It's my pleasure to introduce professor John Lennox,
who's a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Oxford, as well as
emeritus fellow in mathematics and philosophy of science at Green Templeton
College in Oxford. And now, John Lennox' field is group theory, so I went to the
library and and got some books on group theory, but unfortunately this is not
quite my field, so I don't have a full understanding of this but ehm... I'm sure that
this is not the topic of your lecture also. Now, I see John Lennox is
standing in the great tradition of British scientists, and I would like to
mention four of them. Because the four greatest physicists in Britain in the last
half of the 19th century were William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin
– he's known for thermodynamics. It was George Gabriel Stokes, who's known for fluid dynamics. And it's Barron Rayleigh, who's known for acoustics as well as a Nobel Prize for discovering argon. Acoustics by the way is my field. Now, all of these three were very clear on the importance of the Christian faith for their
life and for their science and... it is clear from their writings that they were
inspired by it. And the last one of the four is probably the most famous one, sometimes called the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein,
and that was James Maxwell. Now I went to Cambridge, to the Cavendish lab that
he led for some years, and from which 29 Nobel Prizes have come, and …
over the entrance he had carved "the works of the Lord are great, sought out
of all them that have pleasure therein" from Psalm 111 in the Bible. The last of
these four died in 1919, that was Baron Rayleigh, so that's 99 years ago, and certainly they believed in God in a scientific
world. Now we want an update 99 years later:
is it still relevant? So with that, I'll leave the word to you. I'm sure you'll be interested to know
that one of my textbooks is called "Subnormal subgroups of groups", it is
usually classified under abnormal psychology. It's a great honor to be in
the university of two famous group theorists: Niels Henrik Abel and Sophus
Lie, and I've often thought particularly of the first one and his genius, who is
reputed to have kept mathematicians alive for about 300 years after his brilliant
work on equations of the fifth degree so it is an honor to be in the University
of Oslo and I am asked to speak to you on: can we believe in God in a
scientific world? I'm not quite sure what a scientific world is but we shall
investigate that as we go I think the first point to make is misconceptions
first of all alvin plantinga one of the world's most distinguished philosopher
says the alleged conflict between science and theism is superficial
there is real concord and secondly the alleged concord between science and
atheism is superficial there is real conflict so we ought to
balance our talk with another talk with this title can we believe in atheism in
a scientific world and I shall be reflecting on that as we go along my
professor Holm has mentioned some of the pioneers of science 16th 17th centuries
and later: Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, but I thought I ought to put a
mathematician in among them and that is Euler all of them firm believers in God
and the first question to ask from a historical perspective does that help us
in any way to see a connection between faith in God as creator and the rise of
modern science and indeed it does professor Alfred North Whitehead quoted
by Lewis here points out that centuries of belief in a God who combined the
personal energy of Jehovah with the rationality of a Greek philosopher first
produced that firm expectation of systematic order which rendered possible
the birth of modern science men became scientific because they expected law in
nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a legislator
the alleged conflict between science and theism is superficial the second thing
to notice is that the alleged conflict is the wrong conflict and I want to
argue with you that there's a real conflict but it's not between science
and God it is between two worldviews naturalism on the one side which is
atheistic and theism on the other side and it's easy to see that the conflict
is not between science and God there are two Nobel Prize winners for physics
Steven Weinberg and Charles Townes they both achieved the pinnacle of work in
physics so their physics doesn't distinguish them what does distinguish
them their worldview Weinberg as a notable atheist and Charles Towne was a
Christian and you may not be aware I hope the statistic is reasonably right
that in the century from 1900 to 2000 over 60% of Nobel Prize winners actually
believed in God so what we need to investigate is just exactly what the
relationship is between worldviews and the scientists that are hold them
because you see it's not so much believing in God
in a scientific world it's every one of us in this room has a worldview that we
bring to the study of any field whatsoever some people are very open
about that for example George Klein who won the Nobel Prize says I'm not an
agnostic I'm an atheist my attitude is not based on science but rather on faith
notice how he contrasts science with faith we'll come to that in a minute the
absence of a creator that non-existence of God is my childhood faith my adult
belief unshakable and holy so he starts with his worldview which is a theistic
he then brings that to bear on his science here's someone who did the exact
opposite you've probably never heard of him but I need to tell you about him
because he's the only Irish Nobel Prize winner for physics and I happen to be
Irish so for that reason this is a TS Walton who worked on splitting the atoms
so he's a very famous person one way he said to learn the mind of the creator is
to study his creation we must pay God the compliment of studying his work of
art and this should apply to all realms of human thought a refusal to use our
intelligence honestly is an act of contempt for him who gave us that
intelligence so two diametrically opposed worldviews but the same level of
qualification in physics so we must never think that the conflict is between
science and god it simply is not that's enough to show it it lies between
