Points of Origin - Professor John Lennox

well thank you again for the warmth of your welcome and it's lovely to see you I can see tonight I'm not like the bishop who turned up a little country charts and as he was climbing up into the pulpit he noticed there were only three elderly people in the audience and he said to a local minister he said did you tell them I was coming he said no but where does seem to have got around so we're not like that tonight no I've been asked to talk to you for a while on a very major topic at a very important topic the title I'd been given is points of origin and interest in origins is vastly important for a very very simple reason it's that a person without a past is a person without an identity when people get amnesia and forget their past they lose the sense of their identity and as I travel around the world I notice that each of us is searching for a bigger story into which we can fit our lives we have our own story it's very important but how does it fit into the rest of the universe that's why of course documentary films like those of Brian Cox and others and television by the history of the universe of humanity are enormous ly popular it's why our book shops are filled to bursting by the stories of the origin of the cosmos because there is a restless search in the human mind and intellect and heart for meaning and the bigger the story we can fit our lives into the more meaning we discover in them now there's competition very strong competition for the big story in our culture in the way particularly in the UK here the dominant view is that there isn't a big story with any ultimate meaning there is a group of world views 3 in the main they're not so very many to choose from when you think about it one big story is that this universe goes back ultimately to mass and energy of nothing else there is no transcendence there's no God so that everything must be explained bottom-up in terms of physics and chemistry of nothing more that's the story we call naturalism or materialism is a more stronger refinement of it on the other side there is theism that is the belief that there is a God who created the universe and opposed it and I stand within that family of worldviews as a Christian theist the only real alternative is to regard the universe and ultimate reality if you call it God as one and there is the worldview of pantheism so there is an attempt to capture our minds in this country at least in the UK and to move them towards materialism and the documentary films I mentioned the statements of people like Stephen Hawking who are immensely gifted scientists are geared to getting the public to believe that science has come to the conclusion that there is no God so we are ultimately in a meaningless universe I think they are wrong I think that what they're doing is abusing science but I'm very aware as a scientist that science has rightly a considerable cultural authority we're all grateful to the technologies that have put all kinds of iPhones in our pocket and if I bore to tears that waiting will start at a colossal extent I know so we're grateful for that but it's important I think to come back and realize that a lot of what is being said about the biblical big story is mythological not that the story's mythological what's being said about it is false and highly misleading and so I want to begin to talk about this ancient story that begins the Bible in the book of Genesis the book of Genesis is foundational for our understanding of the biblical worldview it gives to human beings a meta-narrative a big story into which they can fit their lives and so I want to start talking about that big story and I've hinted at it but Nalepa said explicitly one of the most basic questions anyone can ask is what is the nature of ultimate reality you see everybody sitting in this room has got a worldview if your students that may only be partially formed and that's true even if you're a bit older but you wrestle with these big questions what is the nature of ultimate reality how am I related to it is there life after death where is the universe going can my life of any significance where do we get morality from all those kind of questions and the claim of Scripture is that the ultimate reality is God the majestic words that start our Bible in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth that statement challenges the naturalistic worldview head on because it's claiming that there is a God and God is the cause of the existence of the observable universe that is a colossal claim to make and 21st century in the 21st century West now you will notice that the Bible starts by asserting there is a God in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth it doesn't give you any evidence for God not here and that's not a weakness it's a strength because as Lewis pointed out long ago every world you start somewhere you got to start somewhere and the biblical worldview starts with God and then of course as you read through the narrative it piles up the evidence for the existence and involvement of God do you remember what Lewis wrote I believe in God very much as I believe in the son not because I see it it's dangerous to look directly at the Sun but because in its light I see everything else and one of the reasons I'm a Christian is that the biblical story not only hangs together but it cogs into reality it's a coherent hanging together story that matches reality as I see it in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth now please notice what God created he created the heavens and the earth that is he created the whole show Hebrew as a way of describing things by contrasting opposites the heavens and the earth technically we call that a mariner Amer ISM and what it really means is God created everything it's beginning to get across an idea of who God is now in the beginning God created there saying that there was a beginning and God was there already because he was the cause of that beginning to space-time or to the universe but please notice that what has been emphasized is the fact of creation in certain parts of the world people get very hung up about other secondary matters to which I will refer briefly like the timing of creation but overarching all of that it's the fact of creation that is utterly basic now the things doesn't say that explicitly that the universe was created ex nihilo as the scholars say that is out of nothing there was nothing to create it from but there are very strong arguments for understanding it this way as many scholars do because if the heavens of the earth stand for everything and God created everything there there was nothing before it by definition so it seems to me the implication of an ex nihilo a universe is standing there the second thing is this that the universe came to exist because God willed it into existence this is a topic that's taken up in the book of Revelation and a very famous statement in chapter 4 verse 11 worthy are you our Lord and God to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and by your will they existed and they were created why do you exist it's an interesting question to ask and I bet you've often asked it and quieter hours why do you exist why does this universe exist that's not how does it existed why does it exist hazard a purpose now many atheists of course will tell you it has no purpose the Bible has a very different view and says the universe exists because God wanted it to be and so do you that is a magnificent thing you exist because God wanted you to be that's one of those statements that imparts to humanity immense dignity and I'm not only going to be talking about the universe tonight because Genesis addresses in much more detail the origin of humanity and this overarching statement at the beginning gives us a direction a sense of motion which will begin to define what is utterly fundamental to human life God created because he will to do it and in that sense you cannot second-guess God I recall I think it was Christmas Eve 1968 that I was watching with many millions of people voices coming from around the moon and Apollo 8 that spacecraft I listened with goose pimples really to the words read by the astronauts in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth and you know that was advanced technology I know the computing power that put it up into space was less than you've got in your