The Loud Absence: Where is God in Suffering? | John Lennox at Columbia on 9/11

welcome to the Veritas Forum engaging University students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of [Applause] life thank you very much for that welcome I feel looking around me that I've arrived in Athens and that makes me feel very comfortable because of the Greeks and their fascination with science you've asked me to speak to you on the question that I find the hardest of all each one of us whatever his or her worldview finds the problem of pain and suffering and evil an extremely difficult one and I do not want you to think at the outset that I feel that I've got a set of simplistic answers what I wish to share with you are ways in which I approach this question that I have found increasingly helpful in my life you will realize of course that the problem of suffering and evil has two sides cancer looks like one thing Through The Eyes of the oncologist it looks very different Through The Eyes of the young woman of 25 who's just been told that she has a few months to live there is an intellectual side to the question because our minds want reason and meaning there is also a pastoral side to the question because many of us May well be hurting and we have questions that go beyond our human resource to cope with so I'm going to try to do what is really impossible and difficult tonight is to combine both of those sides and you will forgive me if I don't go into much detail but I hope it will begin to open Avenues of thought and indeed hope for some of you now yesterday I visited the 911 Memorial Garden I slowly went round the pools read some of the 3,000 names beautifully engraved in [Music] bronze around that large waterfall which Cascades in a square form into an abyss and then it moves into the center it tumbles into an abyss and you cannot see where it goes and it evoked in my mind powerful symbolism my mind flashed back to 11 years ago as I watched an utter horror from my position in Germany at the time as the towers fell into the ground and that stream of dust and debris and twisted steel and Humanity poured into the Earth never to return from it and 911 is seared into all the memories of those old enough at the time to understand what was happening a horrific callous evil Act that brought grief and still brings it to thousands of families dis deprived thousands of their Partners their fathers their mothers their children their relatives their friends their colleagues and their neighbors it led to acts of memorable heroism who will ever forget the selfless actions of the New York firefighters and police it was an attack upon a nation and its sheer magnitude has made it difficult to Pro says for many people especially maybe some of you who do not really remember it 911 raises in an acute form the problem of evil and I have received a number of questions as you've heard from Colombia students and the most prominent among them is the word why and some say 911 shows if we needed to be shown that there is no God but I did something else today I switched on the television channel and watched for several hours and listen to the names of the people being read out listen to relatives describe their love for their lost husband or wife or girlfriend or colleague and I was struck very struck by the many clear assertions of faith in in God and his love and the hope that it gave to those left behind in fact what was particularly moving was that the people did not speak about their relatives and friends as if they no longer existed they spoke not about them but they spoke to them I love you Dad that went to my heart as a dad what must it be like to gaze at those holes in the ground and realize that your son was buried there and you will never see him again but what was even more striking in this was that I didn't hear a single tinge of atheism from those who were immediately involved in suffering bement now it may be that 911 has been eclipsed for many of you by more immediate problems than the suffering caused by terrorism in a crowd like this there will be many who are suffering their own private horror whether it's the horror inflicted On You by somebody else or whether it's disease or illness or some natural catastrophe that fills your entire Horizon I can remember the day my brother was blown up by a terrorist bomb and nearly lost his life I haven't had that experience myself but I've been near to it and those things are so real because in the end the suffering that we are most concerned with is our suffering and our pain and it gets more remote as it fades into the past and is the suffering and pain of others so this is what we call the problem of evil and suffering and we all face it and I'm a scientist and I like to analyze things and take them to pieces and understand how they work and there's been some very interesting work in Psychiatry and psychology recently by Ian mcgilchrist arguing how the two sides of the human brain work now this has been in a sense for years common knowledge that the left side of the brain is concerned with analysis concerned with reducing things concerned with explanation concerned with science but migil Chris's thesis is this that human beings are so made from the perspective of science that they have two haves to their brain and what we've done since the 17th century is to neglect the right side of the brain which is concerned not with breaking down and reducing and analyzing but concerned with integrating and finding meaning and discovering a big picture into which life fits and that fascinates me because it's coming from a scientific discipline it's saying that's the way we humans are and so we are in Peril if we simply concentrate on the side of scientific analysis and that's why tonight ladies and gentlemen I'm not going to be speaking in terms so much of scientific and forensic analysis I will to address the right Bane question why how can we fit this into a world viiew that makes sense but above all gives us some kind of hope and perspective now suffering comes to us from two logically distinct sources the first is the moral evil for which men and women are themselves responsible like 911 the second is the kind of suff suffering that doesn't come from human beings natural disasters earthquakes tsunamis and cancer and this is often called natural evil so there are those two kinds are often entwined and they very much belong together in our consideration at the intellectual level the most famous response to suffering comes from David Hume the philosopher epicurus's questions are yet unanswered he writes is he God willing to prevent evil but not able then is he impotent is he able but not willing then is he malevolent is he both able and willing when then this evil I will never forget sitting talking to two Jewish acquaintances and we started talking about God and before I'd gone very far they said look just stop a minute we don't believe in God and there's no point in talking about God to us and I said why and they said we don't want to tell you because you seem a nice Chap and we don't want to offend you well I said I may or may not be a nice CH but if my faith cannot meet objections and difficulties it's not worth believing it in why don't you believe in God and eventually they told me they said they read out loud together and they were reading a book by a famous Nobel prizewinning literature a a bashit singer who wrote a book called the slave and in it he