worldviews so if we think of these three major things there's naturalism
physicalism and materialism on the one side and theism on the other side how do
they relate to science Richard Dawkins wants to say that science leads to
atheism I want to say the exact opposite so we disagree now there's a third major
family of worldviews was I'm not considering here pantheism but generally
speaking most of us fit into one of the three major worldview families but if
the conflict is superficial why is it so widespread what fuels it well the first
thing that fuels it is that statements by scientists are not necessarily
statements of science and Richard Fineman the Nobel prize-winning
physicist said I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific
problems is just as dumb as the next guy and it's easy to forget that because
science is such Authority in our culture that when a scientist speaks when
Stephen Hawking says there's no God people accept it because of his correct
authority and science but that's simply an assertion by him on his own authority
it's his own belief it's his own world view there are several other things that
confuse the issue and I'm going to look at some of them briefly first of all
there's a confusion about faith secondly the failure to recognize that science
has its limits as in our title of scientific world thirdly confusion about
the nature of explanation scientific or otherwise so let's look at faith what is
faith well for many people influenced by the current wave of atheism faith is a
religious word and it means believing where there's no evidence so Lenox here
is a man of faith which is about the biggest insult that you could give him
because it means he believes for there's no evidence so it is not worth talking
to him but this is not faith faith in English and many other languages to rise
from the Latin fides which from which we get the english fidelity trust
reliability and so on and it is an attitude that we use every day
you didn't check every result in the scientific textbook you used you trusted
the results because your professor was reliable or because you felt that the
textbook author was reliable in every area of life we exercise faith you're
exercising faith this moment in the chair you're sitting on you're hoping it
won't collapse you trust it so that this idea that faith is believing where
there's no evidence is dangerously wrong that's only blind faith ordinary faith
the trust I put in my wife the trust you put in your friends the trust you put in
your bank or perhaps more importantly the trust your bank puts in you those
are all matters of the ordinary use of the word faith and it is always
connected with evidence you can always ask if somebody says I trust that you
say for what reason what is your evidence now the Christian faith which
is my position is not blind faith and this is very important that we realize
that one of the the fourth gospel where John says Jesus did many other signs in
the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book but these are
written that you might believe here's the evidence that you might believe in
other words Christianity is an evidence based faith but it's not only evidence
for faith in a set of propositions it's evidence for faith in a person so
you require much more so then faith is not just a religious word it's a
scientific word really yes let's come to Einstein the great
master because Einstein talked about what is the basic attitude for doing
science listen to this science can only be created by those who are thoroughly
imbued with the aspiration towards truth understanding the source of feeling
Springs from the sphere of religion to this there also belongs the faith please
notice that in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of
existence are rational that is comprehensible to reason I cannot
conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith in other words
ladies and gentlemen scientists are people of faith all of them without
exception for a very obvious reason you cannot do science without believing it
can be done you cannot do science without believing there is order to be
found in the universe that you can argue to other people so that there's some
degree of objectivity science depends on faith so here's the other false idea
that people of grasped that religion involves faith therefore useless science
doesn't involve faith both are totally wrong so we need to correct some of
these false ideas but you see can you believe in God in a scientific world now
that made me think of a very common view Dawkins believes that Hawking believed
it and that is scientism that science is the only way to truth now our title
could be interpreted that way a scientific world what would you mean by
a scientific world I can understand the scientific fact for the scientific world
what does that mean that the only way of gaining truth about the world is through
science Bertrand Russell once famously wrote whatever knowledge is attainable
must be attained by scientific methods and what science cannot discover mankind
cannot know Russell was a brilliant logician but not here just think of this
statement whatever science cannot discover mankind cannot know is that a
statement of science no it isn't therefore it
true it's false it's too late in the afternoon for logic I'm afraid but
anyway this is a wild extreme of scientism the only way to truth another
Nobel Prize winner erwin schrodinger again a physicist he
got it right nobody says about science the scientific
picture is very deficient it gives us loads of factual information but it's
ghastly silent about everything near to our heart it cannot tell us a word about
red and blue bitter and sweet physical pain physical delight it knows nothing
of beautiful and ugly good or bad God and eternity it's sometimes pretends to
answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that
we're not in trying to take them seriously that's a right attitude to
science but that's have it more precise because it's important
here's another Nobel Prize winner for Oxford Sir Peter Medawar and what he's
saying is vastly important science is not coextensive with rationality
otherwise half the departments and faculties in this famous university
would have to shut tomorrow there'd be no history there be no