iPhone so it was a massive achievement for the time and yet the astronauts felt no incompatibility in using the latest technology and beaming the message from space that in the beginning God had created the heavens and the earth so the first point is God created everything is that important very important because what I discovered today is this that many people dismiss God for the wrong reasons there is a fog generating activity going on in our society and the first major fog is confusion about the nature of God you see when I was much younger in the last century long before any of you existed and I mentioned God in public people understood I was speaking about the God of the Bible the triune God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ but that's no longer the case and I've been puzzled over the past few years asking myself the question why is it someone with the intelligence of Stephen Hawking and I remember at Cambridge he's just ahead of me and he's like years ahead of me and his mathematical ability but why is it that a man of that intellectual eminence tells us that we've got to choose between God and science and I suddenly discovered that it was because he's confused about God he's confused about science and I'll argue that in a moment or two but he's actually confused about God and let me try and explain that you see when many of these people meet someone like me they think the God I believe in is a so-called God of the gaps I can't explain it therefore God did it in other words our science advances it squeezes out any space for God God in their view is like the Greek god of lightning the Greeks were frightened of lightning so they postulated a God behind it if you go to acquaintance and study physics the god of lightning will disappear lecture 1 if you learn a bit of atmospheric physics because we don't need a god to explain lightning we know about pressure gradients we know about to the discharges and so on and so forth and Hawking and many others imagine that that's exactly what we believe that God is the God of the bits of the universe you don't yet understand scientifically so the more science advances the less space there is for God that's the God of the gaps now I want you to try and follow this logic if you think of God as a God of the gaps you have to choose between science and God because that's the way you define God obviously if you define God to be the X that explains something until science explains it then of course you've got to choose between God and science because that's how you define God but that's what Genesis gives the lie to in the beginning God created the bits of the universe I don't understand no he created the whole show the ministry do understand the bits Rideau so Genesis is actually answering that objection by filling in the concept of God as the creator of everything and that's why Isaac Newton who was a genius of course and held the chair that Hawking held until recently when he discovered his law of gravity he didn't say there's no God when Hawking uses that law of gravity says because there's a law of gravity there's no God what Newton did was when he discovered the law of gravity wrote a brilliant book the principia mathematica expressing the hope in it that it were persuade thinking people to believe in God because you see Newton the more II understood of the universe the more he admired the genius of the God that did it that way and that's the way we naturally think the more you know of engineering the more you could admire the genius of a rose or a rice the more you understand the painting the boy you would admire the genius of a Rembrandt nonetheless and it's very important to realize what's going on in our culture the God that is being shot done in the name of science is not the God of the Bible at all they're not even dealing with the God who created everything that's the first very important thing to realize from Genesis the second thing to realize is that Genesis is answering the question why is there something rather than nothing now this is a fascinating topic I mean the topic of nothing I give lots of lectures of nothing these days because it has become such an important thing so let me try to explain this to you in the context of the amazing fact the Genesis has been saying there was a beginning not for hundreds of years for thousands of years but what in science think well until the 1960s what I was around they thought there wasn't a beginning they thought the universe was eternal because that's what Aristotle taught and so in the 1960s and I remember it very well when evidence began to come in from astronomy and astrophysics then the universe appeared to be expanding and then particularly the microwave background seemed to be an echo of some distant past event and people started to say in the scientific journals we think we find traces of a beginning to space-time you will remember this but I do it was resisted fiercely by the United Kingdom scientific establishment and it went right up to nature which is our leading scientific journal and the editor of Nature John Maddox at the time wrote an article saying we cannot accept this new idea that there's a beginning because if we do it will give too much leverage to people who believe about them so the major astronomical and Astrophysical cosmological the 20th century was resisted because of paralleled the Bible there's none interesting that's conveniently forgotten by the scientific establishment scripture had it right now I must be open with you when I put that to Richard Dawkins he said so what's the big deal either there was a beginning or there wasn't then you've got a 50% chance of guessing whether there was one or not and I said Richard the thing wasn't decided by tossing a coin into masses intellectual pressure from the scientific establishment to get people to say that there was a beginning precisely because they didn't like the biblical view and this is vastly important we're right at Ground Zero here we're talking about the fact that there was a beginning how did the Bible get it right it's an interesting question to ask isn't that they got it right and sometimes people say to me and it was said to me at a scientific meeting at the highest level not long ago professor Lennox surely you were joking when you suggested the Bible as everything relevant to say to the 21st century my said I wasn't joking at all I said the fact is that the Bible has been declaring clearly that those are beginning and science in general didn't believe it until the 1960s now I said if you take it the biblical worldview a bit more seriously you might have looked for evidence of a beginning long before you did and you might have found it you see you can base a prediction based on the biblical worldview now of course I hasten to add the Bible is not a textbook of science you don't learn chemistry from it and you certainly don't learn mathematics from it but the mistake that many people make is they see it's not a textbook of science but they forget that are very important points in it it talks about exactly the same universe that science talks about there is an overlap that is the domains of science and the Bane's of theology are not entirely separate and it's that point of intersection that point of overlap that we need to pay very close attention to why is there something rather than nothing my to follow me you have to realize that what has happened is as so long as the universe could be regarded as eternal you didn't have a problem at least he didn't have a problem with scripture but scripture says it was a beginning and Augustine wrestled with it and he came to the view that creation meant cause to exist so that you could use that of God with an eternal universe or a universe is finite backwards in time he admitted that the Bible said indicate there was a beginning but theoretically and philosophically he had this concept of creation but you see we now are in the situation where there is general unanimity among the scientific world that there was a start to space-time and that the universe came from nothing now their fun starts because of course how do you get something from nothing well you can't you see the Christian view is not that the universe came from nothing it was created by God is not nothing but God is not physical God is spirit God is real he's the eternal person who created it out of nothing physical