that's not created doesn't and you see that question that is the heart of The God Delusion book only applies to created gods and as I made the point none too gently that of Richard Dawkins had written a book called the created gods delusion I don't think many people would have bought it because we don't need him to tell us if created gods are a delusion as Freud pointed out we usually call them idols do you see the point it's a very subtle thing the real issue is if you look at the dog claimed by the Bible whose transcendent and uncreated the question doesn't even apply to him so it's a non question when it comes to God but it does apply to create a God so I said to Richard or could Dawkins Richard let me try your question on you you believe the universe created you okay let me ask you your question who created your Creator I'm still waiting for the answer see it works both ways it is amazing to me ladies and gentlemen I want to say this very strongly that intelligent young people are being put off belief in God through the triviality of arguments like this and I've no hesitation in saying that and I say Dan Oxford I'm amazed utterly amazed at the intellectual poverty that rests Behind arguments like this there are much better arguments for atheism but then it's not my job to to to to present them no the next thing and I'm gonna stop in five minutes because I'm interested in your questions is this another big confusion that causes so much difficulty goes back to Peter Singer when I said you remained in the faith that you were brought up in but he said it isn't a faith and then I said but don't you believe it this notion of faith what do you think faith is ladies and gentlemen what do you think faith is you see I discover that most people really know what faith is after the banking crisis we thought we could trust certain bankers but then the basis for faith went the markets froze and confidence couldn't be regained and there's still major difficulty in regaining it everybody in this room knows what evidence-based faith means faith comes from the Latin fides which means trust reliability but a very clever trick has been played by the new atheist they've redefined faith faith according to Richard Dawkins is believing where there is no evidence and it's a religious term solely so when he meets me he regards me as a man of faith that's not a compliment sin insult lenox believes where there is no evidence that's the definition of faith now it's even crept into Webster's dictionary faith known believing where there's no evidence that is blind faith ladies and gentlemen but all of us understand what faith normally means you faith in your friends you've reasons for it you trust your professors I hope you have reasons for it and so on we all all the time or exercising faith in every conceivable area of our lives including science but what has happened is this very cleverly these people have isolated faith and said it's a religious concept it means believing where there's no evidence so you can forget about it because science it doesn't have any faith what utter nonsense Einstein said couldn't imagine a scientist without that faith what did he mean he meant this every scientist believes that the universe is accessible at least in part to the human mind science can be done none of us would do science if we didn't believe that we are men of faith and we're gonna faith we believe it can be done why do you believe it can be done now here comes the interesting stuff what's the rationale behind that faith that every scientist has got to have before you start science you must believe it's worth doing you must believe it can be done well what is it that does the science well it's my mind what is my mind well according to my atheist friends my mind is my brain and what is my brain it's the end product of a mindless unguided process pardon if you knew that your computer that you use tomorrow morning was the end product of a mindless unguided process would you trust anything it produced of course you would Darwin saw that very clearly it's known as Darwin's diked and he repeatedly referred to the idea that if as I believe he said the mind of man has been descended from lowly our minds how can it give us any semblance of truth that argument in a very much sharper form has come center stage in contemporary philosophy fascinating book by Thomas Nagel mind and cosmos very provocative title let me read you the subtitle why the neo-darwinian account is almost certainly false an atheist philosopher what's he talking about he's talking about this ladies and gentlemen if you subscribe to the dominant worldview in the Academy naturalism that nature is all that exists and therefore the mind is simply the end product of mindless unguided processes then you have a massive difficulty grounding your faith in rationality Lewis saw it clearly Plantinga one of the world's most distinguished philosophers living here in North America sees it very clearly JBS Haldane years ago said you know if the thoughts in my mind are simply the random motions of atoms in my brain why should I believe that my brain is composed of atoms ladies and gentlemen I want to submit to you tonight this my biggest problem with the Atheist worldview is that it cuts the ground from the rationality that I need to do my science that's got nothing to do with God at all I just Christianity fair on this wonderfully because it tells me that the reason we can do science is that the human mind in here and the universe out there are ultimately traceable back to an intelligent creator that makes sense atheism to my mind makes no sense at all now my final point it seems to me to be extremely important to realize that evidence-based faith is at stake