“Has Science Buried God?” Talk by: John by: John Lennox, author of “Seven Days That Divide The World” and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at The University of Oxford. Tan, at The Chicago Festival of o f Thought, The Notes taken by: Victor by: Victor Tan, University of Chicago.
These are notes from “Has Science Buried God?”, a public event that was carried out at The University of Chicago, and one of the best apologetic/ theological defenses of the Christian faith that has ever been carried out in the United States. These notes were typed out contemporaneously with John Lennox’s speech. Within the notes, there will be links to some of the books mentioned in the talk: If you are interested in following through with some of these ideas mentioned, in particular with John’s book, do click the links and purchase the books!
Has Science Buried God? It’s an odd question in a way because in a way, we are looking at it naively. What is Science, even? It’s a discipline that studies nature. How could studying something that is given, be an argument against a Creator who put it there? We didn’t put the universe there, though some people say they did… But the reality is clear:
We didn't invent The Mind.
Now, here in Science, we study a given with a given, but there’s more to it to that: Page 1 of 34
L goes on, to describe some images that he puts on a board, featuring himself, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking. He says, Dawkins and him have a debate in the place where there is a debate between Thomas Huxley and Dawkins. The bottom picture on the right is a debate with the late Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens had felt strongly about the matter, and said that Science had Buried God.
Well, there’s a widespread impression that Science is here, God is there, the two won’t meet: L said he was talking to a physics PhD student in another city in the state and he said when his colleagues discovered he was a Christian, he said well, they criticized him for doing physics and believing in God.
But not only has science not buried God, but faith in God and Science sit very close together.
The real conflict is not within Science and God, but Naturalism and Theism.
As evidence, L cites Nobel Prize winners in Physics: There are these Nobel Prize winners in Physics, consisting of Stephen Winberg, Charles Townes Townes invents the laser, the maser… They are Christians. These men won the Nobel Prize, and their Physics did not divide them: What divided them was their world view: Weinberg an atheist, Charles a Christian.
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In other words, the first thing to take onboard in this debate is that it’s not a conflict between science and religion alone… Nobel Prize Winners logically would none of them be Christians, if this were the case.
On the contrary, 65% of Nobel Prize winners believe in God, so the skeptics can soothe themselves with the idea that God stops science: It is a delusion.
Now, Now, we put these things side by side, side , Atheism on one side, Theism on another. These two world views distinguish themselves in the way they answer questions. What is ultimate reality and what is real? The universe seems all that exists, and no transcendence is not in the Theism philosophy, for a God is there and creates it and upholds it. Naturalism God, L notes: cares about mass/energy, mass/energy, Theism posits Ultimate Reality as God,
He gives lots of lectures on Nothing these days, which paradoxically means that he has lots of things to talk about, he says.
On the theistic side, it is a universe that explains itself “bottom up”, and the universe requires both bottom up and top down explanation in Theism. All explanations, however, must be reductionist.
Everything must be reducible, on the naturalistic side, to principles… Science in the same way as Christianity is, let us say.
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Theism, however, is not contradictory to these facts - Naturalism on the other hand gives no evidence of God in the universe, and Theism regards evidence to be present.
Scientists disagree, but Where Does Science fit? Science, Naturalism, or to Theism? Is it neutral, and how do you investigate these things?
An intellectual fog hangs over the western world, generated by thinkers he shall name. It gets blocked by some title like The God Delusion: This book is claiming to use psychology and psychiatry in thinking that there’s no point in thinking about God and God and it is not alone: The idea is that God is a Freudian creation.
Now, Now, Hawking says that…
“Religion is a fairy story for those afraid of the dark.”
L’s reply is as a s follows:
“Atheism on this basis is a fairy story for those who fear the light”.
The point is that assertion doesn’t carry the day, and the next principle he suggests is statements by scientists that are not necessarily statements of science. His reply was not a statement of science either - We must look elsewhere to get evidence. He is annoyed by Scientists claiming that he
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follows these things. There are 2k students there, he is accused, like Santa Claus, and he asks this question. The Scientist asks, “How many of you came to believe in Santa as an adult, how many adults become Christians?”
