Stephen Meyer Interviews John Lennox about going "Against the Tide"

it's great to have you with us we understand that you have a a new movie coming out which is a bit of a departure for you you have so many excellent books uh in fact first of all maybe you should tell us about your new book on artificial intelligence my new book is called 2084. uh it's a take off from george orwell and it's it's really quite amusing because the title was suggested by none other than peter atkins the famous atheist professor chemistry at oxford we were going to a debate which is online actually where he was very opposed to me but in the car he said we're not going to talk about the debate what are you writing so i told him and he said i've got a title for you i said what's that he said 2084. well i said peter that's brilliant if i use it i will acknowledge you and i've done that excellent i've had a a very spirited debate with peter myself on uh your bbc radio 4 at one point but that's that's that's terrific so uh even our opposite numbers can be uh can can add something to our work so that's that's absolutely because it it just captured the spirit of what i wanted to do talk about the both the ai that's working at the moment narrow ai it's pros and cons and to try to get people to see that they don't have to be afraid of everything but there are huge ethical issues and then to talk about this more speculative stuff artificial general intelligence so i'm very pleased to see that there's been a huge response around the world in terms of interest and i've done dozens of zoom calls and interviews about it that's terrific john so you can see the promise of ai as a technology without buying into the medi the materialist metaphysical program saying that the machine is conscience conscious and the human mind becomes unnecessary is that well that's absolutely right and i want to encourage young people who are scientifically gifted particularly if they're christians to go into this field so that a they can contribute some of the wonderful stuff that's being done in medicine like the work of rosalind pickard at mit but also can give folks insight into the ethical issues for example that surrounds surveillance technology very good that's a real concern for sure well we're we're promoting this and we'll be promoting it more on our mind matters uh website here at discovery institute but let's shift gears back to the primary reason for our conversation with john this morning we want to give our uh subscribers and viewers and uh supporters and followers a heads up on a really fantastic film that's coming out it's a little bit of a departure for john he writes uh technical papers in mathematics he writes uh books about science and faith and uh but now he's become something of a of a film star working with none other than kevin sorbo the actor who played hercules john's always been a a bit of an intellectual superhero for all of us but now he's actually teamed up with a real superhero and uh and i can tell you the conversations between the two of them are quite interesting kevin's uh quite up-to-date on these issues and about science and what it has to tell us about larger worldview stuff so let's dive in there john and just uh with that introduction maybe have you give us a little uh a background first on yourself uh your your career in in math and in science and uh and and how that's how you've related that to your personal faith and god because i know that you you uh are a believer and uh and so maybe a little background on yourself and then let's let's then we'll segue from there into a discussion of of the film and your life story and the way it it tells that fine well i come from a very tiny country called northern ireland and it's been made famous by people like c.s lewis but unfortunately it's rather infamous for sectarian violence and i grew up when that was just starting and some of the seminal influences on me when i was very young came naturally from my parents who were keen christian believers but were very unusual because they were not sectarian and my father ran a store and he employed around 40 people i suppose and he employed people from both communities the protestant of the catholic community and he got bombed for it and my brother was nearly killed by one of these bombs and i once asked him dad why do you take the risk he said for this reason that we learn from the bible this fundamental mandate for civilization that all human beings have the dignity of being made in the image of god and he said i'm determined to treat them like that irrespective of what they believe and that became an absolutely fundamental principle for me throughout my life the respect for people even if you violently disagree with them like peter atkins who might mention the second thing is they love me enough to give me space to think not only that encouraged me to think about the christian worldview but also about other world views and encouraged me to read very widely so that when i came up to university i'd read not only of christian arguments defending intellectually the veracity of the christian faith but i've read quite a bit of philosophy and quite a lot of the opposition so coming to cambridge in the early in 1962 i in a sense hit the ground running because i've read a great deal of stuff and the basic conviction i had was christianity is true not simply helpful or emotionally supporting but actually true and therefore my mathematics and my interest in science and philosophy are seen against the wider worldview picture of christianity and i learned very early on even at school that the two fitted together because i came across books on science and religion in the last few years of my high school and so i was reading this kind of stuff and it's interesting robert e d clark nobody's ever heard of him his old books yeah yes well i knew him in cambridge and i'd read his books and they helped me to see that there were serious problems with the um atheistic interpretation of the universe and and with neo-darwinism and so on so he put me on an intellectual track and really said for which i never recovered you never did now if you came up to cambridge in 62 then you would have overlapped with cs lewis in the last year of his professorship before he died did you ever encounter him there i did indeed yes i had read a great deal of lewis i owe him an immense intellectual debt because i have no idea what it's like to be an adult and an atheist but he had and i needed some kind of mature guidance into what does it feel like to be in an atheist shoes and lewis guided