John Lennox: The Question of Science and God - Part 1

[Music] welcome to Socrates in the city south of France la bestia version yeah I am giddy I think unfortunately I'm to the point of giddiness to be here today with dr. John Lennox dr. Lennox when I discovered his books and his works I immediately invited him to speak at Socrates in the city in those days we would just have a lecture in New York and dr. Lennox spoke on actually this book seven days that divided the world which is dedicated to Larry Taunton who's sitting over there in a sweatshirt but I didn't know that this book had been dedicated to Larry Totten but but it's fitting because Larry has done so much to bring John into the wider world in a number of ways John debated dr. Lennox I should say debated Richard Dawkins at a famous debate you can find it online incredible debate changed lots of minds and and and those kinds of things part of why I'm doing Socrates in the city today here with John Lennox is that I want you to be enticed to search out other videos that dr. Lennox has out there on the web dr. Lennox has done a ton of things with Veritas forum started by my dear friend Kelly Monroe Cole Burke all kinds of stuff out there that you can watch so if this is your just your introduction to dr. John Lennox I'm thrilled because it will entice you to check out these other videos the first one you must watch of course is the Socrates and city in which he discusses this book if you buy copies of this book that would be fine with me I think you should but John has written so many wonderful books his credentials like many of our speakers at Socrates Socrates in the city are formidable I I can probably sum it up by reading the back of this book unless there's more it's unbelievable he's professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford not Mississippi England not very far from here fellow in mathematics in the philosophy of science he's pastoral advisor at green Templeton College Oxford he's the author of a book some of you may know God's Undertaker has science buried God again that's at the heart of what I want to talk to dr. Lennox about he's generously given us the time so we can do to Socrates in the city sessions he's debated Christopher Hitchens forgive me for having gone on and on I don't want to steal dr. Lennox's time so at this point would you give a warm Socrates in the country welcome to the man himself dr. John Lennox all right dr. Lennox here we are thank you thank you thank you thank you and praise God that you're here I'm just really grateful to you as we spoke last night in front of fire people don't expect in July in the South of France for it to be cold enough for a fire but we were sitting by the fire talking about what we would talk about today and it became clear to me that eight hours wouldn't be enough so I thought I'm just gonna leave it to you the issue on the table is this false idea that science and faith are at odds you to my mind are the best person to speak on that subject and I just thought if we could speak about that for a little bit I'd be grateful to you well we can and thank you very much for inviting me to an event that bears the name of one of my great intellectual heroes Socrates was an amazing man because he made his impact on culture and philosophy by asking questions and I sense that your motivation and all of this is to really get people perhaps to go outside their comfort zone and ask the big questions yes and I spent my entire life even before I had heard of Socrates I heard of him very young asking questions being curious about the universe and this huge question that you've introduced came about in my case because I was fascinated by mathematics from a very young age in Ireland I grew up in in Northern Ireland yes with parents who made me inquisitive because they allowed me space to think they were Christian but they were big enough and they loved me enough to let me think and let me explore and they actually encouraged me to study other worldviews which was very remarkable my father handed me a copy when I was 13 of the Communist Manifesto and I said that's that should I read it have you read a dad no he said but you ought to because you need to know what other people think and that set me on a lifelong process of playing Socrates I actually do that but that's in the business school in Oxford I play Socrates I use Plato to ask business executives about the big issues in life but your question the contrast between I'm going to say science and God and not science and faith because faith is involved in science now I know when you introduced me you were using faith in the sense of religion and belief in God I regard that as slightly dangerous because it gives people the impression that you've got science here you've got faith there and the two don't meet well faith in English has at least two meanings one religion the Christian faith the Muslim faith of Jewish faith and so on but it also has a natural meaning trust belief and so on and I shall be saying if I get the opportunity to and remember in my old age to say so that science has faith at each heart so it's not science here and faith over there and I'm gonna be talking about not faith in the sense of religion but faith in God and science now why that's important to me there are several reasons but firstly because I was curious Christian background but wanted to discover just where my mathematics fitted inside science and then where my science fitted inside the big picture let me stop me for a moment that's a remarkable statement most people have very little fascination with math it's difficult so the idea that you were fascinated by math and wanted to pursue math is something but what was it that made you want to fit math into science I mean because there I would guess that most mathematicians don't leap into the world of science you've lept rather fully into that