both in the scientific endeavor and now I must speak for my own Christian faith other religions quite rightly of a right to speak for themselves but as a young man I had to ask myself this question is my faith in God evidence-based or is it blind faith that is a very important question the fourth gospel the Gospel of John makes this statement many other signs Jesus did 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 are not believing you might have life in his name in other words John is saying here is the evidence on which faith can be based I'd stake my life on that and that's why I've written recently a book and which I investigate the evidence for the major sign of those signs and that is a resurrection of Jesus looking at it through the eyes of skeptics because in the end I wouldn't dream of standing here one minute in front of you ladies and gentlemen if I didn't believe that there was evidence for the truth of Christianity one other little point we talked about worldviews I find this so interesting you know we've got common rooms in Oxford I'm a fellow of a college and when the discussion gets boring sometimes I try little thought experiments you see and to see what happens and one of them is this we're talking about explanations and I noticed as I flew in today there appears to be a beach somewhere near here so you go down to the beach of New Orleans tomorrow and you see the ten letters of your name written in the sand what do you deduce you just walk up and there they are you immediately infer that whatever mechanism has been used to do that there's an intelligence behind it isn't that so why do you infer that because of the semiotic nature of the marks on the sand they carry meaning which is significant for you isn't that right okay now let's do a better magic and you're suddenly transported into a molecular biology laboratory and you look into a stereoscopic magic microscope and you see in it a double helix uncoding for unfurling and you see letters spin take off @c g a a t t GGC a a t GC and you say what are those oh those are codons those are letters of a genetic alphabet well what is this it goes on and on and on well it's the human genome how long is it three and a half billion letters is there order important absolutely it's like a computer program you can change one or two letters but generally speaking if you're not will not you destroy the whole thing the longest word we've ever discovered and then I ask the question tell me what's the behind up oh you say obviously chance and necessity what what you mean random processes in the laws of nature and of course what do you mean of course how is it that every one of us in this room can look at the ten letters of our name and because it contains a coding we instantly recognize intelligence whatever mechanisms have been used to put it on beach and we could look at the 3.5 billion letters of the human genome and say it's only chance and necessity ladies and gentlemen let me reformulate the two worldviews as they stop Carl Sagan at the beginning of one of his TV series says the cosmos is all that is was or ever shall be in the beginning where the particles was mass energy and the particles have swirled together to form stars and galaxies that they have in their permutations under the laws of physics they have produced worlds a universe or maybe a multiverse life intelligence consciousness and the idea of God because there isn't ago so that intelligence is derivative and mass energy is primary the other view goes like this in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God all things came to exist through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be ladies and gentlemen it's not only as a Christian but as a scientist that that explanation in terms of word and intelligence being primary and mass energy and everything else being derivative it's not only as a Christian but as a scientist that that makes infinitely more sense to me is God relevant and now comes the bigger thing which is not our topic for tonight the central claim of Christianity is that the word became human ladies and gentlemen that puts the relevance of God beyond all conceivable dispute thank you very much you're very kind now one thing about an audience like this is the following that everybody is interested in the questions that other people have and so we're going to do the Q&A this way I'm going to collect four or five questions before I comment on any of them so that we can see what kind of a spectrum of ideas is going on in the room you'll find that much more interesting and so will I now the topic is clear we're not here to answer questions about politics and all this kind of stuff we're here to discuss this topic so if you have the question remember your time formulating your question is time taken away from the next person and I want to give as many people a chance to just put up your hand I recognize you and write down your question we'd go to the next person so he's going to start right let's have a look at these for a minute well that's very interesting it gives us some idea of of the spectrum of the whole thing well let's jump in here at the level of the second question which had to do with the the fact that of Christianity Judaism and Islam and the attitude to science and I referred to the rise of modern science of the 16th and 17th century which by common consent owes a great deal to the judeo-christian tradition if you go back earlier of course our Islamic friends did a great deal in preserving the knowledge that had gone before particularly in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where many translators were involved in translating Greek texts that would have otherwise have been lost now