but if you dismiss God all you've gots nothing so the irony of the contemporary discussion is very interesting we have two alternatives for the origin of the universe one is God the other is nothing there's something beautifully symmetrical about that to me so what about getting a universe from nothing how do you do that well by redefining nothing of course and here's where the absurdity starts let listen to this here's one of the world's leading astrophysicists talking Lorentz Christ's I've debated with him a couple of times he says because something is physical nothing must be physical especially if you define it as the absence of something what because something is physical nothing must be physical especially if you define it as the absence of something that's nonsense patent nonsense and when scientists start writing this is written in his book a universe from nothing we may be alerted to the fact that something serious is going wrong you see getting your universe from nothing is proved so difficult that what they've ever ly done without alerting the public to it is to redefine nothing listen to Stephen Hawking the heart of one of his books this is the main argument because there is a law of gravity this is his reason for dismissing God because there is a law of gravity the universe can and will create yourself from nothing partly because there is a law of gravity because there is something the universe will create itself from nothing flat contradiction number one the universe will create itself well if I say to you X creates Y that means roughly if you got X you'll get Y yes if I say X creates X at means if you got X you'll get X and what does that mean it means that nonsense remains nonsense even of Hawking writer but it's worse than that that's the second level of contradiction the third is this because there is a law of gravity he doesn't say because gravity exists but what would a law of gravity beat if there's no gravity laws are meaningless if there's nothing for them to describe and that opens a window on another huge misunderstanding the idea that laws can create the world Peter Adkins is a colleague of mine and the famous atheist at Oxford and I once asked him after a lecture I said Peter what do you think created the universe and he said mathematics and I was so taken aback I started to laugh and Peter was cross and he said what do you now figure out when I said I'm sorry Peter but I have in that petition that must be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard in my life he said why what I said I'd make it simple for you one plus one equals two did that ever put two pounds of your pocket we thought you know a few years back that money could be produced by mathematics in me it's called creative accounting have you ever done and the banks nearly went bust because mathematics doesn't create anything this is a basic confusion think of Newton's laws of motion that we all love I hope you do love them they never moved a billiard ball the history of the universe people work used to that the laws do nothing now here I'm indebted to Lewis who although he was an arts man he understood philosophy of science brilliantly and a he points out you can do arithmetic from now to eternity but it'll never create anything if you've got one pound at one point that will give you two pounds but first get your points arithmetic won't do it for you that is a fundamental confusion so here at the heart of Hawking's book dismissing God there is a fundamental statement that's got a triple level and perhaps more of contradiction in it now here's a challenge for you if you go home tonight you can't sleep try and write a similar sentence on another subject so it's got three levels of contradiction in it you'll find it extremely difficult now that I find in a way sad because you see ladies and gentlemen one of the things I've learned to this debate is this not every statement by a scientist as a statement of science you need to be wary of that I'm very aware of it tonight because I'm going outside my field of mathematics therefore what's important is I check the logic of the argument very carefully and I take seriously the best arguments of my opponents because not every statement by a scientist is a statement of science and the state that the universe can create itself from nothing is not a statement Dyson of science at all but of course I am fortunate in the kinds of things that I get allowed to do and one of them was to actually meet and publicly discuss with the father of inflation Alan Guth the most brilliant cosmologists in the world at MIT in Cambridge Massachusetts so when I had this opportunity I couldn't resist having a little word with them and I said Alan you know out there in the public there is much ado about nothing people are very confused about nothing so tell me when you as a physicist talk about the universe coming from nothing you do not mean nothing in the sense of which all of us understand it to be that's absence of anything he says no we do not I said thank you very much and that leads to the most absurd statements like chrissake nothing is full of potential what and you discover that some of them think nothing is a quantum vacuum but a quantum vacuum isn't nothing niala straight that because you see the Bible is telling us that you don't get a universe from nothing you got a universe from God which makes most sense getting it from nothing sees let me put forward to you the sheer absurdity that's facing us now intellectually nothing explains everything or God explains everything well when it's put us crossly like that the answer ought to be pretty obvious and there's a curious ineluctable logic that's going down that path it used to be mass energy explains everything as materialism but now it's nothing explains mass energy so you've got down to Ground Zero nothing and you have to decide which of these worldviews makes most sense and a great deal hangs and depends on it now the New Testament version of Genesis one is in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God the same was in the beginning with God all things were made by him but it's not actually were made by him it's much stronger than that all things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be it's talking about existence in the beginning was the word that is an existence statement in the beginning the word already was the word is eternal the universe and you came to be now why is that important well it's very important because everywhere I go one of the questions that comes up all the time has taken straight out of Dawkins book and I don't simply get it from university students I get it from leading professors around the world if you believe that God created the world then you have to ask the question who created God have you heard that question before and who created the creator that created the creator that created the Creator that goes back forever and ever amen the whole thing is absurd so let's forget God it sounds very powerful doesn't it that actually isn't any such thing so let's analyze it Lewis taught me a bit of logical analysis you see who created God that's a question there'd be abstracted sessle's who are what created X where s is anything you can think of now what does the question ask it asks for a cause of the existence of X but it does more than that it makes an assumption it says who created X what does that tell you about X it assumes that X was created of course there's man if you ask who created God you're assuming God's created what if he wasn't the question doesn't apply . the end it amazes me how many people have been fooled by the statement you see let me put it this way The God Delusion suppose the title had been that created God's television well nobody would have ever bought it because we don't need Richard Dawkins to tell us that created gods are a delusion we usually call them idols don't weigh in you see the question though it sounds very subtle and clever does not apply to the dog who's revealed to the pages of Scripture who already was he is eternal it bypasses the question of God altogether the God of the Bible it's only applies to a created God but it's got a big sting in its tail and I put it a richard dawkins i say you think this is a sense of a question okay you believe the universe created you don't you who created your Creator i've waited eight years to get an answer to