me also although he was no mathematician in fact we nearly didn't have c.s lewis because of my field of algebra because he failed his first attempt to pass the oxford entrance exam in algebra and the war saved him from having to reset it and i dread to think that he might not have had lewis because of algebra but he had a brilliant mind and he understood not so much science but the implications of science and that was a huge education to me from the humanities side for which i am really indebted and realizing he was there but not knowing that he was very ill i looked him up in the lecture list and so he was lecturing in the lecture rooms just within one minute walk of the mathematics department in middle lane and so i turned up and listened to lecture for two or three of what turned out to be the last lectures he ever gave that's quite a legacy i know you and i have both been influenced by lewis's writing about the laws of nature he has a wonderful little essence that's right published in god in the dark and then of course his writing and miracles and he uh has a brilliant exposition of why the laws of nature don't actually cause things they describe patterns that we observe but they're not the causes of things and that's immensely important and what amazes me steve is that there are very clever people they don't seem to understand that so the late stephen hawking never seemed to grasp it's right it runs right through all his work in what's now called quantum cosmology the idea that that the laws of physics can somehow explain or the origin of the universe by offering a causal explanation for matters i know time and energy but math doesn't do that the laws of physics are written in math math describes uh the matter and energy within the universe once it's here but it doesn't tell us where it came from and it's that's right and it's like saying it's like saying that newton's laws of motion call uh cause a snooker ball to go across a table absurd exactly prescribes the motion doesn't cause it or or it'd be like saying that the the latitude and longitude lines on the map are responsible for the great height of the himalayan mountains or something it's it's not quite the same that's good actually yeah well i know there's to the film itself the title is really intriguing it's against the tide um give us what what is the tide that uh your life has been running against in the in the sense the film is describing well i think it's essentially the tide of atheism naturalism materialism it's a world view tide and it ebbs and flows right and goes in and out but i find myself for most of my life in the academy which is largely in the west at least dominated by naturalism and i determined from the beginning that i would fight against that not by compromising mathematics or even science but by asserting them and it's one of the great encouragements of my life to have lived long enough to have read books like thomas nagel's mind and cosmos where he points out that the naturalistic interpretation of the universe risks actually demolishing human rationality and our use of it in science which is an argument as you well know that lewis foresaw and that kind of thing confirms my stand and it's very similar to your own stand in the academic world it's just important yeah it's a very exciting time to be a theist and a scientist and a philosopher there's so many intellectual trends that are now moving against that tide that's been so dominant for so long what was it like in the 1960s and so we've had this let me preface this question we've had this publishing genre since about 2006 2007 when richard dawkins came out with the uh god delusion and there's been this spate of new atheist books as they're called right up to 2016-17 i think stephen hawking even got in the act near the end of his career with with books that were making these kinds of arguments arguing that science properly understood undermines any rational basis for belief in god um this has been a more aggressive sort of uh scientific atheist polemic but as you mentioned this naturalistic worldview that is uh has been around for longer than just the new atheism and i wonder what it was like for you in the 1960s and 70s when you were starting out in your academic career was the uh the atheistic tide as strong or as as uh as as as aggressive as it has become in the last few years with a new atheism or was it more of a subtle undercurrent i think it was more of an undercurrent and ironically a lot of it in my early days at cambridge was coming from inside professing christianity in the honest to god debate and that kind of thing so that many students were raising these questions but it was more from the perspective look can we believe anything that christianity claims but there was still quite a lot of interest being generated the arguments that i mentioned of rdd clark were of interest to people there were lectures being held and so on and i remember going to listen to people like john polkinghorn in in those early days giving a rational defense of christianity let's put it this way there was great interest in rational defense of the christian faith it wasn't so much in the science religion area but in the wider sense of rationality and of course we weren't we weren't crippled in those days by the prevalence of scientism which uh holds that science is the only way to truth at least people felt that history and philosophy were rational disciplines right and could be taken seriously sounds like you were encountering the undercurrent of naturalistic thinking or materialistic thinking as much in the religious community uh as in the as in the wider academic community that there was liberal theologians who were denying the possibility of miracles uh christian theologians who were denying the resurrection or jewish theologians denying the exodus or whatever that that was part of how you were encountering this underlying assumption that that the material world is all that really exists and nothing could exist that's right and the interesting thing is what prepared me to encounter it is that in the 1940s and 50s lewis saw this very clearly you mentioned his book on miracles it is a brilliant refutation of naturalism it's almost as if lewis thought was going to happen and the abolition of man was a book that influenced me greatly where he talks about this subtle way in which naturalistic worldview can be communicated even in an english textbook right and it was it was creeping its way into the fabric of the academy and having read those things even as a schoolboy i was certainly at a bit