at the level of the lecture I am NOT saying that Christian science Trump's Muslim science or Jewish science I'm not even saying it Trump's atheist science that's not what I'm saying at all and I'm glad you raised the question because atheists can do utterly brilliant science the tree man that decoded DNA Crick and Watson we're both atheists you see so that's not what's at issue here it's not whether a Christian faith will help you to do better science the question is this which way does science point that's a totally different question and what I argued to you tonight is from both history and the nature of science that what science points towards is a rationally intelligible universe because there is a rational creator that belief in a rational creator is of course shared by the three major monotheistic religions so at that level there is no real difference at all and I wouldn't want that to be misunderstood now related to that is the final question where you asked about the statistics of belief in God that it is notable that you tend to fewer biologists believing in God and more physicists and chemists and and cosmologists and so on all kinds of reasons have been put forward on that topic some people say well biology has never gone through the kind of revolution that quantum mechanics brought to physics the macro and the micro and all this kind of thing I'm not so sure about that I think one of the reasons has inevitably to be this that when it comes to arguing from science towards God there are non-controversial arguments and there are very controversial arguments let me explain what I mean by that and that relates to another of the questions which is why I'm glad asked them altogether you see the question seven was is earth finely tuned for life now I was debating in the Oxford Union just a few weeks ago with Michael Shermer the editor of skeptics magazine and and another couple of people amongst whom was Professor Peter Minicon who's an atheist philosopher Doc's furred and he invited me to dinner the following week to grill me with about fifty of his students he thought fifty to one was about the right proportion and so we had a very interesting discussion and I said to Peter what would you say from an atheist perspective was the strongest argument in my favor well he said without the slightest doubt the fine-tuning argument he said if I wanted to put a case for your side I would immediately go to fine-tuning because fine-tuning is recognized by most people it's what people are desperately trying to explain for instance all you have to do is to get a copy of Hawking and Laden off spook the grand design and he goes on page after page about the incredibly sensitive fine-tuning and then he says well some people would believe in a creator but that's not the answer of science I've written a little book on that as well incidentally because that's false logic but the point that that I want to make just in there is this the fine-tuning argument seems to me to be immensely powerful it is to be expected actually from the Bible incidentally some people think the Bible is irrelevant to all of us it isn't the Bible isn't of scientific textbook world one of the very interesting things it says at it's very beginning relating to your question is that God didn't create everything at once they're setting aside all these questions about what the day's mean the bare fact that most of us miss is the striking thing that the Bible claims there was a beginning but God didn't create everything at once there is a sequence leading to a goal in other words the universe is fine-tuned to put it in the terms of the physicists it is a TD ology it has a goal it has a plan it has intentionality so because that argument is there and because the fine-tuning is accepted as normative physics that seems to me to at least partially explain why you get more physicists of cosbo it's believing it God because when it comes to the biological sphere some at least of the arguments about God are based not on accepting the consensus but on going against it I'm not going to go into that debate at the moment I will just at a couple of seconds go into it very briefly but that would seem to be to make a certain differentiation and secondly there's been a lot of publicity since Thomas Huxley's day and Darwin's day of openly saying that evolutionary theory is an engine to drive atheism that is said in many textbooks now of course there are many people who reject that uh Turley I rejected utterly you cannot deduce atheism from evolution but many people say that you can and that is stuck in the modern psyche so that biology has become aligned with atheism in a way in which physics chemistry and cosmology have not no there's a great deal more that can be said about that but that remember ladies and gentlemen this is a Q&A I can only give suggestions and how you begin to look at these questions because all of these questions deserve a lecture on their own now and let's have a look here are the skeptics influenced by a rejection of a priori knowledge rather than empirical I suspect that there's something at what you say I think one of the things that the sociology of science has taught us in recent years is the old idea of science being completely objective is gone most scientists like me perhaps that's overstated would be critical realists we believe that there's truth out there we can access it at least in part but we never absolutely grasp it but we bring a set of presuppositions a priori to it now some people are more honest in admitting that I think the most stunning example is Richard luetin of Harvard the geneticist he says look he says you science itself does not compel us to look for materialist explanations it doesn't