that but haven't got it yet you see what the question is really about is what is the ultimate reality do the questions go back forever of course they don't do for most of my atheist friends the buck stops with the mass and energy or the multiverse or nothing for me the buck stops with god those are the two alternative claims to ultimate reality so you see the bible itself is answering Dawkins question indeed it answers it explicitly because in John's Gospel it doesn't simply say all things came to be through him it says without him nothing came to be that came to thee now put in Dawkins question into that Dolphins claims God came to be so what a scripture say nothing came to be without him so a God came to be he didn't come to be without the word who is God contradiction end of story the Bible anticipates the objection very clearly you see ladies and gentlemen what we read in the Bible is in one sense simple but it is immensely sophisticated and one of the reasons I'm a Christian is that I've grown to trust it as utterly exact in terms of its intellectual content and its analysis of the big debates even today we've hardly got beyond the first few words of scripture and yet we're using them to analyze the nature of one of the biggest debates on the planet so here is this Genesis account now of course I know that there's a question in many people's minds because this is my home country and I come from our mouth you've heard about my haven't you it's a way up country that it had a very distinguished Archbishop do you remember him called Archbishop Ussher remember him and Archbishop Ussher he was largely a transfer and he was a brilliant man by the way he's often written off as an ignoramus he was not he was a very distinguished scholar but he came to the conclusion reading genesis of the rest of Scripture but the earth was very young now you notice that as far as I've read in Genesis it says absolutely nothing about the age of the earth you notice as well that the New Testament says absolutely nothing about the age of the earth but I'm going to say something about it because I find with many people it's a stumbling block and it's assembly mark in two directions first of all in the world in which I operate the secular world any suggestion that the world is young is effectively to close down any discussion of God and Christianity secondly I made many Christians and like me they are totally convinced of the inspirational authority of Scripture and they're puzzled by this kind of question because they don't want to look foolish in the eyes of their teachers and the eyes of their university professor to scripture but they don't want to look through so what do they do and my heart goes out to people like that and I just want to say one thing won't answer all your questions but then there's going to be a Q&A you see and the one thing is this but if we take scripture seriously we will note that there's a little paragraph at the beginning in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth nor the earth was formless and empty darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters and the God said let there be light and there was evening and morning day 1 and God said and there was evening and morning day 2 there's an introductory paragraph of two verses followed by the famous sequence of days you know by that sequence of days don't you it's there the interesting thing is just looking up from a grammatical point of view the first two verses are written in a different tense and Hebrew from the sequence of days and I've consulted several world-class experts on this we have no axe to grind at all that they point out to me that that means that what is stated at the beginning in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth is detached from the sequence of days now that is highly significant but this tells me instantly that actually Genesis says nothing about the age of the earth or the cosmos may have something to say about the age of humanity which is a different thing but according to the grammar and this is interesting I know there would be various opinions about the days in this room whatever you believe about the days the actual text itself detaches the beginning from the days day one in the beginning didn't occur a day one it when I don't know and because I don't know because Genesis doesn't say I'm not prepared to die for an opinion that scripture doesn't say anything about that's just one way in which carefully reading scripture can help us possibly avoid a totally unnecessary clash now you may want to ask me questions about that and I'm happy to do that because I want to come back to what is most important before I give you the chance of Q&A who is this God that created the heavens of the earth is he some force you know it's very odd to me and it's a bit scary are you people are icy people young people and sometimes older people we've got a Star Wars concept of God the force we heard of the force that's very dangerous because you see God has revealed of this chapter is not a force he's a person how do I know that because there's a whole sequence of verbs connected with them God saw God blessed God said those aren't things that you can only predicate of a person and the danger of coming to believe in God as a force is simply this we use forces because we're superior to them as persons and how dangerous is it for someone to get into their heads the idea that God is a force that you can use he isn't as for him to use us not for us to use him so Genesis begins to be a corrective to false ideas of the nature of God you notice that God created but he's distinct from his creation it isn't an emanation from him he spoke and it was and there's so many of these things I'm only going to leave you with two of the first is this the thing that is repeated again and again is and God said and God said and God said whatever you think about the days there's a sequence of statements by God now that's very important because what it's telling us is that this universe this cosmos is not a closed system of cause and effect God spoke into it so to speak from the outside and things happened may I point out to you that that's the exact opposite of an unguided natural process and it gets even more interesting if you notice that I'm true of those days God speaks more than once on day three and day six on day three the differentiation is between matter inanimate matter and life you don't get in Scripture from inanimate matter to life without and God said it doesn't happen through an unguided natural process and on day six its animals and human beings you don't get from animals to human beings without and God said it's not an unguided natural process it's almost as if the chapter anticipates the contemporary debate does now now these are very challenging things coming up to us from the ancient world how do I say the question again how did they know this because we have lived in our generation really is the first my generation I made to realize that this notion of God speaking the logos the word is fundamental to human life it's fundamental to physics by the way as well but we know that eats of the 10 trillion cells in our bodies has got a copy of the longest word ever discovered is the DNA code word-based life in the beginning was the word and the big problem the faces by biological colleagues is this where do you get the information from that's coded on DNA you see and I'm cutting a very long story short we've taught at school often but all explanation goes from the simple to the complex and the ideal explanation is this that you take a complex thing and you explain it in terms of simpler things that's wonderful when it works as it often does there's one area doesn't work and that's where language is concerned the moment you see something written even it's as short as your name written on the beats of Portrush if there's still a beats there you immediately affair that there's been an intelligence at work don't you you haven't seen it written but you know because it instantly has meaning for you that an intelligence has been at work and I sometimes tease my colleagues at Oxford my colleagues when the conversation gets dull which is very rare but I point this out to them and I say you go into the lab and you look at DNA and it's a word with three and a half billion letters in it in exactly the right order and I say to you where