What is TRUTH? | Practical Wisdom Podcast

science has only been going seriously for four or 500 years he said it doesn't matter the meaning must imply a mind and then he told me he studied DNA and I said what's the origin of this long word which is has a semantic Dimension because it codes for proteins oh he said chance and necessity I said but look you've just told me that a fivelet word requires a mind why doesn't a 3.4 billion letter word require a mind we need know to that and I think that's one of the important ways in which God has written into each of the 10 trillion or so cells of our bodies this huge database that's screaming at us in the beginning was the word hello everyone and welcome to this new episode of practical wisdom with me Samuel marusa today we're going to be talking about truth about science and faith and uh I'm delighted to be joined in this conversation by professor John Lennox John it's a pleasure to be here with you hello hello it's a delight to be with you as well John Lennox is Professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and he is a renowned author and international speaker he's debated Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and many others he's a very um loved author he's published God's Undertaker has science buried God uh a more recent book is can science explain everything he's also written uh Cosmic chemistry 2084 and many other books um John I'd like to start talking about truth this idea of Truth now uh it's a very difficult concept to Define and uh um we have this theory in in our contemporary culture that there's only one way to truth which is science when you say God exists there's no way you can verify that so logical positivists say metaphysical propositions are nonsensical because you can't establish whether it's false or true and then KL poer who wasn't a positivist himself um came with this uh falsifiable Theory which goes along the way that you need to prove be able to prove that something can be falsified in order to show that it's correct so for example if I say all swans are white um then there's only you only you only need one example of a Black Swan to disprove my theory so my question to you John is what is truth well you've made quite a number of assertions just now and we need to tease them out just a little bit what is I think mostly worth discussing is the dominant notion that science is the only way to truth and we call that scientism and it's a strange thing I love logic as obviously you do and that to my mind is logically self-contradictory straight away because the very statement science is the only way to truth is not a statement of science so if it's true it's false so it's logically incoherent and and therefore you're right in saying truths hard to Define but so are all the interesting Concepts in life the really big things are hard to Define and my instinctive response to the question is of course to talk about the usual criteria for truth the two main lines of thinking there and first of all the idea that if a story is going to be true it it must be coherent within itself and secondly it must at some level Cog into reality now in your introduction you made a statement that the idea that God exists is not verifiable I would contradict that straight away I think it is verifiable in the sense that you can aduce evidence for it in other words you can begin to put up a case that it corresponds to our experience of reality and I would want to defend that of course I think there's another dimension to truth because for where I sit as a Christian ultimately truth is a person and since my teenage I've been absolutely fascinated by one of the central claims that Jesus made I am the truth and I noticed very early on that his claim was not I say the truth of course that is true but I am the truth now if we step aside from that and we ask what is the truth about this piece of matter well we start examining it and we can give a list of the various materials of which it's made then we can go down what's the truth about those materials well they consist of molecules well what's the truth about the molecules well they consist of atoms well what's the truth about the atoms well they consist of Elementary particles and what's the truth about those and the question is do does the series of questions go back forever I don't believe it does I think at the end of every question series like this the huge claim at the heart of Christianity is you find Christ standing and saying I am the truth because ultimately he is the cause for which all of this exists at all its different levels so truth is a person and I constantly emphasize to people that God is not a set of propositions there are plenty of propositions about God but God is personal and so when you ask the question what is truth then how do I get to know the truth about a person now if I want to get to know you sa you I could lay you on a sophisticated table and scan your brain and I could measure some of the electrical impulses but I never get to know you the the only way I would get to know you is if you reveal yourself to me now once you begin to reveal yourself to me which would normally be in the first instance by your talk and your gestures and your demeanor I can then apply criteria to that does it make sense if you say well I actually come from the Moon um I would want to put that up against some kind of measurement I think this is hugely important because getting to know a person means you have to reveal yourself and the basic question the basic God question to my mind is if there is a God has he revealed himself now the other big claim of the Christian faith is God has disclosed himself in uh two major ways one by speaking through through his word which we have written in the Bible and at the deepest level in Christ himself so that there is a revelation so that we can get to know the truth about God not by guessing as the philosophers have been doing for years and that's fine I'm join them I keyed philosophy but by realizing there's another category that will yield truth and it's not simply human Ros ation human reason is God's revelation the important thing there and with that I'll stop because this has been rather long answer the important thing about reason is it's not in opposition to Revelation if you tell me about yourself Samuel I will use my reason on your Revelation but my reason on AED will not produce that Revelation and it's exactly the same with God God has revealed himself self in Christ and in scripture my reason doesn't produce that it's a given I'm a scientist I study a given the universe with a given my mind they're both given scientists are people that study Givens with a Givens the other thing that's in my Orbit so to speak of as a source of information is God's revelation but I use my reason to study it you're right raed some very significant points uh earlier and I think it's uh it's amazing that actually truth isn't a concept it's a person and you also mentioned the the correspondence theory of Truth which you you seem to agree with and also uh you you use the word category there and I want to pick up on that um there are many scientists and uh people of influence including actors who seem to make a a category mistake um and they seem to make claims about um God for instance um