economics there would be no languages there would be no literature music art
or anything else because they're not Natural Sciences and metal are pointed
out that there is indeed a limit upon science has made very likely by the
existence of questions that science kind of answer that no conceivable advance of
science would empower to answer these are the questions that children ask the
ultimate questions of cob popper such question is how did everything begin
what are we all here for what is the point of living it's not to science he
adds therefore but to metaphysics imaginative literature religion that we
must turn for answers to questions having to do with first and last things
science has been successful why because it asks a limited range of questions
it doesn't deal with every aspect of reality
now when Stephen Hawking co-authored his book the grand design he mentioned some
of these questions by popper and he said traditionally these are questions for a
philosophy but said Hawking philosophy is dead philosophy has not kept up with
modern developments in science particularly physics scientists have
become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge
now that's scientism more or less again but please notice what he says
philosophy is dead now the Cambridge Department of Philosophy were not very
pleased about that statement and some of them ironically like I did were very
surprised that Hawking said that because it comes at the beginning of a book
about what topic the philosophy of science so to say it's dead before you
start is not a very hopeful Pro way of progressing now let me say something
Stephen Hawking was a genius I remember him at Cambridge just when his motor
neurone disease had started mathematically is light years better
than I are so let not what I say be taken as criticism for his mathematics
what I'm gonna say is more in line with Einstein who once said the mathematician
is a poor fellow surfer and at the really the farewell of the burial
service for Hawking Lord Rhys who's our astronomer royal said I know Stephen
very well I know he doesn't know any theology and even less philosophy and we
shouldn't take him seriously on any of these topics and I thought that was a
very honest statement of a man who praised talking and personally I wish
he'd won the Nobel Prize because someone had discovered Hawking radiation but
that remains to be done so I'm not criticizing this math petition but what
concerns me is with this great Authority he comes across to say that philosophy
is dead that science is bearing the torch of truth and is going to solve
these ultimate questions and I think he's achieved none of them and I want to
suggest that to you just very briefly now Hawking's also interesting because
he occupied up until not so long ago Isaac Newton's chair of Cambridge
so you've Isaac Newton and you're Stephen Hawking they both worked on
gravity Isaac Newton discovered gravity and he believed in God Stephen Hawking
worked on gravitation of black holes and he didn't believe in God so here are two
people involved in working in gravity one an atheist and one a theist and I
asked myself when I read the book how do you get really from Newton to Hawking
what has happened is something about science that has changed or something
about theology or what is it so I decided to write a book about it and
here are some of the ideas that I came up with there are three reasons I
believe why some of these eminent scientists are atheists first of all
there's a logical problem secondly there are problems with their ideas about God
and thirdly there are problems about their ideas about explanation now the
first one one of the central statements of this book is where Hawking is talking
about the positive energy and the negative gravitational energy in the
universe being balanced and then he says because there is a law like gravity the
universe can and will create itself from nothing and I thought I would like to
think about that he then said that M theory you needn't worry about what that
is is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe now the first
point I want to make is that this has been heavily criticized he says it's the
only kind they his coworker Sir Roger Penrose says
his book is misleading it gives you this extra impression or a theory that's
going to explain everything it's nothing of the sort it's not even a theory and I
actually knew of one of the co-workers of Stephen Hawking who's a Christian so
I wrote to him does this M theory how does it affect
faith in God or not here's what he wrote back even if M theory were a fully
formulated theory which it isn't yet and were correct which of course we don't
know that would not imply that God did not create the universe so here's
someone who goes down in the same lines as Hawking but interprets theologically
the results in the complete opposite direction now that was the first thing
that interested me but then coming back to this famous statement I was
interested in a universe that can create itself from nothing you say well it's
interesting isn't it if I say to you X creates Y or roughly speaking if you've
got actual get Y somehow if I say X creates X what does that mean if you got
actual get X or what does that mean well it seems to me to mean that nonsense
remains nonsense even if scientists write it and you see the colors are low
like gravity but that's the existence of something it's not the existence of
nothing and then it puzzles me with that big sentence is he talking about nothing
in terms of 0 that is the colors are low like gravity the positive and negative
energies balance to 0 but that doesn't mean nothing as you
very well know if your assets exactly balanced your debts it doesn't mean
there's nothing in existence it simply means you're financially zero ok so it
seems to me there are possibilities of serious confusion there but I then
started to study nothing and I've been giving lectures or nothing
the world i'm not going to weary you with a lecture nothing but I came across
this gem I just love this this is by one of the world's best-known
astrophysicists Lawrence Christ how about this just analyze it logically
folks surely nothing is every bit as physical as something especially if it
is to be defined as the absence of something what that is sheer nonsense of