does that come from and you say chants the laws of nature you see your own name five letters long at a page and I say where does that come from and they say intelligence quite the difference I don't see a reason why you see ladies and gentlemen the Bible claims that God is evident in his creation and if emphasis is anything to go by what Genesis is calling to us is to pay attention to information word and almost every single statement about creation and the oldest scripture is like that by faith we understand that the worlds were made by the Word of God where did the laws of nature come from we encode them in mathematical language in mathematical words it's another evidence of God who is the word because the one thing you cannot do is generate words of language from nothing or even if you've got some molecules and material you can't generate them by unguided natural processes the only place where words come from his mind and every analogy we know runs in that direction so it seems to me that and God said and God said is unpacking what John 1 says in the beginning was the word and he's utterly profound and in the cords with all I do of science because you see I've lived to see people change their minds many leading people now realize and some of them are leading atheists like Thomas Nagel that you can't reduce language and word and meaning to molecules and they're suggesting as atheists as there's something fundamentally wrong with the materialism that does so well that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned science and the universe are not neutral they're pointing towards a creative world now my final point is this and I wish I had a lot of time to spend on this because more important in a way than everything else and God said and God said and God said there's a sequence leading to a climax it's not a sequence of unguided natural processes it's the exact opposite and the culmination of it is and God said let us make man in our own image male and female he created them the universe is wonderful ladies and gentlemen but it wasn't made in the image of God you were if you ever thought about that how important is a human being you look over the vastness of the universe and I have a telescope and I love looking at the galaxies and see Andromeda with his billions of stars and I'm so tiny but then as sighs the measure of importance it shows the glory of God it doesn't even know I exist I know it exists that means you see if it's right this is telling you something about yourself it's saying that you are uniquely made in the image of God the universe isn't it shows his glory and we would want to unpack that wouldn't we because this is the foundation up until relatively recently our far morals and ethics isn't it in our Western world our value system is based on the Bible that is though being rapidly undermined and as being undermined by the bioethicists led by Peter Singer who suggests to us that we're just one species among many others not particularly important and perhaps far too many others anyway is that the solution when what scripture says at the very beginning is that human beings are made in the image of God and that gives to each one of us an infinite value I say again even leading atheists like Jurgen Habermas on the continent says look we need to be careful he's an atheist what we do with religion because he says our Western concepts of human rights of egalitarianism all come from the judeo-christian heritage and he even adds he says we've no other source everything else is just postmodern chatter but the postmodern chatter has risen to such a crescendo that basing human values and then ethics on the uniqueness of humans as creative than the image of God is being eroded in our colleges and universities as fast as it could possibly be and you only have to teach a couple of generations of young people that they are merely animals until they start to realize that they've like none of us small wonder of what is happening to our society I hope I've said enough to indicate to you that these texts are so important not simply for our understanding of the cosmos but for our understanding of ourselves now all I've got two so far these are only the little steps I've been talking to you about your value as a created being in the image of God there's a bigger value than that because the heart of the biblical story is that the God who created the universe at you in it became human and by the way if you want a powerful argument for the uniqueness of human beings you might want to think about this our human being special oh yes they are because God became one that's awesome and because God became him in Jesus Christ and he died on the cross those of us who trust him have an even bigger it's one thing for you to have unmeasurable value as a creature of God all of you have that whether you believe in them or not but what a wonderful thing to discover then Christ died for you the most precious life had all of history was extinguished for you God so loved the world that He gave His Son that's a much deeper value isn't them and you see if the first story is credible if our universe bears traces of having been created by that word then it's a smaller step isn't that to begin to take seriously the center of claim of the Christian faith that the word became human and has provided the means for you to get to know the world who created the universe but that's a story for another time thank you very much I'm going to collect a number of questions because there's an audience like this everybody's interested in everybody else's question so what we're going to do I'm going to get some idea and so a you of the spectrum of questions that are in the room now the rules are simple keep them on this topic I'm not here to deal with all the other cultural and biblical topics around the place we're talking about points of origin and what I've been saying secondly this is not the place for statements the time you take for your question this time take it away from the next person so we're going to try and get as many as possible thirdly if you've got a question ask it now I am NOT going to be available afterwards often that happens we get several questions and then I go to the door and I'm overwhelmed with dozens of questions your chances now this is the third major session I've had today so I think I've earned a rest so if you don't ask it now don't ask it afterwards so off we go put up your hand it might we'll get to you and I will write your question down and then we move on like that okay hi yeah what do you make of Tom Wright's proposal on Adam and Eve they were chosen couple over source selection of humans in the way that Israel was a chosen nation how does that you know selected the idea that they were selected right of a group of Neanderthals or something like that is that it generally okay sorry he briefly speak about the pantheistic world with the starts of your talk how do you approach the society were increasingly pantheism other gods it's been this there was a welcomed ideology in house Christians are we to respond to that response to pantheism referred a couple of times to John's Gospel and John's Gospel you know it says in the Word was made flesh it uses the word word on a number of occasions has always struck me as an odd word to use so these are significance in the word word in your view and is so forth what is that significance thank you okay for why do you think the atheists get away with such bad logic and you know just prior to I see us get away with because we let them okay again we're going fast you'd mentioned that it's thought that many scientists say things aren't scientific how would you define science then what would you define as the remit of science okay how I define science I'm not sure from stepping on the pantheism question the party knew it was the Christian God who created the universe under salt Yukawa or one of the other gods okay how do you know it's a Christian God and not say Allah and so on okay okay so I just wondered given the advantages that the Christian worldview has from an existential perspective so you know the existence of right and wrong there's an ultimate purpose what do you think has led it isn't the ghee and grind in the way that it has given it offers no ultimate purpose and on the world but hope or or right or wrong okay good question right is there another urgent one because