Welcome to the Veritas forum, engaging university
students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance
of Jesus Christ to all of life. [Applause] Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted
to say I'm not like the Bishop who turned up at a county church in England and as he
mounted the pulpit, he'd noticed there were only three elderly people in the audience.
And he said to the Vicar, he said, "Did you tell them I was coming?" And the Vicar said,
"No, but word seems to have got around." [Audience laughs] Now, I am particularly delighted to be in
the University of Harvard because I studied at Emmanuel College Cambridge. The other Cambridge.
And in that college, there is a very special room which has been preserved for several
hundred years. It was occupied by John Harvard. Because you're great John Harvard came from
Emmanuel College. And one of the things that was my joy during my time at Cambridge was
to get to know a succession of very distinguished Harvard scholars because there probably still
is a system where you can spend a term or a year in Cambridge at Emmanuel and you enjoy
his huge suite of rooms and a very extensive entertainment allowance. [Audience laughs] So, I'm particularly delighted to be here.
I'm interested to see that the motto of your university is the word that stands behind
me tonight -- Veritas. Which indicates that the founders were interested in truth. Of
course, all of us must start somewhere and I started in the small country of Northern
Ireland. My parents were Christian but they were not sectarian and they gave me the greatest
gift that a parent can give to his child. They allowed me to think. Now, when I arrived
in Cambridge, in my first week as a student someone said to me, "Do you believe in God?"
And they said, "Oh, sorry. I forgot. You're Irish." [Audience laughs] "All you people believe in God and you fight
about it." [Audience laughs] That was a turning point in my life. Because
I was interested in truth. Could it be that my faith in God was simply a product of Irish
genetics? And so on that day, I decided to get to know people that did not share my worldview
and befriend them. And I have been doing it ever since. I have spent a lot of time in
Eastern Europe in the communist time during the Cold War and more laterally, because I
speak Russian, spending time in Russian discussing these things in the academies of science.
And one of the questions that keep cropping up is the question that you've invited me
to talk about tonight. Miracles as belief in the supernatural, irrational. Now, there
are several concepts here and the major one, of course, is the word "miracle" which comes
from the Latin miraculum -- something wondered at. Now, of course, I'm aware that there's
a weaker meaning like, "It was a miracle that she passed her exams at Harvard -- [Audience laughs] since she never seemed to do any work." You
will be mistaken if you think that is the topic I'm going to address this evening. [Audience laughs] The Oxford English Dictionary describes a
miracle as "a marvelous event occurring within human experience which cannot have been brought
about by human power or by the operation of any natural agency and must therefore be ascribed
to the special intervention of the deity or some supernatural being." Now, of course,
if there is no such thing as a supernatural being or supernature, there is no need to
discuss miracle and they're not quite the same thing. So, the antecedent question that
we need to discuss is first of all, is there a supernature or is nature that we observe
all that exists? In other words, we have to face the question of the existence of God. Now, if you've been following the British
newspapers -- as I hope you do every day, of course -- [Audience laughs] you will discover that Richard Dawkins is
all over the front pages all this week militantly proclaiming that atheism is essentially the
default position. He, as the acknowledged leader of the new atheists, is determined
to show that science has rendered belief in all supernatural gods impossible. His book,
The God Delusion, is directed explicitly against the concept of the supernatural. And he wishes
to use science to abolish religion. Now, of course, not all atheists are as extreme as
Dawkins. Jürgen Habermas, a leading German intellectual who's an atheists, regards religion
as an important source for creating meaning and indeed, he warns Europe that our educational
system, our legal system, our human rights are all derivative from the Judeo-Christian
tradition. And interestingly he, the leading intellectual atheist on the continent adds,
"To this day, we have no other source. Everything else is postmodern chatter." That's a fascinating
statement for an intellectual atheists and I was reminded of that origin of our educational
institutions as I looked up at your magnificent philosophy building. It's the only one in
the world I've ever seen to bear the inscription, "What is man that you are mindful of him?"
Ladies and gentlemen, students of Harvard, you stand at a tradition that at its inception
saw no contradiction between the highest intellectual aspirations and belief in God, even in the
philosophy department. [Audience laughs] I don't know what it's like now. [Audience laughs] But certainly, they did not believe then that
belief in God was an insult to the intellect. Now, the new atheists are determined to spread
the myth that science and belief in God are incompatible. I say "myth" because it's very
easy to see that that is far too simplistic an analysis. How can science and belief in
God be essentially incompatible when, for instance, so many leading scientists at my
own University of Oxford believe in God? I can name the heads of several scientific departments,
world famous in their fields -- nanotechnology, electrical engineering and so on -- who are
believers in God. And in this country, just to name one, William Phillips, Nobel Prize
winner for physics is a believer in god. And what I simply observe is this -- that brilliant
science can be done by atheists and brilliant science can be done by believers in God, which
shows us, ladies and gentlemen, that the conflict, which is real, lies much deeper in. It is
not simplistically between science and belief in God and the supernatural. It is between
two worldviews, two concepts of the nature of ultimate reality. And it is against that background, that I
wish to make my remarks. The one worldview is naturalism or materialism -- there's very
little difference between them -- which believes that this universe is all that exists or the
multiverse. And that is implications for the nature of explanation. It means that explanation,
by definition, must be reductionist from the bottom up because there is no transcendence,
there is no ultimate top down causation. That was the view of Democritus and Leucippus in
the ancient world. But also in that Greek melting pot, there were philosophers like
Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and they did not accept that view. They believed there
was transcendence. There was something more. And those two views come barreling up through
history and they divide us in this room tonight and they divide the professors in the academy
both in Oxford and in Cambridge in England and in Massachusetts. So, what we're talking about, ladies and gentlemen,
is worldviews. Belief systems, each of them. The one is naturalism and the other is theism
and it's just here that we encounter the first confusion. When I debated Princeton professor
Peter Signor in Australia recently, he started by saying to us that his chief objection to
religious belief was that people remained in the faith in which they'd been brought
up and of course, I was a prime example. So, just to reduce the balance, I asked him publicly
about his parents. I said, "Peter, were your parents atheists?" And he said, "Yes, they
were." [Audience laughs] So, I said, "You remained in the faith in
which you were brought up then." "Oh but," he said, "It isn't a faith." "Oh," I said,
"I was under the impression you'd believed it." [Audience applause and laughter] Now, ladies and gentlemen, that little spat
-- and I got on very well with Peter Singer. You can watch the debate online -- is very
revealing because it's consistent with the attitude of the new atheists to regard religious
faith as faith and therefore, by definition, believing where there is no evidence, but
atheism isn't a faith. And of course, any philosopher could point out to them how trivial
that is. It is very important to see that we are dealing with two belief systems. One
believes that this universe is the ultimate reality -- mass energy. The other believes
that God is the ultimate reality. And the burning question is, "What evidence is there
for the very task of either of them, the truth of either of them? And in particular, what
way does science point?" And therefore, we need to be clear that the kind of faith that
the new atheists are describing is what most of us would call blind faith. It's dangerous,
of course. But faith in its ordinary dictionary sense -- derived from the word Fides, it means
"trust" and all of us know that we don't usually trust people unless we're gullible, unless
there's evidence to do so. We don't trust the banks either, unless there's evidence
to do so but that's another story. [Audience laughter] But the banking crisis has at least taught
all of us the difference between evidence based faith and non-evidenced based faith.