described how some women and children were buried alive in a Russian PG round and I think it's in the book it says I can forgive God anything but not that and they said at that moment the light went out there was no God and we haven't believed in him since I've stood in aits many times ladies and gentlemen and I'm not ashamed to tell you I have wept every time as I saw the horror of the Holocaust and what it left now to many people when they see 911 when they see the Holocaust when they see their own personal suffering they say well there isn't any God and that's it that's the finish and it seems to them that they've got rid of the problem but does atheism get rid of the problem let's just think about that for a moment I was in New York just three weeks ago to appear on the Charlie Rose show of which some of you may have heard it will be heard next week I think with Richard Dawkins the world's most famous atheist whom I've debated three times before now here is his left brained analysis of the question of suffering and evil in a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt other people are going to get lucky and you won't find any Rhyme or Reason in it nor any justice the universe has exactly those properties we should expect if there is at the bottom no design no purpose no evil and no good Nothing But Blind pitiless indifference DNA neither knows nor cares DNA just is and we dance to its music were the suicide bombers of 911 were the architects of The Killing Fields of Cambodia and in Rwanda simply dancing to the music of their DNA is that all there is to the massacres of Stalin Hitler Mau and pulpot and if you felt like cutting babies to pieces for fun would that simply be dancing to your DNA if Dawkins is Right ladies and gentlemen then evil and good do not exist which strikes me as being very odd for a man who will condemn 91 and everything else as being evil and quite rightly so but he himself appears to believe that there is no such thing this is one extreme atheistic response to the problem it's essentially to deny that there's any good or any evil we are simply robots preprogramed to follow our genetic uh inclinations but doens like the rest of us is outraged by evil in spite of his philosophy but outrage which we often rightly feel presupposes that there exists a standard of good that is objectively real and independent of us so that we expect others to agree with us in condemning things like 911 but if all that exists is mass energy if there is no Transcendence and no God how can there be such a standard of good and if there is no moral evil or good in any case the concept of morality disappears and moral outrage is absurd many leading thinkers agree with this char Taylor the leading thinker about secularism says the Modern Age more or less repudiating the idea of a Divine lawgiver has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of right and wrong not noticing that in casting God aside they have abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well the irony to my mind is the very morality that atheists use to condemn 911 is in the Bible itself and Thomas Jefferson recognized this God who gave us life gave us Liberty he said and can the Liberties of a Nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis a conviction in the minds of the people that these Liberties are the gift of God I would like to suggest to you if for whatever reason we lose faith in God our future is Bleak because we will not be able to defend the freedoms we value on the basis of the moral relativism that remains when we lose our anchor in God no secular morality was able to withstand Stalin Hitler or mauo and no secular morality will withstand secularism or religious fanaticism today Friedrich nich saw more clearly than anybody else the consequences of abandoning traditional biblical morality that is at heart of our western civilization and on which all our human rights conceptions and legislations are based nature predicted that the death of God would lead to a darwinian imperative of expressing the will to power the strong must eliminate the weak the biblical prohibition Thou shalt not kill he wrote is a piece of naivity life itself recognizes no solidarity no equal right between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism one must excise the latter or the whole will perish nature despised Christian morality as that of slaves and pointed out the death of God would mean the death of compassion kindness and forgiveness when one gives up Christian belief he wrote One deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality Christian morality is a command its origin is Transcendental it possesses truth only God is truth it stands or folds with the belief in God and then he asked the key question why morality at all when life nature history are non-moral and yet there is morality absolute standards exist I dare say and hope that all of us agree that torturing infants is wrong and The prominent atheist philosopher JL Macky said ethics constitute so oddd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have Arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all powerful God to create them if then there are such moral values they make listen to this now this is an atheist philosopher if moral values exist they make the existence of God more probable than it would have been without them thus we have after all a defensible argument from the existence of morality to the existence of God so the situation looks to me like this we all find ourselves to be moral beings we're outraged by 911 we're outraged by things that happen to us and to our friends the existence of such objective standards is consistent with the existence of God and very difficult to explain without him but the existence of God gives rise to the problem of evil and some of you might want to break and say but look isn't it obvious that God's part of the problem not the solution I hear from your accent that you're from Northern Ireland doesn't Northern Ireland give the lie to any possibility of God helping us in this problem look at you fighting in the name of God against each other I admit I do come from Northern Ireland what do I say to the fact that professing Christians in my own country have got involved in terrorism so that even my own brother was nearly blown into eternity do you know what I say about it ladies and gentlemen I am completely ashamed of it utterly ashamed that the name of Jesus Christ has ever been associated with violence but I want to tell you why I'm ashamed of it because because people that take up weapons to follow Jesus Christ are not obeying him they're disobeying him he explicitly told his followers not to fight and he told pilate the Roman Governor when he was put on trial for what it may interest you to know if you don't know the history that Jesus was tried for fermenting political terrorism and when pilate discovered and listened to Jesus say my kingdom is not of this world of otherwise my servants would have been fighting pilate realized that he was innocent what was his kingdom about it wasn't about fighting to this end I was born he said and to this end I came into the world to Bear witness to the truth and pilate then knew that there was no danger political or violence Wise from this man because ladies and gentlemen it must be obvious to you that the one thing you cannot do by violence is to impose truth especially if that truth conveys the way in P people can be