John Lennox - Why believe in God in a scientific world?

let me welcome you very warmly indeed this evening to Christchurch it's great to have you with us unconscious there are people here this evening from the local community at the local schools and colleges local churches across West London wherever you're from this evening you're very warmly welcomed indeed with us and we put on events like losing time to time to give the church family but also members of the local community an opportunity to ask the big questions to consider the questions that are out there in the world and we're always delighted when we've got a speaker who can help us think through those questions more closely and more carefully this evening we're delighted to welcome professor John Lennox as our guest speaker John was born in Northern Ireland is the emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford as well as a fellow of Wickliffe Hall and the side Business School in Oxford after school in our MA in Northern Ireland John became the exhibition ER and senior scholar at Emmanuel College Cambridge and went on to obtain an MA and a PhD from the University in Cambridge before being awarded a DSC in Cardiff for his research and a DPhil from the University of Oxford he's got a few more degrees than I've managed to pick up in my time and I suspect he'd be me as a game of mental arithmetic during his 29 years at the University of Wales in Cardiff John was the Alexander humble fellow at the University of Fribourg for a year and has lectured extensively in the former Soviet Union in Russia in Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe and North America in the areas of mathematics apologetics and philosophy John is the author of many many books some of which are available at the back afterwards if you're intrigued or interested in pursuing the subject further some of as I said some of which are available afterwards he's also presented on Radio 4 and debated against many of the so-called New Atheists including Christopher Hitchens Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer I'm sure you agree that we've got somebody speaking to us this evening who is more than qualified to address the title of is it reasonable to believe in God in a scientific world John will speak for 25 to 30 minutes please feel free in that time to pick up these white bits of paper and scribble down your questions John is very happy to answer questions afterwards and let me encourage you to be engaged as you're listening and writing down your questions as we go they'll then be a brief break after he finishes speaking five minutes we'll say you can top up your glasses you can take a comfort break or whatever you need to do and while we sort the questions and then we'll grill John with the questions until nine o'clock when we hope to to to draw stumps and mop up any spilt wine and that sort of thing so you're very warmly welcomed without further ado let's welcome professor Lennox [Applause] ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for coming on this freezing cold evening and I hope that you might find something this evening that a warm at least part of your gray cells the title this evening is interesting is it reasonable to believe in God in a scientific world what would we mean by a scientific world I notice the title isn't is it reasonable to believe in God in a musical world or an artistic world or a literary world because after all all of those disciplines form part of our human experience so why concentrate on science well there are several reasons for that one is the widespread idea that in the last analysis science is the only way to truth or the only serious way to truth that has been popularized by people like Richard Dawkins and perhaps more particularly by Stephen Hawking in his false as a very simple piece of thought will indicate because of science is the only way to truth then you'd have to close half the faculties in every university in this country there'd be no literature there would be no languages there be no history there be no economics and unfortunately such is the cultural authority of science not without justification that there is developed their hubris into thinking that science is the only way to truth I've been fascinated by logic since I was a small boy and when I hear statements like science is the only way to truth I subject them to logical analysis because you see the statement science is the only way to truth is not a statement of science so if it's true it's false so it's perhaps it's too late of the evening for logic but let's try anyway it means that it's logically incoherent and Sir Peter Medawar who won the Nobel Prize an amazing scientist said we do science at this service if we think that it can answer every question it obviously can't it can't even answer the simple questions of a child where do I come from where am I going to what is the meaning of my life we have to look outside science to literature and philosophy and theology for answers to those questions so my first point is it's not a scientific world science is one intellectual discipline that has very successfully revealed to us part of the nature of nature but thank God not all and I for one am grateful for history and literature and languages and music and art and all those other ways of exploring the wonder of human experience surely you can't be a scientist and believe in God these days why not well science has given us such marvelous explanations of the universe and shown us that God just is necessary beneath in God is old-fashioned it belongs to the days when people didn't really understand the universe and just took the lazy way out and said God did it that won't do any more in fact the sooner we get rid of religion the better well that's the popular story and it's supported by some very powerful people for instance Steven Weinberg who won the Nobel Prize for Physics says the world needs to wake from the long nightmare of religion anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization we might just notice the rather sinister totalitarian element anything that we can do ought to be done that attitude isn't new I met at 50 years ago while studying at Cambridge and one occasion the only occasion I find myself at dinner sitting beside a Nobel Prize winner not Weinberg somebody else never met anybody of that eminence before and wondered what can I talk about what questions can I ask so I decided to gain as much as possible from this encounter by asking him questions about how science shaped his worldview the answers that he had formed to the big questions of life and in particular I was interested in whether his wide-ranging studies of his success had led him to make any reflections of the existence of God the mention of the word God was a trigger for discomfort and since I don't like people to be uncomfortable around me I backed off and changed the subject and thought that was the end of it but at the end of the mail he invited me to come to study invited two or three other senior academics and so far as I recall he asked me to sit and they stood around me in Lenox do you want a career in science yes sir then he said in front of witnesses tonight you should give up this childish faith in God if you don't it will you intellectually you will suffer in comparison with your peers you will not make it talk about pressure here was I an undergraduate and this was a Nobel Prize winner attempting