it's our our priori and I'm quoting our commitment to materialism that forces us to accept naturalistic explanations no matter how counterintuitive they are etcetera etcetera etcetera and then he says this for we cannot allow a divine foot in at the door now that's breathtakingly honest but it's showing how an a priori commitment to materialism is affecting a science now ladies and gentlemen let me say something here to get a sense of proportion 99.9% of science doesn't raise these questions it's only in a couple of areas to do with origins mainly that these questions come up and it's very easy to lose our sense of proportion 99% of science just doesn't raise these questions but these areas do now talking about our priori commitment why is evolution such a big deal now I'm not going to don't fool yourselves I'm not going to go into this I'm Huli going to make one very simple observation the problem is that evolution is the only area of science I know where you can deduce most of it from philosophy without reference the data now what do I mean by that you cannot deduce Newton's laws or Einstein's equations from any philosophical viewpoint but if you assume that materialism or naturalism is true that is that mass energy is all that exists and then you're asked please on that assumption account for the existence of life you have got to produce an evolutionary theory as Lucretia's did centuries ago and he got everything Darwin got except the transmutation of species now that's not a comment on whether evolution is right or wrong or how much is right or much is wrong it's a comment on why the problem is difficult it's because there's such a close tie between that theory and materialistic philosophy and you see if it is true that life cannot be explained as Thomas Nagel is now suggesting an atheist and consciousness even more and rationality even more cannot be explained in terms of physics and chemistry that doesn't just mean a little adjustment that means if naturalism is false as a philosophy I recommend if you're interested in this to read Nagel because he's not biased but this is immensely important stuff and it is the reason why the whole thing is a very complex business now what's the next thing we've got a few more minutes I understand so let's let's let's have a look at this we'll finish the science things and we'll come to other things there is a question here about I'm arguing that God and science are not in conflict but half a minute surely science has discovered the laws of nature and they show that miracles are impossible so the belief that Jesus turned water into wine or rose from the dead is impossible I'm glad you asked the question that was in my notes to talk about it but I ran out at a time so thank you I was on the Charlie Rose show raced there vo - Charlie Rose it hasn't been aired yet but I was invited over for some reason to meet none other than Richard Dawkins again for an hour and on the Charlie Rose show he started by mocking my faith in God he said you know this is just a caricature I can't imitate Richard Dawkins but it went something like this ladies and gentlemen this is John Lennox and believe it or not you know he's a professor at Oxford had he actually believes I mean you can stressfully credit it he believes that Jesus turned water into wine I said stop right there I said you know Richard if Jesus is the word of God incarnate he'd already created water and perhaps turning it into wine wasn't such a big deal after all but then I said more seriously we could talk all night on this program about the miracles of Jesus you wouldn't listen and I said you wouldn't listen because you think that David Hume the Enlightenment the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher solved this problem long ago when he described miracles as violations of the laws of nature and therefore we couldn't believe in them so what we need to talk about Richard now is this was Hume right or was he wrong he was wrong and it's very easy to see that he was wrong Lewis saw it brilliantly sure let me use his illustration because as usual most people can understand it I I stay in a hotel here and I put a hundred dollars into the drawer last night I put a hundred dollars tonight two hundred dollars yes one plus ones to wake up tomorrow and they're fifty dollars in the drawer so what do I conclude that the laws of arithmetic have been broken or the laws of Louisiana been broken now your laughter shows you've got the point and it's a very important philosophical point you see that the laws of Louisiana are not the same kind of law as the law of arithmetic there's a lot of confusion about that you know right there secondly what is it that tells you that the laws of erythrulose of Louisiana have been broken it's your knowledge of the laws of arithmetic if you didn't know the laws of arithmetic you'd never recognize you said well under plus hundreds two hundred yesterday is 50 today so what you see ladies and gentlemen if we pursue this it's fairly helpful it's very simple actually most of these things are very simple what is a miracle does it break the laws of nature of course not God feeds a new event into the system from the outside the laws of arithmetic tell me 100 plus 100 is 200 they can't stop a thief putting his hand in and taking 150 out can they but you've got to know them in order to recognize that the thief has put his hand and so God has created a universe with regularities that he is responsible for that we recognize and here's the answer to another question of david hume that in the biblical days they were primitive and they didn't know the laws of nature so they recognized miracles all over the place that's utter nonsense the people in the first century