forgiven and at peace with God and enjoy a very close and intimate relationship with God now of course other religions must speak for themselves in this matter of violence I come from Ireland I am a Christian so I face it from this perspective but there is another side to this ladies and gentlemen you've all heard the song that people like to sing and Dawkins quotes it by John lenon imagine a world with no Taliban imagine a world with no religion with no Northern Ireland I don't know how people can imagine a world without Northern Ireland but there we are imagine that world and I agree with a lot of its sentiments but I noticed that what Dawkins does not say is imagine a world without Stalin imagine a world without Hitler imagine a world without Paul pot the leaders of three militantly atheistic regimes there is no excuse for one liter of blood that flowed in the name of religion in history but the millions of liters of blood that have flowed in the name of secularist atheist ideologies beggar description Alexander Solja niton stood in this country years ago and I'll never forget what he said he said if you asked me what was it that led to SI 60 million of my fellow citizens dying he said the answer is this we have forgotten God and many a Russian because I spent a lot of time there has said to me do you know Professor Lennox we thought that we could get rid of God and preserve a value for human beings we found we couldn't and so in this contemporary secular society we need to think about these things but it's just at this point that atheism that worldview seems to me to face another great difficulty the problem of Justice we all feel that we should get justice but the fact is not everybody does indeed for over the centuries probably most people have never got Justice and in The Atheist worldview death is the end so they will never get Justice the promised Utopia has never come and that is one of the factors to put into the equation how can you possibly believe in Justice in the light of the fact that the vast majority of people will never get Justice and of course the terrorists get away with it when Hitler sees he's against a wall he blows his brains out and since there is no justice there is no judgment there is no assessment because death ends everything he's got away with it that is a moral affront to our being and our moral sense so what I want to say to you tonight is this the biblical monotheism shared at this level by the three great monotheistic religions says the exact opposite it says yes there are absolute values there is a moral law but there is a law Giver God is behind the law and he will be his Vindicator because there will will be a final judgment when perfect Justice will be done now this is not the justice of an Angry God I'm amazed that I meet so many people that think that God is angry listen God created you with all your wonderful Gifts of artistry he painted the universe the only thing that gets God angry is the thing that destroys life let's call it by its name it's sin but God painted all the colors we've never invented a new one and we need to get away from this picture it's precisely because God is a god of love who loves the creatures he created that in the end he must do justice that we may see that Justice is being done and that it is not a mockery and that our intuitions and consciences actually backed up by something real now many people reject the notion of judgment I don't like a god like that they say to me but then they protest at moral evil and say why doesn't God stop that that's very interesting why doesn't he stop that so long as he doesn't intervene in my life but you know none of us can realistically discuss this problem without realizing that we're not just Spectators of a phenomenon extraneous to ourselves GK Cheston the famous novelist was once asked to reply to the London Times to answer the question what is wrong with the world and his famous reply was the shortest letter in history dear sir I am Yours Faithfully GK chesteron he was honestly prepared to say openly what we all know in our heart there's evil in each one of us we're part of the problem and once we grasp this fact a more realistic formulation with B I think and do evil if then there is a God why does he tolerate me now the questions come thick and fast why does God allow suffering if there is a God surely if it's all powerful he could have created us without the capacity for moral evil well of course he could God could have made beings without the capacity for moral evil in fact there are H us lot of them they're animals we can create beings that don't do evil they're robots but they're not human beings I'm glad I do not have a robotic wife if I went home and pressed the screen and it came up on my wife's you know in front here um the screen came up with uh press uh number one for kiss I press number one and I get a kiss well that would not be meaningful would it but she wouldn't sin she'd never do anything wrong but she couldn't love me because you see ladies and gentlemen this capacity to do evil is the flip side of the capacity to do good and that is associated with the capacity to love to say yes or no It's associated with one of the most magnificent things about us and that is the fact we possess to a certain degree freedom of Will and choice and a free will is real as I believe it is and most of us do the last thing we like to be told is you did that because you're an Irishman or whatever it is you're a woman you're a man no we like to think we did it because we chose to do it in other words our dignity our Humanity consists in that succession of choices that we have made and still make that makes us us this is to my mind a magnificent gift of God but it has correlatives as CS Lewis pointed out if God created the world so that a beam of wood remains solid when I used it to build a house and bent in two when I used it to hit you it would in in the end render Choice impossible we would be forced into an automatic universe evil thoughts he say would be impossible for the cereal matter of our brain would refuse to carry them it would only convey good thoughts and so on so God took a risk let's face it God took a risk in creating such beings I've got three children I took a risk in bringing them into the world didn't I I remember holding the first child and thinking you know this child could grow up to love me or say no to me I brought it into the world why did I take the risk aren't you glad somebody brought you into the world now your experience of Parental love may be very different but you know it is an amazing thing that even though we know as parents there's a possibility of it going wrong we still open ourselves up to love we do that in all of our relationships but you say look that argument of Free Will doesn't apply to natural disasters I arrived in New Zealand 2 days after the earthquake and if you want to see what I said the many TV and radio interviews you can Google my name in New Zealand under the word earthquake and you will find out but I just want to say this it's a very strange situation because tectonic plates that are responsible for earthquakes are essential to life if there were no tectonic plates you you would not be alive because there wouldn't be enough carbon dioxide and a lot of various processes that happen in the world would not occur so on the one hand they're necessary for life but on the other hand they destroy life if we build houses above