to use his culture of power to squeeze the Christian life out of me I was a bit paralysed but in the end I said sir what have you got to offer me that's better than what I already have and he came out from some ancient philosophy that thanks to my reading of CS Lewis I knew a bit about and I just stopped him I said if that's all you've got then I'll take the risk thank you and good night well ladies and gentlemen up put steel into my mind and heart I thought suppose it had been the other way around and I'd been an atheist and he'd been a Nobel prize-winning Christian and they'd stood around me and tried to beat Christianity and to me it would have hit the newspaper headlines throughout Britain the very next day and there would have been disciplinary proceedings in the university it was threat it was bullying and I remember deciding that day if ever I get a chance to be a scientist I would love to be in a position to write in front of the public and encourage them to think about these big questions without threatening and without bullying and without trying to use my cultural authority to do so the sad thing is he was totally wrong and he should have known he was wrong because if you look up the Nobel Prize winners between 1900 and 2000 over 60% of them believed in God so the idea that science and faith in God are incompatible is demonstrably false but it's important to see just what that means for instance still alive today there are two Nobel Prize winners in physics Peter Higgs is one of them in Scotland an atheist and Bill Phillips a Christian in America I just think of those two men what divides them not their science they've both won the Nobel Prize what divides them is their worldview and what that shows me is this that the idea that science and faith in God is incompatible is just false here's a Nobel Prize winner believing in God here's another who's an atheist where the real conflict lies in our society we're told it's a conflict between science of God it isn't it's a conflict between two worldviews the worldview of science the worldview of naturalism or materialism on the one side and the worldview of theism Christian theism in my case on the other side that's where the conflict is but what is happening is that the public is told it's science versus God so if you want to be intellectually respectable yahuwah science and reject God that is demonstrably false and it saddens me how many people buy into it so the question that needs to be asked the much more serious question is this can science help us at all does it point towards God does the point against God or is it neutral and I spent a large part of my life thinking about that so we're doing worldview thinking tonight naturalism is the idea that the universe or multiverse or whatever you call it is all that exists mass-energy the fundamental stuff there's nothing else there is no transcendence Sean Carroll the physicist wrote a best-seller recently called the big picture and he said we humans are blobs of organized mud which through the impersonal workings of nature's patterns have developed the capacity to contemplate and cherish and engage with the intimidated complexity of the world around us the meaning we find in life is not transcendent now I notice that is a statement by a scientist and here comes the next mistake all statements by scientists are statements of science they are not this is simply a statement of his personal belief it's not a statement of science but unfortunately because he's a physicist people read the book and they invest it with the authority of a an established result of science like Newton's second law we need to learn ladies and gentlemen that not everything scientists say is science in fact Richard Fineman whom I love to read brilliant Nobel Prize winner he says outside of its failed the scientist is just as dumb as the next chap and that's worth remembering so we do a little bit of looking at some of the evidence very briefly and I have a website called John annex org and you can see me there in various situations of debate and lecturing and many of the world's leading universities so if you want to follow it up then you can do that I said scientists can be as dumb as the next job in fact they can get it wrong for example Stephen Hawking in his book the grand design says this philosophy is dead and it's now left to scientists to bear the torch of truth in our generation philosophy is dead what he caused a lot of set of the philosophy department in Cambridge when he wrote that but he also caused a huge amount of laughter because he says at the beginning of his book philosophy is dead and what's the book about the philosophy of science and I'm afraid if I dare say so he proves adequately that as far as he's concerned philosophy is dead it's tragic here's a brilliant world-class scientist I remember him at Cambridge he was just ahead of me but he's the light years ahead of me as a scientist but once he goes outside science you find these wild statements and the public needs to be aware of this kind of thing that is happening in the name of science the second example of getting it wrong is Richard Dawkins claim that God is a delusion you've all heard of the book and maybe even read it The God Delusion and when I first read it I thought that's interesting because delusion is a concept from psychiatry it means to use Dawkins definition which is quite good a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence and I thought this is very interesting let's see what Dawkins says about the research and psychiatry's read because obviously he's not a psychiatrist and nor am i so what do you do well what I do is to say what did the experts in the field say and to my astonishment when I started to read the experts of the field I found they contradicted Dawkins completely that is simply wrong now let me give you an example of that let's go to the top of the field of Psychiatry the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists past president Andrew Sims here's what he says the advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally if the findings of the huge volume of research in this topic had gone in the opposite direction and it had been found that religion damages your mental health it would have been front-page news in every newspaper in the land and Sims tells us furthermore that in a major survey conducted for the American Journal of Public Health the majority of studies correlated religious involvement with well-being happiness life satisfaction hope optimism purpose of meeting higher self-esteem better adaptation to bereavement greater social support less loneliness lower rates of depression and faster rates of recovery etc etc etc and where do we read of that in Dawkins nowhere in other words ladies and gentlemen he's claiming to give you scientific evidence from the field of Psychiatry which is not his own faith that's ok but he's not giving you the evidence of the experts in the field so it's the Dawkins delusion he's deluding you with non facts and I regard that as a very serious thing to do claiming to use science to make your point but not doing the research now we know that the man most associated with the idea that God is a delusion is Sigmund Freud and one of Germany's best selling psychiatrists a very interesting man called manfred lutz points out that the Freudian explanation of religion is will a wish-fulfillment works very well provided only God does not