It's fashionable in academic circles to publicly say there is no God. Yet one Oxford professor not only believes there is a God, he believes that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.

Has Science Buried God, Part 2 w/John Lennox

Do you really believe that one is a fool to really believe that there is no God? Coming from Oxford, England I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Part 2 of a program called, “Has Science Buried God? w/Dr. John Lennox”. In a minute you’re going to join us in a conversation with an Oxford professor at the home of the late C.S. Lewis, an Oxford professor who not only believes there is a God, he also professes faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. First, Chris reminds us of the God who is great and loves his people so very much.

Song: How Great Thou Art
Performed by: Chris Rice

This is Haven Today and we are coming to you from The Kilns and I’m sitting at the desk of C.S. Lewis across from Dr. John Lennox who is a professor at Oxford University, three earned doctorates and the author of the book that we’d like you to have a copy of, “God’s Undertaker: Has science buried God?” We’re sitting at the desk of a man who actually had an influence on you early in life, didn’t he?
JL: He did indeed yes. I went to Cambridge in 1962 to read mathematics and it was Lewis’ last year as a lecturer there teaching. He was dying at that point, of cancer I think. And I had read most of his books before I came to the university because I had very enlightened parents who allowed me to think and encouraged me to read. So the English department lecture theater was just across the lane from the Maths department so I sneaked out once or twice from the maths lectures which I should have been attending diligently, and went to hear Lewis and I’m so thrilled I did because it was, it was a profound experience just going into that lecture theater packed with students sitting on the floor, Lewis bursting in through the door in the winter, dressed in his big heavy coat and starting to lecture as he came through the door and unwinding his scarf and taking off his coat so that he was in full flight by the time he got to the lectern. And then when he finished his lecture the reverse process happened so his last words were uttered as he closed the door behind him. So it was quite dramatic.
CM: You were a believer when you went to Cambridge, you’ve told me that in the past. But at the same time, here you were listening to Lewis, Lewis was an atheist and early in your experience at university you befriended atheists, didn’t you?
JL: Oh yes, well of course Lewis had been a Christian some years by the time I heard him but he was an atheist up until middle life, certainly. And I came up to Cambridge as a Christian but I was approached, or at least in a conversation in my first week as a student when somebody said, “Do you go to church? Do you believe in God?” And then the questioner said, “Oh sorry! I forgot you’re Irish. They all believe in God over there and they fight about it.” And it raised a question that of course wasn’t new to me, but it raised it more sharply than ever. Was my faith and my commitment simply a product of my parents’ faith and their parents’ faith, in fact Irish genetics and environment and if I’d been born somewhere else I’d believe something else. So that propelled me on really a lifelong journey of trying to find out what people who had not been exposed to my background or upbringing believed. And so the diametrically opposite poll to my own position was atheism, so I looked around for an atheist and found one. And became friends and we entered into a dialogue and he became a Christian about a year later. And I suppose I’ve been talking to atheists ever since. But when he became a Christian that was important for me to see that people could assess the evidence for themselves and independently of their background they could come to a conclusion and make a commitment and I have found over the years that by discussing with people who don’t share my background, discussing openly, I’ve found that that has confirmed my faith. The more I’ve exposed my own position to alternative arguments, the more that has strengthened my own position in fact.
Cm: It’s interesting that you bring up evolution, it’s in your book. It’s interesting that evolution is the one theory that can’t be questioned but you actually commit the heresy of questioning the theory of macro evolution. How provable is it?