them earthquakes are big things but they're little earthquakes four years ago I had an earthquake in my heart I was given a few minutes to live that concentrates your mind I said goodbye to my wife I thought I'd never see it her again when the operating theater closed and 40 minutes later the surgeon said well I don't understand it you should be dead but you're not you can go home tomorrow and I'm here and you say well you're a Christian you thank God for that yes I do but listen in the very same year my 22-year-old niece had an earthquake in her brain and it killed her her young husband watched her die and I had to come and watch her die and talk to them all very well isn't it for me to say yes God help you but have I nothing to say to my sister then I better keep quiet hadn't I and that seems to me and forgive me for being personal but these things are personal and real they give rise to questions like this could God have made electricity that wasn't dangerous could he have made fire that didn't burn could he have made a world without tectonic plates without predation without bacteria could God should God would he could he possibly should he and we can go on forever and we have done haven't we what do I do with questions like that I have no Ultimate answers so I think of another question and the other question is this whatever we go to along arguments like that the fact is we live in a mixed world we live in a world where we see wonderful flashes of good and kindness and friendship and compassion even in the horror of a 911 but we see other things that go beyond they're so excessive by the time I'm finished this lecture how many thousand children would have died from preventable diseases but they had no medicines because they couldn't afford it and that gives us a sense of proportion so my question to you and I'm coming to the end of my talk ladies and gentlemen is this we can argue from now for years on what a good God could should would might have done but there's another question we can ask granted the universe is like this there is good there is evil there is pain there is beauty there is hatred there is Love Is there any evidence anywhere in the midst of it all that there is is a God who can be trusted with it has God made provision big enough to cope with the fact that humans have gone their own way I spoke to you that there's going to be a judgment I'm going to have to face that judgment it's not something we like to talk about but that's because we don't see it in its true context who's going to be the judge now here I must speak as a Christian one of the opportunities is in universities to listen to other world views please do but I'm going to try to explain to you how Christianity copes with this at least it's worth listening to because atheism is no way out you may think it's right or it's wrong but at least listen to it and assess it the heart of Christianity is a cross and if Jesus is who he claimed to be God become human and now that goes way beyond our thinking but I've written a great deal about those questions elsewhere but just come to this Central thing just imagine with me if you can for a moment the claim is that God suffered that's spectacular because do you know what it tells me it tells me that God has not remained distant from Human suffering but has himself become part of it I find that a little window that begins to open on a whole world of possibilities for meaning in my little life because the claim goes on to suggest that he suffered for me who've made a mess of my life who've got all these hurts and these pains so sometimes as some of our students sadly do we commit suicide because it becomes too much there's no way out there's no source of meaning listen ladies and gentlemen think this through there is a source of deep and satisfying meaning because the death of Christ was not the end he rose from the dead I believe that is a sign scientist miracles of this kind do not violate the laws of nature because Jesus did not rise by natural processes occurring in his tomb five minutes before it occurred he was RA raised by the very power of God and that's what gives me hope because ladies and gentlemen I believe this is a moral universe and people who suffered innocently will not perish for that ultimately I'm going to say this and please understand it comes from my heart I really do believe that if I could see what God has done with people who've suffered innocently in natural disasters are under horrible moral evil if I could see now what God has done with them instead of having questions I probably bow my head and worship I believe that with all my heart otherwise I wouldn't stand here for one minute what am I saying I believe that ultimately God knows how to compensate not find any of that in atheism is that pie of the sky when we die well you'll have to decide that what is the evidence and you know when we're really hurting we need something to hold on to I remember speaking to a man who was seven years in solitary confinement in China for his faith I said what kept you saying he said a sparrow that flew in through the grating of my prison cell high up because he said I could see at least it was real and beautiful and he said it held my faith in God for all those years that I was there and so as I listened to the names being read and was moved myself to tears listening to a girl say Dad you're my hero happy birthday on the birthday of her dad on 911 I thought yes all those people who read almost all of them as far as I could see burning in their hearts was what resoning in the human soul there's got to be hope somewhere and there is There's Hope in God but then your University motto says it all inum VI Lumen is the Latin version of it by the way in your light we shall see light do you know where that comes from listen how precious is your steadfast love oh God the children of mankind take refuge in The Shadow of Your Wings they Feast on the abundance of your house and you give them drink from the river of your Delights for with you is the Fountain of Life in your light Colombia University in your light do we see light and in the New Testament there is a very similar thing when the Apostle Paul who suffered greatly for his faith is encouraging others he says look share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God who saved us and called us to a holy calling not because of our works but because of his own purpose and Grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began and which now has been manifested through the appearing of Our Savior Jesus Christ now listen to this who abolished death and brought life and immortality to life through the gospel on 911 ladies and gentlemen let us determine that this year we're beg going to begin the search Under The Motto that led the people who set up this University to found it thank you very much indeed [Applause] one of the one of the questions that was pretty popular um when people suffer you know people talk about God as a source of Hope um how does that interface with actual evidence of God showing up or is that just a projection of people's hopes well this is a very important question it was raised famously by Sigman Freud who thought that the idea of God is a wish fulfillment Pie in the Sky when we die and I referred to it there's a very interesting book been written by a German psychiatrist just recently it's called a brief history of the great one in which he says if there is no God then of