exist but then he points out you see that if God does exist the very same argument will show you that atheism is a delusion the desire never to have to meet God and give account for the mess you've made of your life of other people's lives you see the flip side of Freudianism we never hear but you will hear it from people some of them who have lived in the Marxist world where I spent a lot of time during the Cold War take Ches swath me wash you won the Nobel Prize for Literature in Poland he says a true opium of the people is a belief and nothingness after death the huge solace of thinking of for our betrayals greed cowardice murders we are not going to be judged so for him atheism is a psychological escape mechanism to avoid the concept of having to face judgment for what you've done wrong manfred lutz points out you see it's interesting if God doesn't exist Freud explains religion brilliantly if God does exist Freud explains atheism brilliantly but what Freud doesn't do he can't help you to decide whether God exists or not and that's a very sharp and penetrating remark I can't help telling you this forgive me but Stephen Hawking was asked what he thought of religion and gave the typical Freudian answer religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark I was asked to comment in the Daily Mail or something come to remember what it was but I know it reached John Humphries on the news at eight o'clock in the morning I was asked to comment and I said do you want a one-liner oh yes they said please give us a one-liner so I did I said atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light now you laugh you see because you haven't understood what I was saying two minutes ago those two statements are statements of our personal belief Hawking statement was a statement of his belief it's got nothing to do with science my statement is a statement of my personal belief it's nothing to do with science the statements themselves do not decide which of them is true but we have to decide that so we proceeded a little bit the other thing is example of scientists getting it very foolishly wrong is the jibe that I'm a drone Christmastime when I'm doing debates and a scientist will stand up and say Lennox your God is like Santa Claus I have you heard this in like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus you see and I remember once being in front of a very large audience in a very famous Dutch University several thousand people there and I just stopped the man who said that I said let's test your hypothesis and he looked at me as if to say how you go to test and I said very easily so I asked the audience tell me how many of you came to believe in Santa Claus as adults and not a hand went up and then I said how many if you came to believe in God as adults and hundreds of hands went up and I turned back to him and said please don't insult our intelligence for centuries some of the finest minds in the world have been thinking of her god of the arguments about his existence the authenticity of the Bible etc they haven't been doing that about Santa Claus you see these are silly arguments ladies and gentlemen but what frightens me almost is I meet them again and again from intelligent students and professors who think that deals with the god question doesn't even begin to deal with a gob question so let's go on to the positive side and the background to this and it's going to be very brief is the very odd fact that you've tool occasion professors Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking same chair at Cambridge hundreds of years apart Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity and Isaac Newton was a believer in God Stephen Hawking studies the law of gravity and he's an atheist what is more he uses gravity as a reason not to believe in God and that puzzles the Irish in me you know that got me really interested I need to investigate this how can you possibly get there and I think I understand what has happened and it may interest you first point is this as evidence that science points towards God we need look no further than beyond the history of modern science because you see all the pioneers of modern science Galileo Kepler Newton Clark Maxwell Faraday Babbage they were all believers in God so much so that there's a thesis about this called mertens thesis which see as Lewis put this way men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law of nature why because they believed in a lawgiver faith in God didn't hinder the rise of science it was actually the motor that drove it and sometimes I put this very provocatively I am not remotely ashamed of being a scientist and a Christian because arguably it was Christianity that gave me my subject so here's the amazing thing Newton discovers gravity and he doesn't write a book his most famous book principia mathematica saying ah now I've got a law of gravity I don't need God no he says what a brilliant God that did it that way and you know when you think about it that's the way our mind works isn't it the more you understand about engineering the more you admire the genius of rolls-royce not the less the more you understand about art the more you admire the genius of a Rembrandt or a Picasso not the rest not the less and the more Newton understood of the way the universe worked the more he admired the genius of the dog that did it that way so what's gone how can hawking tell young people quite explicitly you've got to choose between science and God well let's have a little look at it the first reason which I'll deal with briefly is because he's got the wrong concept of God I'm afraid he's thinking not of the God of the Bible who is eternal and the creator of everything he's thinking of a Greek god like the god of lightning who's simply postulated to account for a phenomenon we don't understand science gets rid of those gods Imperial College down the road we'll get rid of them and lecture 1 and good riddance you see but the God of the Bible is not a God of the gaps I can't explain it therefore God did it I hope you've all read the first page of the Bible it's very good reading you know it starts like this in the beginning God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand oh it doesn't deceive but that's exactly what Hawking things that I believe in a God who's just there until we have a scientific explanation now of course ladies and gentlemen your logic will tell you if you believe in a God like that you have to choose between God and science that's because you define God that way but it's got nothing to do with the Creator God of the Bible who's created the entire universe the heavens and the earth the bits we do understand the bits we don't so that's the first thing the second thing now is well let me tell you what Hawking sells to replace God here it is the key statement in his book the grand design and you say are we going to go into a level physics no are we going to go into all level of physics no what are we going to go into I'll tell you in a minute we're going to do a little bit of logic here's a statement because there is a law of gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing and when I read that first I thought say that again because there is a law of gravity because there's something the universe cannon will create itself from nothing flat contradiction number one secondly because there is a law of gravity not because gravity exists but this is a huge confusion