of an advantage when it came to entering the fray which i did from the word go actually you couldn't help yourself john it was built into your the fabric of your your being um so let's bring this up to date because what was a subtle undercurrent or a kind of tacit presupposition among most academics has become much more explicit and uh aggressive with the with the advent of the new atheism and with writers and scientists like uh richard dawkins lawrence krauss peter atkins several of whom of these folks you and i have encountered debated encountered had interesting conversations with um how have you tell us a little bit about your encounters with this more aggressive form of scientific atheism well for me it was almost a quantum leap i had several encounters at a much lower level but things changed about a dozen years ago when uh it was larry taunton of the fixed point foundation suggested to both dawkins and myself that they'd like to hear a bit of the oxford debate as he called it in alabama and that was it now of all places yeah it's a great place i i love being there but that encounter with dawkins which was really formidable almost overnight gave me a worldwide platform which i've managed to retain and the aggression which i discovered doesn't characterize all atheists i learned very rapidly to that they're still some of the more old-style atheists who take the view that they respect but disagree with what i believe whereas the aggressive stew style is we don't respect what you believe and we will mock it and ridicule it and all this kind of thing which to my mind is an academic that means you've lost the argument before you start right yeah that's interesting for our our viewers uh that debate is definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it it's online and there are bits of it in the film exactly film actually refers to several of those debates as part of the spicier encounters in that exchange yeah but for we haven't mentioned this but for people who don't know john's current position he is a professor of mathematics at oxford and he's a a fellow of the green templeton college in the philosophy of science so he's both a mathematician and a philosopher so his encounters with dawkins were in a way poetically just two oxford professors of diametrically opposed world views discussing uh the big question and especially the central question about the reality of god and what science can tell us about that from my point of view i thought john did very well in the debate but you know we we also very much appreciate i do these uh in some ways the new atheists are a different breed of scholar advancing a naturalistic or materialistic worldview but there's something to appreciate about them they have a they have a gift for clarity in defining issues uh dawkins has been brilliant at that from the very his very first writing uh his book the blind watchmaker uh began with the first page with the the the central issue in biology biology is a study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose and he defined the issue right there it's the appearance of design or real design in some ways the intelligent design movement owes its origin to the clarity with which dawkins defined that issue so i've always appreciated them in another way i mean they're aggressive and they come right at you when you're in discussion but um they they raise the central issues and they do it in a way that brings clarity as to what they're about and i thought you handled it beautifully in in in uh making the opposite case and so there's some of that in the film then your your encounters with oh yes there's some of that in the film because they that was something that interested kevin sorbo uh now by the way not as hercules but it is right you were right to say that he's shown great interest and understanding of the things and it was wonderful to get to know him because i immensely enjoyed that interaction and yes we talked about the debates and went to where they were held and all this kind of stuff well the film does a great job of weaving your life story uh as a scientist and as a mathematician as a person of faith into a fascinating narrative and then uh and then it allows it it unfolds in this conversation that you're having with kevin uh sorbo in oxford and and then in in eventually at the end of the film you you both go to to israel and the holy land um one of the things that i didn't know about you that i learned by watching the film was the number of visits that you made behind the iron curtain when it was still in iron curtain before the east east block was liberated and tell us a little bit about that what what uh what what motivated you to go there and and give those lectures and uh there was the film has footage of you in these kind of secret locations at the time it was pretty fascinating it was extremely fascinating and the origin of it i think so far as i can determine it is i've been interested all my life in people that hold diametrically opposite world views to myself now in in the west in england and the united states one met it in the academy but going to eastern europe opened up the possibility for me to see what this kind of worldview does in society what its cultural effect is and in the earlier days the 1970s i frequently went to the german democratic republic and of course that was hard atheism hard marxism and i mainly went there actually as a christian teacher to the churches to encourage them because they had very few intellectuals in the christian ministry for the simple reason that kids who would not swear allegiance publicly to the atheist six state at the age of 13 or 14 were not allowed to do any further studying didn't go to university right yeah no they couldn't so very few got to university and so that was an immense learning curve and a huge privilege to do that it was only after the wall fell that i started going to the former soviet union but in those early days i could see exactly the effect of atheism and what it taught me was that people like richard dawkins and so on have not got a clue not a clue otherwise they'd be much more careful to evaluate their position they are living really on the basis of the judeo-christian legacy in culture that founded the universities they worked in and certainly oxford and harvard and many other universities around the world and afford them the luxury of the freedom to speak about these things but the philosophy they were spouting and still are would actually close that down and you saw that actually happening in eastern europe and the former soviet union