that simply don't make sense or simply are simply uh from a different category they argue for a point using a a different category so for example um many people would ask you well who created God but if you ask who created God it already implies that God has a beginning uh it already implies a certain understanding of the concept and of the of the person of God and also many people would say I don't believe in God because I don't believe in ancient deities or the Greek gods and many people would uh would come to me and say um you seem to be a a rational reasonably rational person um surely you can't believe in God we don't believe in Santa Claus anymore when when people say that I feel that there's a different category uh that they put God and the the the idea of God into and also you have have um uh people like Steven Hawking who make uh similar CA claims um outside of science so how can Christians um uh engage with these types of arguments well I tell you how I engage and I think you're putting your finger at something immensely important because that's often the main barrier that people put up and if you can't get through that barrier you don't get any further I was doing uh a kind of interview debate in the Netherlands some time ago and a professor of physics was put up against me and he said your faith in God is like belief in Santa Claus the one you mentioned so I thought I would do a little experiment and I said let's just test this a little I I said to the audience how many of you came to believe in Santa Claus as adults and not a hand went up and then he said how many of you came to believe that Jesus was the son of God as adults and there were hundreds of adult there a couple of thousand people in the audience and then I turned to this professor and I said you know I'm going to be very blunt with you you're insulting this audience's intelligence because the f of Minds have spent centuries understanding or trying to understand the nature of God because they believe in his existence there is not a similar group of intellectuals studying Santa Claus because we all know he doesn't exist so you are making a fundamental category mistake now you mentioned Hawking and I think he was he was a brilliant mathematician but he had very little knowledge of philosophy and again he placed God in the wrong category I used to wonder why it was that and this I found very helpful and others I think have found it helpful why it was that Hawking was so enthusiastic about saying to us all you must choose between God and science now that to me is a category mistake for various reasons but it was why that choice and then I realized that he had problems in two separate directions one was what is science as a category but the second one was he put God in the wrong category he thought that I believed people like me and you believed in an ancient type of Greek god that is to use the common phrase a god of the gaps I can't explain it therefore God did it so that advance in knowledge pushes God out God is the god of the gaps and suddenly it dawned on me and it should have dawned on me years ago that if you define God as a god of the gaps then of course you have to choose between God and science because of your definition of God and sometimes I say to people you know the first state in the Bible is in the beginning God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand and that brings a smile and I said no in the beginning God created heavens and earth and that is a merism in technical grammatical language he created everything the bits we do understand the bits we don't but the interesting thing is that serious scientists who are believers in God there are many of them their evidence for God coming from science doesn't come from the bits they don't understand but the bits they do Isaac Newton is a classic case when he discovered amongst other things his law of gravity and brought his famous book principia Mathematica which probably is the most famous book of science ever written he didn't say I Now understand how it works I've got a law of gravity I don't need God no he said what a wonderful God that did it this way and he dedicated this book hoping that people would read it and come to believe in a deity so that's such a serious category mistake and there's another one which if you like we can talk about which is to do with the definition of science but the first one that you mentioned getting God in the wrong category and as you started this you talked about this absurd knockdown which Richard Dawkins thought which staggered me I used to meet this argument in Russia actually when I first began to go there uh who created God uh and the argument that um if you can say well I believe God the created the universe you must ask who created the Creator and then it goes back forever in its nonsense I was amazed that Dawkins couldn't see through that that as you say you're placing God in the created category but nobody believes at least nobody sens God yes absolutely and uh I uh if if we are to look at this from this this way I don't believe in the god that Dawkins doesn't believe either that and he didn't like that when I I said it to him but there is a philosophical point that lies at a slightly deeper level Samuel I think and that's this do the arguments go back forever anyway and I don't believe they do the atheist will stop asking the questions with mass energy or the most popular these days is nothing you have to redefine nothing to get there the Christians like me or theists will stop with God that's where it stops because God by definition if he's worthy of the name is eternal and therefore people that raise that question what I say to them and this used to be very interesting in the Russian context because there was a strong materialism is your problem that you cannot believe in anything Eternal and they would tell me they believe in The Eternity eternity of matter and I'd say oh if you believe in The Eternity of matter then the Eternal is conceivable so I'm telling you that the only sensible kind of God to talk about is an eternal one what about evidence uh can we talk a bit about evidence of course and um what role does evidence play in establishing truth I want to quote to you uh you mention U Richard Dawkins in your in your book God's Undertaker and Richard Dawkins is saying next time that somebody tells you that something is true why not say to them what kind of evidence is there for that and if they can't give you a good answer I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say I wish he' took take his own advice because um when it came I actually asked him whether he had any friends he talked to about things like the evidence for the resurrection and he just rugged it off I think the number very high-profile atheists who aren't really interested in evidence beyond the narrow kind and it seems to be that you have to open up your mind to various levels of of evidence when it comes to the god question because of the nature of science as a category of Investigation the idea that science can answer every question is false and Sir Peter medir he he got it exactly right he said it's obvious that science has its limits it can't even answer the basic poers questions he called them of a child where do I come from where am I going what's the