thinking that laws can create the universe I once had a very interesting discussion with the famous atheist Peter Atkins professor at Oxford and I said Peter what created the universe and he said mathematics and I was so taken aback that very rudely and I confess it that I started laughs he said why are you laughing when I said I am a mathematician and that's the silliest thing I've heard for a long time he said why is it silly well I said Peter let me put it simply one plus one equals two did that ever on its own put two pounds in your pocket incidentally the financial crisis was caused in part by very clever people thinking that mathematics could create money I would call that creative accounting but actually mathematics doesn't create money and CS lewis who was brilliant at this sort long ago he said you can add one plus one plus one you can add it to all eternity but if you don't get one pound on one pound it'll never give you two pounds doing mathematics won't create anything another example Newton's laws of motion have never moved a billiard ball in the history of the universe people accuse do that the laws describe the motion so Hawking is completely wrong and saying because there is a law of gravity what would the law of gravity mean if there's no gravity well I pass that by and go to the final bit the universe can and will create itself for nothing pardon if I say X creates y roughly that means that we got actual get Y if I say X creates X that roughly means if you've got actual get X and what does that mean it means that nonsense remains nonsense even of scientists write it it is sheer nonsense now say nothing about nothing the universe this is the big idea these days because physicists some of them have come to the conclusion that God's gone and what are we left with nothing so what you have to choose now is not God or mass-energy it's God or nothing and I give lectures or nothing I find them very interesting but I'm not going to let you you're nothing if you want to ask me about nothing I'll tell you about nothing afterwards but not now all right because I have nothing to say at this point of it and but when I read that as a central argument for dismissing God I thought what are we coming to it's not science it's not a level science is not university science is not all ever it's nonsense logical nonsense coming from one of the brightest people and they do write amazing stuff some of these people in their mathematics and these are the genius but as for getting rid of God it does no such thing but I want to go a little bit further than that because there's a huge confusion about science and if you get it sorted out it can help you go a long way in this field and that is what is a scientific explanation I was taught the law of gravity I love it because deriving the elliptical orbits of the planets ride the Sun from Newton's law is is a gloriously artistic thing to do but you see when I first met the law of gravity I thought it explained gravity it was many years before I realized that nobody knows what gravity is and the law of gravity does not explain gravity as Newton himself realized all those years ago you see this comes to some people as a shock even within science a law is usually non comprehensive it only gives you in right into something now the law of gravity gives you brilliant insight into doing calculations of the relative motion of heavy bodies and enables you actually without Einsteins Corrections to land a person on the moon it's brilliant doesn't tell you what gravity is nobody knows what gravity is and that's the trouble because so often you hear oh well we found a law science says this therefore God doesn't exist that's usually sheer nonsense point number two again on explanation how shall we explain this boiling water well just imagine there's a Bunsen burner there and it's heating the water and the water is agitated and the molecules are moving faster and faster and the steam is rising that's why it's boiling well actually it's boiling because I would like a cup of tea now which of those two explanations is correct they're both correct now see here the danger of making science the only way to truth there are scientists who tell you that only the scientific explanation is valid I want to tell you that the agent explanation my personal desire for a cup of tea is actually well people have been enjoying tea for thousands of years before they knew anything about heat transfer and heat equations and all the rest of it do you see the point I'm making is there different levels of explanation they don't compete they don't conflict they complement let me put it this way god no more competes with science as an explanation of the universe then Henry Ford competes with the law of internal combustion as an explanation for the way a motor car engine works you need both why can't help people see it well they do I find it's cool third form level they can understand it it saddens me but university students and professors can't see it it is so important to realize that not only are there different levels of explanation of the same thing that complement each other often it's the non-scientific ones that are by far the most important except in science so once you see that that God isn't competing with science at all then you can begin to take a deep breath and do some more exploration and every scientific discovery that's made that's a genuine discomfort II you can say well isn't this brilliant that God did it this way instead of it becoming a huge problem it becomes a marvelous insight into the ways of God so those are some ideas of this but I want to finish just with one little well a kind of story I'll tell it in the form of story otherwise I'll take too long but what is the significance of the fact that we can do mathematics you say what do you mean well it's one of my main reasons for not being an atheist not because of a Christian but because I'm a scientist you say what do you mean to that well let me tell you about several conversations I've had they all go the same way I say to a scientist tell me what do you do science with oh we got this hundred million dollar machine no no I don't mean that I mean oh you remain my and they're about to say mind when they realize that it's not politically correct to say minds they say brain they think the mind and the brain are the same thing I don't but understand from it okay you do science with your brain yes Oh tell me about the brain what's the story of your braids boil it down to the the absolute essence and so often I get something like this well my brain is the end product of a mindless unguided process I always say and you trust it well what do you mean well tell me honestly I put this too many people if you knew that your computer or your research instruments or the end product of a mindless unguided process would you even use them I've always had the answer no now I said you're in a problem aren't you because you're using your mind and yet your philosophy of mind is undermining the very rationality you need to do your science wealth now that is a very important argument again Lewis was the first appointed to me he said we do science by thinking and that's wonderful but what we haven't done is think about thinking and any theory that invalidates thinking cannot be true because you reach it by thinking the fascinating thing is a leading atheist philosopher has caught on to this recently as named as Thomas Nagel