so this was an immense um opportunity for me though i had no idea of it at the time to be able to go out and face hitchens and dawkins and peter singer and all the rest of them with some kind of knowledge of what it's like to see this kind of stuff in practice that's excellent john you're mentioning uh you mentioned of the university as an institution i think is really important it literally means uni veritas right one truth and it was yes the university was a christian invention that uh was meant to explore the unity of truth under god our university uh harvard has the motto for christ in his church and was founded by a cambridge puritan john harvard who came to yes he went to my old college at cambridge emmanuel you were at emmanuel okay yes i was so i mean this is a it's a very when we think about going against the tide the people who are men and women of science who are also men and women of faith were not always going against this type science seemed to science started in a different milieu or intellectual context and i know you've often said that you're not ashamed to be a christian and a scientist because uh christianity gave you your your your discipline tell us a little bit more about that that's absolutely right and historians of science like yourself and philosophers of science seem to be in wide agreement with slight differences for nuances the fact that there's an intimate connection between the monotheistic worldview coming out of judaism and christianity and the rise of science and i couldn't put it any better than c.s lewis did when he said men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law of nature because they believed in the law giver in other words the genesis account gave them the rationale to do science they believed science could be done because it was the product of a rational mind the mind of god and they were made in the image of god and so they could therefore do it and that's one of my big objections to atheism is it given it gives really no grounds to trust our rationality i sometimes say these days steve christianity and christian theism and science ride perfectly well together but i'm concerned about atheism and science that doesn't seem to work together so very well although of course atheists can do brilliant science and i discovered quite recently actually that between 1900 and 2 000 over 65 of all nobel prize winners in science were believers in god god is not dead in in the scientific world but the trouble is the general public don't know that it's absolutely true and one one of the uh the key premises that i think gave rise to modern science and which atheism threatens is that the trust in the reliability of the human mind that's correct and that's very important yeah the whole idea that that was important to newton and boyle and kepler was the intelligibility of the world people understand it because it was made by the same rationality namely the mind of god who made our minds in such a way as to understand the order and the lawfulness and the design that had been put into the world and i think and einstein was clever enough to see there was a problem when he said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible but that's where christian theism biblical worldview gives a reason that atheism by definition cannot supply and therefore the explanatory power of christian theism is very much more powerful than the atheistic worldview supplies in in the film you you talk a bit about this but you also talk not just about the presuppositions that come from the theistic worldview that made science possible but also some of the discoveries of the last hundred years or so that are are in a way pointing back to god and uh this comes up very naturally in some of your several conversations with the on-air host kevin sorbo but why don't we talk about it might be good to talk about some of those discoveries you talk a bit in the film about the discovery that the universe had a beginning how did how does that affect our what are the worldview implications of that in your view well to go back a bit uh we mentioned i was in cambridge the 1960s and i remember so well when the world of cosmology and physics was discussing the possibility of there being a beginning which had been suggested by georges le metro who was a catholic priest actually in an earlier generation but now the evidence was piling in and one of the things that really struck me at the time was the editor of nature the most prestigious scientific periodical in the world resisted this as one of the leaders of the united kingdom scientific establishment and he said something like this he said we we can't afford to go down this road off a beginning because it will give too much leverage to people who believe in a creator and the irony of that is so obvious one of the most brilliant discoveries of the 20th century um which led to the standard model of the hot big bang was resisted because it seemed to parallel scripture and i therefore failed and dawkins brought this up against me he said what's the big deal i mean either there was a beginning or there's not and if you're guessing it's 50 50. but i said you know it wasn't decided by guesswork it was decided by brilliant science and the conclusion was resisted and to people that say look anything that comes from the biblical worldview is useless from a scientific perspective i say two things one yes the bible is technically speaking pre-modern science it is not a textbook of science but it talks about the same universe that scientists study and for centuries while people were still buying into aristotle's steady-state universe that had no beginning the bible was saying it had a beginning right after the beginning of the 20th century in fact there was that that's absolutely up to 1960s they had no evidence and i say that is a hugely important fact and i dared to say at a conference where i can't really tell you where it was or who was there that some physicists of great fame got very cross with me and interrupted a little talk i gave they said professor lennox please tell us you were joking when you said the bible had something to say to us in the 21st century and i said i wasn't joking in fact they said of course i agree with you the bible is pre-modern scientific but it's talking about the universe and incidentally if the scientific fraternity the intellectual fraternity had taken its worldview more seriously than it did it might have looked for evidence of a beginning earlier than it did because on the basis of the worldview you could make a prediction just as on the