knew that dead bodies were being dead just as much as we do Joseph knew where babies came from and when his wife said she was pregnant he wanted a divorce her not because he was an ignorant and primitive of the laws of nature but because he knew them the fact that there's a universe with built-in regularities is one side of it that we recognize and know we got to the God that created it isn't a prisoner of those normative things of course he isn't it's an absurdity now the resurrection of Jesus would be breaking the laws of nature if I argued that it was explicable in terms of natural processes going on to the tomb five minutes before it occurred but I'm not no Cristian claims that when the New Testament describes the resurrection of Jesus it describes it using every Greek word there is for power it's something from the outside and nature as we are but here's the question naturalism believes that this universe is a closed system of cause and effect but it isn't of course it isn't so that helped me to understand that humor is just wrong simply wrong and so it's a question of history to determine whether or not something supernatural happened in the grave of Jesus of course I'm not going to fall into the trap of believing in every claim to the supernatural we've got to test them on the basis of evidence what is the evidence and that's why in my book gunning for God that's just come off the press the last chapter is devoted to looking at the resurrection through the eyes of David Hume for exactly that reason so your question is very much justified on the one hand I'm arguing tonight that science as an endeavor the very fact that we can do it is based on the assumption of a rationally intelligible universe and historically and philosophically that points towards the intelligent now if we come down to the subdivisions of the questions what about supernatural and so on those fit in perfectly but they depend as you've just seen on different and very important considerations near-death experiences are they evidence I'm not an expert on near-death experiences but the way I approach this whole thing and I just speak from ignorance here is that for me central is a resurrection of Jesus which isn't a near-death experience it's a complete death experience followed by a resurrection and whatever you argue or don't argue about near-death experiences and some of my friends who are experts in these things find it very interesting higher and bigger of course and central to this whole thing is the claim that death is not the end because Jesus has broken the death barrier and it's on that that my Christian faith rests centrally on that not a near-death experience a death experience and the fact that he actually died and was buried is a very important part of the evidence now there was someone asked about creation and evolution I'm going to give you a shameless answer to this I've written a book on it it's called God's Undertaker of science bury God we don't have the time tonight to be fair to your question I'd love to have another hour but I wasn't asked to so sorry about that but let me just say I have a website John Lennox dot org where there are lots of things on this kind of topic and this is such an important question it's a very nuanced thing you see because it really is two questions and they get confused the two questions are this whatever you think about evolution can you deduce atheism from it that's question number one that's a logical and philosophical question I don't think you can then there comes the very the very dangerous and risky question and that is how much weight can the evolutionary hypothesis bear and well you could read my little book but re Thomas Nagel and see what an atheist is now beginning to say because it's very interesting that there has been admission in some circles not many that people have been so frightened of the supernatural that they have sort of papered over cracks where the science hasn't really been done and you know people talk about a God of the gaps I don't understand it God did it there is such a thing as the evolution of the gaps we don't know what happened but evolution did it you see but that's something that you need to investigate but you'll find around the world that many Christians except either in large part or partially the the Darwinian hypothesis because they don't see it as threatening faith in God others feel it's more controversial so in order to discuss it in detail but I just can't do that tonight I want to come to the final question which is the very first question and there's a lot behind this question I'll answer it as quickly as I can because I promise to be done by nine o'clock and that is I've been talking about religion not being essentially in conflict with science and that is now being qualified quite rightly so by the questioner and again it's something I left out and I hope it would be asked by somebody who is interested in it and they say but half a minute didn't Galileo suffer persecution from the Christian Church and isn't there such a track record really looking back even in my own country of religion indeed Christianity from promoting wars and famines and violence and everything else and what do you say about all that well I say an awful lot about that because it's a very important question and we need to factor it into the equation so let me say one or two things very briefly about that question first the Galileo he's a fascinating character really you see Galileo we have this wonderful story you'd almost think Galilei was an atheist and the Catholic Church persecuted him and hided it virtually to death that isn't true galileo was a believer in the Bible and in God when he started and when he finished his