and if you google him you'll see what a for Rory he's called in cyberspace by the atheist because he's making the point which is essentially this if Dawkins and the other people are right in their explanation of the origins of the mind in it in mindless unguided processes then they're undermining not only the credibility of their explanation but the credibility of any explanation and anything that's why I'm not an atheist ladies and gentlemen because I have far too higher view of science to go for a theory that undermines it now one of the fascinating things is this that we have lived at least I have lived it happened before most of you were born I'm ancient to discover that not only is the universe mathematically describable in a very precise language which is marvelous stuff I hope you all love it but there are strong linguistic elements coded into the very DNA of our cellular structure and each of us have got many copies of the longest word that's ever been discovered the DNA code three and a half billion letters and exactly the right order now isn't it interesting and I test people you look around and you see on a church-door the word exit exit4 letters you know immediately that that cannot be explained in purely natural processes there's a mind binder that understands the word exit well if you say that with a four letter word what are you going to say for 3.5 billion letters in the right order you see ladies and gentlemen as I conclude these two worldviews were faced with go like this either in the beginning was nothing or mass-energy and everything else developed through unguided natural processes until we get brain and then as an epiphenomenon mind and then the idea of God because there isn't a God the other worldview goes like this in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God the Word was God the same was in the beginning with God all things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be that I find is stunning because it's telling you that the real understanding of nature is the exact opposite of what you're being sold for the naturalist or materialist word is derivative mass-energy or nothing as primary the biblical view is that word is primary and everything else is derivative it couldn't be more different and to me as a scientist the biblical view makes much more sense and then that opens up into a staggering claim that the word became human and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory glory as of the only son of the Father full of grace and truth and just perhaps you're sitting here tonight looking for ultimate meaning in life science can help us a little way but you see all that I have said so far is the human search for understanding of the universe if the word became human that now goes also the other way around because this is God looking for you and he's still looking for you I'm looking for me but that's a story for later thank you very much John thank you very much for very thought-provoking and stimulating start to our evening now it's your turn you get to scribble down your questions you get to pass them to the ends of your rows in the aisles and a will then gather them in sort them into some sort of logical order or perhaps it'll just be chance and we'll throw them up in the air and while you're sitting in your seats drinks will be brought to you so you'll have your glasses charged and so on if you need to use that the Lou's do make yourself make you so those facilities we'll take a five-minute break before we reconvene ladies and gentlemen let me put it to you very much for the four thousand questions it's great to have so many questions obviously by definition we won't get to all of them what we're going to try and do is answer as many as possible by grouping them into areas and to grow John with those questions before we get before we grill him I just want to draw your attention to the beige colored cards in your pews which I've heard of response cards it gives you a chance to say what you thought of the evening topics you think you'd like us to tackle in the future also it gives you a chance to say you'd like to find out some all by reading a gospel account by exploring Christianity further and put down your email address we promise not to send you any delivery vouchers or anything like that but what we will do is put you in touch with somebody locally whether you're in Kensington or Chelsea or Fulham or wherever and that will be most helpful to you John we've got lots of questions first question I think from your publisher which of your books is the simplest to understand the one the one I'm writing just now not the first one but for a fairly comprehensive approach to the whole quest of atheism not simply science but philosophy morality Christianity gunning for God is probably the easiest one to follow and that's on the table at the back you'll be delighted to know John we're going to try and get through as many of these as we can in the time what if truth was not the most important criteria how do we know that we should care about truth try that on your bank manager my truth is they've got 50,000 pounds in the red no sorry in the black Andy and he says well my truth is you owe the bank half a million where are you going to get with that I don't actually understand the question because the inquest in the zooms that the words are understandable and they represent a certain truth on the part of the person you can't get away from truth ladies and gentlemen and to say what of it is not the most important criterion for a lot for what it's not a complete statement you have to ask what you're thinking about know when it comes to big things in life truth is all important if you go for a cancer diagnosis you're going to be very interested in truth a friend of mine has said that people lose concern for truth only in areas that they think are not important which sadly often include morality but everywhere else you're concerned about truth John is it possible there's a number of questions about creation and awful lot of questions actually and let me give you a flavor of two or three of them is it possible to believe in both creation and evolution do you believe God orchestrated the Big Bang if so how do you comprehend this the Bible seems to suggest humankind has been around for circa 6,000 years and yet science suggests it's been around for a lot longer how do we rationalize those is that all there are born well this is a huge topic now the fact is there are many people who profess Christianity and are very credible Christians who accept evolution at various levels some the complete neo-darwinism I'm a bad person to ask because I'm a mathematician and we've got quite a track record of scepticism not just on the part of Christians but I just say one or two things what I think about it I've written in my book has science buried God God's Undertaker but what gets missed in all of this is there are two separate things for many years Richard Dawkins book the blind watchmaker was the authoritative almost Bible on this that the blind unconscious mechanism of natural selection which Darwin discovered is the explanation of the existence and all the variations in life he's retracted that because it's wrong and it's seriously wrong because the one thing evolution no matter what you believe about it cannot account for his life for a very simple reason that evolution whatever it does requires life before it can start and therefore