And now, I cannot, of course, speak for other religions. They must rightly speak for themselves.
But I'd like to make it very clear that Christianity is an evidence-based faith. One of the central
statements of the Gospel of John is "These things are written," he said, "that you might
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God and that believing, you might have
life in this day." In other words, "Here's the evidence. I've selected it in order for
it to provide a basis for your trust, for your confidence, for your faith." I'll come
back to the matter of faith later, but having talked briefly about that, I want to address
this question quite rapidly. What way does science point? I claim that science points
towards God. The atheists claim it points in the opposite direction. And I want to bring
as witnesses, first of all, history. It is no accident that when Harvard was founded,
belief in God was written into its motto and onto its philosophy building. Because historians
of science like my colleague at Oxford -- my former colleague John Hedley Brooke -- usually,
most of them will agree with what's called Martin's Thesis. And the best formulation
of it, I think, is due to C.S. Lewis who said that men became scientific why? Because they
expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a law giver.
And the great pioneers of science -- Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Clark Maxwell, Babbage and
so on -- were all believers in God. I can remember -- I had the opportunity to give
the very first lecture on this topic in Novosibirsk in Siberia. Quite a few members of the KGB
in front of me -- [Audience laughs] and I was invited by the Provost -- I think
that's what you call them over here. I was invited by him to give a lecture on why a
mathematician believes in God. It was the very first lecture on that topic in the university
in 75 years. And when I started talking about the history of science and the fact that Newton
and Galileo were believers, I noticed anger rising in the front row of heavyweight professors.
So, I stopped. And I said, "What's the matter?" And they said, "Why were we never told this?" [Audience laughs] And I said, "Can't you guess?" [Audience laughs] They'd never been told. It was totally new
to them that the founders of science were believers in God. Now, you laugh but actually,
we need to think carefully about the implications of that because the one thing it demonstrates
is that belief in God and supernature were not, at the beginning, incompatible with science
in the slightest degree. It was exactly the opposite. So, what has happened? Why is it
that I'm even having to give a lecture on this topic in Harvard? Why isn't it that we
do still believe that there's something more than the natural world if there is such a
deep-seated harmony between science and belief in God? Well, first of all, there is a confusion
about the reach of science. Alex Rosenberg in his book The Atheists Guide to Reality
says, "The mistake is to think that there is any more to reality than the laws of nature,
that science discovers." Scientism, in other words, is the reigning view. The idea that
science is the only way to truth. Now, we're immediately into the realms of Epistemology
and Bertrand Russell summarized this viewpoint by saying, "What science cannot tell us, mankind
cannot know." Now, Russell was quite a brilliant logician but his logic failed him badly when
he made that statement. "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know." Is that a statement
of science? No. So that we cannot know it. [Audience laughs] Is it too late for logic? [Audience laughs] This is what we call a logically incoherent
statement. "If it's true, it's false." "You could work a night afterwards." [Audience laughs] Far more sensible is the view of Nobel Prize
winner Sir Peter Medawar who said, "It's so easy to see the limits of science. It cannot
answer the questions of a child. 'Where am I coming from? What is the meaning of life?
Where am I going to?' We need to go outside science." So, point number one -- major point
number one, ladies and gentlemen, is science does not define the limit of rationality.
Rationality is bigger than science. Einstein, of course, saw it clearly. He said, "You can
speak of the ethical foundation of science but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations
of ethics." He saw that there was a realm into which science couldn't go and of course,
that's obvious in Harvard, isn't it? I do believe you still have some humanities faculties
left, don't you? [Audience laughs] Because if science was the only way to truth,
you'd have to shut them tomorrow. And I don't think you'd want to do that and neither would
I. This scientism is extremely limited. The second thing is a confusion about the
nature of explanation. I'm talking about God, ladies and gentlemen, but I wanted to be very
clear to you what I mean by God because it seems to me that a great deal of atheist confusion
today is that their concept of God is not one that I would share for a moment. Their
idea of God is a God of the gaps. Again, in Novosibirsk, I remember I was severely attacked
-- I tend to be severely attacked -- by a professor. He said -- he came up to the blackboard
and he drew a stroke of lightening and he said, "This is absurd, what we're listening
to. You see, the ancients used to believe that the Gods were behind this. And then we
did a bit of atmospheric physics and we found it wasn't the Gods exit space for God." And
that's the concept of the God of the gaps. I can't explain it, therefore, God did it.
A bit more science, a bit less space for God. Now, if you believe in a God like that, it's
clear that you've got to make a choice between God and science because as science increases,
by definition, God decreases. But what if you don't believe in a God like that? I certainly
don't. My God is not a God of the gaps. He's the God of the whole show. So that when Isaac
Newton discovered his law of gravitation, he didn't say, "Wonderful. I've now got a
law and a mathematical description of how it works, I don't need God." He didn't do
that. What he did was write the most brilliant book in the history of science, The Principia
Mathematica, expressing the hope that it would persuade the thinking person to believe in
God. In other words, the more he understood of science, the more he admired the genius
of the God who did it that way. The God was not a God of the gaps. Because you see, ladies
and gentlemen, God is not the same kind of explanation as science is. Steven Hawking in a recent book to which I've
responded in my little book God and Steven Hawking -- [Audience laughs] See, that was a quite plug wasn't it, aye? [Audience laughs] Steven Hawking says we've gotta choose between
God and gravity. Well, if I were to have a -- you know what a Ford Galaxy is, don't you?
Or automobile? If I had one of those here and said, "Look, I want to offer you two explanations
for it. The one is the law of internal combustion and mechanical engineering -- a law of mechanism
explanation. The other is Henry Ford. Please choose." [Audience laughs] You'd say, "You're absurd. You need both."