first critics weren't the Catholic Church his first critics were the philosophers the Aristotelian philosophers because they all believed and had for centuries that the earth was fixed and didn't move so it was the worldview of the time they if you like the scientists of the time although that word wasn't in existence then that was the world view that the earth didn't move now the Catholic Church had bought into that and felt that the Bible supported it God has set the earth and it's pillar so that it shouldn't be moved but it is wrong to think of this as a conflict between science and religion and indeed I've worked with John Hadley Brook at Oxford one of the world's leading professors of science and religion and they all say the one thing you cannot do with the Galileo story is use it to perpetuate the so-called conflict myth and the Catholic Church didn't Terran eyes Galileo he's put under house arrest and he was looked after very comfortably for the rest of his life so we need to we need to get that into proportion but it's very important to see you cannot use that as an iconic example of science versus religion the more serious point is the the point about look you have presented this glowing picture that the judeo-christian tradition was responsible for science but half a minute I can paint you another picture and I can paint it from your own country in fact if you knew you could paint it from my own family because my brother was nearly killed by an IRA bomb so what do I say about that here we have a country two sides a religious divided Protestant and Catholic fighting each other well now that's a complex problem it's not all to do with at all but suppose it where that's the impression the world has got what do we say about it well let me say what I say about it because they'll have to cut this short I'm utterly ashamed of it ladies and gentlemen that's what I am utterly I'm utterly ashamed that the name of Christ has ever been associated with an ak-47 or a bow and arrow but I want to tell you why I'm ashamed of it because Christ himself for 'bad the use of weapons in the defence of his message now this is very important here's one of the greatest ironies in the world I've debated Christopher Hitchens a couple of times the late Christopher Hitchens and in one of the debates at the Edinburgh Festival he spent the first 15 minutes talking about these awful religious wars and what Christianity had done and when I got up I just said Christopher I agree with you that's the unacceptable face of it and then I said what I'm about to say to you ladies and gentlemen if we want to assess Christianity visa vie this we need to look at the trial of Christ he was put on trial by the Romans do you know what he was accused of he was accused of political violence he was accused of the very thing that the New Atheists accused Christianity of now this is critical moment in history Jesus is accused of stirring up political violence is he guilty or not he claimed to be a king and so Pilate because he regarded the cases so serious the leading Roman commander took the case himself that is very dramatic are you a king he said Jesus My Kingdom is not of this world otherwise my servants would have been fighting that I should not be delivered to the Jews was the reply and instantly Pilate knew that Jesus wasn't guilty of political violence he had the report on his desk of the Centurion who led the squad that went to arrest Jesus when one of the disciples it wasn't a good swordsman tried to cut off somebody's head and just cut off their ear remember that glad you laughed at it because you remember what I'm now going to say if you take weapons to defend Chrysler's gospel that's what you do in a big way cut the ears off people why do many of my atheist friends they won't even listen to the Christian message because the rears have been cut off by the violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Jesus woody for battered let me say this very clearly people who resort to violence in the name of Christ aren't following him they're disobeying him this isn't Christian ladies and gentlemen our that there's another very important thing why does Christ repudiate violence because of the nature of his message of course and this is one of the reasons I'm a Christian if this message is true Christ is God incarnate he invented the Adam the invented light he invented the biochemical pathways he thought out the human brain and he became human because he loved me and wanted me to have the possibility of a relationship with God not simply to know the universe through science but ever relationship with God or no these are the big things these are the big things is God relevant I think that's such a funny question from where I said some of you would give your right arm to know a pop star or a leading basketball player and NASCAR driver or whatever what about getting to know the God that invented the universe and living a life of fellowship and friendship with him that's meaningful and instead of ending but 70 years plus or minus a little bit in a grave opens up into the potential of a vast eternity because Jesus rose from the dead that's big stuff I don't find that in the limiting tiny piece of Animus philosophies of atheism no I don't Jesus repudiated violence because this message was a message of love and truth and the one thing you cannot do ladies and gentlemen is imposed truth by force big question something you have to answer and I have to answer is God relevant goodnight ladies and gentlemen 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

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Id: _uFyubUd464

Length: 80min 40sec (4840 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2013