world and you've not left your math behind but what was it that pushed you to be inquisitive about science from the position of a mathematician well I think it involves Christianity in a very profound way because I hadn't been studying mathematics long I'm talking about being a teenager nice long before I got to Cambridge I'm a teenager and I'm reading and I discovered statements like Kepler statements that God has revealed to us the secrets of the universe something like that in the language of mathematics and I discovered pretty early on through my reading actually of CS Lewis because CS Lewis was a literary genius but he understood in a way that some scientists don't the big issues that arose and he made a statement in one of his books and that really stuck with me and I've used it all my life that I'm going to use it now he looks back at the origin of modern science it arose in the 16th and 17th ten centuries with people like Galileo Kepler and Newton let's just think with those three and he makes the point that people have observed and many books have been written about him that they were all believers in God and the question comes up is there a connection between belief in God and doing science and the answer is and it still is today given by most people with nuances that there's a very profound connection Lewis put it as usual brilliantly he said men became scientific why because they expected law in nature and they expected law nature because they believed in a lawgiver and when I discovered that I thought this is wonderful because it's telling me that far from their belief in God hindering their science it was their belief in God that drove their science it was the motor the drove it which is why I find your question which is right at the heart of our particular Western culture today it's ironic that today people are saying science and God are incompatible when the very people they depended on the real geniuses of science all believed in God and so they didn't see any inconsistency I learned that pretty young and what it narrows down to is the very interesting fact that mathematics works that idea that math makes sense somehow that the world is under that that's that the world of science is related to mathematical equations most laypeople would never think about that and even when I have read about this concept in a newspaper article that some mathematician or some scientist is marveling at the idea that the laws of nature can be understood and that they can be described by math they they seem to make it sound stunning that that it's startled but to laypeople it's almost as though we don't understand why it's stunning in other words we maybe we associate math and science in such a way that we think well of course it's got to be that that's right that's right but it took a really great mind to see it was stunning Einstein Albert Einstein said the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible and he was clever enough to see there was an issue I gained Vigna who also with Einstein won a Nobel Prize for Physics he wrote a paper which is much loved by mathematicians of 1961 and he called it the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics the unreason yes that's very interesting yes in other words you shouldn't expect mathematics to work the richard fineman the great American Nobel Prize winning physicist said the same thing it's just stunning that it actually works here is somebody and she's in a petition and she's thinking in here about the universe out there and she comes up with equations and they describe what's out there I mean how does that possibly work in such a way that it gives us power over these things Newton law of gravity and his laws of motion alone without even Einsteins Corrections can help us send a person to the moon how does that actually work now what interested me and this is a bit later on at university I read vigorous paper read it several times so Vigna wrote the paper as late as sixty-one years yes the unreasonable effectiveness and I said what do you mean unreasonable what is the world view that's driving that verdict and that opened a whole world to me that wasn't apparent in terms of its significance until the last ten years or so when I saw how powerful it is because one of the things know that I say to people is my main reason for not being an atheist as a scientist it's not that I'm a Christian it's because they can do science because the only thing that makes reasonable the effectiveness of mathematics is my faith in God that's a very radical statement it's a very round against a one almost never hears that statement even from people speaking on the very subject on which we're speaking that you're saying that not only our science and God compatible you're saying no in a way that's wrong there they're not merely compatible science drives you to believe in God that's right let me make it even more provocative because I can tell that you're quite a provocative guy I like it you see let me put it this way I feel I think and I believe there's evidence for the fact that faith in God and science sit very comfortably as they did in the minds of Galileo Kepler and Newton what doesn't fit together is science and atheism I think that atheism undermine science for a reason that is connected with the effectiveness of mathematics so we should properly be challenging atheists far more than they challenge people that's right and I can unpack that a little bit if you like yeah because it is a major argument these days you see we have this trust as scientists as mathematicians in human reason we rely on our human reason to get to our conclusions now in the 1940 CS Lewis was writing about this and I think people didn't really grasp what he was dead saying what he was saying is this he said any theory of mind that undermines the validity of human reason cannot be true because you reach that theory