basis of the aristotelian worldview the prediction what was made is the universe was eternal and there was a bit of silence after that they hadn't quite thought of this so therefore i feel this is hugely important as a fact which at least with the modern state of science there is a convergence of course we know that science changes but that's not the only issue it raises because if there was a beginning and i mean a beginning to whatever you think the whole thing is a universe or a multiverse and so on there's a finite point backwards and energy right yes there's a finiteness backwards in time it raises the causal question you count absolutely yeah and if if matter itself is part of what comes into existence you can't offer a materialistic cause for the origin of the universe because that's that is so obvious that i know many professors who cannot see it yes yes i do know i know a few myself john but i'm fascinated just by the way your own story intersects some of these great discoveries because of course hawking was in his uh phd years when you were an undergraduate correct he was writing his thesis on black hole physics and he had that brilliant chapter chapter four in his thesis about the singularity theorem yeah and that was uh the in a sense the uh the mathematical uh proof of a beginning that a development within theoretical physics that converge with all that observational evidence from astronomy to to really cinch the the point that the universe must have must have begun and that happened in cambridge when when you were there it's kind of it did indeed it didn't date and i remember stephen hawking i never met him but i remember him walking around with the limp that indicated sadly the onset of of his disease well the other the other extraordinary discovery that was made in cambridge uh was actually there were two and you you discussed them both in the in the film but the was the discovery of the fine-tuning sir fred hoyle the great astrophysicist spent a good deal of time in cambridge and he was one of the first physicists to realize how delicately balanced the universe was to allow for the possibility of life all these different parameters that were just right and i wonder if you uh ever encountered hoyle or or if you could inject more general terms just tell us about the fine-tuning of of the physical parameters that make life possible and what that has to tell us about about the possibility of god the fine-tuning of the universe is hard science and in the last session must be really 100 years now people realize that so many of the fundamental constants and fundamental parameters of nature have to be accurate to an astonishing degree of precision in order to have carbon-based life and sir fred hoyle he was interested in carbon itself how do you get so much carbon and he predicted that there would have to be a certain resonance we didn't go into what that exactly is and really i i think but maybe i'm biased he should have got the nobel prize when that resonance was discovered and he said that nothing had shaken his atheism so much as discovering that as he put it it seemed as if a super intellect had monkeyed with physics and he had that sense a profound sense of the whole thing was did he call it a fix now i did meet him i met him later because when i was in the university of wales one of my colleagues was professor white graham right yeah yeah who was the astrophysicist or astrobiologist as he calls himself these days and he and hoyle were very friendly and hoyle came down to cardiff just after i had met wickrama's thing and wake rama singh had been off to the united states where he'd taken part in the creation trial i think you might have been part of that one too and he said to me it's a pity the people they're so nice he said the christians that i met but they're so naive that they take the bible seriously you see and i said well chandra so do i and he looked at me with horror and he said you're not one of them are you well i said i don't know and he threw me the chalk and never forget it he said prove it to me so i went to the blackboard and i wrote on his blackboard and god said let there be light and he laughed up roarlessly yes he said you are one of them this is absolutely naive do you think god is a voice box of lungs like we've got well chandra i'll spell it out a bit more for you so underneath i wrote in the beginning was the word and the word was with god the word was god all things came to be through him he said what does that mean well i said word that conveys ideas of command intelligibility information and he stopped he said did you say information i said yes of course he said you're not telling me are you that the bible contains the idea of information well i said you tell me what does it look like you see and he said does fred holt know about this and i said i have a notion well he said listen the next time he comes down i'll invite you to meet him and we'll tell him so i said fine well hoyle came down and it was so far as i recall it was a famous occasion where he stood up and said that he'd done the calculations uh mathematically and it was obvious to him and it was an easy calculation i have his notes actually here in the form he wrote about that evolution could never have produced anything on earth because there just wasn't enough time so he dropped the bombshell life came from outer space and i've never seen so there were hundreds of people there of course the whole academic uh cohort in cardiff there was a collective drawing of breath at all the rest of it so i later met hoyle with chandra and chandra told him and he said what are you saying i'm saying that one of the few but very important things that are said about creation is that it was a speech act and god said this is summarized at the beginning of john's gospel and it's telling us that this is not a mass energy-based universe as atheists claim it's a word-based universe which is the exact opposite so that the biblical worldview is that word is primary mind is primary mass energy or derivative the atheist worldview is the opposite oh he said the idea of information i thought that only went back to shakespeare remember this very well and i said well yeah it actually goes back uh 20 centuries to the new testament unfortunately i never got the chance to follow it up with him later yes or or psalm 19 in the old you know well sure yes right and poor fourth speech uh i i if you permit me i had just an i had a little encounter with hoyle myself my as a a first-year graduate student oh really he came to lecture on his uh ideas about