JL: Well, my book, the argument in my book and this is important to notice, is at two levels. You see, Richard Dawkins particularly, who is a zoologist, claims that you can deduce atheism from biology. Now I’m skeptical of that, wearing my philosopher’s hat and my scientist hat. Firstly, evolution is a biological theory. Atheism is a world view. They don’t’ belong to the same category. One is science the other is world view and that sends my philosophical antennae quivering a bit and red lights start flashing. And it seems to me that what’s going on here is a fundamental category mistake and a very serious error. And it goes like this, you see when Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation and discovered at one level the heavens worked, so to speak. He didn’t say, “Marvelous! I’ve got a mechanism, therefore there’s no agent who designed it.” No! What he said was, “What a marvelous mechanism! It must be a very clever agent who designed it.” The point I’m t making here is this: the existence of a mechanism that does something is not in itself and argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed it. If we understand the laws of internal combustion on which a motor car operates, that doesn’t prove that Henry Ford didn’t exist. And it seems to me that this is the kind of error that’s being committed. Here’s a mechanism, natural selection and mutation, it clearly does something. Now just for a moment, for the sake of the argument let’s suppose it did everything. There’s a mechanism that produces something. OK? Well, how does that prove there isn’t an agent who designed it? And somebody said, “Ah, but there’s randomness involved. Well, so there is in a self-winding watch. But because a self-winding watch winds itself up by the random motions of your arm you don’t argue that there’s no watch maker. In fact you say he’s more sophisticated because he did it that way and not the usual wind up way. So that, I want to argue, number one, that whatever the answer to the evolution question is, you still can’t deduce atheism from it. Now once you see that you can then say, of course there is another question, does the proposed theory of evolution bear all the weight that’s put on it? It clearly bears some weight, natural selection produces differences in human beings, produces differences in plants and so on and so forth. That’s not controversial. Mutations, we all alas, suffer from them. So mutation and natural selection produce something but does it bear all the weight? And I raise questions in my book. I’m not a biologist, I’m a mathematician. So I try to read as much as I can and see the way things are going. And I notice that within the biological field there’s a vast division among evolutionists. Richard Dawkins says it all happened gradually. Steven J. Gould says it happened with great jumps. So I way, well that’s interesting. There’s not just one view out there. Although of course they all believe in the theory of evolution. And where I find the major problem is not the idea that things can adapt to natures and so on and so forth and the minor variations that Darwin brilliantly observed like finch beak lengths and all this kind of thing. It’s the creation of something novel, that is increase in information and that’s why as a mathematician I’m more interested in the origin of life itself because that’s where we’re getting down to the heart of the digital type of information that I mentioned before. So to cut a long story short, I am very skeptical about the weight that some people put on this mechanism and I am extremely skeptical when it comes to the origin of life because it seems to me that it demands an external input of information from outside. But whatever the ultimate answer to that is you can’t get atheism out of it. Which is why, in the world today, leading people like the director of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins would describe himself as a believer in evolution and simultaneously a believer in God.
Cm: so here you are in Oxford and you’re not only a theist, you’re a believer in Jesus Christ. Do you find that a little hard as a scientist and as a philosopher?
JL: Not at the slightest, because the Christian faith, at the bottom the Christian faith is true. That as been the thing that has always motivated me and it’s the same motivation in science, what is the truth about reality? So I find no conflict here at all because I think that the evidence supports the claims of Christ and in the sense of the objective claim that he rose from the dead, it’s a matter of ancient history, that he was God incarnate, those are the only answers that make sense to me of the data and of the evidence. So if the scientific mind, or the rational mind is following evidence to the logical conclusion I’m not the slightest bit ashamed of believing that Jesus Christ is the son of God because I see that the evidence points powerfully that way. We have historical evidence outside of me but then my own subjective experience of what it means to make that commitment and how it works out in life. I think what may be behind your question though, is that as a scientist many people, and Richard Dawkins said it to me quite recently, he said, “You don’t really believe all that stuff about the resurrection? What about David Hume?” And many of my colleagues in science think that the Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume disposed of the possibility of believing in miracles long ago. Now I simply think that is false because Hume made a definition of miracles that has become very popular that they violate the laws of nature and to my mind that’s nonsense. Because as C.S. Lewis pointed out – and we’re sitting at his desk – C. S. Lewis who’s helped me enormously in many ways, ever since my early days at Cambridge when I listened to him lecture, C.S. Lewis makes the point that miracles don’t violate the laws of nature. And he gives a lovely little illustration and it goes like this. He says, the law of arithmetic, 2 +2 =4, so if you put $200 plus $200 in your bedside drawer tonight it’s $400. If you wake up in the morning and find only $50 you don’t say, “Oh, the laws of nature have been broken!” But you might say the laws of the United States have been broken. But how do you know that the laws of the United States have been broken? Because you know the law of arithmetic, it hasn’t been broken, so you know somebody’s put their hand into the system. Now that’s exactly the same. We know that dead bodies don’t normally rise, otherwise we’d never recognize a resurrection as anything special. So the point that Lewis makes is very important, it seems to me, in order to have what we call miracle, you need to have two things: One is a system that has regularities built into them and secondly, God who is outside that system can feed a new event in. God is not a prisoner of his laws because those laws are our formulations of what normally happens. So when God becomes human, to put it in contemporary language, he codes himself into human life, he codes himself into one of the cells, one of the eggs in Mary’s body and 9 months later nature takes over, assimilates it, as Lewis says, and 9 months later a child is born as Dr. Luke tells us. In other words, laws of nature are not broken. It’s God feeding a new event in. And you see, resurrections aren’t normal nor are they natural but no Christian ever claimed they were. This is super-nature, that is, as the New Testament says, quite explicitly. It didn’t come about by natural processes. Of course not, it came about by an enormous injection of power by God from the outside. So to suggest that miracles, in that sense, God doing something special that is not within the normal cause/effect web violate the laws of nature is simply nonsense in my mind. But secondly, the other nonsensical thing is, the argument that many of the new atheists use that in the New Testament times they were so pre-scientific they had no notion about the laws of nature and they could believe in miracles easily and of course we can’t is nonsense. Joseph, who was betrothed to Mary, knew exactly where babies came from and when he heard Mary’s story and discovered she was pregnant he wanted to divorce her. That’s part of the historical record. He was a pious Jew. It took quite a bit of convincing for him to accept her. The blind man that Jesus cured and there was a big discussion with the religious authority, was he blind before and what had happened and he said, “Look,” he said, “Gentlemen, it hasn’t been known since the creation of the world that a man who’s been born blind,” he knew the regularity, you see. So this is observed as if they were somehow unintelligent people at the time of the New Testament.