course and that concerns me now why is there a problem here the problem is
created by contemporary cosmology in the standard model because the universe is
reduced backwards in time to nothing this I never thought I'd live to see
where the choices are God or nothing but that's where we've got to so that if you
are someone like Hawking and Christ you've got to get a universe from
nothing so what do they do redefine nothing now I was puzzled by
this until I suddenly was invited and terrified at the prospect of doing a
debate with Alan Guth the father of the cosmological theory of inflation at the
Harvard MIT faculty club a couple of years ago packed with professors and
Alan Guth turned out to be a very friendly man and talked about his theory
of inflation and I asked the first question which I rarely do I said Alan I
can't resist this I said out there in the public there's much ado about
nothing.the people are bothered they don't know what nothing is tell me as a
cosmologists when you use the word nothing do you mean what most of us mean
the absence of anything he said no we do not I said thank you very much
they haven't got a universe from nothing hawking in his book says there's no such
thing as empty space he talks about a quantum vacuum with particles coming in
out of existence there all of that is fascinating stuff to think about but
what bothers me is that claim is we've solved the biggest question of life we
can get a universe without God in fact we can get it from nothing they have
done no such thing so on we go of course the next thing is
to ask about the origin of the laws because there is a law of gravity now
that raises fascinating questions for me what would a law of gravity mean if
there's no universe to describe it and where do the laws come from anyway do
they come fit it to the universe as descriptors of what normally happens as
we regard them now most interestingly Hawking says that the answer of Kepler
Galileo Descartes Newton and Clark Maxwell was the laws were the work of
God however this is no more than a definition of God as an embodiment of
the laws of nature doesn't actually and he realizes it unless he says one and
dies God with some other attributes such as being that God of the Old Testament
employing God as a response merely substitutes one mystery for another so
if he involved God the real crunch comes with the question are there miracles
exceptions to the laws and I might not get to that question so you might want
to answer ask it at the end but you see unless you and Oh God with more
properties well why not because from where I said the most intelligent thing
now to do is to endure God with the properties that are ascribed to him by
the biblical worldview and here you see we're told that the universe is not made
from anything physical but it's not made from nothing it is created by God
because God has been forever in existence and that in one sense puts a
different perspective entirely on this big question the second thing is that
the universe is create enough held by God who's not material but is spirit and
so here's a stark choice God or nothing and one of my colleagues at Oxford
professor Keith Ward says a biblical theism is true not only as matter not
the only reality matters not even the prime reality there's at least one mind
that is prior to all matter that is not in time and it's not people have being
brought into being by anything it is the one truly self existent reality and the
cause of all physical things now this is not and I don't pretend it to be an
exhaustive treatment I simply want to stimulate you to think and to think
about nothing if you would to see whether you feel these people have
solved the problem because there are more issues to come the next issue are
false ideas about God now this struck me relatively recently I could not
understand why many leading thinkers would say you must choose between God
and science I couldn't understand that I could never understand that until I
realized they were talking about a different God from me because their
concept of God and you see hawking with it in this book is a kind of Greek god
that say of lightning the ancients couldn't understand lightning they were
afraid of it so they postulated a God behind it but if you go to atmospheric
physics 101 and this university the god of lightning will disappear because it's
only a God of the gaps it's a placeholder until science advances to
fill the space of explanation now follow me carefully if you
fine God as many people do these days to be the explanation for what science is
not yet explained of course you have to choose between God and science because
that's the way you've defined God you've defined God to be that which science has
not yet explained see how to choose between the two and that was an aha
moment for me I realized that we're talking about different things because
when I talk about God I'm talking about not the God of the gaps but the God of
the whole show you may have noticed that the Bible does not begin with the words
in the beginning God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand
well that's just furnished but that's the way it's science it's very important
to realize you see that this kind of thinking was behind Newton he didn't
give up belief in God because he discovered the law of gravity he didn't
say I've got a scientific explanation I don't need God No What did he say
well he wrote the principia mathematica the most famous mathematics book in
history hoping that it would persuade thinking people to believe in a deity in
other words he was saying isn't this mathematics wonderful what a brilliant
God who did it that way so his increase in knowledge of how it worked increased
his worship of God not diminished it and I have found the same in my own data
life and one of the things that he didn't observe so well because he didn't
have the information is what Hawking says in his book please notice Hawking
calls his book the grand design why does he do that because he sees a grand
design and what he says about it is as you see our universe that's laws appear
to the design that's tailor-made to support us and if we are to exist leaves
little room for alteration that is not easily explained the discovery of the
extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of