the big issue actually is not what level variations can go to and what Darwin observes as far as I can see we can observe it's not controversial where it becomes a bit more controversial is is this mechanism of natural selection which does something cannot bear the weight that's put on it one thing it certainly cannot do and Dawkins admits it and most biologists do it cannot account for life the origin of life from a scientific perspective is a bigger mystery today than it was in 1953 when they thought they'd sold it and the reason for that is that if you have if you're going to explain the origin of life you have to explain the origin of information but now the thing underlying this is often that if evolution does something then God cannot exist that is a false argument the law of gravity does all kinds of things but it's not an argument against God let me put it this way the existence of mechanism that does something is not an argument against the existence of someone who designed the mechanism even if there are random elements in the mechanism I have a watch that self-winding that is it winds with a random movements of my arm to argue that it hasn't been designed as ridiculous it's actually cleverer than one that wins with the spring but if you want to follow arguments like that perhaps the simplest book since we're into simple books is I've written a book called seven days that divided the world and you can guess it is about the Genesis account of creation and it is much more accessible than my first book gods Undertaker and I'll have to leave you if you want if you're really interested in what I think about these things I leave you to have a look at that and have a look at some of the lectures I've given there's one in New York and Socrates in the city on that seven days that divided the world but it's less than an hour so you can get the flavor of it in a brief time so shameless advertising has to deal with some of these questions because they are big questions and they're important questions john number of questions about have evidence of science what evidence is there in our world for the existence of a creator you said a lot about how science doesn't disprove God is there any positive evidence that suggests God's existence from science can science prove the existence of God if so how well the word proof is the problem here you see own matha Titian and you get rigorous proof in mathematics you don't get any other intellectual discipline not physics not chemistry not anywhere else only in mathematics and we use the word proof lazily we alternate and popular language between the mathematical rigor and the legal informal definition of proof evidence beyond reasonable right now the important thing about that is this one you will never get mathematical proof of anything except mathematics so in that sense you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God but in the informal sense of the word proof that's a different matter altogether and it doesn't mean that the proof is less rigorous it's only that it's different for instance I've been married to the same girl for 50 years I can't prove to you mathematically that she loves me but I'd give my life for her I'm going to America tomorrow in a plane I can't prove mathematically that it's going to get me there but I've committed my life to it so in other words we can find in life positive evidence we trust surgeons we trust doctors we trust trains and so on now I thought I was giving you positive evidence for God tonight I wasn't simply claiming you can't disprove God I said first of all the history of science points strongly towards a connection between faith and God and science that's positive I pointed out secondly that when we begin to understand the nature of God and the fact that God is a mind that makes perfect sense of the mathematical described ability of the universe that to my mind is very powerful evidence for the existence of God from science thirdly the existence of DNA as well as all kinds of very sophisticated mechanisms that require linguistic understanding fits perfectly with the idea that our minds behind them so I think there are all kinds of positive evidences for God it's another matter when you come to the God as revealed by Christianity but we haven't had a question about that yet so I'm saying nothing about it yet let me just push you a little bit on that crucially our world is no more special than Mars or Jupiter oh really can't it just be chance well there wait a minute the world is no more special than Mars own Jupiter that they are barren uninhabitable planets compared with the lush spectacular complexity of our world so to say it's no more special I just don't even begin to understand and then to say can't it just be chance that isn't an argument what do you mean can't it just be child's you're assuming that it's no more special well if you assume that well how do you know it's by chance you see what do you mean by chance chance usually means that we can't quantify it because we don't understand enough about it but when you see these after mentioned planets including the earth moving in perfect orbits described by Newton's laws and think of back of the history of discovering that and the sheer beauty of it the artist in you your sense of beauty would say look there's something going on here now of course if you refuse to see that that's fine but to say couldn't it just be a chance i I don't begin to relate to that I'm afraid somebody's similar relations watching make of Dawkins comment that Christian faith is blind faith a leap in the dark in the absence of the evidence well sadly some Christians think it is I don't I think Dawkins atheism is the prime example of blind faith actually you see here's the odd thing faith is a much misunderstood concept and so often I meet people who say well you see the trouble with you is you're a man of faith we're scientists we don't believe in faith which is nonsense science depends centrally on faith Einstein was clever enough to see that he said I cannot imagine a scientist without that faith he didn't mean faith in God he meant faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe if you do not believe that science can be done believe it as an article of faith you'll never do any science so it's none to say that religion is faith science has no faith now blind faith allows Dawkins has popularized this he thinks all faith in the god question is blind which is absolute nonsense you see my faith in God is evidence-based as is my faith in my wife as is my faith and many scientific results in scientists in the audience did you do all the experiments and check them in your physics textbook at all level of course you didn't you believed what was written you're a person of faith because they'd certain Authority now you see it's quite obvious that Jesus himself understood faith to be evidence-based because John wrote a gospel and here's his reason for writing it he says many other signs Jesus did which are not written in this book but these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah the son of God and that believing you might have life in his name in other words the New Testament is written as evidence upon which faith can be based if Christianity was blind faith it would be no new testament so there's a huge confusion here and it leads to nonsense listen to Christopher Hitchens the late Christopher whom I enjoyed meeting and debating even