Do you? Now, this is extremely important. To realize
that explanation comes in different kinds. If you want a complete explanation of the
Ford Galaxy, you have to have a law of mechanism explanation -- the scientific one -- and you
have to have an agent explanation, in terms of Henry Ford. Please notice they don't contradict
each other. And the ideas going around spread variantly by one of the Dawkins means, the
ideas going around that you must have either or. That's nonsense. The existence -- and
I'm wording this very carefully -- the existence of a mechanism that does something is not,
in itself, an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed it. So, that we don't
see science -- I don't see science -- I'm a passionate scientist, if you count your
mathematics a science, but that's another matter -- [Audience laughs] I'm a passionate scientist. We don't see a
competition going on here at all. Because God is not a God of the gaps. So, the more
I study, the more I'm impressed with the genius of God. We must not assume that there's only
one level of explanation. Now, to move on a little bit. I mentioned
faith. And it has been put about that faith is A, a religious concept and B, it means
believing where there's no evidence. Both of those definitions are seriously false.
I've argued for the second, now let's come to the first. What about the use of faith
in science? It is vastly important, of course. Einstein saw it. And so did Eugene Wigner
who wrote a wonderful paper, much loved of mathematicians, in 1961 entitled The Unreasonable
Effectiveness of Mathematics. I mean, how is it that this bright Harvard mathematician,
thinking in her mind in here, comes up with equations that describe the universe out there?
How does that work? And it led Einstein to say, "The only incomprehensible thing about
the universe is that it's comprehensible." Now, we do science with our mind. And what
I want you to think about now is not the philosophy of science but the fact that we can do it.
Because to me, one of the greatest evidence is that nature is not all that exists is the
fact that we can do science. Now, let me try and proceed with the argument. It starts with Darwin and something he wrote.
Let me read it to you. "With me, the heart of doubt always arises whether the convictions
of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value
or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there
are any convictions in such a mind?' Now, that particular statement is being subjected
at the moment to an immense of philosophical analysis in the light of the way in which
science is going. Because, you see, many people hold that the driving force of the natural
processes that eventually produced our human cognitive faculties were not primarily concerned
with truth at all but with survival. And we all know what has generally happened and still
happens to truth with individuals or commercial enterprises or nations motivated by what Dawkins
calls their "selfish genes" feel themselves threatened in the struggle for survival. They
are essentially obliged to regard thought as some kind of neurophysiological phenomenon
and from the evolutionary perspective, the neurophysiologicaly might, of course, be adaptive. But why, for one moment, would one think that
beliefs caused by the neurophysiology should be mostly true? After all, as the chemist
Holden pointed out long ago, "If the thoughts in my mind are just emotions of atoms in my
brain, a mechanism that arisen by mindless, unguided processes, why should I believe anything
it tells me, including the fact that it's made of atoms?" [Audience laughs] Now, this is, to my mind, very important indeed.
One of America's leading philosophers, Alvin Plantinga, puts it this way. "If Dawkins is
right and we are the product of mindless, unguided natural processes, then he has given
us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore,
inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including Dawkins own science
and his atheism. His biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore to be at war
with each other in a conflict that has nothing to do with God. I find that fascinating. In
other words, I'm suggesting to you, ladies and gentlemen, that it's not irrational to
believe in supernature. It is irrational to believe solely in nature. The boot is entirely
on the other foot. Atheistic reductionism undermines the foundations
of the very nature of the rationality needed to construct its arguments or any argument
of any kind, whatsoever. And I think that the new atheists have signally have failed
to appreciate the catastrophic implications of their view for science. A very interesting side light is thrown on
this by nature. Listen to this. Only if we assume a God -- this is nature -- only if
we assume a God who is morally or alike can truth and the search for truth be at all something
meaningful and promising of success. This God, left aside, the questions permitted,
whether being deceived, is not one of the conditions of life. So, ladies and gentlemen,
my basic argument tonight it this. It is a scientific argument in that sense. I believe
science makes sense as something we can do. And for that reason, I reject a naturalism
that undermines the foundations of the rationality I need to do my science. On the other hand, Biblical thesis, which
I espouse, is completely coherent in this explanation, why the universe is rationally
intelligible. Because it teaches me that the universe out there and the mind in are ultimately
traceable to the same intelligent God. Naturalism, I submit, is incapable of explaining itself.
So that rational explanation has a legitimate claim to universality but natural explanation
does not. And ironically, particularly recent science
suggests that naturalism is doomed because it teaches that the universe is a coarsely,
closed system by definition. This means, of course, that everything can be explained reductionalistically
in terms of physical and chemical processes. But the naturalist, who insist on explaining
everything in terms of such processes, cannot explain their own scientific theories or mathematical
equations in terms of mere physical or chemical processes for the simple reason that theories,
laws and equations are not physical. They are immaterial. And the odd irony of all of
this is you and I live in the information age and we've discovered -- and the physicists
are telling us, that information is essentially a fundamental quantity that is not reducible
to physics and chemistry. So, the irony of naturalism is that we're now in an age where
we've got to believe in something that's non-material. It is supernatural in the strict meaning of
the term. So, it's a very interesting, intellectual situation to be in, ladies and gentlemen,
and I want to suggest that the very existence of rationality is an outpost, so to speak,
of the image of God that opens up the conceptual space to seeing that limiting ourselves to
a naturalistic explanation is destroying the possibility of all explanation together. And you know, that question of the immateriality
of information is very important. It means we cannot reduce information to physics and
chemistry. Let me tell you a little story. We have a marvelous college in Oxford. I'm
a fellow of Green Templeton College and we put on lovely dinners. And unfortunately,
sometimes the seat arrangements are fixed, so you can't adjust where you're sitting.
So, this night, I was sitting beside a biochemist and he asked me what I did and I was foolish
enough to reply. I said, "I'm a pure mathematician." "Oh," he said, "how dreadfully boring." [Audience laughs] And I said, "Oh, but I try to make up for
it by being interested in the big questions of life." He said, "Like what?" "Well," I
said, "like the status of the universe, is it created or not?" "Oh dear," he said, "It's
far worse than I thought." [Audience laughs] He said, "Listen. The bottom line is this
-- I'm an atheist. I'm a reductionist. We're going to have an awful evening. We've nothing
to talk about and that's that." [Audience laughs] So, what do you do with that? "Well," I said
to him -- I said, "you know, it's not all that bad, is it?" I said, "I mean, I'm fascinated
by reductionism. I know at least three kinds. Which kind are you?" Well, he wasn't quite
sure, so being a kind man, I helped him a little bit and I said, "You're a methodological
reductionist. You take a big problem, spin it into little problems, solve the little
problems, get inside of the big problem." " Yes," he said, "I do that." "Good." I said,
"We agree on that then." So, he was warming up, called me by my first name so we were
getting on famously. [Audience laughs] And then I said, "I think you're an ontological
reductionist. That you believe ontos Greek being. You believe everything can be reduced
to physics and chemistry." He said, "That's right. That's my basic principle." So, I said,
"Let's have an experiment then." He said, "What? Here at the table?" I said, "Sure."