panspermia and uh after we were done or after he was done i came alongside him and we were walking to one of the uh the common rooms for a post uh a post talk uh reception and i started to ask him about his his view of the origin of life and the information bearing properties of dna and i asked if he thought that that information in the dna molecule might be providing evidence of a designing mind and when i said that he looked both ways and said he he kind of went and then he said walk with me and then he just began to jabber and he was very intrigued with that idea and of course i was in the early stages of formulating my thoughts about intelligent design and what information implied so it was really interesting he was a very interesting figure but that kind of brings us in your whole discussion of the word the primacy of the word both in the universe and in life to the third big cambridge discovery uh this one happened a little before your time but it was still the the afterglow of that was still i'm sure very important in the 60s with the molecular biological revolution but don't share these before you you came up to university watson of course elucidated the structure of the dna molecule in 57 puts forward the famed sequence hypothesis that that argues that the the dna contains information in a digital form and you you in the film talk quite a lot about the importance of information to uh this this deep worldview question of materialism or theism which makes more sense and i wonder if you could talk more about that from the standpoint of the the reality of information in a biological context what the step back from that you see as a mathematician and some kind of a scientist what you mentioned about the rational intelligibility of the universe is is central you cannot do science without believing that and so science doesn't give you a rational justification except for a pragmatic one you've got to believe it before you start the theistic judeo-christian worldview gives you a rational basis for believing that as the pioneers of science uh thought now if you carry that a little bit further we're saying that we can describe at least in part some of the phenomena in the universe by using a highly compressed language mathematics it's words very carefully defined and precise words now to back that up now within the universe not within its description but within its very biological nature we find two huge surprise when it was discovered that the longest word of any kind is actually the human genome in other words here we have a chemical word and four chemical bases and it's three and a half billion roughly letters long and i came across this of course rdd clarke pointed it out and its significance and i used to go around and visit him in cambridge and talk to him about this and i have never the slightest doubt that this is one of the most powerful evidences of a designing intelligence and the more i've studied it even though i'm not a biologist the more powerful the evidence for that grows because of course people have attempted now for a very long time because it was also in the 1950s that they thought they'd discovered how life originated if you remember the miller uri experiment where they passed a simulated lightning discharge through a cocktail of what they thought were the chemicals in the primeval atmosphere they produced a few amino acids and so on but that's 70 years ago and origin of life research as you know better than i do has not progressed to whit except to demonstrate that the difficulties are infinitely greater than miller and yuri ever imagined so i think this is a significant it's quite an irony isn't it john that that watson and crick make their discovery in april of 1953 the same year as the miller uri experiment so you have this great optimism about explaining the origin of life in the very year that the discoveries made that would would ultimately produce an impasse in that field because no one's been able to explain the origin of the information that's that's stored in the dna molecule that's right and my summary of the whole thing you've written a book with a superb title that i would encourage everybody to read called the signature in the cell that i would expect from my reading of the biblical material that god has left a stamp on the universe i mentioned earlier the dignity the value that the fact that humans are made in the image of god give to humans but scripture goes further it says that there's evidence of god's existence and his power in the things that are made yes and we perceive them and the interesting thing is you quoted the blind watchmaker that biology is the study of things that give the appearance of being designed you just have to change that very slightly they give that appearance that is our perception because that is the truth they have been designed absolutely uh what do you make of of the career of francis crick uh he's he makes this extraordinary discovery it's it's a discovery for the ages and he goes further than watson they elucidate together the structure of the dna molecule but crick is the first to realize that dna is literally storing information in a digital form this is his sequence hypothesis he suggests the nucleotide bases are functioning like alphabetic characters or digital characters in the machine code and yet uh he maintains a staunch atheism and materialism throughout his career he's a code breaker in world war ii he breaks the ultimate code of life and yet doesn't seem to be able to see the significance that you and i see in it what what what do you make of that it's very hard to second-guess what thoughts go on one of the things that i believe crick said in early days was that he attacked the problem of the nature of dna to prove there was no god which is absolutely ironic because what he discovered is very powerful evidence that there is a designing intelligence i just do not know i did have an encounter with watson which was memorable because he gave a talk and we were walking down the stairs in my college and i quoted crick to him and i said professor watson francis crick once said that the origin of life was like a miracle what do you think he was quite angry and he said it happened and he turned away and that was the end of the conversation yeah well it's as if i'd hit a sore point why it's strange in this world that when you raise the question of intelligent origin or god people somehow get embarrassed it's a bit like thomas nagel although he's very different he he writes quite candidly he doesn't want there to be a god well of course that's not