by reasoning okay this is another heavy one I want to pause yes that's it those are big ideas but they're very very important ideas he phrased it in such a way Louis did at some point I can't remember the exact quote but he says if the universe made no sense or if the universe were absurd if the universe made no sense we should never have discovered that we never would be able to discover the God that is part of it that goes down to the root of it and the reason for it and he put it brilliantly but it wasn't in the center of the big debate not to the extent it is today because what's happened in the last four or five years yeah is that a very prominent atheist is beginning to use Lewis's arguments and that has changed the balance completely and who is that it's Thomas Nagel in new york city new york city why he right that's right but if you like a backtrack a bit so that we can unpack this so that it makes a kind of sense yeah lewis is suggesting that if you undermine the validity of reason your theories are wrong now i'm suggesting that that's why they drew said mathematics is unreasonably effective because his world view which was atheistic followed to its logical conclusion actually destroys rational thought yes now let me put it the form of a discussion I frequently have I tease people my fellow colleagues they like being teased you see and I say to them tell me what you do science with and of course if they're in the physical sciences they'll tell me about some very expensive piece of equipment they've got a billion dollars David I said no no I don't mean not I mean oh they say you mean my and they're about to say mind whether they remember it's not politically correct to say mind so they say had no idea things have gotten to the point where it's no longer politically correct to say mind oh yes you've got to say brain the mind is the brain because everything is physically okay we the anything can be reduced to physics a let's let's let's let's make sure that that's clear to the audience yes because this this is an amazing idea the idea that the mind is not the same as the brain the idea that if we were only moist robots as somebody disgustingly put it yeah computing make computing meat if that were the case then in effect anything like a computer ought to develop consciousness but nothing that we ever know of except humans has consciousness so the mind is separate from our mere brains but it has gotten to the point and I just wanted to annotate that or underscore that that you're saying that in the world of science at Oxford people are afraid to use the word mind because it implies that there's something beyond the physical material brain well yes that's right but it's not all people if we step back from this let's put this in a bigger framework what we're up against in the culture is the logical conclusion of a materialistic view of the universe see let's go back to Socrates and Plato because that'll help make things clearer in the world of their time by 300 BC or so the Greeks were divided in their view of the big question what is the nature of ultimate reality now Socrates Plato and Aristotle all believed in the gods they believed there's something more than the physical universe but Democritus and leucippus who were geniuses because they developed the atomic theory and the atomic theory is one of the most important things ever discovered Richard Feynman actually made a very interesting statement he said if all of science was lost all of science was lost but there was one result that we could preserve to pass to the next generation just one it would have to be the atomic theory that everything is made of atoms no optimist means indivisible we know they're divisible but the basic idea is there is stuff very tiny stuff and everything but everything is made of that stuff but I have to say as proud as I am to be a Greek the idea that someone in Greece in the 4th century Democritus came up with that idea how in the world without going into this too much but how could they back then have come up with this idea well by a brilliant piece of reasoning they they could take a piece of wood and they could cut it and there were smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and they reckoned there must be a point at which that process stops by something that couldn't be cut and this is the basic stuff of reality but then they made a leap that this would be all of reality now that view barrels up through the centuries and it sits in Oxford it's in fact the dominant philosophy in Western academia and we call it materialism though there's another version which we call naturalism they're both atheistic they both deny anything beyond but some give a little bit more weight to the existence of mind that's independent of matter no if you are a materialist then you're going to say that whenever thing else is said mind reduces the brain that's all it is brain reduces the physics and chemistry and all we are is physics and chemistry now back to my little story you see let's suppose that's true for a minute and I say to my friends tell me what you do science with I do it with my brain tell me about your brain I've read fun with this right your brain what is the brain give me the short story well the short story is the rain is the end product of a mind s unguided process and I look at them and I smile and they say this and you trust it you trust it now tell me honestly and I let this thing in if you knew that the computer you use in your laboratory or any of the instruments was the end product of a mindless unguided process would you trust it I've never had the answer yes to that no and yet it now I say there's a problem there can you not see that you are using something that your theories that is your philosophy your world view of what is ultimate reality is destroying the very thing you want to trust I regard that as totally inconsistent no from