So I picked up the menu. And he looked at it and it wasn't very interesting. It said,
"Roast Chicken" and not even in French, in English. [Audience laughs] And he said, "What's the problem?" I said,
"You're a reductionist. Everything in terms of physics and chemistry." I said, "Now, look
at this thing here. R. O." I said, "Those are mark, aren't they? But they're semiotic
-- Greek semion -- a sign. They're marks that carry meaning." He said, "That's right." "Okay."
I said, "Explain to me the semiotics of those marks in terms of the physics and chemistry
of the paper and ink." And there was a silence. And then his wife said a bit loudly, "Get
out of that if you can." [Audience laughs] He didn't try. I want to tell you what he
said. Now, this is one of the world's top biochemists. He said, "John, for 40 years
I've gone into my laboratory thinking that that could be done. But it can't. I was so
amazed, I backtracked." I said, "Oh, but science has only been going 500 years or so." He said,
"Doesn't matter. You cannot explain the semiotics bottom up. You have to introduce an intelligence."
And then it dawned on him that I wasn't bright enough to have thought of the argument. He
said, "Where did you get that argument?" [Audience laughs] I said, "I borrowed it from a Nobel Prize
winner." And I'm glad you laughed, ladies and gentlemen. It's interesting, isn't it?
Just a few marks and you instantly argue upwards and postulate mind and we sit and look at
the human genome. 3.7, is it, billion letters in exactly the right order in a four letter
chemical alphabet. Sophisticated, because the levels of information are contained not
only in the linear sequencing but in the folding and in its relationship to the sale and all
kinds of things and we ask about its ultimate origin, chance and necessity. What? Chance
of the laws of nature. We don't say that about print. What's the difference? Semiotics in
both cases. Seems to me something very interesting is going on. And that semion, the evidence
of meaning, our capacity -- because you see, ladies and gentlemen, we are not only containers
of text, we are producers of text. And that, to my mind, is great evidence that there is
a transcendence beyond nature. The beginnings of supernature are already to be seen within
you. But now we must come finally to the question
of miracles. Because David Hume famously thought that miracles are, by definition, violations
of natural law and natural laws are unalterably uniform, therefore, they cannot occur. And
Richard Dawkins is quite quick to say that the 19th century's the last time when it was
possible for the educated person to admit to believing in miracles. Well, it's not quite
that simple because the aforementioned Nobel Prize winner, William Phillips, believes that
the resurrection of Jesus literally happened, as does a friend of mine who is a vice president
of the Royal Society and a biologist to name just two. It can't be that simple. Now, in order to focus this, because we could
spend a whole evening on it, I'm going to concentrate on the central claim of Christianity
and that is that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. And I want to approach two questions.
The one will be slightly longer than the other; the second would take a whole evening on its
own. The question of the possibility of miracle as distinct from the actuality of miracle.
C.S. Lewis reminds us that the first fact of the history of Christendom is the number
of people who say they've seen the resurrection. If they died without making anyone else believe
this gospel, no gospels would ever have been written. Now, let's remind ourselves of the contemporary
perspective of science. Since scientific laws embody cause/effect relationships, scientists
nowadays do not regard them as merely capable of describing what has happened in the past,
provided we're not working at the quantum level, such laws can successfully predict
what'll happen in the future with such accuracy that even Newton's laws will land, some of
them, on the moon. And it's very natural that such scientists resent the idea that some
God could arbitrarily intervene and alter, suspend or reverse or otherwise violate these
laws of nature, to quote David Hume. To them, that would seem to contradict the immutability
of the laws and thus overturn the very basis of the scientific understanding of the universe. Now, David Hume is a problem child because
unfortunately, he didn't believe in cause and effect, which is the foundation of scientific
laws and secondly, he thought, quite correctly, that you couldn't prove induction which is
also the foundation of many of our scientific laws. Now, just before he died, I had an opportunity
to talk to Anthony Flue, who used to be Richard Dawkins of another age and was the world's
authority on David Hume. Now, he told me, quite straight, he said, "I was wrong about
Hume. All my books would have to be rewritten because Hume did not actually believe in cause
and effect and his arguments against miracles fail." Unfortunately, Anthony Flue did not
live to write that book. Now, let's look at some of these objections
very quickly. The first is that belief in miracles in general and in the New Testament,
miracles in particular, rose in a primitive, pre-scientific culture where people were ignorant
of the laws of nature. That's nonsense, of course because a moment's thought shows us
that in order to recognize some event as a miracle; they must know a corresponding regularity
to which that event is an apparent exception. If you don't know that people who died normally
stayed in their graves, you would not be surprised at a resurrection. [Audience laughs] And of course, that was appreciated long ago.
Joseph, for instance, who was espoused to Mary, knew exactly where babies came from. [Audience laughs] And so when Mary said she was pregnant, he
wanted to divorce her. He wasn't ignorant of the laws of nature. And so his reason for
later accepting her and the child that was conceived of the Holy Spirit -- God becoming
incarnate -- must have been enormously powerful. It is simple nonsense to say that people did
not know the laws of nature in those days. In fact, there was a uniform attitude against
resurrection. When the apostle Paul prates to the philosophers at Athens and talked about
anastasis, Jesus rising from the dead, anastasis, to stand up again, they laughed. They would
not have laughed if he'd have been simply asserting the survival of some soul. They
laughed because he was asserting something none of them believed in and that is the physical
and bodily resurrection. Now the second objection is that now that
we know the laws of nature, miracles are impossible but that involves a further fallacy. Suppose
I put $1,000.00 tonight in my hotel room in Cambridge and I put $1,000.00 in tomorrow
night. One plus one equals two -- that's $2,000.00. And on the third day, I opened the draw and
I find $500.00. Now, what do I say? Do I say, "The laws of arithmetic have been broken?"