nature could lead us at these some of us back to the old idea that this grand
design is the work of some grand designer that is not the answer of
modern science our universe seems to be one of many each with different laws now
please notice the nature of these arguments the old idea
CS lewis had a marvelous word for that argument
he called it chronological snobbery because it's old it's wrong
well since I'm old obviously I must be wrong ideas that aren't necessarily
wrong that's just nonsensical secondly he says that that is not the answer of
modern science that's an incorrect statement that is not the answer of some
modern scientists it is the answer of some modern scientists
so he's conflating science with a group of scientists and then he says the
alternative to God is the multiverse but any philosopher will tell you God and
the multiverse are not alternatives indeed God could create as many
universes as he likes the ideas are not antipathetic so fine-tuning comes again
as one of these important ideas I had a debate not so long ago with one of our
senior professors of philosophy and he said I want you to meet my students and
they're going to give you a very rough time a hundred philosophers and I said
well that's ok and he said I hope you use my my best argument against eight
years I've always said please help me he's an atheist of course a very famous
one I said what's your best argument against atheism oh he said obviously he
said if I were ever to become a Christian or a theist it would be
fine-tuning I think there's a lot of weight behind it ok I said I'd use it
and I did so the fine-tuning which is a hugely interesting field is one of those
indicators to my mind of specialness of our universe the accuracy
to which the basic constants of nature have to be tuned to have a universe like
this it's a bit of evidence it's not about medical proof of course but you
never will get mathematical proofs of God or anything else except in pure
mathematics because rigorous proof only occurs in pure mathematics and every
other failed it's giving evidence giving arguments to the best explanation
etc but there is no such thing as a rigorous logical proof but then it's
come down to questions of explanation I learnt the law of gravity at school and
I was told that gravity explained and we said that's my teacher sir
what does gravity explain because you know what I used to think I used to
think the law of gravity explained gravity that doesn't Newton said it in
Latin so I didn't grasp it the first time I read it nan fing go who put AC
I'm not making hypothesis I don't know what this stuff is my law relates the
motions of heavy bodies in relationship to one another and the law of gravity
describes those motions but it doesn't tell you what gravity is a little bit
more research showed me nobody today really knows what gravity is nor do they
know what energy is nor do they know what time is so we need to be humble
here it doesn't explain now here's the big problem somebody's dealing with
science and God says ah but science explains what's up very carefully
because very frequently the scientific explanation is very partial let me give
you a simple illustration why is the water boiling well you say it's boiling
because there's the heat from a gas flame is being conducted through the
copper kettle base agitating the molecules that's why the butters boiling
well of course but it's boiling because I would just love a cup of coffee
a little ripple of laughter but you see the point those are two explanations for
the same thing tell me do they conflict no do they compete no they complement
now this is such a simple example there's a scientific law like
explanation involving hate there's a personal agency explanation why cannot
not be true of the universe science studies how it works
God's the answer to who made it they don't compete and the way I often put it
to people is this Newton's law of gravitation
no more competes with God there's an explanation of the universe then the law
of internal combustion competes with Henry Ford as an explanation of the
motorcar one more thing about explanation does explanation as were
sometimes told always go from the simple to the complex
well Dawkins seems to think it does you can't use a designer God to explain
organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have
to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right
well let's apply that to Dawkins own book The God Delusion it's quite complex
so I was interested in where it came from and somebody suggested to me that
it came from the infinitely more complex mind of Richard Dawkins so I dismissed
that you can't explain it Richard Dawkins book by Richard Dawkins because
then you would have to explain Richard Dawkins you see there's something gone
wrong with the logic and what's gone wrong with the logic is very simple
ladies and gentlemen the moment you see anything with language involved like
that up there one of those words you know our minds been involved whatever
the physical processes whatever the materials you know a mine
has been involved because you see that those marks are semiotic they carry
meaning and whenever you see that you postulate mine I think that's an
extremely important intuition and just to illustrate it finally I want
to go back to our faith as scientists because sometimes I have fun with my
colleagues and I ask them what do you do science with and they tell me about some
billion-dollar machine I said I don't mean that
oh you mean are and they're about to say brain when they realize that it's not
politically correct to say brain mind sorry
you mean our brain I said okay you believe the brain is the mind I don't
but let's stick with the brain tell me the brief history of the brain well the
brain is the end product of a mindless unguided process and I smile at them and
I say and you trust it tell me if you knew that your computer was the end
product of a mindless unguided process would you trust it and I always wait for
an answer and in many years I've never got the answer yes I would so why do you
trust your mind and often they said to me you know that's a very interesting
question where did you get it I said you not believe I'd not ever enough to think
of a question like that but actually Darwin thought of it what yes he did but