meaning of life can't answer the why question it can't answer well the why question of purpose the theological question it does have a why question it can answer and that's the why of function and sometimes what is that bit doing here why is it there that's a genuine scientific question but not the why of purpose and I often I think this is is hugely important Samuel actually and I place a lot of evidence emphasis on it in my little book can science explain everything because what many people don't realize is that science is even limited within itself what I mean by that is this when I was at school I was badly taught physics and I thought that the law of gravity explained gravity and it wasn't until a number of years later that I realized that the law of gravity is a brilliant mathematical equation that enables one to do very precise calculations good enough to land someone on the moon but the one thing it doesn't do is tell you what gravity is just describes it yes it just describes its effect and Newton realized that so it was limited no one knows even today what gravity is now that's interesting that's a hot question and I like to tell people that I'm passionate about science but it doesn't even deal with the what questions that you think it deals with but to take a very simple analogy here is water boiling and we can ask what's going on here well why is the water boiling well because the molecules are being agitated by the heat conducted through the kettle base and that's why it's boiling okay I can equally well say it's boiling because I want a cup of tea now the interesting thing is what Dawkins and Hawking even more so actually it seemed to be are say you got to choose between those two explanations which are ridiculous they lie in different categories and I feel huge amount of the so-called opposition between science and faith in God and I'll come to that addendum in a moment is because of this category difference that it's a different class of questions that's being answered and I put it as school kids and I say please choose between those two explanations of the water boiling and they say but sir you need both why can't some iant scientists see that and by the way if I might just add I'm frequently asked to speak on science and faith and I say to people do you want me to talk about God and they say yes well I said where is it in the title faith I said but look I can give you a lecture on science and faith without mentioning God because faith is essential to science do you realize that your title is in itself an atheistic formulation because what they've cleverly done is to get across the idea that faith is a religious concept it means believing where there's no evidence whereas faith is a normal concept and I only would take it seriously if it is based on evidence and science Einstein's wonderful quotation I cannot imagine a genuine scientist without that faith not faith in God but faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe all scientists are people of faith and they bring the faith to the science because you cannot do science unless you believe that it can be done unless you believe that the human brain has some access to what we believe to be the real world out there so I always I'm very careful if you want to talk about science and Faith well faith in God but still that's not a balanced thing because it's giving the impression that faith is all in the sight of religion and that is a category mistake of the worst kind to my mind well you mentioned uh the the water boiling and uh there two ways to to describe it there's the scientific way to explain what the molecules do and also the the the personal way the purpose of water the why the water is boiling which is because I want a cup of tea so the two ways of Des describing reality are not conflicting they complimenting each other and also you said uh uh even atheists have faith and scientists also uh do do science using Faith it's not only uh theists uh which is a very significant point I think and on that point I want to say um I think uh that many in our popular culture many people will simply take someone's argument for for granted just because they are a person of authority so for instance uh I saw a very popular actor saying um well there's no God uh and the way to prove this he said if you take the Bible and destroy it for instance in a thousand years time you will never get anything like it uh but if you get a book of Science and destroy it in a thousand years time you will get the exact same book because it follows certain tests and it seems to me that these claims are very very easy easy to to refute uh but because they were made by someone in Authority uh or someone like a scientist for instance if we say like uh Hawking so who am I to disagree with Hawking uh in this aspect that's right that's why I wrote my book about Hawking because it had a Trigger story I had received a letter from a young man in Northern Ireland where I self-evidently come from and he wrote to me and said he was driving his car along the road and saw a hoarding saying stepen Hawkings says there is no God and he said it had a shock effect on him he had to stop his car and he thought to himself well if stepen Hawkings says there's no God who am I to believe there is and that's why I wrote my book God and Steven Hawking because I do not think Steven Hawking actually understood enough of philosophy or religion and in fact that was interestingly Enough Said by another person who's not a theist uh Lord Reese who's the astronomer Royal he said I know stepen very well and he knows little philosophy and no Theology and I wouldn't listen to him on either of those two subjects but because of this Authority and that's a huge question and it's a question for me because those of us who talk about these things we're talking about subjects on this podcast that are not my main field my main field is pure mathematics so what right have I to talk about this my answer to that is that if you go into a field that's outside your own professional expertise you must consult the experts in that field and I've tried to do that I'm sure I failed to do it rigorously but to give you a an example of the opposite and I'm afraid it's Dawkins again he points out in one of his books I think it's a God Delusion that a good case can be made that Jesus never existed although he fair enough he said he wouldn't make the case himself well if he wouldn't why mention it and he quotes a certain Professor but I looked up this professor and this was a professor of German in other words there was no ancient historian he consulted and that to my mind is is a cardinal error and I try to be extremely careful to trace sources of real experts in the field I go into and I approach things at the level of what one might call the public understanding of science you mentioned that if you want to know about something we would go to that's outside of our field of expertise we ask the experts now what about the lay Christian who can't understand doesn't understand philosophy or theology uh but has faith in God um they can't explain the ontological argument or uh the argument from design perhaps but they still have faith in God they can't quite um argue uh make a case for for Jesus or a case for God so what do you say to to people uh who