a scientific position so i don't know how to answer your question but what i do know is that when crick tried to explain on atheistic foundations the nature of human consciousness he really began to talk nonsense he wrote a book called the astonishing hypothesis that you and your thoughts and were simply um a bundle of billions and billions of atoms and neurons and synapses that's how he started the book and then in the middle of the book he said you are essentially that well of course we know that we're composed of billions of atoms but to say that we're only that well if that were true we'd never know it as many people have pointed out to not only theists but many philosophers have pointed out that we'd never know it so i think he loses the plot when it comes to philosophy now this is an important thing and i'm sure that you can say a lot more about it than i can einstein once said something that lives with me and is a warning to me the the scientist is a poor philosopher and you can see that in the writings of people like dawkins and hawking they haven't a clue about philosophy and you know i'm reminded that lord reece who's our astronomer royal was asked what he thought of hawking's views on theology and philosophy well he said i know stephen hawking very well and of course he's a brilliant cosmologist mathematician and physicist no question but he said he knows very little philosophy and no theology and i wouldn't take seriously anything he said about that and we come up against steve what i see as power play and authority play that is if i am a distinguished scientist then i can speak on any topic in the world with authority that is not true and i'm constantly aware of that because here i am talking to you i'm a pure mathematician i'm going outside my field now that's risky business it's risky for dawkins it's risky for me so what do we do and i find the first thing to do is check with the experts in the field and that's where i have deep criticism of people like richard dawkins who will quote as evidence of historical matters a retired professor of german and no ancient historian i mean that is just absurd and and so it's very important that we do our homework and be modest about our conclusions but check with the experts in the fields that we're delving into well in a point that you've made very cogently a number of times is that very often these debates that are alleged to be uh scientists critiquing religionists or something are really or scientists who might critique uh a scientist such as yourself who has faith your opposite numbers will position themselves as making a scientific critique of you but actually what's in place are competing world views that's right and the important thing here you say scientists like me who have faith but we need to add my faith is in god and they are people of faith there there's a huge myth around in the world and this is what they build on that you and i were people of faith and faith is believing where there's no evidence so we're not worth talking to i want to shout from the house tops that every single person is a person of faith they have a worldview they believe in and so when i talk about faith i try to i don't always succeed to say faith in god i've also got faith in the scientific method and faith is something that operates in every area of life it's a question point john that there's no there's no worldview neutrality here everyone has a worldview and you see this in the writings of people like hawking and krauss and dawkins they will disparage philosophy and at the same time make an argument for a very naive materialistic philosophy for which there's virtually no evidence and even worse than that statement stephen hawking's book the grand design starts on about page four by saying philosophy is dead and the rest of the book is an attempted philosophy of science well yes i mean that's it that's very important just absurd but you're right terrific physicist fantastic cosmologist really bad philosopher of science and uh yes yeah and yet he his public pronouncements are mainly in the mode of of of philosophical statements in defense of a materialistic worldview and what i find fascinating and we maybe should come back for this is we've just been talking about these three big discoveries the universe had a beginning the universe has been finely tuned from the very beginning for the possibility of life and then there have been these big infusions of information into our biosphere making new forms of life possible when i add those three things up i think that they they seem to have profoundly they certainly point to a designing intelligence but when you think about the fine-tuning being present from the very beginning of the universe it looks to me like the best explanation is i find is an intelligence of a transcendent kind when absolutely and so there's actually not only not only has christianity and judaism the the the monotheistic um worldview brought presuppositions to science that have made science possible but now we're finding powerful evidence within the natural world that's pointing to god through the reality of god and so that's i think it's on those terms that i'd like to have this debate with our our new atheist interlocutors going forward because they've assumed that there can't be any evidence and then they they proceed to uh well that's a that's a very cheap anti-intellectual cop out and you made a point a few moments ago that's worth picking up on the central issue is not science versus god the central issue is the collision of two diametrically opposed worldviews atheism and theism and there are scientists on both sides of that right and so the real question to be asked is where does science point if anywhere does it point as dawkins claims towards atheism or does it point towards a transcendent intelligence as i would strongly claim and there is where the debate is and people who think it's science versus god i say to them look this cannot be so for a very obvious reason and the obvious reason is that if you go to the top level of science let's stick with physics and the nobel prize you've got peter higgs who won the nobel prize a few years ago who's an atheist one of the more pleasant atheists actually and then you you've got the american physicist whose name escapes me just at the moment he's still alive the low temperature physicist who won the nobel prize who is a christian now the fact that you've got those two people their science doesn't differentiate between them they both won the biggest prize that you can win what the difference between them