then with me he wrote the horrid dolt always arises whether the convictions of
man's mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals are of any
value or at all trustworthy would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's
mind if there are any convictions in such a mind now that is now moved to the
center of the philosophical debate because now it's not just Christians
that are bringing it up but atheists one of the most famous is Thomas Nagel look
at the title of his book I thought can anybody dare to write a book like that
in the 21st century why the neo-darwinian view of the world is
almost certainly false Negus one of the world's top
philosophers and what is getting at is this central Darwinian argument if the
mental is not itself nearly physical it cannot be fully explained by physical
science evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our
convictions seriously including the scientific world picture in which
evolutionary naturalism itself depends but he didn't get there first see as
Lewis got there years ago unless human reasoning is valid no
science can be true the naturalist have been engaged in thinking about nature
they have not attended to the fact that they were thinking the moment one
attempts to this it's obvious that one's own thinking cannot be merely a natural
event and therefore something other than nature exists so here's something very
important to my mind can I believe in atheism in a scientific age with huge
difficulty because as far as I can see atheism removes the grounds for doing
any science at all that's pretty provocative statement but
it's only fair to balance up what we said at the beginning so in coming to a
conclusion we have lived to say that we have got biological molecules that carry
information what is that point - well the obvious intuition it points to a
word based universe the moment we see a thing like that we postulate mind
everywhere else except here because we've got to find an explanation that
fits with atheism and that one does not do that so we haven't time to go into
the fascinating thing that the very brief description of creation and the
first book in the Bible is profound beyond belief because it says this
universe was built up in a series of energetic
informational inputs from outside a non closed system and God said or to update
that into New Testament times in the beginning was the word and the Word was
God all things were made by him made by nothing made by word and every intuition
for me is am a petition in the mathematical described ability of the
universe in the fine-tuning of the universe
in the information contained in our biology points in one direction and that
is the ground designers ground because there is a grand designer and I love
these words by astronomer Arno Penzias who won the Nobel Prize
astronomy leads us to a unique event a universe made out of nothing with the
precise fine-tuning which is necessary for life in which one might say has an
underlying super natural plan well now that brings us to Hawking's
second point that the whole business of a universe with laws raises the question
as to the status of those laws the central claim of Christianity is and the
word that is God became human and dwelt among us our miracles are stepped too
far in a scientific age according to Hawking if we involve God then the real
crunch comes with miracles and he says his book is rooted to the concept of
scientific determinism which implies the answer is that there are no miracles nor
exceptions to the laws our miracles are stepped too far well if you want to know
you'll have to ask me because I'm done that times up thank you very much I should just say to those of you who
feel that's unfair I gave a lecture in Harvard on miracles and it's online
under Veritas org I've also written about miracles of David Hume and my book
gumming for God so at least I'm not running away from the question but over
a very good thank you very much to Professor Lennox I should say that there
are some books on sales at the back of the of the whole hair and you might even
ask him for some senior frozen signatures of them two of his books have
recently been translated into Norwegian you're open for some questions and some
answers and you want the questions in a particular way yes I would in an
audience like this everybody likes to hear the other people's questions so I
collect a few before I comment on any so keep your questions short brief I write
it down and then when we've got a few I'll try and comment on them okay off
you go there's one down there yes so we're bringing the microphone so
everybody can hear it thank you for a very great lecture I saw you had the
slide by Dennis Noble so I have just a bit curious about since he is a very
famous guy in this movement of the paradigm shift in biology and he is he
has published a lot of works about agency in biology and I was just
interested in how you can relate his work with reductionism and how agency
shows that naturalism is wrong thank you very much next I meant what I said you say concerning
both students and faculty do you find that they're more or less receptive to
theistic ideas than they were say 15 or 20 years ago okay thank you next three my question is very short I
just wanted to know that since you use the argument that you cannot you cannot
trust your mind so how can you trust your mind to do scientific things how
could I can't hear you oh yeah I just since you used the argument that how can
you trust your mind to do scientific things
I was just wondering how can you trust your mind to believe in God if it's okay right number four I thank you for that
the exceptional lecture I'm going to about something is there a time matter
and on space did they came to existence simultaneously with with the loss of
science in them sorry what's the question if if time space and matter
come to existence was created simultaneously okay next well great
religious questions really what this means for us and whenever you have souls
about the afterlife and your input on that okay I'll take seven we got two
five here's one here do you think it's metaphysically possible there is no God
wait about just go a bit slower do you think it is metaphysically possible that
there is no okay seven do you believe mr. Lennox