Or, "The laws of the United States have been broken?" [Audience laughs] Well, you obviously got the point. But see
how important it is? First of all, it's telling you that law means a different thing in both
cases, at each case. Secondly, how do you know the laws of the United States have been
broken? It's because you know the law of arithmetic. If you didn't know that, you wouldn't know
the other. Now, you see, it's not the laws of arithmetic have been broken, but what they
tell you is that somebody has put their hand into the drawer. That is, something has come
in from outside this system because it wasn't a closed system. This is crucial. You see,
I believe in the laws of nature. Indeed, God, who's responsible for them, created an orderly
universe; otherwise, as I said before, we'd never recognize an exception. But God is not
a prisoner of the laws. They're not like the laws of the United States. God, who set the
regularities there, can himself cause and event. Of course he can. What's to stop Him
doing that? You see, what Christians are claiming about the resurrection of Jesus is not that
he rose by some natural processes. No. They say that he rose because God injected enormous
power and energy from outside the system. Now, unless you have evidence that the system
is totally, totally closed, you cannot argue against the possibility of miracles. So, now
you have to come -- and that was far too brief, but I want to give you plenty of time for
questions. Now, we need to come to the actuality. Is
there evidence anywhere that a miracle of this order has occurred? And of course, as
you know, Christianity is based on the claim that Jesus Christ came alive from the dead.
How do you get at a thing like that? Of course it's a singularity. Of course it is highly
improbable. Observations of all the graves, if you were to take people from Harvard and
set them in the graveyards to watch for a month and write in their book whether they
saw a resurrection or not -- [Audience laughs] you could scientifically show by statistical
methods that resurrections are very improbable in the Harvard area. [Audience laughs] But unless you've investigated every grave
back to the beginning of the universe, you cannot say they're impossible. Singular events
are, by definition, improbable. But the question is, is there actual evidence that it happened?
The claim is it did? What are the facts? There is an empty tomb. How do we know? And then
I would have to take you into the specifics of the evidence. And unfortunately, ladies
and gentlemen, although I'd absolutely love to do that, I'd have to come back to do it,
but I've got a little bit of a shot in that direction. This question, I'm so glad that
you asked me this question because I find it all over the world the same because it's
vastly important to realize that this is not knocking science in any sense. It's recognizing
the limits of science. So, what I decided to do was this. I decided to read through
David Hume in great detail, look at his criteria for evidence and witnesses and then take the
resurrection of Jesus and put it under the magnifying glass from the perspective of David
Hume. And here's another shameless bit of advertising, I've just produced a book on
it. [Audience laughs] Which is called Gunning for God. And it deals
with that question and I hope that those of you who want to pursue it that far will be
able to read it. Now, my final point is this. Of course science
and history are not the only sources of evidence for the existence of God, miracle and the
supernatural. Personal experience is enormously important. And it's even important to a professor
who's interested in intellectual things because one of the prime evidences, to me, that these
things are real is my personal experience over many years of the living reality of Christ
in my life. If he's risen from the dead, of course, it means he's alive and that opens
up an enormous possibility of having a relationship with him. So, that too, would be a very important
thing to explore. I started by reminding you of Harvard's motto
Veritas. But you know, that's not what it used to be. And I was delighted to see it's
still on one of your main buildings. Harvard's motto was -- and still is -- Veritas Christo
et Ecclesiae. Truth for Christ and the Church. I would suggest to you Harvard students and
professors the time has come to revisit the original meaning. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. [Audience applause] Audience: So while you collect your questions
and hand them towards the aisle, I have a few questions myself for Professor Lennox
-- one more personal, since he concluded on a personal note and a few to have him help
us think through the implications of belief in supernatural and miracles for academic
study and research. First, though, could you tell us a little bit more about your background
and upbringing and what have got you interested in these questions of the supernatural God
and the relation to science? John Lennox: Well, as I said, I come from
Ireland, which has a pretty rotten reputation for religion and I was very fortunate to have
parents who were Christian and not sectarian and who loved me enough to allow me to think.
And what I mean by that is this. I remember my father saying to me when I was about 13,
"Have you ever read Marx?" And I said, "No." "Well," he said, "I think you'd better." And
he handed me The Communist Manifesto. [Audience laughs] And that habit of thought in our home -- he
was not an educated man. He'd love to have had an education. I was the first to get to
university and I got to Cambridge and I was very fortunate. But that habit lived with
me. Now, when this student challenged me about my Irish-ness and "Of course you believe in
God. It's all genetics" I'd heard that many times, but I thought, you know, I've thought
about a lot of arguments, I've read a lot but I want to really get to know people because
we don't all start in the same position. And Singer, he's say, "My big objection to religion
is people end up where they started." Well, of course Singer -- and I talked to him about
it afterwards -- doesn't seem to have a lot of experience with people changing their worldview.
But what I discovered at Cambridge in England was that by considering evidence, people who
started from non-religious presuppositions from atheism or agnosticism, could come to
faith and could see their lives transformed. And that was a very powerful bit of evidence
for me, because I'll be honest with you ladies and gentlemen, I do not know what it is like
to be an adult and not believe in God. So, I suppose that set me on a path and particularly
going to eastern Europe where I met in eastern Germany, particularly, I met many people who'd
been systematically exposed to atheistic philosophy in their schools and education and I spent
most of my life exposing my faith to its opposite. Why? Because I'm actually interested in Veritas.
I'm not interested in religion as a sort of comfort prop and you know, a wish fulfillment
kind of thing a 'la Sigmund Freud. I want to know whether it is true or not. And I would
just say that I profited from many mentors. Cambridge was a wonderful institution and
Oxford is nearly as good. [Audience laughs] And I've been fortunate in life to be able
to have these interactions at a very high level and recently, to do these debates. Now,
you might to precise that a bit, you know? I'm waffley a bit. Do you want to come down
to anything more precise than that? Audience: I think that that will suffice for
now, since our time's somewhat limited and I would like to move on to these questions
of how does some of what you were saying about beliefs systems and the possibility of the
supernatural relate to our actual day to day work, say, as academics? It seems like a lot
of academic work precedes under what might be called an assumption of methodologic naturalism.
That even if we believe in the supernatural, we often set those beliefs aside for the purposes
of academic study and research that supposedly leads to more common ground and a common method
for study and allows for consensus amongst those with very different beliefs. So, how
would a general belief in the supernatural and allowing that to come into academic work
change the way things are done and should that happen? John Lennox: Well, it doesn't change
the way -- Audience: Excuse me, one second. I think your
microphone is off? Can you double check? John Lennox: Mine? Hello? [Says deeply] [Audience laughs] Audience: It's on low. Just speak a little
louder. John Lennox: Let's have a go at putting this
up. I've -- the term methodological naturalism I don't find particularly helpful. Reading
Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker, you know, where he talks about -- it's terribly
tempting to think it's designed, but it's only been apparently designed. Just taking
that example. It seems to me for 99.99 percent of science, it makes no difference whether
you think it's apparently designed or actually designed. So, methodological theism would
work as well as methodological naturalism. The problem comes here with what I would call
the truth quest. Could it be that there are times where philosophical presuppositions
affect the science? Now, in 99.9 percent of cases, they don't because scientists are studying
how it works -- what are the equations governing this diffusion and so on? What are the statistics
of the latest epidemic and so on in your work? We're not concerned with those questions,
but now comes the big question. Could it be that studying a system under, if you like,
naturalistic presupposition raises questions that are insolvable at that level where we
must look to a higher level of the input of mind? Now, that's where the real problem comes. Now, if you take Richard Muent enough -- I
believe he's here, isn't he? Or was here. A very distinguished geneticist, he said,
"Look, science doesn't force us into methodological naturalism. It is our apriority conviction
of naturalism that forces us to look for a purely naturalistic solution." And I'm quoting
now, "However, contrary to intuition and however counter intuitive --" and then he was very
honest. He said, "We must not let a divine foot enter the door." Now, I can precise that.