where I sit atoms aren't ultimate reality ultimate reality is God who is mind you've got it exactly the wrong way around the fundamental stuff of the universe is not mass energy it's spirit God is spirit he's not material and therefore I believe mathematics is very reasonably effective because mathematics being a product of the human mind is a reflection of the God in whose image we are made and that is why science rocketed up in the 16th century because that's exactly what Newton and company believed couldn't you take this even another step and say that the the reason God gave a science or gave us the kind of minds that would want to know and that would eventually discover that science can be the path to discovering everything else was so that in the end we would discover him in other words it seems to me that God and and this would really upset scientific atheists but to say that the whole point of science is to discover the God who created the universe that's why the Lord gave us a planet where we have a transparent transparent atmosphere and we can see the Stars and we can we can discover all kinds of things that God designed the universe and designed us in such a way that we would by doing science ultimately discover him that's right let me tell you a little story that illustrates us beautifully full of irony Larry tonton whom you mentioned and under whose auspices we sit here so delightfully he organized by big debate with Richard Dawkins but he organized the second debate with Dawkins in the Natural History Museum in the University of Oxford in the same place where a famous debate happened that is worthy that's right between Thomas Huxley and Wilberforce you say bishop before the bishop the son of William Wilberforce yes that's right it was an amazing situation now when I walked into that debate I suddenly remembered that there was a deep motive for building the building in which you were having the debate I checked with the people of the desk they'd never heard of it I didn't have Wi-Fi I couldn't get into it so in the middle of the debate I said to Richard who had worked for years in that building he had novice in that building I said to him I think there's a connection between this building and demonstrating the glory of God through science oh no there's no connection whatsoever you see now of course we checked later and we discovered this is a wonderful thing that building which as scientific exhibits as a beautiful building was built with excess profits from the sale of Bibles by Oxford University Press and it was dedicated by its founder to the glory of God so that people could see the magnificence of God in creation now coming more precisely into the point you're making Eric I agree with you entirely I think properly understood this kind of things science mathematics is a pathway to appreciating God now you're saying a lot there because I think we can we can narrow that down and make a lot out of it but just in a moment because I'd like to finish the first point about the mind and how it's come into the center of the contemporary debate one of the most distinguished philosophers in the world is Alvin Plantinga who was at not today and has now retired but he's a brilliant writer and he writes full of wit but he makes a point roughly like this he says the Dawkins is right that our brain and our minds are simply the result of the random permutations of atoms in the universe then he has given us every reason to doubt not only is atheism but in science in fact he's given us every reason to doubt any form of rationality at all so it self-destructs now that's marvelous but when Thomas Nagel wrote a book with the most explosive subtitle I have ever seen and then by the way this is the atheist at NYU this is not only the eighth iasts at NYU this is a man who's a hard atheist he has written he does not want her to be a God not simply he doesn't believe in God he doesn't want there to be a God so he's no prejudice but he wrote this book at what I came across the first night say that again a title mind and cosmos why the neo-darwinian view of the world is almost certainly false I thought what and then I read it and he starts by saying I want to defend I couldn't believe what I was reading I wanted to defend the naive untutored view that there's something seriously questionable about the idea that everything we see all living things etc came about by random unguided process I want to defend that and very interestingly in the first couple of pages he defends Stephen Meyer I've never seen anyone you were talking about Steve Meyer for those who don't know Stephen Meyer is one of the great great scientific minds who almost invented the idea of intelligent design he's at the Discovery Institute when he didn't quite invent it well goes back to scripture actually what hey he has he has written modern idea impressive stuff yeah and his book signature and the ceylon packs us all kind of thing but to see him defended by an atheist I thought this is amazing so I've read this book several times that I put some of it into some of my books but at a certain point he says that here's the problem if you cannot reduce mind to matter that's putting it if you cannot if you cannot do that if it's not reducible to matter then evolutionary naturalism collapses because it's it's materialistic to the core in other words there's something very very wrong with this materialistic view now I now go further than that I say look we are in the Information Age information is usually carried on material information is not material it's immaterial now here's a wonderful thing this is another huge idea it is information is immaterial so if all you believe in is the material universe information itself doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense yes absolutely you like it yes but you'll have to explain how information is immaterial well suppose I want to