is that it those are lady there yes please and with me from Concord isn't a cop how do we revert unhide a congregations to faithful eight challenge was that which is untrue yeah okay thank you very much we'll have a look at these I'm going to take those last one first how do we move from conflict to Concord ISM by exploding the conflict myth and it's a very sad thing I haven't time to introduce it at the beginning the general impression in the UK is that science here theology here they'll never meet and there's a real warfare between science and belief in God I don't think there is and I think you can demonstrate that relatively easily and I find it helpful to point out to people that last year's physics nobel prize was won by Peter Higgs he's an atheist and the price a few years before that was run by Bill won by Bill Phillips who's a Christian now if you win the Nobel Prize in Physics you're pretty bright so that what this thing this is Bill Phillips from Peter Higgs is not their science they both won the Nobel Prize what distinguishes 'm is a worldview once a theist and the others an atheist now i analyze your question this way the conflict is real but it's not between science and god it's between two worldviews particularly in this country that is the worldview of atheism and the worldview of Christian theism there's where the conflict is and science trains both sides dokin strange science points to atheism I claim the exact opposite so the real question to ask is which way does science point that's the proper question but we need to get rid of the conflict myth the difficulty in getting rid of it though is that there are two iconic things in history that keep it going one is Galileo and his aunt at all with their concert hall with the Catholic Church the other is Huxley of liberal force now I haven't time to go into those in detail I've written about them in my book God's Undertaker it's enough to say this the scholars now dismiss those stories in the sense not that they didn't happen but that their interpretation is completely false they cannot be used as evidences of a conflict between science and religion just as we say briefly about Galileo the sort of myth is near he was and he was the genuine scientist bringing the truth to the world and he was first opposed by the church who were obscure attested they believed the Bible and then they persecuted him all the rest of it well he wasn't first opposed by the church at all he was first imposed by the philosophers why because he was challenging the reigning paradigm of the day which was Aristotelian ISM which believed the earth didn't move and he was challenging that the church jumped on that bandwagon because they thought that scripture taught the same thing but it's very important to realize there wasn't a conflict between science and razor at all it was a conflict between two interpretations of the data and oddly enough galileo wasn't an atheist either was he it was a man who believed the Bible who turned out to be right so the confusion about that iconic story is just wrong and if you want to read more about it my colleague a top starter who was at Oxford with whom I work John Hadley Brook our first professor of science and religion has written a great deal about it so much so that the general consensus now is this these stories far from establishing the conflict myth the real question is how they possibly managed to sustain the Met for so long so conflict is something written into the genes of many people but I believe it's completely false is asking the wrong question no the next thing is let us have a look there were two questions about atheism why do they get away with bad logic and why does atheism gain ground well that people get away from bad logic because unfortunately whether we like it or not if you're a scientist and your prestigious person you have an authority and people get away with it by making statements you know for instance Stephen Hawking was asked what he thought of religion and he says religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark and because he's a scientist everybody bows to but that's not a statement of science and I ought to tell you autumn day that when I was asked the same question I said atheism was a fairy story for people afraid of the light well you know that proves nothing absolutely nothing but it's easy to make these wild statements and people do it all the time and we let them get away with it they'll show you a magnificent picture of the universe talk to you about a few equations and say there's no God there's no logic in it there's no argument in it there's just beautiful photography and wild assertion why does it gain ground because a lot of people want to hear that there's no God because the issue of God ladies and gentlemen let me make the point again God is not a Theory's a person and if God is not simply at the back of our universe but as is the back of our morality the very mention of God will raise moral questions in people's minds I mean I often ask myself why are people so frightened of a god that it doesn't exist because the very mention of God somehow makes people think of the transcendent of responsibility about the way they're behaving and some are very honest like Thomas Nagel I mentioned before he said I don't want there to be a god that's not science that's just personal preference I do not want there to be a god but it's honest it's very honest and of course atheism grains grind because many people have had such a negative experience of Christianity this is shameful isn't there a friend of mine the United States thought he'd write to all the students who ran humanist secularist atheist groups and colleges and universities in the states and he said I'd love to hear your story I'm not going to tell you mine I'm just interested in your story Juno defined every single one of them had started in a Christian background every one that's shameful isn't that why does that happen well the biggest reason given in Britain for leaving the church is simple they don't answer our questions they live in a ghetto they talk our language that we don't understand they don't answer our questions and we go on like that we lose a generation and this is very important ladies and gentlemen grind is gained because there's no credible alternative and it's no use of simply preaching and teaching and explaining we've got a live consistently what we preach are nobody listened to us and that's an enormous challenge to me Alice's enormous challenge to you and there are many young people here if you're going to influence the world you need to make some very serious decisions and one of them is how you spend your time just go home and write down how many times how much time you spent the last week watching a screen and play games and write down the site at how much time you spent in prayer and studying Scripture and then you know why we're failing to reach the world we're paying up religion ladies and gentlemen and there's so much distraction now I'm not a fuddy-duddy I use the technology I'm grateful for my website but I watch and say that we're damaging our attention spans by our concentration not simply on one instrument but several at once and even the psychologists are coming in and telling us were rewiring our brains by doing it we need to get real about this and that's why we're driving people into atheism they're looking for questions they're looking for reality but if we spend all our time tweeting and texting we won't have time to get to know people at any depth how many people have said to me I've got hundreds of Facebook friends I have no real friends they ought to learn from that way we're amusing ourselves to death and as Christians we need to wake up and take it seriously I'm glad people told me that when I was your age and if you make up your minds tonight and do something about it you can change the world you can change this country but I'm starting to preach so I better go back to Christchurch no how do i define science with great difficulty but I'm glad I'm in very good company defining science is a very difficult thing people used to think they could define science but as Augustine said about time everybody knows what time is until we try to define it that doesn't mean we can get no idea of what science is but the experts in the philosophy of science have long since given up trying to give a