course Freud could give you a wonderful explanation of how religion is an illusion a delusion in fact if there is no God but of course if there is a God Freud will give you an equally good explanation of why atheism is a delusion and he quotes chesf um ches bosia from Poland who pointed out that the great opium of the people is atheism the desire to avoid having to meet God and the conclusion of this book is very interesting he says look if there is no God Freud's argument works against religion if there is a god it works against atheism but on the question of whether there is a God or not it can't help you at all so we come to the question of evidence and one of the questions actually another one I think Ashley had to do with faith and is Faith blind and we do we just have to take a blind Leap of Faith No we certainly do not faith comes from the Latin word fedas which means when we get Fidelity from it it means TR trust and You' be very foolish to trust someone else or trust a theory without evidence and I'm firmly convinced that the Christian faith is based on evidence so the question now boils down to this what is God really like has he shown himself has he given evidence of what his heart is like and the only way to find that out is to read and if you've never read them as an adult try read the gospel start say with the Gospel of John and watch Jesus at a funeral as he watches how for example death has torn a family apart and one of the sisters who's been deprived of her brother through death is actually quite angry and gets all worked up and says Lord if you'd been here he wouldn't have had to die and Jesus said well he'll rise again at the Judgment yes I know all that and there was a terrific argument the other sister came in and she stood weeping and Jesus what did he do he wept too and that story has always moved me to see this is the heart of God answering the woman's intellectual questions Mary uh Martha's intellectual questions but sympathizing with Mary in her grief and weeping with her and it's incidents like that and the new New Testament gospels are full of them and there's only one way to get to know them is to read them with somebody else I think Ashley you've mentioned that you do organize things like this to get to see a picture of what the evidence is you don't have to start by believing it or closing your eyes and taking a big jump of faith faith grows as it grows in human experience by getting to know someone I didn't take a big leap of faith and marry my wife in the first millisecond that I knew her no it took time and as they got to know where more and more the trust grows and it's exact ly the same I believe with God remember ladies and gentlemen God is not a theory he's a person and he's revealed himself in terms that we can understand a human person Jesus Christ who claims to be God incarnate now I don't know whether that begins to answer your question Ashley you'll tell me if it doesn't yeah so um you know here at Columbia we study I guess freshman you haven't studied it yet but after the Greek stuff you'll get to the biblical stuff and uh you know just one of the the strong Impressions that you know you get is you can't really trust these documents so if that's the source of evidence um you know if someone doesn't trust those sources what evidence do they have or why would you trust those sources oh this is immensely important and it was a very important question for me as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the last century it was one of the first questions I asked and fortunately we've got an enormous amount of evidence on the reliability of for instance let's just take the New Testament one of the fascinating things is there have been people historians who set out to disprove Christianity by showing that the details in the Gospel of Luke for instance and in the book of Acts which is the first history of the Christian Church were wrong and as Sir William Ramsey went round checking these things he found that every single one of them was correct now one of the very interesting things on this your question comes straight from The God Delusion really by Richard Dawkins and one of the fascinating uh things is that he gave an interview recently to Playboy now I've got this second hand I didn't see it directly but um uh apparently he said there that the evidence for the histor historical existence of Jesus is very scant indeed I find that staggering because I've actually written a whole section of my recent book gunning for God on this very thing because the existence or not of Jesus to start with is a matter of History so who would you consult well Dawkins quotes in his book either a professor of German or an anesthesiologist he doesn't consult a single ancient historian but I'm not a historian so I do consult the historians I cannot find a single leading ancient historian in the world atheist or not who would raise major questions about about the existence of Jesus and one of the Staggering things I met this with Christopher hin himself and Sam Aris says something similar that the evidence for the existence of Jesus is thin it isn't the evidence for the New Testament documents is overwhelmingly better than the evidence for much of the classical literature that you'd study in this University Caesar's gallic Wars I think the first document appears about 900 years after Caesar and there are only two or three of them for the Bible we have documents going right back into the first century and leading Scholars who've studied these texts in ancient literature all their lives have come to the conclusion that the general authenticity of books like the histories of Luke and the book of Acts are among the highest standard of literary work that we've got the point is if this question bothers you there's plenty of literature to help you answer it and the test as to whether the question is real for you will be seen as to whether you study the literature of course but you know that being Colombia students all right so we have some great questions here uh so Dr lenx likes to answer a few questions at a time and this would be good because uh we have a lot of questions so I'll just lay them out in front of you and you can organize them um and some of these questions actually aren't that much about suffering but we'll see how many we can get to well the first one that I can read and you forgive me uh it's not your writing it's my eyesight in the darkness where does atheist morality come from now that is a question that's being addressed at the moment by particularly by Sam Harris in his book The moral landscape and the argument up to now is that you cannot get an ought from an is hume's idea Hume the enlightenment philosopher said that there's no way in which you can get morality from isness you can't get an not from an is and many philosophers and thinkers have agreed with that even Dawkins up until recently has said it's very difficult to see how you can get morality from science Einstein famous ly said you can talk about the ethical foundations of science but you cannot talk about the scientific foundations of Ethics now Sam Harris believes he's overcome the problem and in my recent book I've actually dedicated part of a chapter to Sam Harris because I don't think he has overcome the problem he simply smuggled the Morality In at the beginning now there are various possible sources The evolutionary psychologists the geneticist try to get often morality from