carry a message I'm sitting on top of a mountain and the Washington State my favorite mountain up there with the snow on it you know that much I do and I'd really green here you're a deer so I I make smoke signals I hope they go into the air and they're seen by some Indians 20 miles away but they're more intelligent than me so they've got a telephone so they pick up the telephone and they convey the information to somebody else who types it on the internet and it's received in Oxford the information that's received an Oxford is not material material things have been used to get it there but in itself is not material and this gives people great difficulty but is the idea behind that if my eyes read letters on a wall I'm reading a sign the letters on the sign or material yeah I am material yes but what I gather from the letters the concept it's not reducible on any level to the material no in other words it's not as if something has been beamed into my brain my eyes can look at the shapes but turning it into information is somehow immaterial let me illustrate this with what actually has happened to me several times I'm sitting at dinner and we've lovely dinners at Oxford you know in our College and the Sikh placings are fixed and one night I found myself beside a very eminent biochemist and unfortunately he asked me what I did and I said I'm a pure mathematician and he said how dreadfully boring and he meant that said that yes he said that how dreadfully boring and I saw that this was gonna be a bit of a social disaster so I said but don't worry about that I know my subject is quite unsociable and complicated so I try to make up for that by being interested in the big he said what big questions well I said like the status of the universe is it created or not he said stop it's far worse than I thought he said listen I'm an atheist I'm a reductionist and we have nothing to talk about and we're going to have a miserable dinner well that was a challenge for an Irishman so I looked at of it I said I was a great gredin because I grin you know when I'm panicking I a great grin I say to have no organ of a marvelously interesting evening he said why is that well I said I'm fascinated by reductionism I know at least three kinds which kind are you well that was a bit difficult so I helped about because I'm also quite a kind friendly Irish well you're very generous so I said to look you got a problem I got a problem you and biochemistry me and mathematics we split it up into little problems try and solve them get insight on the big problem he said I do that I said I do that that's methodological reductionism I said we both do that so we have something to talk over but he said I'm not that kind of reductionism a reductionist I said I know you're not you are an ontological reductionist on tossed Greek for being you believe everything can be reduced to physics and chemistry he said exactly and that's why we've nothing to talk about I said we have why don't we do an experiment he said what I said you heard me why don't we do an experiment but he says this is dinner I said yes but it's Oxford he said watch the experiment I picked up the menu and he said what's the problem of the menu roast chicken I said that's the problem for you know for me he said why I said uh-oh ast those are marks and paper yes they are but they say roast chicken I said how do you know when he said I've learned English always said that's very interesting you've learned English and you give those marks a meaning and you're a reductionist everything physical honestly I said okay you explain to me how those marks convey the idea of roast chicken and just use the material of the paper and ink dance silence this is a deep this is maybe not for you but for most of us this is a very deep or as we say heavy idea it's at the heart of everything yes whatever I'm down to your question but I've never heard anyone but you talk about this issue and I was hoping you'd bring it up or we would come to it yes this is a fascinating and it it goes to the heart of all we've been discussing so far about the mind and material he looked at it and it was very funny actually I must say that's because his wife was there and she said and she said it too largely she said get out of that if you can but what was amazing he did not try after a minute or so he said it cannot be done he was sharp enough to see that but it was devastating for a man of his eminence he said John no he's getting friendly I have been going to my laboratory for forty years thinking that could be done for tea so he saw he saw through it there saw through it form like that like a flash and I tried to play devil's advocate which I can be reasonably good up and I said befitting some chemistry properly spoken I've only been going five or six hundred years he said it doesn't matter you must have a mind and he got it you see and this is what we're about that the moment you see language and this is where I want to blow a hole in the popular conception that all explanation goes from the simple to the complex it's reductionist Dawkins wants to explain elephants as he says in terms of the bits and pieces of physicists work on I say that's marvelous where it works and it does work we can split water into hydrogen and oxygen and so on but where doesn't work where I want to say it never works is where language is involved now the interesting thing is this here's a man who works on DNA so if I say look are no AST roa st is five letters you saw those five letters and immediately postulated the mind item a by DN a which is 3.5 billion letters all in the right letters of course in the chemical alphabet but they code we talk about the genetic code and we're not embarrassed about it so it's semiotic it indicates it's a sign semi on a sign it indicates something that is meaning what about that we said that's chance and the laws of nature I said come on ro ast mind 