though we went out of hammer and tongs as you see in the internet he writes and he says our beliefs are not a belief our faith is not a faith that's just sheer nonsense and it's because he's mixing up blind faith with actual faith now all of us know what evidence-based faith means and if you don't you've never been to a bank manager for to get a loan because the first thing you say is what collateral can you offer me why do you believe this is a sound scheme oh well I just think it is you know I mean by blind faith the thing is going to be you'll never get a penny that way and in society we would be Fuli to trust people without evidence just look at the coning that goes on in our society on the internet when gullible people and sometimes people not so gullible trust folks we got to learn to trust on the basis of evidence and therefore my Christianity is not blind it's the exact opposite it's a commitment based on evidence let me pick you up on that number of questions about miracles and how can you believe in miracles here's illustrative one hauser as a scientist can you believe in miracles that Christians claim Jesus did doesn't the resurrection of Christ break the laws of nature shouldn't a scientist therefore deny it no is that enough of an answer no it isn't you see here's confusion upon confusion don't miracles break the laws of nature no they do not suppose I'm staying in a hotel in London and I put a hundred pounds in the drawer tonight that stay tomorrow night I put on another hundred pounds in as 200 isn't that I go to clear the drawer the next morning and I find fifty quid in it now you tell me have the laws of arithmetic been broken or the laws of England which which have been broken tell me the laws of England how do you know that because the laws of arithmetic have not been broken you see it's a confusion of thought what are laws they're not like laws that say if you part of this area you're going to face a fine the big confusion lies with not understanding the difference between the scientific idea of a law and the legal idea of a law now let's just look at it very simply you see the laws of arithmetic and the laws of science are descriptions of what normally happens now what can science tell you about resurrections it can tell you they're very rare suppose I sent all of you are to Highgate Cemetery after this and gave you a notebook a lamp and a hot-water bottle and say you sit there all night and record one of you see a resurrection and 0 if you don't see a resurrection and you come tomorrow night and I collect all the books 0 0 0 0 what does that prove it proves that resurrections are improbable but to say they're impossible you would have to have observed every to two in the entire history of humankind and you see here's the interesting thing there is a record of a tomb 20 centuries ago that was observed then he carefully observed now when Jesus came out of that tomb he didn't break any laws of nature because we're claiming as Christians that he came out of the tomb by some natural process what the New Testament says is God raised him from the dead now if I can compare the sublime with the ridiculous my hotel room with the money in the drawer what did I think about that drawer I thought it was a closed system of cause and effect it turned out to be wrong because a thief came and put his or her hand in and grabbed one hundred and fifty quid that didn't break any laws except the laws of England but it's because the laws of horrific aren't broken that I know he broke the laws otherwise I would have said well that's interesting 100 plus a hundred equal 200 yesterday now they've got 50 oh well there we are it's confusion of thought to think that's impossible for a scientist to believe in miracles now there's a huge lot more to be said because have you been listening to what I said about the human mind if the human mind is not to be explained within naturalistic assumptions ladies and gentlemen I'm afraid you don't even have to go to the miracles of the New Testament the human mind is supernatural if it's not natural that's logical the very fact that you can think is actually evidence of the supernatural in fact it's evidence that you're made in the image of God now that's a topic that CS Lewis developed but it's an immensely important thing so to sum up I don't believe in all claims to miracle we got to be skeptical we got to check things out at a distance but the central miracle that God became human and the evidence of it that God raised Jesus from the dead I'm convinced of those because I spent the entire life examining them now if you want to see how I examine that have a look at the last two chapters of my book gunning for God and I have a detailed explanation of how they go about forensic ly investigating the evidence John time is flying I've a very quick question for you which is a question of fact Italy and then lots of questions about this one last final bit okay question of fact has anyone made a study of how many scientists have no distinction saying in the 20th century or the post-world War two period have started out as atheists but come to believe in God as a result of their studies I expect they have and I've read some stuff of that and there's certainly quite a few I was talking to a friend America recently and he was telling me a friend of mine who won the Nobel Prize for Physics became a Christian not long ago and I mean that's anecdotal but it's it's it's true the point is people can change their worldview and that actually was very important to me you realize I'm Northern Irish it's not very difficult to tell that is it and when I got the cambridge people said of course you believe in God all you Irish believe in God and you fight about it and that's the Freudian explanation and I have to spend a lot of time untangling it is that right so it was very important for me to befriend people they've done it all my life to befriend people who do not share my background or my worldview and when I began to see them become Christians having investigated with me or with others the evidence I began to realize no it's not an accident of birth you can become a Christian you can change your worldview on the basis of coming to the conviction that Christianity is the truth big last question conscious it's not a small one lots of people have asked it thank you for your talk I now understand God is more likely to have shaped our world than not but why the God of the Bible why the Christian God why'd you choose to believe in the Christian God when there are so many other gods out there professor professor Lennox would you be prepared to tell us your definition of God what is God for you well taking the last one first we can't get very far with science you can get the impression of a rational mind bind the universe the powerful mind but you see Christianity does something much more it's claiming that God became human the word became flesh and so if I want to understand more about God I realized two things one that I was made in His image as a person and God has revealed to herself historically in Jesus Christ who was human as well as being God and so my definition of God and I'm not evading the question is have a look at Jesus Christ read the Gospels soak your mind in them and just begin to realize how simply wonderful he is and what he offers now that brings me to the second question it's a perfectly legitimate question you see I was asked to address that