watertight definition of science of course they will talk about various methodologies that we think of a scientific testing hypothesis repeating experiment all this kind of thing that is they've become a little bit more modest the the reason for that is that they've realised that science is not something out there that's dispassionate and completely objective but it is something done by people and people have the world views they have their predispositions that their prejudices that they bring to bear so when I said not every statement by a scientist is a statement of silence what I was meaning more precisely was not trying to beg the question of how we define science it's when people move outside their realm let me give a glaring instance of it Carl Sagan at the beginning of his famous book cosmos TV series in America the universe is all that is was or ever shall be that's the state with a bita cosmos by a scientist but it's a statement of his own belief system it's a philosophical statement in that sense it's not a scientific statement because however you define science it can't prove to you that the cosmos is all that there is wherever shall be that's all that event by that but read any book on the definition of science what is science for instance which is a very popular one and you see how difficult it is No some of these this what about the word Lagos isn't it an odd word I don't think so actually it's an immensely powerful world because it was already in existence at the time that John wrote his gospel and it was used by the stoic philosophers to describe what they believed to be a rational principle a reason behind the universe now the insight was brilliant it wasn't enough so what John does is used that word but give it much more depth in terms of its meaning and connotation in itself at his ideas of word commands speech logic and we get all those concepts from it but as John pointed out that this is the God that created the universe a person a triune person who has a fellowship he indicates that at the beginning the Word was with God and the Word was God that boggles the minds of a gypsy how can God be with God well only if God is very complex and is a fellowship rather than a single monolithic person so I think the word is wonderful because it's full of these big suggestions of ideas but is telling us that the universe is intelligence based and rational that's the exact opposite of the claim of my atheist friends they try to get rationality or to be rationality and they can't of course so volumes have been written on Lagos so you better read some serious theologians and see what they make of it but I find it a most useful concept because the physicists not are saying information however you define it and that's difficult to is fundamental to our universe and cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry and it's those developments I find very exciting now how do I respond to pantheism that is a topic for an evening sir and what I would recommend to you to do is what I have done and that is to read a little book called the universe next door by a man called James sire and if you've got it in a second edition it is very helpful in enabling you to respond to pantheism after all if I say how do you respond to atheism I have to spend a lot of time spelling that out and you just can't do that in the Q&A so that's a desperately unsatisfactory answer but for the rest of you if you've never read James Eyre book on worldviews it's very worthwhile reading because it will introduce you to a way of thinking that will help you communicate he wrote it in light of experience with generation after generation of students and helping them to articulate their faith so his response to pantheism is one of the most interesting that I have found two more questions left one was Tom right Adam and Eve are they a pair of Neanderthals over whom God to whom God gives this spirit I've read Tom write on this so let's leave Tom right aside I'm very familiar with the the view and it is a very common view and I'm going to be very controversial right now so if you don't like controversy leave okay basically I don't know what's at stake at all of this is the question of continuity and discontinuity as we look at biological life animal life human life is it a continuous tree of ascent from the simplest kind of life to human life with no input from outside the system that is the big issue now if you take the view of many of my atheist friends by definition you regard that as the only possible option because you do not believe that the universe is an open system it's a closed system of cause and effect there is no supernatural so there's got to be a continuum now of course believing in the supernatural doesn't necessitate that there can't be a continuum but it opens up a bigger possibility now I believe that there was a singularity a point toward the laws of nature break down at the beginning of the universe most atheists believe that - I'm most Christians I believe that behind that singularity was God they believe that behind it was nothing secondly if we're Christian we believe in a massive singularity when God entered the world the word became human that's not to be explained in terms of natural processes going on just before it happened I believe in another very big singularity when Jesus rose from the dead and when he ascended now the big question is are there any more are there any connected with the origin of life just to name two and the origin of human life and these ideas that there was a poo they've got it down from millions to thousands and they're getting at Laura Laura I'm not sure myself perhaps I don't understand the argument very well why it can't be - but a pool of hominids that are ascended so to speak by purely unguided natural processes from lower forms of life well I must state my position a I'm not a biologist they I read a lot of biology and I'm not convinced in fact I'm more and more convinced as they read the biologists that many things came to be pollution or what my atheist friends claim about God a God of the gaps there's an evolution of the gaps how did that happen evolution did it give me a mechanism there isn't one that's an evolution of the gaps and one of the world's leading authorities of the origin of life Robert Lawson said he's utterly fed up with evolution be used as an ante theory that is an excuse for not doing solid science this is a Nobel Prize winner who's not a Christian he says you claim your massive proteins became a chicken evolution did it that's an empty statement because you've no mechanism that doesn't now and I find the biologist and this is a very long story and I can't authenticate this tonight but you can have a little look at my web site and other web sites I get more and more alarmed the claims that are being made for unguided natural processes let me come at this from a biblical point of view you see I have more options than many of my biology friends why because I believe the universe is not a closed system now 1953 an experiment was done which won the Nobel Prize and miller-urey thought they'd discovered the secret of life that was 1953 this is 2014 the situation is not infinitely more difficult than it was then why because we've discovered life has a digital semiotic base an information-rich micro molecule of DNA and nobody's coming up with any ideas of how you get information from matter and energy now that's exactly what I would expect to find if the Bible is right let me put it this way I believe that there are bad gaps and good gaps bad gaps are like electricity and lightning they're closed by science the good gaps are opened by science and if you're not open to the possibility of an input from outside this system so you're trying to get the rationale from the non right meaning from non meaning and you run into difficulty it's just possible that you're using the wrong tools that you're refusing to admit that mind maybe have been involved and so the longer it goes on the more evidence I think there is but mine was involved in the beginning was the word secondly when it comes to human beings let me tell you about the genesis story briefly what does it say well it says that God made humans of the dust of the earth Hebrew language would have found it very easy to say that God made human beings are two pre-existent animals but it chooses not to so it's making a very bad