When we're studying, the question of genetic information, it is perfectly legitimate to
work out all the pathways, all the possibilities and so on. But it raises the specter of this
question -- can we account for it exhaustively bottom up? Or, because it has a semiotic dimension,
do we need to allow the influence of mind? And I suggest on lack of progress in a way,
with the origin of life question may lead to that. And that's a topic on which I've
written one or two things. So, that's what I would say. Let's watch, are we narrowing
science down? Anthony Flue, I mentioned before, he was a great atheist who converted to Deism
late in life and he was asked, "Why did you become a Deist? Why do you believe in an intelligent
creator, at least at the beginning?" And he really shocked Richard Dawkins because he
said, "Because of DNA. Because I see in that evidence of intelligent input." So, what he
was doing was looking at the facts that have been discovered either by methodological naturalistic
methods or whatever and saying, "But the implications of what we've discovered at that level transcend.
They break through a barrier above." And all I'm saying is, I want to be able to follow
the evidence where it leads. I don't want to have my evidence and my conclusions forced
into a naturalistic paradigm because it seems to me, that's closing down science rather
than opening it up. Audience: So, following up that and I'd like
to focus in briefly on a short case study from my own field. You talked about how miracles
are often taken to be violations of the laws of nature and I'm wondering to what extent
is the miraculous then, really open to scientific inquiry and scientific methods. And within
medicine, and public health, believe it or not, there are randomized trials to look at
whether prayer is effective or not. And some of these studies have found an effect. Others
have not. And there have been meta-analysis made looking at this question. One published
in a prestigious medical journal suggested there was an effect. Another one published
by a very reputable group that focuses on meta-analysis suggested that there wasn't.
Is this sort of thing reasonable to do? Should we look at these questions with regard to
the miraculous, to the supernatural using the methods of science or should this be left
to theologians, to philosophers or to discussions on a Friday evening? Audience: Just one second while Professor
Lennox is answering that question. Could the students who are reading the questions from
students please come to the microphones to ask those questions? And this will be our
moderator's last question. Thank you. John Lennox: Well, I'll have to give a short
answer. He's asking really interesting questions to my mind. I think we should apply the methodology
appropriate to the claim and if the claim is that a certain thing happened -- let's
take the resurrection -- as a fact of history, what are the appropriate methods? Well, of
course it's a singularity and it's highly improbable and it leads us into a realm of
science that often is not carefully defined enough. What I mean by that is this. Normally,
when we think of science, we think of inductive methods. We do an experiment 100 times. We
get the same result and we expect that to happen the 101st time. Well, you can't repeat
a resurrection to see if it happened or not and what we therefore have to employ are the
methods of forensic science. The body of John Lennox lies on the floor, he's dead. You can't
say, "Well, let's rerun the experiment to see what happened." [Audience laughs] But you can get at it by methods that we might
generously call historical science. I would certainly call them that because they -- natural
sciences have got those two branches. The whole history of the universe only happened
once and cosmologists are constantly investigating singularities by these kind of methods. So,
the methods are more appropriate to the historian. Now, because they're opiory, highly improbable,
I think Frances Collins, the director of the National Institute of Health, as you probably
know, was an atheist, became a Christian. He's got a very good warning. He said, "We
mustn't rush into the miraculous too quickly and believe in in all over the place. Otherwise
we will completely obscure those things that are genuinely of that character." And I would
agree with him very much. But I do think -- and that's what I've tried to do. We can approach
them by those methods. Now, to come directly to your question, I'm actually interested
in those meta-analysis and I think we need to discuss this a little bit in more detail
because I'd just been reading a book by the former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists
Andrew Sims and he's responding to Dawkin's notion that religion has zero benefits. And
he quotes a distinguished meta-analysis -- this is Andrew Sims, the book has just come out
-- and I'm not an epidemiologist like you but what he suggests is this. That the vast
volume of literature shows that religious belief has a beneficial effect. And he adds
this. He said, "If the findings had gone in the opposite direction, it would be front
page news in every newspaper in the world. But it's actually one of psychiatry's best
kept secrets." Now, I don't know -- I just read his book recently and I'm impressed by
it. I assume he's done his work. So, it seems to me that there is a benefit. I am highly
skeptical though, about testing and saying, "Well, you pray for the chap, but you don't." [Audience laughs] "And let's see what happens." I think that
-- [Audience laughs] Audience: Done. John Lennox: Yes, I know, but I'm very skeptical
of the results. What I'm not skeptical of is my own experience of answers to prayer
and guidance in life. But of course, you could write those off as subjective experiences
so, I'll have to leave it there, I'm afraid. Audience: Well, thank you very much for your
responses and I think we're going to turn over to the questions from all of you, now. John Lennox: And what I'm going to do, ladies
and gentlemen, just to explain, we want you to hear a few questions before I answer any
of them. So, I'm gonna write them down and then we'll look at a few together. So, go
ahead. Audience: Great. So, of course, we want to
thank everyone who sent in their questions either via Twitter or via text message. And
so here are our first five that we've chosen. How do you approach people who simply don't
care? Who neither believe nor do not believe? John Lennox: Okay. How do I approach people
who don't care? With caution. Next question. [Audience laughs and applauses] Keep going. Audience: All right. The next question. Do
you believe that there are examples of God's supernatural intervention today and have there
been any in your life? The third question, if I were to tell you I was just resurrected
from the dead, what evidence would you require to believe it? [Audience laughs] Question four; you claim that science and
religion do not make exclusive truth claims. Various world religions, however, do make
exclusive truth claims. How can we know that Christianity is right at the exclusion of
others? And the fifth question, in light of your claim that God is not a prisoner of his
own laws, please clarify your Henry Ford analogy. Henry Ford, of course, is a prisoner of the
laws of the universe. How then, does he compare to a God, which you claim, is outside of the
universe's mechanisms? John Lennox: Thank you very much. Well, that's
very interesting. You've all heard the questions and I'll now have a go at them. You're now