consists in their world view and unless we can see and i think it's so important to get across the public that this is the world view discussion and we're bringing in evidence on which world view you should believe and though it's a nonsense about which worldview provides a better overall interpretation yes explanatory power right the better yes exactly explain it it's an issue of explanatory power and there i think theism really has a decisive advantage that's the case i'm making in a new book and it's the it's beautifully made in the film this comes out well i'm glad to hear that well you do it so conversationally it kind of goes down like butter but i think uh it it allows you you've opened up a window to this great big and important question in the film is god real or imaginary as our friend professor philip johnson used to say was the most important question is god real or imaginary but then you talk about the different evidences that allow you to adjudicate that question to assess it and uh and engage in that worldview debate but not a worldview debate that's uh conducted purely in the realm of abstract philosophy but rather the philosophy intersecting with the evidence which was what makes the films correct yes absolutely john um just for the audience how did you uh get involved in a film project like this is this isn't your usual um well it it actually the idea the idea came from a physicist uh steve huff of the pensmore foundation and he had read one of my books and looked me up in oxford i got this phone call i didn't know who he was and we sat down and i found that he would have been very interested in seeking for ways to explain to the public the deficiencies and inadequacies and naturalism and we became friends and he ran several conferences and you took part in some of them for example in westminster theological seminary but i think what partly chris crystallized it was there was a film made with kevin sorbo in the role of an atheist professor called god's not dead and i saw this film and to my utter amazement it explicitly used some of my arguments they were quoting you they were quoting me in some detail so sorbo was faced by his student called wheaton interestingly with arguments that came from me and of course i was absolutely astounded because i'd not heard of this before and that led to the idea uh slowly it took quite a while of making some kind of a film and eventually about my life and eventually the notion of involving kevin sorbo so we met together and we got on very well and and the rest is is history so they made it no more they allowed you to make your own arguments for yourself then that that's exactly right the idea was to try and get the thing out in an interesting way that's got a bit of human interest as well and so that that is what has happened and of course we didn't restrict it to the science god discussion because there comes a point a turning point in the film where kevin said to me look you know all this stuff is is good and but you actually are christian how do you justify the step from theism to christianity which is a very important question so i turn around and say to him look the best way to deal with that is to go to where it all started and so the rest of the book takes place in israel where we're dealing with the much more history and experience specific claims that christianity makes so it's an interesting kind of blend i don't know whether it's been attempted before uh people tell me at times absolutely new genres as best i can tell it's a part travelogue part intellectual autobiography part uh science documentary it it fuses all these three things beautifully and um and you guys are much to be commended it's really good i'm going to just give a little plug for our audience uh with some information about how to how to uh get more information about the film there's a wonderful website againstthetide.movie.com.movie and you can also follow our coverage of the film as it gets closer to release on evolution news.org john i think you you uh you've just had a fascinating career and your voice is so important in this larger dialogue within our culture about what science can tell us about uh the reality of god and we're just very proud to to be able to give your your film a bit of a plug and the film succeeds beautifully and what you all set out to do so thanks for joining us today in the in for this interview and we'll be sharing it with our audience and uh we hope we can get a lot of people to to go to the theater when does it release is it i believe on november the 19th but it's a one-night cinema release i don't think it's it's there for any longer that you'd have to check on the website right november the 19th is the debate and trying to encourage people to go and see it and all this kind of thing but thank you very much for inviting me on as usual it's been with you a fascinating conversation and i could see we could keep going for a while i have a lot more to discuss i'm sure there will be another time but in the meantime thank you very much for using your wonderful platform to to support this well thanks for all you're doing john and we'll we'll look forward to this release now in just a little over a month so again congratulations goodbye okay goodbye nice to talk today yeah why there is something rather than nothing is a huge question today belief in god does not really help us religion teaches us to be satisfied with not really understanding i believe the exact opposite god far from being a delusion is real religion is a fiction that just is never challenged i believe that the public need to hear that there is another side and that's why i'm here too to have you help me to understand and follow the evidence i do argue that there is evidence for the existence of an intelligent god behind the universe i'm convinced of it not simply as a christian but as a believing scientist

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 113,374

Rating: 4.9097066 out of 5

Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, evolution, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, human origins, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Charles Darwin, darwin's doubt, Stephen Meyer, Evolution News & Views, John West, signature in the cell, John Lennox, atheism, debating atheism, against the tide, science and religion, scientific materialism, evidence for design, finding god, richard dawkins, christopher hitchens, god's not dead, kevin sorbo, new atheists

Id: zD50_1kicw4

Length: 64min 11sec (3851 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020