that necessarily God exists or do you think that there might be a possibility
that God does in fact not exist and if so then why believe in God when one can
see could simply remain in doubt the god question do you really need a belief in
God okay that's about four questions but never mind okay I reached the end of the
page there may have a go at some of these Dennis Noble is a very interesting
man in Oxford I know him fairly well and I'm a strange mathematician I go to a
lot of biology seminars and I've been very interested in listening to his
critiques of the neo-darwinian synthesis and in his anti reductionism you see a
great deal of what lies behind Dawkins and Hawking and so on is the idea that
everything can be explained bottom-up or everything can be reduced to simple
elements I want to argue that that is not impossible and I want to bring
physics in because physics has at last presented us with the concept of
information as apparently irreducible to physics and chemistry now that's a
hugely interesting thing because it means the physical materialism is false
because information is not material but Denis Noble is as you say our systems
biologist he really invented the subject and he is very clear on this that if we
reduce rational behavior simply to molecular and cellular causation which
you have to do if there's no top-down causation then he says we would no
longer be able meaningfully to express the truth of what we had succeeded
in any case the question does not arise no such reduction is conceivable now it
takes a lot of courage to say that in a reductionist scientific community my
teacher of quantum mechanics of Cambridge professor Sir John
Polkinghorne makes a similar point he said the reductionists reduce thought to
the firing of synopsis in the brain and therefore the empty 'it of all meaning
so that reductionism is not the way to go to remain intelligible and that
relates to one of these questions about trusting my mind how do you trust your
mind to believe in God but just half a minute what I am claiming is not that
atheists don't trust their minds of course they do not that they don't do as
brilliant science as Christians of course they do
I'm much better and why is that possible because from where I sit everyone
whatever they believe is made in the image of God and can show his creative
reflection I'm making a very careful point I'm saying that many of my atheist
colleagues have no logical ground for trusting their mind they trust them but
they have no logical ground to do it as a Christian of course believing that God
created the universe out there and my mind in here I have every ground for
trusting and believing in God with my mind of course I have because that
atheist argument doesn't apply to me no the next one was word time matter and
space created simultaneously well I don't claim to be an expert in cosmology
I read all the books and the idea of a simultaneous creation runs up against
welfare as far as Hawking's concerned against his no boundary
concepts of time at the beginning and I find that a very stretching idea but let
me go back to the more simple place and the fascinating thing for me as a
Christian is the biblical record is that God did not create everything
simultaneously there's a sequence now what you make of it or not is another
matter but there is a sequence and God said and God said and God said and God
said and it seems to me to be a very deliberate sequence to make some very
provocative points almost as if the writer of Genesis have thought about the
contemporary era because on so called day three and if you're interested in
the days I just had a book translated into Norwegian on that topic on day
three there are twice two times that God speaks twice and God said and you get in
organic material and then you get and God said and you get organic material I
find that fascinating because it's indicating at least there that you do
not get from the inorganic to the organic by mindless unguided processes
and it's the same on day six between animals and humans as I say that seems
to me to almost anticipate a contemporary debate so the idea that
that creation itself broadly speaking is not simultaneous is it seems to me
thoroughly biblical okay do you find students more or less receptive than
fifteen to twenty years ago well you all look so young you know ii
mean I've I've been living with students for well over 50 years and in a way
their questions don't change much when I was in Cambridge in the 1960s they were
very receptive I mean with ten thousand students we get five hundred of them
every Saturday night to have a public Bible study that was incredible
if we had a special meeting we get a thousand so the interest in Christianity
was huge but only less than 10% of the population went to university I am very
encouraged at what I see around Europe as to interest among students because
look at the group that's here today and by the way thank you for coming you've
taken our time to come to this but I find this in almost every university I
visited over the last 20 or 30 years people are getting a little bit tired of
the emptiness of a materialistic philosophy often they haven't grown up
of Christianity so they haven't been put off by a negative experience of religion
and they may have come into contact among their fellow students with
Christians who are really living the Christian life and they've got some sort
of life to offer and therefore it seems to me that there is perhaps moral oh
that's dangerous always very dangerous to make generalizations but let me put
it this way I keep doing it and I keep doing it because of the immense response
of people like yourselves the exciting thing about a university like this is
that you can learn from different perspectives no doubt you've had Dawkins
here in the past but you can learn from different perspectives and by learning
from different perspectives you can have lost the whole thing it's not sever I
just want to show you the very last slide which you don't need to see
because I can say it there it is you got the chance to investigate and
make up your own minds can I tell them a story a little story why I do this kind
of thing when I was 19 I met my first Nobel Prize winner and I set beside him
at dinner and he tried well I talked to him about my Christian faith and he