about to experience the limits of my ignorance. Because this is a Q and A, ladies and gentlemen,
I'm going to my best and what I'm going to do is -- they're very good questions. I'm
going to suggest an approach to them for you to think about and that's as much as we can
do in this kind of thing. But let's have a look at the first one. How do I approach people
who don't care? I try to care for them. That's what I try to do. If people don't care, there's
usually a reason and it often is a very complex, psychological reason. I'm very fortunate to
have two loving parents. Some people have none. And the idea of a God who loves them
is just foreign. It means nothing to them. And so it seems to me that people who don't
care, they are saying something about themselves that goes very deep and I would like to find
out a little bit more of why they don't care, provided I don't intrude too far into their
private space. Because it seems to me that God is extremely interested in people who
don't care because they often have very good reasons for not caring. So, I would begin
to explore that. And treat people -- you know, I was taught very early on that every person
is of infinite value. I look at out at you -- I really do believe that every one of you
is of infinite value, made in the image of God. You're more important than the sun. You
know it's there. It doesn't know you're there. [Audience laughs] You realize that, don't you? And so it seems
to me that when we get these, "I don't care" because if you look at that statement, standing
back from it, if there is a God who really is ultimately is behind you and he cares for
you and you don't care about him, there's a disjoint somewhere. And I would want naturally
to try very gently to find out exactly what's going on. And of course, it's often because
people have had a very negative experience of religion, of Christian religion, alas,
sometimes. So, that's how I would approach that. Now, if I were to tell -- I'm not gonna
answer these the order in which you asked them. I'm going to have a slightly more logical
order, I hope. If I were to tell you that I was just resurrected -- well, I would want
evidence that you died. [Audience laughs and applauses] But I'd want more. I'd want evidence that
you were buried. And actually, that raises a very interesting question because when we
come to study historiographically the resurrection of Jesus, the fact that he died and it's historically
attested and was buried and it's historically attested is part of the thing. So, when you
show me you've died, then I'll take you claim seriously. [Audience laughs] Now, Henry Ford is a prisoner of the laws
of the universe. I'm not sure that's correct. We are beings and of course our existence
is parameterized by the laws of physics. We live consistently with them. But I do feel,
ladies and gentlemen, again, naturalism tends to lead to determinism and that tends to lead
to the fact that thought it meaningless. And dialogue is meaningless because, of course,
it's simply been preprogrammed in the genes of the atoms of the universe. But I don't
believe the universe is a closed system. And just as I believe that there is a creator,
God, who has made each of us in his image, I believe he has made us, at least in part,
to be creative. In fact, I think that's why many of you are at this university. You're
developing your creative potential. You want to do something new. _ a marvelous thing.
But of course, that wasn't the point of the analogy at all. Analogies are dangerous things
because they lead to people asking all kinds of questions that had nothing to do with the
point for which the analogy was intended. [Audience laughs] The point of the analogy is this. That in
the construction of the motor car, two separate things are involved. It was originated in
the mind of Henry Ford. It involves physics, chemistry, engineering and the laws of internal
combustion. Talking about Henry Ford as an explanation -- if you use that word "explanation"
-- you do not mean the same by that as when you say the laws of internal combustion are
an explanation. That's all I'm saying. I'm saying what you read in any book of the philosophical
analysis of the nature of explanation that there are several, in fact many, different
categories of explanation and unfortunately, many of the new atheists are not philosophers
and they collapse them into one. Now, are there examples of God's intervention
today and in my own life? Now, that's a very personal question and there's always the danger
in attempting to answer this of rationalization. What will convince one person will not convince
another and that is why I feel we need enormous evidence for the question of the intervention
of God. I believe in the resurrection because I think we have got that enormous evidence
at the objective, historical side if -- history's never completed the objective, of course,
but as contrasted with the evidence of my subjective experience. But in my life, I have
a wife. We've been married 43 years. I've got three children and I've got five grandchildren.
We pray together. We discuss scripture together. I couldn't begin to enumerate to you the times
when things have happened in life which you could attribute to coincidence, if you wish,
but where the improbability grows vast. Would you like me to tell you about one of them? Audience: [All] Yes. John Lennox: I very rarely do this. [Audience laughs] But I will because as you know, I have been
a lot to Russia. How did I come to go to Russia? Well, I'll tell you. I was at a conference
of mathematical cryptographers. [Audience laughs] You all depend on them, so don't laugh. [Audience laughs] If you ever use an ATM, you've got a mathematical
cryptographer right inside the box collecting the money. [Audience laughs] And it was in Belgium and we finished the
conference and the bus driver lost his way to the station and we missed the train. So,
there were 50 very angry mathematicians standing on the platform in Belgium. And in the end,
we got on the train and I was going to Colon and it was late at night. I was a big concerned.
I had a heavy suitcase and in those days, Colon station wasn't the best place to be
found after midnight. So, I found myself in a compartment with a German, a Belgium and
two Russians and I sat beside the Russian and I started to talk to him, but he was rather
surprised that I could speak a bit of his language. And I said, "What do you do?" And
he said, "I'm an ecologist." "Oh." I said, "Do they have those in Russia?" [Audience laughs] And he said, "Yes, and this is the first time
I've been out on the west. I come from Lake Bikar." So I said, "Can you openly talk about
ecology in Russia?" He said, "Well, you know, we can say a bit." And then I said to him,
"Are there other things that you can talk about openly that were taboo earlier?" He
said, "Like what?" I said, "Like God, for example." And he said, "Yes, we can talk about
God." In that moment, the thought came into my head, "I've got to give this man a Bible."
It's a curious thought to get in a train going through Belgium in the middle of the night.
And I kept talking to him. I couldn't get it out of my head. And in the end, the thought
grew so strong I thought, "This is crazy." I mean, where do you get a Bible from in the
middle of the night on a train going through Belgium? And then I had another thought. I
thought, "I wonder if it's still there." Three weeks before that, I'd been in Germany with
a publisher. Sitting on his desk was Russian Bible. And I said, "That's a nice Bible."