are not able to defend themselves um in with respect to their faith so does that mean that because they don't have the evidence or are not able to point to the evidence their faith is not valid of course not you don't have to understand electricity to have to be able to trust it and use it I I think the important thing here is not everyone is called upon to be in that sense intellectual defender of the faith and there must have been many Christians in the early church who were very grateful that people like Paul existed because he was the defender that's the first side of it but there's another side to it that explanation and argument are extremely important Jesus argued but when it comes to the defense of the faith we often use the sorry word apology etics for that I I say sorry because transliteration from one language to another can be a dangerous thing and that is exactly what's happened with the Greek word aalia which simply means defense it's now become uh an elitist topic for clever Christians and a a sort of subdivision of philosophy 101 but apolia is defending and I find it very interesting that in most of the occasions that used in the New Testament and they are by Paul or in that context by Luke describing Paul his first line of defense is his experience of meeting the Risen Christ in the Damascus Road now it seems to me that therefore evidence splits into two rough categories although there are gray ages between them and they are the objective and the subjective that some of us have been taught how to argue philosophically and so on and that's very important but that would be valueless in itself when it comes to God as person and Christ as person and Christianity as a personal relationship if we had no personal experience so it seems to me that there are several in that sense categories of evidence there's the evidence from the natural world there's the evidence from logic argument and philosophy but then there's the evidence from experience from psychology and finally and very importantly from history and putting all those things together I see it as a cumulative thing but I would want to say that we haven't necessarily and this is a wild generalization we haven't in the Christian church done a good job of teaching people to answer questions because you know uh you say Christians don't know how to defend it but if they've had an education of any kind and they're living in a pluralistic complex world they're going to be faced with questions I think that's a very significant Point you're raising I think uh this is a major U uh point in in Christianity in general the fact that some people would say would argue that uh Christians don't need to defend their faith um they just because faith is believing in something that you you cannot see um and of course many many atheists would would argue that all faith is Blind Faith and some would say uh well why study the evidence why look at the evidence uh because that somehow would probably make you doubt uh uh the existence of God As a Christian yes what is your take on that oh well well my initial reaction is to say it's it's very superficial thinking because if you go in to try to get a mortgage for a house you'd better bring some evidence that you've got collateral to support your payments and people all understand that indeed the notion that faith is blind is a complete invention that all faith is blind is a complete avention of the so-called new atheists well they're old now because faith is an ordinary word from the Latin fedas from which we derive Fidelity and trust and the cognate words in most of the languages are involved in the New Testament are words that lead us to think you look at the OED on faith and they will talk about evidence-based Comm commitment or belief and trust and we all know what that means especially after the financial crisis where we thought we could trust the bankers and until evidence came back it it froze the entire Market I find on inquiry that people know what evidence-based faith is and the difficulty is it's a total intellectual copout for atheists and I have no quite few of them here in Oxford who keep insisting that faith is a religious word and means believing where there's no evidence because that actually absolves them from actually seriously considering any evidence which I naturally want them to do and I think we need to help Christians I do believe that the average Christian can be taught without having a scientific or Humanity education to any high level just common sense arguments that they can use to break through a lot of this stuff and I do feel our churches ought to take more responsibility for doing it especially dealing with this kind of argument from the pulpit and not simply and of course there are many churches that already do this but there's a danger of comining Christianity to the devotional rather than having an intellectual Dimension when all these people go out to work they have an intellectual Dimension to their work especially if they're professionals you you touched upon this very uh briefly just now on objective truth and subjective truth and which which leads us to to this concept of moral relativity yes now many people would argue that if you if you're making statements about uh God for instance um then that's just your opinion so if you say that there is a God you you can't really uh say that that's an objective truth um that's just your opinion I have a friend who says people only take that postmodern relativist view in areas that they think are not important that's aside from the fact that I know that postmodern is a category within art and I leave that aside but this idea of moral relativity and Truth relativity people don't live like it because they can't live like it and I think there again it's important to get across to people that they do believe in truth H to a very large extent otherwise life would be utterly impossible so this idea that we've shifted from the premodern to the modern to the postmodern in terms of chronology I think is false we can have all three in the same person let alone in the same age let's move on and talk about um How the Universe came to be and the Big Bang uh because obviously you're you're a mathematician and a scientist um what is the big bang and what might have been there before the Big Bang if we can contemplate uh the existence of time and whether something else existed before time was created well the Big Bangs are on the mystery the term was coined as a joke by Professor sir Fred H whom I met on several occasions to discuss these things because he didn't like the idea of a start to the universe and it's simply means the universe started and it's important to emphasize that because I I meet a number of Christians and really they ought to know better who are worried about that expression um it's simply saying there was a beginning which is wonderful because that's exactly what the Bible has been claiming for many Millennia which in itself is an interesting thing I'm old enough to have lived through the 1960s and I remember in the 1960s when the most powerful evidence to date came in that there was a beginning to SpaceTime which was there labeled the big bang and inter inly enough that idea had been suggested in the 1930s by a Belgian priest called George lametra and the