biology but that creates PR problems very obvious ones for instance to put it very crudely Darwin was a nice Chap and he studied ants and he saw that they cooperated and he said there you are there you can get altruism care for other people Spencer saw nature very differently he saw it as a struggle for the survival of the fittest and we all know where that biological Theory got when it was written into Morality In the Eugenics and the war crimes of the Nazis the problem ladies and gentlemen is if we remove the Transcendence of God and try to get a morality from down in here if you listen to the biological world you can construct any morality you like and that is why I think if I might be so bold as suggested there's so much moral confusion in the world today but what is more I want to say this the question is where do atheists get their morality from partly from the fact that they're human beings created in the image of God that to my mind is the explanation for the Staggering commonality of core morality around the world now I know there are various differences how many people you can marry and all the rest of it but the core things honesty truth respect for old people and so on you find them all around the world this has been documented CS Lewis wrote a whole list indeed you can find the Golden Rule love your neighbor as yourself in every major philosophy in every major religion including Roman Pagan religion it's there now where does it come from well from where I sit it's because you and I are dignified not only by having free will but by being made in the image of God and that's why whether you believe in God or not you will come up with a very similar morality and that we ought to be thankful for that because it's the only basis on which society has any chance of surviving so that's the first one you want me to go on to another one here I'll ask one followup I remember um oh well he there is a a very relevant one do atheists have the capacity to do good of course they do of course they do ladies and gentlemen this is very important when I say that there's no Foundation rational foundation for Morality and Atheism that is by far and way not saying that atheists cannot be moral some of my atheist friends can put me to shame many an atheist has a higher standard sadly than many a professing Christian or religious person why is that well I go back to my same answer it's because we're all human beings made in the image of God so I would tremble if I thought that anybody went away thinking that atheists cannot do good of course they can and they're often in the Forefront of doing good do I proceed keep on going why is your god more valid than Thor Zeus and all the rest of them and hundreds of thousands of other gods that humans have um invented since the beginning of humanity well that's a very interesting thing uh Richard Dawkins put that to me he says you know you're an aist I said what does that mean he said you're an atheist with regard to Zeus and I said that's exactly right he said so am I well he said I just go one God further than all the rest of them and I'm an atheist so there's no difference I said yes there is I said I notice you've written a 400 page book on atheism but not a 400 page book on aism authorism ah wotanism and a anything else ISM why is that now that is a very important question the difference of course is a question of evidence again I know no other way to approach these questions what is the evidence for the existence of Zeus the Greeks themselves particularly xenophanes I hope you read xenophanes in your classical studies who was The Marvelous man who got the Freudian argument centuries before Freud and said you know the thians like horses and no if horses had gods they would invent them in the form of horses and so on now the one thing that distinguishes one major thing that distinguishes the biblical God is that Genesis that starts to talk to us about God doesn't fit into the genre of myth at all it's a protest against myth the Greek god as was well known were a deification of the forces of nature and if you want to understand the real difference between Greek Babylonian Egyptian gods and the judeo-christian god read verer jer's book on the Greek gods and he says the profound difference is this that the gods of the Ancients all of them came from within SpaceTime they actually were many of them products of a primeval soup which in the Babylonian case they called uru that is they are part of the SpaceTime Continuum whereas the biblical God transcends space time that is a phenomenal difference and of course it's why there have been millions of books written defending uh the Christian faith the monotheistic Faith as distinct from defending Thor so there's a massive difference it seems to me so so that's just the start of an answer to that question but since there are other questions I better go on to them do we really have free will over our lives if God is omniscient he knows the past present and future well of course we do but you say explain that that's a bit more difficult but ladies and gentlemen I'm not really embarrassed can you tell me what time is no what's energy well we don't know we can use it measure it we don't know what it is what is consciousness we don't know what it is and what we don't know is God's relationship to time sometimes people talk about God is well he knows everything he knows past present and future but that is causation well even a simple human analogy I'm living in a hotel overlooking Ground Zero and I can see from my room two perpendicular streets meeting I could see cars coming down both those streets who can't see each other I could predict a collision even though each of them is freely in control of their vehicle now that's only a trivial analogy and it seems to me that this question which has been debated by philosophers really circles around the fact of God's relationship to time now remember when Jesus was in the world he said a very startling thing in fact something that classifies him as a lunatic if it isn't true he said before Abram was I am what I mean think about it in other words he was claiming to be eternally present so he does see everything is that causative I don't think so and I don't think you think so because in the heart of our hearts the thing that imparts dignity to us and the Bible spends page after page pointing out to us that the essence of our response to God is freely chosen otherwise it would be of no value God loves the world he's demonstrated his love on a cross can we say no yes we can say no and when God himself turned up in a village and the people said we don't want you he went so it's very important I think to realize that uh we do have that freedom now there was another part to be fair to that questioner who will say you missed out the first part of my question first part of the question in the Bible God commands his people the Israelites to destroy other nations why does God do that now that is actually a major question and it's a question again that if you want to follow forgive the personal reference but I've devoted a whole chapter of it of my book gunning for God to this very thing this is a question that disturbs us us it disturbes me how can it be that the God who talks and I read it to you from the Old Testament this isn't the New Testament about the God of steadfast love how could he command anything like this well here's how I begin to approach it firstly the record of this happening