didn't like it so being a kind Irishman I backed off and at the end of the
dinner he invited me to his room that sounded threatening and he asked me to
sit down and he had to three other professors with him no students said
Lennox do you want to make a career in science yes sir
well in front of witnesses tonight give up this naive and childish faith and God
it will destroy you you'll never get anywhere in mathematics you will suffer
by comparison with your peers talk about terrifying and I couldn't help thinking
if he'd been a Christian and I'd been an atheist he the lost his job the next day
and I asked him what he had to offer me that was better than what I'd got
already and he came out with a theory of evolutionism that I happen to know about
by Amy de Becque song and I said if that's all you've got I'll take a risk
and stick with what I've got but I tell you the reason I sit in front of you is
this I resolved on that day at the age of 19 that ever I got the chance to
mention these things in public I would not try to browbeat people I try and
present the evidence as I saw it and respect them enough to make up their own
minds or a couple of other questions is it metaphysically possible there is
no God well I presume so since you made a metaphysical statement to that effect
you see in connection with what I just said to you I have spent my whole life
making my faith in God publicly vulnerable why because I come from
Ireland and when I got to Cambridge the freudian objection was already there you
believe in God perch up of course you do all the Irish do and they fight about it
well you see when you're brought up in that I wanted to know and so on my first
day at Cambridge I deliberately befriended a person who didn't share my
worldview and I've been doing it all of my life so those kind of questions I've
been treating with endlessly and had the opportunity to discuss it with some of
the leading atheists in the world because I wanted to be sure and the
reason I City are confident as a Christian is not because there's
anything special about me because what I've discovered is that when you expose
a living faith in Christ to the world and I've done it a lot in Russia and
they know what atheism is far better than anybody in Western Europe you find
that it stands the test of time so a lot of these quasi metaphysical questions
in one sense I answer them at the practical level because it's the only
level I don't cut myself as an expert philosopher hello I love philosophy it
is so interesting is God necessary or not and I suppose you decide he is what
way is that going to change your life and your thinking these are difficult
and they're interesting questions but in a way I find it much more satisfying to
expose what you believe in the public's space do we need a God do we need to
believe well that of course is just Freudian emotionalism you believe in God
because you need one well some people do believe in God because they need one
that doesn't prove you use this or not you've got to decide that in different
grinds it would be very surprising if a God of love who sent Christ today for me
if that didn't create some emotional response of its truth very surprising so
if it's true you may expect it to fulfill a need but because it initially
seems to fulfill the lead that doesn't prove it's true you've got to settle
that afterwards but we need to watch that kind of argument those fills
fulfill a need when therefore they can't be right
well they may be right you say so that we need to distinguish the different
kinds of evidence now one of the questioners asked about souls of the
afterlife well this is a huge topic if you want to
know what I think about the soul have a look and the mind-body problem have a
look at an article I wrote for a book miss titled
the missing link by Roy Varga see it's where a whole crew of us mostly
scientists answer the question what's your personal take on the mind-body
problem but the afterlife seems to me to be one of the things up to be guaranteed
for the Christian because I firmly believe nobody asked me about the
miracles that's fine you obviously understand all about them that's good
because I firmly believe and it's the heart of my Christian foundation that
Jesus Christ actually did physically rise from the dead so he's broken the
death barrier that's a huge thing because all of us handling death is very
problematic and the older you get the nearer you get to it and you wonder
about it but I'm a person who has already been told he's going to die I
was within a few seconds of it medically and I had total peace said goodbye to my
wife didn't think I'd see her again I'm not telling you that as a dramatic story
I'm telling you that because it's exactly what I would expect to happen if
Christianity is true so that talking about the afterlife Christ gives those
who trust him the confident expectation
that physical death will not be the end there is to be a resurrection there is
to be a new heavens and a new earth but that's a huge story so let me finish
with this our title was can we believe in God in a scientific world
well whatever a scientific world is the world is more than scientific that only
describes part of the way we analyze it you could say can we believe in God in a
historical world or in a literary world and I would want to say we can believe
in God at all these kinds of worlds because he created the world in the
first place and he's given ample evidence in that world and in ourselves
that we can read my big difficulty I confess to you is I would find it
impossible to believe in atheism in a world in which science exists see I'm
passionate about science I don't want to have it on a shaky ground at least I'd
feel embarrassed to have it on a shaky ground
but many do yet as they said atheism raises doubts about the validity of the
rational processes needed to do science but I've said enough you investigated
make up your own minds thank you very much thank you very much again John Lennox it
was a wonderful lecture and with seven questions I guess that's that's enough
those of you who want have even more questions there is actually an
invitation for in either official on under here I believe it is the Christian
Student Union has a free dinner for those who have even more questions thank
you haha