fascinating thing in England was that this idea that there was a beginning was resisted at the highest levels of the scientific establishment John Maddox was the editor at that time of Nature and he said we mustn't go down that road because and this is a partial quote it gives too much leverage to those those who believe in creation and I was at a conference not so long ago with very distinguished philosophers mathematicians and physicists and I was the token Christian or one of them who was asked to talk about this asked your question you see and I quoted in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and I was interrupted heckled from the audience by a very leading professor of physics who said Professor Lennox I hope that you're joking when you suggest that the Bible has anything to say to us in the 21st century there was dead silence oh I said with a smile I said no I'm not joking at all I said actually I would like to suggest to you that if you if science hadn't been so imprisoned by Aristotle's ideas of The Eternity of the universe and time yeah and time that you might have taken another worldview more seriously and that is the biblical one that's been saying for thousands of years that there was a beginning and if you'd taken that worldview seriously you might have looked for evidence and found it earlier than you did I said of course uh scripture is pre-scientific by definition in terms of chronology but it's not pre-scientific in that it is not discussing the universe that you study and the law doesn't say much about how God created what it does say is of profound significance particularly in the digital age because it tells us to put it in contemporary language from Linguistics that the Universe was created not by unguided natural processes but by a series of speech acts and God said and I said in the digital age that's fascinating and one leading astronomer said to me how did they get that right that's very interesting that you you mentioned the speech act theory of John Austin um you also mentioned that somehow the Big Bang gives leverage to Christianity and uh also supports the the idea that there was a beginning uh that the Universe might have come into being um at one point in the past now many atheists the chary of this is that many atheists would argue on the other hand that Christians have changed their views based on the evidence of scientific discoveries so for example uh following Darwin and evolution theories there are Christians who believe that actually we evolved uh and uh believe some some sort of uh version of the of the evolution Theory what is your answer to that well there are two or three separate questions there Savio let's take the first one first do we use science in understanding scripture of course we do here's a simple example when Jesus said I am the door how do we know he wasn't saying he was made of wood or steel or plastic well because we know about physical doors we know something about in that broad sense Science and Technology we can't avoid understanding words in scripture without having the reference of the surrounding nature around us so saying that we can't use science is absurd we're already doing so secondly I would say that one of the very interesting things is this I look at science and at scripture and we must be careful to talk about the current state of Science in other words the current state of science appears to me to be teaching that there was a beginning that correlates with scripture I'm not saying that science won't change or indeed interpretation of scripture won't change but to bore a bit deeper into the the question the notion and it's possibly simpler to deal with it you mentioned darwinian Evolution now in every age there will be Christians who will go overboard as I see it on the scientific side let me give you a simpler example example which is the one I use in my book on on Hawking and that is this there is a cont controversy among some Christians about how old the Earth is for example even before you come to the question of evolution and that was a controversy has been a controversy this in the last century largely but at the time of Galileo the contoversy wasn't anything to do with age of the Earth but it was to do with the motion of the earth now this is a very interesting case at Point Galileo was a brilliant thinker and he challenged a familiar notion which was fundamentally Aristotelian and the interesting thing is often people think that it was Galileo versus the Catholic church in other words in their eyes the Christian church so the Christian church was up obscurantist and claimed the Earth didn't move why did it claim the Earth didn't move because the Bible said so quote one of the Psalms God has set the Earth upon its pillars so that it cannot be moved in fact that's one of the books of Samuel I think has that in it so what is rarely realized is that it wasn't only the Catholic Church teaching that apparently from scripture it was that the philosophers who were the first to challenge Galileo they accepted Aristotle so Earth was at the center motionless and everything else rotated uh around it and the the interesting thing thing was there that it was the philosophers first opposed Galileo and then the church had stepped onto the Aristotelian bandwagon because they thought the Bible supported it now I often speak to to audiences and it's quite amusing because I I they asked me about Evolution and this question of going with science and so on and we must never use science to understand scripture and I say how many of you in this room believe the Earth is fixed in space not a hand goes up I said but the Bible says it is fixed in space so you don't believe the Bible clearly and there's huge embarrassment often and I said but just a moment what we've realized is over the centuries and it took a long time galileia was probably the first moving earther and everybody else was a fixed earther but over time people began to see that although and I'm wording this very carefully you could interpret scripture as saying that the Earth was fixed you didn't have to you could say that this is referring at a deeper level L not to geometric and motion fixity but to stability and the Earth is stable and it will go on and so none of you believe the Earth physically moves although that's a possible interpretation of scripture and I make the point in my book in some detail that you could argue from scripture that the Earth is Young and therefore there's no time for any Evolution for example but there are other ways of understanding it that these speech Acts that I referred to are separated in time now the matter of evolution is a huge thing that could occupy us for hours I'll just make two points one there are two issues here the first is can you logically deduce atheism from biology and that clearly is false because there are many people as you say who accept evolution at different levels and believe in God so the first thing is is can you logically deduce a worldview atheism from a biological theorem the answer to that is no because that's another category mistake but then the second question which is a scientific question is does the darwinian Neo darwinian synthesis or the modern synthesis as it's called These Days Bear all the weight that's put on it and I'm not a