3.5 billion letters in the right order in the longest word we've ever discovered no mind there's something odd going on and I want to maintain that Nagel is right he's onto something and it'll be very interesting to see how that thinking develops one of the most powerful evidence as to my mind that there is a an eternal mind behind the universe is first of all that we can do science that we can do it in the language of mathematics that we have language that we can use we can use abstract con concepts that are not material to describe things that are physical all of that points in one direction and one direction only and it's this in the beginning was the word not the particles I as I listened to you I think to myself is that I assume most people working in science most atheistic materialists are never confronted with these questions they never are forced as this poor soul was at the dinner in Oxford to deal with this question and it stays great credit that that he dealt with it honestly it is and what you just said resonates with me because of an experience I had not long ago I was invited to give a prestigious lecture in a very famous American University and I mentioned this this very thing in detail my audience were all scientists one of them a Nobel Prize winner when I'd finished he came up and in a loud voice he said why have I never heard this all my life I said part he said these ideas are entirely new it staggers me that the veil of naturalism and materialism has been so pushed that science and God are opposites that these ideas are new and therefore they're preventing discovery because you see a sensible person would say listen we now have to take the mind seriously we formerly thought it was all just meat but now we have to take the mind seriously surely that begins to make at least plausible the idea that there is a cosmic mind you see physicists will now say that information some of them not all of them but an increasing number is not reducible there physics and chemistry it's a separate kind of thing and they put it a nice little statement like saying is the universe it before bit or bit before it you see this kind of statement ok if information is not reducible to physics and chemistry that means materialism is false as a philosophy it simply means it's false and therefore a science that is purely materialistic is not going to encompass a huge area of reality that's a very serious business now that could bring us on to another subject because part of the reason that people pitch science against God is because they think that science is the only way to truth a couple of things that I'm pulling out from what you're saying it's not as though I haven't thought of them before but it's really clear as I listened to you that materialism is on the ropes in a way that it has not been for quite some time there's I think so there's been a fascist lockstep in the Academy no different from the church's attempt to squash Galileo the irony is that now those in power attempting to squash something those who are threatened are the scientific materialist establishment they are deeply threatened and they are trying to squash truth in precisely the way they accused the church of trying to squash Galileo but in a beautiful historical irony yeah ordinary historical irony why because if I might interject there the myth is that here was Galileo the great atheist scientist making vast progress at the ignorant church was opposing him when the reality is Galileo was a believer what he started when he finished and the church weren't the first to criticize him it was the Italian philosophers why because they bought into Aristotle's idea that the earth didn't move everything moved around the earth and the church thought that the Bible said the same so they jumped on the bandwagon the irony is here is galih who believed the Bible he was right and they were wrong and it was the whole worldview of the scientific establishment and philosophical establishment were the church hanging onto there the Catholic Church hanging onto their coattails but what it needs to be seen as as to what it is Galileo was actually introducing a more biblical worldview into it and he was right in challenging the domination of Aristotle now the equivalent today is Aristotle has been replaced by materialists it's not that they believe that the earth doesn't move anymore but they believe there's nothing but earth or the universal to speak there's nothing but material and that is being challenged the irony is then and now that Galileo the believer in the Bible was right it's it's all hilarious and ironic I'm sad and sad well the idea - that it is Christians believers today who are calling scientists to be more scientific well in in that sense I think what we're trying to say is actually a number of things it's - I'm passionate about science but making science the only Avenue to truth is very dangerous and it's logically absurd if I say science is the only way to truth well that's not a statement of science it's a statement of my own beliefs oh it's true it's false it self-destructs it's ridiculous it's certainly not scientific yes so therefore it's false because of science is rightly weighted right you didn't reach that by science so therefore if it's true it's false I hear any of irony's I think that's a good place to stop I don't like to stop this is so enjoyable well we can carry it on next time we can carry it on ladies and gentlemen at love Bastide how about a warm round of applause for professor dr. John Lennox thank you doctor [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Socrates in the City

Views: 185,691

Keywords: Eric Metaxas, John Lennox, EricMetaxasSocrates, Faith, C.S. Lewis, Science, Larry Taunton, Oxford, Science and God, Labastide, France, SocratesintheCity

Id: gDjNv-ea56E

Length: 47min 34sec (2854 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2018