Cm: We had you on a few months ago because you had debated the famous atheist Ricahrd Dawkins. Later this week in Edinburgh just a few hundred miles north of where we are right now you’re going to be debating another famous atheist Christopher Hichens. Why has atheism become so popular today?
JL: Well, popularity, I don’t know how I’d measure popularity but these people have all written bestselling books and if we ask them what’s driven that one of the factors certainly is 9/11. Richard Dawkins claims that 9/11 radicalized him. And I think the conclusion that they publically draw is such an easy one to follow in a way that it has immense popular appeal. This is religion, 9/11. OK, it’s extremist religion but it’s got to stop. Where does extremist religion come from? It grows on the edge of modern religion therefore all religion has to go. So they lump all religions into one box and decide that it’s time for religion to be destroyed. And Steven Weinberg at a conference in the US last year I think it was, he said that perhaps the best thing that we scientists can do is to finally bury religion. And so on the one hand there’s 9/11 which sent a shock wave around the world as an example of what extremist, fanatical religion can do as the new atheists understand it, that’s the one hand and on the other hand, the cultural authority of science. So they’re bringing the two together to say that science is going to bury God finally. And then they say well, we don’t need God anyway to be good they bring in the ethical questions and feel that they can provide a base for ethics. So there’s a lot of appeal there because people are naturally afraid, the rise of terrorism, it’s connection with religion and so on. So I think that’s their own analysis of what drives it. Christopher Hichens is very extreme. In his book “God is not Great” he says religion poisons everything. It’s an “unrelieved evil.”
CM: I noticed in the first debate that I saw with Richard Dawkins, you showed love to Richard Dawkins. Surprised me! You weren’t trying to beat him up. You made some better points than him. Was I accurate in reading the fact that you actually love Richard Dawkins?
JL: Well, I would never try to beat anybody up because I don’t think Christ did that. In other words it seems to me that what is very important is to establish a civil public square where we can debate these ideas. I am diametrically opposed to Richard Dawkins’ ideas but as a Christian I believe that all men and women are made in the image of God and therefore we must, I feel, debate these ideas in a very civilized way. And that’s what I tried to do, whether or not I was successful other people must judge, but that to my mind, is the important thing. My motivation in doing the debate was not to score cheap points at all, it was to get these things aired so that the public, who listened, can judge between the two views. And they can decide for themselves.
CM: At the end of that same debate that I saw you engage Richard Dawkins, you actually made a flat out defense of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You said you believed in the resurrection. I thought his jaw dropped at the time and he said, “Now I’ve got you. I knew you would come around to this.” But you do believe in the resurrection, don’t you?
JL: Well, of course. It’s the essential, center base of Christianity when Christianity burst in the world in the first century. One of the famous incidents is where Paul, a senior Christian Apostle who wrote most of the New Testament was called to account in front of the famous Areopagus Philosophical Court in Athens and he pointed out then, much to the astonishment and jaw dropping of the audience then –it hasn’t changed at all – that God has appointed a day in which he judge the world and he’s going to judge the world by Jesus Christ, he would be the judge. And the evidence for that, that he’s given to all men, not just to believers, it is objective historical evidence, is that he raised him from the dead. So to my mind this is the heart of it. This was the central apostolic message preached from the word “go”. Without the resurrection Christianity would not exist. So I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of it and since it’s the heart of what I believe, it brings meaning and purpose into life then I feel it is important to defend it.
CM: this is Haven Today and a program with Dr. John Lennox coming to you from Oxford, England called “Has Science Buried God?” Over the past few minutes we have had a delightful conversation with a believer in Jesus Christ, Dr. John Lennox. May I recommend to you his book “God’s Undertaker: Has science buried God?” It is an amazingly readable book but it’s a book that not only talks about science and God but it also points us to God’s direction for us, God’s sending his son Jesus Christ. Well, we have that book “God’s Undertaker” as a thank you for your gift to Haven Today. You can go online and read all about the book, make your gift, we’ve got it in stock we’ll send it out to you right away. And we also have the DVD of when John Lennox debated Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most famous atheists and we’d like to send you that as well. Well, go to our website, haventoday.org or if you’d like a copy of the book “God’s Undertaker” or the DVD “God Delusion Debate” you can call us on our toll free number at 1-800-54-2836. Let us know the station you’re listening to when you get in touch. That telephone number again is 1-800-654-2836 for either the “God Delusion Debate” DVD or for the book “God’s Undertaker” by Dr. John Lennox. Well, I’m Charles Morris coming to you from merry old England. And I’d like to invite you to come back again next time when again we’ll be sharing the great story together. It’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.