biologist but what I find absolutely fascinating is that the theory the Neo darwinian theory is now under attack as never before which is why I wrote my latest book that you mentioned Cosmic chemistry do garden science mix to point out that within the scientific establishment among people who are still looking for a naturalistic solution they are saying not that Darwinism must be refined but it must be replaced why and I think that I understand correctly that the real problem brings us straight back to the speech acts is that the different levels of informational uh Dimension to all the levels in biology from the human genome to epigenetics and all that kind of thing are just way outside the capacity of simple things like mutation and natural selection to produce so I'm fascinated by this sitting on the outside and and watching in I think mathematicians have got I must confess to you a serious track record right from the early days of doubting the darwinian mechanism but now the scientific reasons are coming in and I think we need to be open to the fact and this is now the major issue and that is the worldview one that there two ways of looking at the question of the universe they're top down and bottom up as the crude way of putting it either the universe the mass energy or nothing Quantum vacuum is the basic thing and everything is derived from it including mind and the idea of God because there isn't a God or there's both top down and bottom up that God caused the universe to be now you hinted at a question a little bit earlier which I will address now the cause behind the universe existing one of the most interesting things from a linguistic perspective I find is a statement at the beginning of John's gospel in the beginning was the word that is the word already was this to my mind is a clear existence statement the ancient Greeks were very interested in two categories things that are Eternal and things that came to be now translations obscure this in the beginning was the word the word already was he never came to be but just a verse or two later it says all things now frequently the Contemporary translations say all things were made by him but actually the Greek says all things came to be through him so there is that opposition all things came to be through the word who is God now that is fascinating to my mind that this is saying that the prime reality is God and God is Spirit he caused everything to be even though he himself didn't come to be and and therefore the atheistic worldview is the bottom up one the Christian worldview is the exact opposite and what fascinates me about the Contemporary developments in science is the realization that information is coming rapidly to be regarded as a fundamental quantity or quality that cannot be derived from matter and energy now if that's the case as I believe it to be you cannot get meaning from Material process that's the end of materialism straight away from within science without even going to theology so Mar you can't you can't get to Consciousness from a material process well that as well nobody knows what Consciousness is going back to your first point uh on Galileo I think that was a significant point you raised there so Galileo you're saying Galileo didn't just go against the church he went against all of science as well against Aristotle's view of of the world as well and he's mology and sometimes science it seems doesn't always get it right so Aristotle for instance said um if you throw a big ball into the air that's right um it will fall very quickly if if you throw it into the air it will fall very quickly much quicker than if you throw if you threw a small ball yes now science has proven that uh and we know as a fact that that's not true um so uh it seems that science isn't always irrefutable sometimes correct correct itself and uh it's I want to to raise this point about the Big Bang um there are scientists and mathematicians like sir Roger Penrose who say before the universe there might have been something else like energy and there there is a body of research now excuse me saying that the Big Bang might have not might not have been the very initial Point uh when the universe was created and that it was created by something else um what is your your take on that do we go back to the artian view of the Universe I doubt it very much now I'm not a cosmologist I read as much cosmology as I can what I understand is that there's a fundamental theorem that was proved not so long ago by Alan goose and and other man from originally Ukraine called V Linkin and I've met both of them who believe from a mathematical perspective that there was a beginning even if you introduce a kind of Multiverse theory in other words there was a singularity and that you don't go infinitely backwards and in that sense there's been a series of speculations that some of them fit with a Biblical view some of them do not science changes and the very difficult thing in this area is the matter of evidence for example Martin Ree our major cosmologist astronomer Royal he likes the Multiverse Theory so did Hawking but then the man that taught me quantum mechanics Sir John puling Horn at Cambridge he says no no no because these other universes there's no access to them we have no evidence that they exist I think the jury out which is why I said earlier before you asked me that question science can change I would still maintain that a substantial part of modern cosmology fits with the idea that there was a beginning now the Bible gives us relatively little information it gives us enough it seems to me to indicate This is highly sophisticated writing Genesis one that's another topic but also that behind it lies a huge amount of stuff we know nothing about one very striking feature is this the creation story occupies very much less than the story of Joseph at the end of Genesis and that gives us an idea of proportion God wants us to know something he hasn't told us everything and that may be for a reason that the Bible itself tells us interestingly enough biology of all subjects was started by God according to the Genesis text he told the first humans to go and name the animals now taxonomy is the fundamental intellectual discipline naming things and you being a Linguistics expert will know that far better than I do and that has always fascinated me because in the text of Genesis 1 God names two or three bits of the universe that is very significant in light of the fact that he later says you go and name the rest of it and so there's that mandate to do science which is confirmed in the fous statement from the Psalms that stands above the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge great are the works of of the Lord and searched out by those who take Delight in them still there today both in Latin and in English it's very interesting you mentioned that science um again there are many Mysteries that science can't explain um in terms of how the universe came to be one of them is Dimensions um there's a a famous physicist New York physicist M Kaku claiming that uh there is a possibility that there are other dimensions in the universe he he he's saying around 11 different dimensions Theory as the string theory the string theory and he's saying uh if you look at a fish in a pond um the fish has limited vision