job of it if the fact is that human beings are descended from animals indirectly that's point number one point number two it gets even more interesting when we come to the origin of women remember the biblical story ladies it's very interesting is that the saw was humorous because what it says is it is not good for man to be alone and it talks about the animals and God told man to name all the animals so what was all that about well God said I will make a help answering to him and he got him to name all the animals and after a very lengthy process of taxonomy which is the beginning of biology sort out as the Bible as pro science or not against it it says but for Adam there was no creature find answering to him where among the animals isn't it interesting that according to the Bible the very first lesson that humans were taught is that they're utterly distinct from animals well if that's a way of telling us that human beings were made from pre-existent animals is doing a very much worse job but it's worse than that the story tells us that God put Adam to sleep and made a woman out of him what do you do but that they didn't gentleman what did you do with that because that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be an attempt to tell you they were made for the animals because the text explicitly says the animals didn't fit so what do I believe what it says this is this continuity it's a direct input by God what can science say about that nothing let me give you a little illustration to get this across suppose my brother here at the front and I were biologists and we're worried about the lack of good weight of the earth and we in our laboratory with our intelligence managed to genetically engineer to produce a wonderful strain of weight that feeds the world our research is lost 5,000 years later scientists in the lab are looking at this weight than saying no where did this week come from they're all Darwinian they were fitted into a Darwinian paradigm but we know it doesn't it was genetically engineered by human intelligence but that's invisible to a Darwinian paradigm isn't it and you see what I observe around me is this I'm open to wider possibilities that don't contradict any science because they say that God made a direct input just as he did at the creation and as he did at the conception of Jesus and at the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension of course God come do it any way he likes the question is what way did he do it and I'm more concerned about getting behind these views and saying is the is the thrust behind them actually to try and argue that as a continuous naturalistic process because I noticed that some of the leading people in the world who believe this the view that was put to be a moment or two ago they still believe that God says something special to these animals and give them a spirit so they believe in a supernatural intervention what then is the imprints of a problem of believing that it was more than that I'm not sure that there is one but that's very controversial so let me end with the final question and it's how do you know it's a Christian God well not from studying the universe except to the extent that the Christian God is revealed in Scripture and the more I find Scripture making sense of the universe and vice versa the more I am in trying to believe that the judeo-christian understanding is correct but this is a very legitimate question because if we simply talk about the universe Paul will tell you he will say look you look at the universe you can see something what can you see well the invisible things of God are revealed are the things that are made what things his power and Godhead you can see there is a God for these powerful you cannot deduce the essential doctrines of Christianity from observing the Stars or biological nature or anything like that so where do you get that from why the Christian God because there are other sources of evidence of course you see I was asked to talk about Genesis but there's the rest of the Bible tacked on behind it and of course as the big meta-narrative of the Bible goes through and tells us that the God who created the universe became human and now the evidence becomes not in terms of science but in terms of history and human experience and the reason that I believe that it's the God of the Bible the Christian God as you call it but there is only one God there is because of the evidence of those deeper things those historical specifics like the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension and so on that's why and let me illustrate that you mentioned Islam let's take the three bono theistic religions we are very familiar with Judaism Christianity and Islam how do you decide well I know no other way of deciding these things then on the basis of the evidence what's the evidence well let's take the central claim I've many Jewish friends they believe that Jesus died he didn't rise I've many Muslim friends they believe that Jesus didn't die and they have no problem in saying this in public it's only the atheists get worried about discussions of other religions I don't know anybody in the other religions that get too worried about them I believe that's easy those three views cannot be simultaneously correct can they logic tells you that so you have to decide how do you decide on the basis of the evidence is there evidence if you died is there evidence that they rose again and because this matter of evidence is crucial I wrote my last book gunning for God you may be able to get it outside and I devote the last two chapters in it to one the in principle question of miracle and then the second question is did Jesus actually rise from the dead because that for me is crucial that's what the Apostles announced to the ancient world that's what Christian got Christianity going so you're quite right and legitimately ask the question you can't decide upon the things I said at the beginning of the talk you have to adduce more evidence but the evidence is available and of course the final bit of evidence is the proof of the pudding is in the eating Jesus makes things about you and me he tells you and me but if we're prepared to be honest about the mess we've made of life and all that muck and stuff we produced and repent of it and Trust Christ he will forgive us and bring us peace with God and transform our lives you could test her they can heal a marriage I've seen it happen so many times they can bring healing to the brokenhearted I must be honest I haven't seen atheism do this as effectively and so in the end the test as if does it actually work all of us need to be loved all of us need to be forgiven and accepted well Jesus claims we can be if we trust him and you see ladies and gentlemen this is where skepticism stops I'm a skeptic skepticism means check it out from a distance and you're very wise to do check things out from the distance but if you want to get to know me you'll have to give up your distance won't you you'll have to reveal yourself to me and I'll have to reveal yourself to you and in the last analysis this is the most important thing of all then if Jesus is raised from the dead he's alive today you can get to know him how do you get to know him by opening your heart and mind to that possibility if I told you young men that there's a red Ferrari outside the door waiting for you you could sit from now to next year and argue with me philosophically that there can't be etcetera you'd never know until you go nope would you and it's the same with this in the end you've got to give up your distance you've got to go to look and if you've never as an adult seriously read a scripture start with the Gospel of John and ask your questions and you get answers you see the faith in God that I possess is not some wishy-washy intellectual suicide it's based on evidence otherwise you'd be a complete fool and that's why I'm confident not because of me but because of the God has provided that evidence but we must stop and we must go home so thank you very much indeed

Channel: Peter Mackey

Views: 58,800

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: John Lennox (Academic), Professor (Job Title), Theism (Religion), Atheism (Religion), Pantheism (Belief), Christianity (Religion), apologetics, philosophy

Id: kJPgtEAouz0

Length: 85min 38sec (5138 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 25 2014