question is it possible to believe in God in the scientific world my answer that is yes but I can answer that without even mentioning Christianity which I mostly didn't tonight but now you're asking me a different question which I'm more than happy to address and that is why Christianity well I have a number of reasons for that some of them are objective and some of them are subjective you see coming to the objective take the three great monotheistic faiths another I have friends and all of them Islam Christianity Judaism my Jewish friends believe that Jesus died and did not rise my Muslim friends believe he didn't die I believe he died in rows those three views cannot be simultaneously correct factually correct and my Muslim and Jewish and Christian friends all admit that so how do you decide there are certain facts you can decide about you can investigate the evidence and one of the most interesting ways to do that at a popular level is to read these struggles but what so called the case for Christ where he's an atheist senior reporter who goes around talking to people who are Christians because he wanted to disprove the resurrection but he became a Christian he tells you hi so on the factual side I think there's a lot that you can do but then there's another thing you say let's not name any other religions the first thing I say when I speak to people of other religions is we must be very clear about this that as you look at all the religions and philosophies in the world you find in all of them common moral elements now that's immensely important the Golden Rule do unto others as you would be done by is in every philosophy religion pagan humanist atheist that you can find and it's very interesting to look them all up there CS Lewis did so in a little appendix to his book the abolition of man so when I start to ask questions about the content of religion please ladies and gentlemen and I mean that's very sincerely I was taught in Ireland by my parents where it was a divided country between Protestants and Catholics and my father was bombed why because he employed both sides equally and he taught me to respect everyone and to value them no matter what they believed so that's my starting point every man and women all of you whatever you believe you're made in the image of God and therefore you're of infinite value that's point number one but now we're religions differ is on this matter of relationship with God because and I'm generalizing generally speaking a religion offers you a way or a path and you try to follow that path and you hope that in the end when the great assessment comes and there's usually an assessment of some kind some kind of judgment that your good deeds will outweigh your bad deeds and you will be accepted into heaven Nirvana whatever it happens to be so that the basic principle is merit in fact it's like Imperial College London University course and I've taught many university courses and I like the students and I'd love to give them degrees but I can't it's their merit and I can't tell them you're going to get a first I can help them and teach them but they know that they won't know what degree they've got until the final assessment isn't that right now many people think that that is religion indeed many people think that's Christianity you try your best hope that God will be kind to you and let you in well that's religion it's not Christianity ladies and gentlemen in fact think about it I met a girl many years ago over 50 years now 60 years actually nearly Wow and I thought she'd be good to marry her so what I did was I came along and I said Sally I would like you to marry me and I gave her a present mrs. Beaton's cookery you know so I said now this book is full of laws there's one set of laws in particular for making apple strudel which I like thou shalt take so what flower thou shalt take so many sultanas I shall take so many apples than thou shalt honor now said it's gonna be like this if you cook to my satisfaction for the next 40 years or so and you help me to look after myself in the manner to which I've been accustomed I'll think about accepting you otherwise you can go back to your mother what why why are you laughing that's the way millions of people think about God it's exactly that if I do this if I do that if I work if I accept then perhaps you'll accept me you would never insult a fellow human being by treating them like that now I'm being strong but you need to realize that ladies and gentlemen to know what I fear most that people reject Christianity without ever having understood this I remember speaking of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and I explained that using that illustration and I saw a scientist near the back of his mouth just fell open and he came up to me afterwards and he said to me he said are you telling me that Christianity is the exact opposite of what I thought it was I thought it was me gaining the merit to be accepted and you're telling me that he can't do that anyway that Christ died for your sin this is unique to Christianity Christ doesn't compete with anybody on this and he said look I died for you I gave my life for you if you're prepared to trust me I can bear the weight of all you've done wrong and you can know you're accepted right now as you sit in this church tonight he said do you mean that I said I mean exactly that well he said it was worth coming to Bulgaria just for me ladies and gentlemen this is why Christianity is good news it's speaking to us I need forgiveness I'm not perfect I've made a mess of my life and other people's lives no amount of piling up merit is going to cancel the past I need something big enough so that I can stand and look at myself and not be afraid because there's been a solution fine to my guilt Christianity is the only only thing that offers me that so let me make it clear Christianity doesn't compete with any other religion for the simple reason that Jesus Christ offers me something that none of them do and therefore it's not arrogance to accept from him something that nobody else offers and you see it's not arrogant therefore for me to sit here and say I actually know that God has accepted me I'm not worried about the judgment I know that one day I will go to spend a magnificent and fascinating eternity with God and with Christ not because of who I am or the arguments I've mastered but because Jesus loved me and died for me that's the heart of it and that really is why I am a Christian and not anything else thank you very much for being so patient today I want to thank all of you for coming this evening I hope you found it informative heartwarming and mind stretching John won't be dashing off straight away he'll be heading off fairly quickly he's got a plane to catch to the United States tomorrow so we want to make sure he gets his beauty sleep but it.if if you've got if you'd like to come and have a word feel free to do that thank you for coming thank all the helpers for serving us so kindly at this evening and let's finish by thanking John again for giving up an evening to be with us [Applause]

Channel: Actionable Futurist Andrew Grill

Views: 13,720

Rating: 4.8323355 out of 5

Keywords: andrew grill, presentation, keynote, thought leadership, God, Faith, Religion, Professor John Lennox, John Lennox, science and God, Christianity, Christ Church Kensington

Id: jUpep7UjIZE

Length: 75min 1sec (4501 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2018