and wouldn't see you uh as a human being uh uh above looking at the fish the fish only sees sideways and uh understands or has some understanding that there is something uh above water although the fish might not even see water itself um it's just a divide there um and the the air and all of this reality this new dimension that the fish doesn't see uh is all around him might there be another dimension um that we're not aware of and I think the Bible hints to this actually uh when it when it uh because it gives us the the baby in the womb metaphor the baby in the womb doesn't understand that there might be something else like air outside of the womb that there might be a whole new world waiting for him to develop and that's actually us um might might it be the case that there is another dimension after death no I would go further than that I would say there is another dimension you know I owe a great deal to the late CS Lewis and he was brilliant I think although he was not a mathematician he claimed he was a good geometer and he used the mathematical notion of dimensionality and geometric Dimensions to illustrate this kind of thing and he used a very famous satire uh flatland to illustrate this that if you live in a world of two dimensions on paper say you would not be aware of anything above or below you and if there is such a thing as a third dimension in which a sphere exists and the sphere passed through your world you would experience it first as a point and then a little circle a bigger Circle and growing bigger and then it would get smaller and smaller and disappear and I think this is a superbly good analogy uh to help understand that we are used to uh our four dimensions three dimensions of space and one of time and the relationship between those is a matter that's much discussed by philosophers and physicists and then we get string theory that introduces many more Dimensions now mathematicians as such are very used to having multiple Dimensions uh in their thinking because they apply in all sorts of different areas of life and I'm not going to go into that but what is very interesting about this idea that there is nature and there's super nature and CS Lewis was always constantly going on about that that humans have a sense that there's something else there's something other and he makes the point that we find certain appetites in our persons as human beings and be very surprising if those appetites existed without some objective satisfaction for them in the world and he said if we find ourselves longing for another world it may be that we were made for another one that actually exists and I think quite a bit of the gospels and the New Testament in particular are arguing that there is what we might term a super nature and Christ Christ claimed to come from above now he wasn't merely talking geometrically although the geometrical movement was in itself an indicator that there was another reality Beyond there is another world and I feel it's one of the most important things to say and what I discover in contemporary Society particularly among some of my very bright friends is a growing sense that there must be something more Ian mcgilchrist is a very interesting writer as you probably have come across him with his recent absolutely incredible magisterial work the matter with things and migil Christ is not a theist at least not in any conventional sense he's a polymar of the first order actually and as a neuroscientist he he tells us that his research in the brain is telling us that what we've done over the past centuries is neglect the right side of the brain that looks for meaning and concentrate on the left side of the brain that's the logic science side etc etc but in his major book which is nearly 2,000 pages and 200 pages of references which is being hailed as one of the most important books in the last 200 years I mean this is I've read quite a lot of it he writes a very interesting chapter as a non-theist on space for the sacred and he says we must reserve space for the sacred we must talk about God and his book is really a strong anti-reductionist anti-materialist argument from Neuroscience left brain that there's something more now he lands up not surprisingly in what he calls the pan antheus position that everything's in God and so on which is just a step removed from pantheism and you can understand it if you are moving from a position where the left side of the brain has been overemphasized I want to say that he's not going far enough that there's evidence to show that there is something more and that something more is not vag but it has revealed itself to us and that's where the category of Revelation becomes very important to date in the modern discussion so you're saying that nature has some Clues there are some clues that we can find in nature and actually scientists point to these that these these uh signs hint to a different reality of something else something above us uh and it was Francis Bacon that said God left us to books that's correct the Bible and nature yes and I think one of the biggest hints is lies in the concept of a written book uh you know when the human genome was classified and written out uh Francis Collins was it today we can reveal the the book that hither tooo has has just been known to God I think one of the most compelling evidences from the intellectual world so to speak for me that there is something more and that something is intelligent lies in the fact that all human beings when they say signs symbols marks that carry meaning immediately in Fair not downwards to material processes alone but upwards to a mind all you have to see is the four-letter word exit above a door to know that whatever materials are used and material processes are used robotically created or whatever there's a mind behind it because that word is meaning because you've independently learned a little bit of Latin and that to my mind is the vastly important thing and I find it ironic and I've talked to people about it again and again that my scientific friends will admit that argument admit it clearly I I often use the illustration of a menu and I've done the experiment many times of many scientists who claim to be reductionists that there's only material and I say okay look at this menu roast chicken r o a s t five letters how do you know it's roast chicken and they tell me well it's English I I've learned the language that means roast chicken and you are a reductionist yes okay you explain to me how those marks on paper with think carry a semantic Dimension the arbitrary linguistic sign yeah and just use the physics and chemistry of the paper and ink to explain it to me and I remember the first one I tried that on he said I can't do it and he said for 40 years I've come into my lab in Oxford thinking that that could be done and it can't and I was so amazed that I said look uh science has only been going seriously for 4 500 years he said it doesn't matter the meaning must imply a mind and then he told me he studied DNA and I said what's the origin of this long word which is has a semantic Dimension because it codes for proteins oh he said chance and necessity I said but look you've just told me that a felter word requires a mind why doesn't a 3.4 billion letter word require a mind we need no answer to that