doesn't occur in some obscure part of the Bible it occurs in one of the most moralistic books in the whole Bible the book of Deuteronomy in other words the very morality which people use to say well God you must be evil if you did this the very morality they're using to condemn those acts occurs in the very book that records those acts now why is that well the reason is that God doesn't appear to be ashamed of what happened because what the Bible claims now here again you may agree with it or disagree with it but if a question is asked about the Bible we got to at least listen to its rationale we may decide to re rejected or accepted that book of Deuteronomy contains the first humanitarian rules of War it contains the first rules for preserving the environment that are very remarkable and yet in this instance it appears at first sight that something very different is happening that God commands the Israelites to deal with particular tribes were they any tribes no they weren't for 400 years they had been C cumulatively perpetrating the most hideous of evils including the horror of child sacrifice and God decided to judge them now before we rush in to criticize God you might think at a much lower level that people took issue with the Nazis didn't they and with Stalin and with MAO and God deals with people in history at the stage that they are they were at and so it seems to me firstly that there was a specific reason that was so strong in terms of judging evil that the Bible stands behind it that's Point number one point number two the language that used we have to look at very carefully because when you first read it if you don't know the way in which the ancient Hebrews use your language you would think think everybody was massacred nobody was left but it's obvious from the history even within the Bible that that didn't happen so much so that a leading scholar Nicholas waltersdorf he's in America here argues that these formulaic things go and Destroy them all actually mean have a significant Victory and he himself does not think that the rules of War were violated in them so there are ways of approaching these things but I still have a problem with it I still have a problem with it because whatever you think of what happened in the Old Testament we of course are not living an Old Testament days now and many things have changed though not the nature of God but whatever the answer to this problem is I'm faced with the fact that thousands of kids died of disease since the beginning of my lecture I'm faced with that and so are you now if there is a God he must have allowed that to happen mustn't he and that brings me back to this question now a lot of it I'm afraid starvation is caused by exploitation they're not just natural disasters they're a mixture of natural and moral evil and we could spend a lot of time going into that and it brings us round again inevitably to the question that hovers in the background here which is the question we cannot avoid the question of judgment and will it be done fairly and there again I can only say what God has revealed through Christ on the cross this is the nature of God and he is revealed to us God so loved the world is the biggest statement of God's love and the whole of the New Testament that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life and in the end I do believe the evidence of the New Testament the evidence of experience the evidence of moral intuition all points and converges in One Direction that our morality doesn't mock us and therefore in the end there must be Justice the evidence well the evidence says that God has appointed the judge and shown whom he has appointed by raising him from the dead historically so in the end for me a lot of the evidence has to do with the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ so what is the value of suffering and what purpose does it serve and we actually got a few times uh in the in the surveys that people said um I believe everything happens for reason uh would you comment on that because I think that logic could be you know taken further yes I sympathize with the question but I feel it's probably too simplistic is there value in suffering yes in some suffering there is doesi once wrote didn't he in one of his novels that he couldn't imagine a great person who hadn't suffered and there's something about pain at the first level that does something to people I believe you have a game in this country called football it's not quite the same as ours I've noticed that the people that get involved in it well actually I watched it once and I tried to make sense of it but it goes beyond my brain it is so complex and then I decided I know what it is I've got a definition of American football it's a series of prayer meetings interrupted by War well isn't that right they go down in a huddle and then they get up and Bash each other but have you noticed that those big guys will endure enormous pain and they don't regard that as anything it's part of the thing to build up your muscles and your strength and so on and it's true if you don't exercise you won't develop pain also acts as an enormously good warning system it's very dangerous for a person who doesn't feel pain to go near a fire because they won't sense when they're being burnt so there are all those valuable things and we all know as well that suffering in limited amount can develop character the Bible says it does for the Christian it does for ordinary people as well and we look up to people when we look at our own troubles and then we see somebody else whose major troubles I was just amazed watching the Paralympics I don't know whether you saw them over here people with no legs or no arms running absolutely full of the joys of life and it is just amazing what people can cope with do you know there's research been done particularly in this country academic research on two things lottery winners and people who've had serious accidents and lottery winners get a lot of money they're euphoric for a little while and then they descend in general into an average deep misery whereas people of a serious accident involving disabled maybe have an initial immense misery but then they gradually come up too now listen to this I could scarcely believe this when I read it but this is the evidence they come up to the same level of Happiness as if they were fully able and a study in the University of Illinois just recently by David Meyers revealed there was no difference on any indices between able-bodied students and disabled students in terms of Happiness so people can bear a lot they can develop character but the trouble with this and this may be the way you are going to go with the question Ashley is there comes a point when pain seems beyond all comprehension and that's where I begin to say no there's a limit to this and I'm backed up by that in the fact that the Bible tells me there is a world where there will be no pain there will be no crying and one of the most beautiful statements comes near the end of the Bible where it says God will wipe away every tear from their eye do you ever notice that you rarely wipe away somebody else's tears why is that because the eye is very sensitive and if you try to wipe somebody else's tears you're apt to hurt their eye what an image it is of god how interested that is God in Me well I believe in a god ladies and gentlemen who will if I put it metaphorically wield the last handkerchief and wipe away the