He said, "You want it? I can't read it." I said, "I'd love it. Mine is pretty old and
I'd like that." So, I put it in my suitcase. I wonder is it still there. So, while I'm
still talking to this chap, I got up, put my hand into the suitcase and the Bible is
still there. So, I brought it out and I handed it to him. He went as white as a sheet. He
couldn't speak. And I thought he was going to have a heart attack. [Audience laughs] I said, "What's wrong with you?" He said,
"Nothing." And then he said [Russian phrase] How did you know this?" I said, "What do you
mean, how did I know this?" He said, "How did you know that six weeks ago, the only
Bible we've ever seen was stolen in Yupuski, Siberia? And we've just got an opportunity
to come to the west and four hours' time, we're taking the plane to Moscow. How did
you know?" I said, "Do you believe there's a God?" He said, "I don't know, but," he said,
"look in the corner. That's my wife. She believes it." And I turned -- I'll never forget it
-- to see this young woman with her face glowing, the tears streaming down her face as she clutched
the Bible and she said, "Is that really for me? Are you really giving it to me?" I said,
"Of course." And they were gone in the night. And the German girl said to me, "Does that
often happen to you?" [Audience laughs and applauses] I said, "No, it doesn't. But," I said, "You
shouldn't think it strange." She said, "Why not?" "Well," I said, "look. This person comes
from a country where they've been systematically denied access to this book. If this really
is the word of God, he could use me as a postman as much as anybody else." " Well then," she
said, "I better read it." So she did. And we carried on a correspondence. Now, what
do you make of a story like that? To me, I got hope. Told my wife. She said, "Let me
see your diary." She did something she's never done in her life before or since. She said,
"Clear your diary for at least two months." I said, "Pardon?" She said, "You're going
to Russia." I said, "Why?" She said, "How would you go to Russia?" "Well," I said, "it's
a very complicated business. You've got to ring the Royal Society, fill in endless forms
and so on." She said, "Ring them." "Well," I said, "perhaps next week." "Right now."
So, Muggins does what he's told. [Audience laughs] And the man at the end says, "Professor Lennox,
you want to go to Russia? When can you go? How long can you go for? And we want the Russian
mathematicians out. It's a week for a week. Can you go for a month?" I said, "My wife
says two." He said, "Done. No forms. You get the money; you can leave tomorrow if you want."
When I got to Russia, ladies and gentlemen, middle of the Academy of Sciences, all they
wanted to know was how could a person like me believe in God. I can't tell you what flowed
from that. But I firmly believe it was an intervention God. But I expect these things
to happen all the time because God is real. But I leave that story at that and come to
the last question and it's this. Science and religion, but there are different religions.
Now, this is an immensely important question because leaving Christianity outside altogether,
religions do not agree with each other. It's idle to pretend that they do. Science is an
international discipline. And of course, we are all aware of the sad fighting's even within
Christendom in my own country of Northern Ireland. So, I've got a lot to answer for,
in a way. And how do I approach this question? Well,
in exactly the same way as everything else. I find -- let's take the three great monotheistic
religions. I have many Muslim friends and Jewish friends in many parts of the world.
And when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, there are three different views, as you know.
The Jews believe -- my Jewish friends believe that Jesus died and did not rise. My Muslim
friends believe he didn't die. And I believe the he both died and rose. They cannot all
be true. How do you approach a question like that? Well, first of all, I step completely
back from it and I realize that there are two levels of difference between religions.
And the first thing to recognize, ladies and gentlemen, as you go around the world, study
all religions or none, people of any faith, philosophy you care to name, you'll find a
striking fact and it's that there's a common element of morality that's shared by almost
every living human being. I've done a bit of research on this. And you will find the
golden rule, "Do unto others as you would be done by." In every single religion, in
every single philosophy -- even Roman Pagan philosophy and in the fundamental state under
British humanism -- you will find it everywhere. What does that tell me? It tells me that we
need to respect each other's ethical code. Sometimes, as a Christian, I can be put to
shame by the moral integrity of someone of another religion and therefore, we approach
this with great sensitivity. So, that's the first thing. But what I notice is this, ladies
and gentlemen, that the real difference comes not at the level of ethics and morality so
much as at the level of the basis on which a person can have a relationship with God
and there, religions and philosophies divide into two systems. One of the systems is a
bit like Harvard University. There is an entrance examination -- I presume you have an entrance.
Do you? Or do you just get in without an exam? [Audience laughs] So, there's an entrance exam. So, we can imagine
that as a door here. And then there's the Harvard way and it goes up and down and you
try and stay on it and there are all the professors to teach you and then there's a white and
gray gate at the end. It's called, "Finally Clouds." Now, the whole principle on which
the system depends is that of merit. The professors, all of them, are infinitely kind but -- I
hope they are, anyway. [Audience laughs] But they cannot guarantee that you're going
to get through the door at the end, can they? It depends on merit. Your performance. Your
achievement. And many religions are like that and their adderance tell me they're like that.
There's some initiation right, you get on the way, you try to follow the way and you
hope that then, when the great assessment comes and your good deeds are measured against
your bad deeds that somehow, the good ones will weigh more than the bad ones and you
will be accepted into whatever is beyond. I know that's a slight caricature, but it's
what many people believe. It's what many Christians actually believe. Now, I do not believe that
at all. Because ladies and gentlemen, the unique thing, it seems to me, about Christian
faith is it's not based on merit. Because it does have a gate, in a way, but at the
beginning, there stands Jesus Christ who claims to have come into the world to die for my
sin. Now, that's a very ugly word to raise in Harvard, but you did ask me about religions,
so I'll have to give you the answer that I believe is the truth. In other words, let
me put it this way. Suppose I did -- my first day at Cambridge, I saw a beautiful girl.
I married her eventually. I suppose I went to her and said, "Sally, you know, I'd like
to marry you but here's a cookbook. Now, it's got a whole lot of rules inside it. Now, if
you keep those rules fairly well for the next 30 or 40 years, I will think about accepting
you. Of course, I couldn't possibly accept you now, but if you perform well enough, when
the final assessment comes, I will accept you." Well, some of you are laughing, others
of you might be experiencing that, I don't know. [Audience laughs] But you see, that would be to insult her.
The secret of my marriage, ladies and gentlemen, is this. That we accepted each other at the
beginning. Unconditionally. And because she doesn't have to keep the rules in the cookbook,
so to speak, in order to gain my acceptance, that sets her free to learn to cook. And it's
exactly the same with God. We wouldn't dream of basing a relationship with a fellow human
being on a measured performance and an acceptance at the end of a long history of performing
laws and yet millions of people think that that's the way to base a relationship with
God. And it seems to me here, and let me say it straight; Christianity competes with no
other religion here. But as far as I can see, Christ is the only person that offers me the
knowledge of forgiveness right here and now. So, in my life, I try to live for him not
in order to gain his acceptance but because, ladies and gentlemen, I already have it. It's
not based on my performance or my merit, it's based on the merit of Jesus Christ who died
and rose for me and there, ladies and gentlemen, I think we'll have to leave it. Thank you
for your patience. [Audience applauses] Thank you so much, Doctor Lennox, for this
wonderful presentation. For more information about the Veritas Forum,
including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events, please visit our website
at veritas.org [End of Audio]
That was an incredibly good talk on so many levels.
Finally sat down and watched this one. It was amazing!