and I think that's one of the important ways in which God has written into each of the 10 trillion or so cells of our bodies this huge database that's screaming at us in the beginning was the word you mentioned the human genome and the DNA and hinted to the argument from design and uh the fine-tuning argument now it seems to me that these are the strongest arguments one can make for theism why is it that scientists and atheists reject these well because the whole issue is not purely intellectual you're right that they powerful arguments uh I have debated a philosopher here in Oxford who's a outspoken atheist delightful man and he invited me to lecture his students and talk to them about God and he said by the way I hope you're going to use the very best argument against atheism that there is and I said well if you tell me what it is I'll use it he said fine tuning If Ever I were to become a Believer he said it would be that there are a few Skeptics about the fight and chinning but the interesting thing is they're faced with it Hawking was faced with it and they realize that it demands an explanation and their problem is if they do not want there to be God as a solution then they're forced to look at extremely speculative Solutions in terms of multiverses and all this kind of thing now why would someone not want there to be a god there are several scientists today who explicitly say that that's a moral position and the problem with the god odd question is that even The Mention Of God disturbs some people because it raises scary questions if there is a God am I accountable and wasn't it one of the Huxley who said what a marvelous thing it was when I the day I discovered there was no God I could essentially live as I liked we got to bring that into play if the biblical analysis is correct which I believe it to be human beings are not only intellectual beings they're moral beings and they're in revolt against God and that is why people are prepared to use the most shoddy and pathetic arguments intellectual arguments to put up a smoke screen against God now of course I believe there are genuine intellectual arguments and we must try to address them but I've discovered very often in life talking to individuals which is where you learn this that there's a much deeper seated thing that maybe they've had a very bad experience with some professing church member or Christian suffered a loss yes or suffered major loss and there's that there's the Rebellion point of view and perhaps that's what you were saying the other really big reason that people bring and I can understand it is the problem of suffering and evil which is the the hard question and that's a topic on which concerns me a lot because that's the hardest question that not only I as a Christian face but that any worldview faces but dealing with that would take quite a bit of time now we talked about truth about science the beginning of the universe and Arguments for the existence of God but it seems to me that this way of new atheism is probably not as significant now as it was 15 10 10 to 15 years ago um so it seems to me that it's drying out and in this secular society it feels to me that there's a different something else coming on uh in which people look at religion differently uh so you have secular historians like Tom Holland for instance who argue that not only uh European values have Christian Roots but there's also some value in Christianity itself and there are there are uh intellectuals and secular thinkers that see appreciate the value of Christianity so what do you think is coming and how do you think Christians should equip themselves well there's a mass of material in there that's important first of all I think you're right in that there's been a change the new atheists have lost their grip but partly because of their aggressive attitude I still find that the science God debate is very very much um off the moment particularly among students and young people it's hugely important but what has happened is that the meaning questions who am I are moving into center stage now there are a lot of Dimensions to this Charles Taylor wrote a book some time ago called the secular age and he pointed out what is clearly the case that what has happened for various reasons is that you get Christianity pushed un religion in general to the margins of the culture then you get a reaction from Believers themselves that they move into a private space and live in a private space and discover that they're in a new kind of world the new kind of world is a world where Christianity is only one option among many other options and I my reaction to that is this is exactly the position that they early Christians were in they were a very minor group a minority worldview and yet they didn't disappear as the secularization thesis socalled predicted and we're still here and there's a multiple of things here that we do need to get to know what our fellow citizens believe I'm very fortunate I was taught to do that as a teenager I didn't have to wait for adulthood to to find out other World Views and I think it's very important to learn about other World Views and other religions so that we can test what we believe we started with truth that Christianity is the truth and that is my passion it's not that I find it helpful I do of course I find it very challenging and sometimes painful from time to time but the fundamental conviction that lies at the heart of my whole life is that Christianity is true and therefore it must go into the marketplace and defend itself and that's hugely important in terms of its intellectual credibility and in terms of its moral effects and spiritual effects and that it brings meaning into people's lives and it's no accident to my mind that all over the world universities are beginning to develop courses on The Good Life what it means to have a life that's thriving what does human thriving mean these are very important things for a Christian to address and they have moved a bit away from the purely cereal science religion debate you're absolutely right there I'm not a prophet so what's going to happen in 70 years I don't know you mention AI now that's another topic for a podcast really because I've written about it and I think they're are hugely important not only technological issues but they affect one of the biggest questions that we can ever ask is what is a human being and they raise very deep ethical questions particularly in light of the idea that we'd be able to transform ourselves into transhuman creatures and what's coming out of the institute for the future of humanity here the so-called long-termism that we ought to invest the money in the intelligent wealthy essentially western part of the world and forget the rest which is absolutely horrific because it devalues humans we're into a new bowl game complet Samuel John thank you very much for your time it's my pleasure thank you well let me tell you for your encouragement that's one of the best interviews I've ever done I'm very glad to hear excellent I'm very glad to and I'd be very happy to do more I would love to do another one yes well there you are thank you

Channel: Practical Wisdom

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Length: 78min 4sec (4684 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023