final tear from my eye that is a magnificent VIs and if there is in that world to come to be no pain and no dying we may know that pain whatever useful purpose it may serve and the story of Job in the Old Testament which one of the great stories of Hebrew literature possibly the earliest book written in the Bible is the story of a man who suffered and yet didn't reject God even though he didn't know why he was suffering so that's the way I begin to approach that but probably I've wandered away from your question you know that's right so this is the last question and this is a question that uh there's a lot of interest in so um last year there was an article that one of the students wrote I think at Harvard about uh their struggle with suicide with depression and immediately uh there was a response at Columbia and over a 100 people posted uh just you know comments identifying with that and um again I think uh it was this past week a few days ago uh someone posted another article at Harvard and there were instantly a thousand views on depression um and you know suicide so what resources does your worldview give to you know something where it's psychological seems ongoing uh you know many people have seen therapist for months for years and haven't seen much progress yeah so that's the last question CU that's a hard question isn't it I'll never forget my last day at Cambridge I student came to us and said well I've had a great time I'm out to shoot myself now we all laughed in the evening he was found dead that was a very sobering experience for me so I try and approach this humbly why do people take their own lives my heart goes out to them often it's because and they leave notes behind if they do leave notes behind I have nothing to live for or it's all meaningless now when you say does my world viiew have resources to offer yes it does but we've got to take them gently one at a time and it goes back to where I started with the left brain the right brain we've been so educated that we analyze we take things apart that we forget that we need to build things up we need a big picture we need a metan narrative into which to insert ourselves and the first major question is who am I as a human being what am I and there the views compete the atheistic materialist worldview says well you are simply the end product of mindless unguided processes you are without meaning and I sense that a lot of the incidence of suicide comes about from people people being taught that and then beginning to believe it well the wonderfully good news is whoever you think you are you are of infinite value because you're made in the image of God if you read the Bible you'll discover the heavens declare the glory of God and if you could see the heavens tonight and I'm an amateur astronomer and love looking up at the sky the heavens show the glory of God but they weren't Made In His Image you are now even that fact to get a hold of what the doctrine of creation means in practice not all the theories about creation but if it's true that God is behind the universe and if what the Bible claims is true then what it's telling you is magnificent you me with all my Hang-Ups with all my difficulties with all my problems with all my defects both mental physical and so on we've all got them to some degree you're made in the image of God that's number one and that begins to help give us a world viiew that is very different from the Bleak emptiness of atheism Dawkin once admitted to me that his atheism was very Bleak and he says of course that doesn't prove it's false well I said of course it doesn't but it doesn't prove it's true either and so what it's good to do if you're in these questionings is to Simply without saying yes or no simply to expose yourself to the Christian worldview to see what it actually says before you make up your mind about it take your time ask your questions because the next level of this Justus I'm going to close now because this is such a big and important question your status as a human being is that you are more significant than the moon or son do you know they don't know you exist you know it exists don't you it was not made in God's image you were but secondly and I'm not ashamed to say this even as a professor from Oxford God loves you and another reason for committing suicide is the feeling of not being loved that nobody cares and it's hard for some whose parents may have abused them who've never known a Father's Love or a mother's love to wrestle with these things and so what I'd recommend you do is to read some of the ways in which the Bible tries to get to our hearts the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are with me those kind of poems in the Psalms that have comforted millions of people and then the New Testament when we see what Jesus was like what he did how he sympathized with people his humility his love his care for the despised the outcasts and so on we begin to build up a picture his disciples were such a rough crew of people you wouldn't believe and yet he loved them and he proved that he loved them it wasn't just sentiment he went to a cross for them we can all have deep and dark thoughts we all go down and up depending on our temperament now I can't prove this to you because in the end ladies and gentlemen the only way to understand what a relationship is is to enter it we can discuss abstractly what God is this and that and the other but the only way that I will ever get to know you is if you reveal yourself to me and I start talking to you the only way you'll ever get to know God is by saying God if there is a God please show yourself to me and I'll open myself up to you and only take the steps that you feel are rationally Justified to take because I firmly believe that the statement is true he that seeks she that seeks will find and Jesus issues This Magnificent invitation come unto me he says all you who are weak and burdened and heavily Laden and I will give you rest take my yoke upon you and learn of me and you will find rest unto your souls is it real the only way you can find out is to begin to take those steps ask your questions discuss with others who've already entered this relationship and in my past experience for 60 years I've got to know a God or even when in that day I said goodbye to my wife I still trusted him for it I haven't known suffering like some of you and some of my friends who've lost all the relatives I haven't known that but at the level in which I begin to understand these things I've met people who've been in all these situations and who still will say like so many people did today as they read those names of the loved ones they'd lost through a cruel Act of terrorism that they still believed in God thank you very much for being so patient it's been lovely to be with you and good night for more information about the Veritas Forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at veritas.com

Channel: The Veritas Forum

Views: 89,327

Keywords: veritas forum, john lennox debate, john lennox faith, john lennox lecture, john lennox science, science and faith, veritas forum john lennox, christianity, columbia christian, generous dialogue, harvard christian, intellectual humility, mit christian, theistic evolution, yale christian, 9/11, 9/11 attacks, 9/11 anniversary, suffering, problem of suffering, columbia university, 9/11 memorial

Id: A_Ga9ccjQiA

Length: 77min 25sec (4645 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 13 2012