He says that he had said, “Professor, please don’t insult our intelligence.”
He has noted that these people thought and believed - He knows that there is a huge volume of literature, and that does not exist with Santa Claus. The things creating fog consist indeed of the concept of Faith, which is clarified in the following section.
What is Faith?
We use the word “Faith” with religion, and etc, but what exactly does it mean? We use it not just in this context, but more commonly also as the subjective response to something: It means different things. I believe it I have faith in it, a fact, a proposition, or a person. The fact is, however, these things are confused in debate.
Faith in the Original Latin means Trust, Trust , and we have friends we trust them, etc, but the new Atheists have very cleverly defined faith to believe in something that has no evidence - And they have redone it to make a cheap intellectual copout - Other faith might speak for itself, but Christian faith.
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The Doctrines of the New Testament Testament and the Apostle John at the ned of the 4th Gospel, he writes of signs that will take place, and the idea is that Jesus is the Son of God, God, and this is the evidence of which belief- based faith, and these atheists, regarding faith as belief without evidence, write, for instance, that…
“A case can be made that faith is one of the great evils.”
In other words, faith, “Belief that is not based on evidence”, is redefined It is made out as blind faith by Scientists, leading to amusing absurdities.
And thus, we can accept that Dawkins says Theists have no evidence, but also that he writes a 400 page book about it with the very same lack of evidence: Hypocrisy. Hypocrisy.
Faith is not just a religious concept. concept.
Often, the Scientists forget that Faith is essential to Science, and Science, and what we find with people who say that they have no science, these people have unlimited faith in the ability of science to obtain the question.
Bertrand Russell says that whatever knowledge is attainable must be obtained by science and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know - So it is said.
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It is logically incoherent, incohere nt, L says. Peter Medawar, he says, is claiming “Science is made clear by inability to answer questions… But the questions that science cannot answer are important. As we look at the Science and God question mathematically, people have often challenged L to prove the existence of God.
L thus asks, What is the meaning of the word “Proof”?
To the Scientists, think about a bout the Axiomatic methods that you use - These proofs, you get it not in any other branch of science let alone any other discipline. Physics Chemistry Engineering, we can’t speak of mathematical proof, but we speak of powerful evidence getting us beyond reasonable doubt: A week ago, L trusted an A-380 and he can prove that he couldn’t get there - But well, he got there didn’t he?
He can’t prove that his wife married to him for 48 years loves him, but he would stake his life on it: We can stake lots of truth on things we can’t believe through science all the time, we do it all the time in our daily life.
Where do we get evidence all the time, then?
We consider the History of Science, the nature of the Philosophy of Science, and the Philosophy of Science itself. He said that scientists are believers that believe in Science, believing that science can be done, the
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rational intelligibility of the universe, the mathematical intelligibility of the universe. Look back in history if you can, and the pioneers of science, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, believers in God as they were, they believed in God.
C.S. Lewis says well, Man becomes Scientific because they expect law in nature, and expect law in nature, implying belief in a lawgiver.
This is why the major universities of the world used to have Biblical mottos, mottos, because the people who created them were theologically literate and saw no contradiction between Science and Reason.
This is because of the essential role Christianity played in modern science.
The historians say that the history of creation is the origin of Modern Science: God does not ask us to abandon all reason.
Galileo says, after all, that the God did not ask them to forgo reason, as did Kepler, who in turn said that the discovery of rational order, reveled by mathematics, was imposed by God:
Newton, then, said that we should not doubt the Creator, denying the possibility of the lack of God.
Hawking claims, then, that God did not create the universe.
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Newton, he says, discovered Gravity, Gravity, but also used also used the law of gravity as evidence there was an intelligent creator: The Principia Mathematica, for instance, expressed the hope that the book would help the thinking person to believe be lieve in a deity. deity.
Hawking, however, did it differently. differently.
A genius, bound to a wheelchair, creates a shock when he Claimed that God did not create the Universe. This Universe. This fascinates L.
Newton uses Gravity to believe in God, Hawking to deny it.
But what exactly is it that is denied here? We think, asking ourselves the question of how we get from Newton’s theism to Hawking’s atheism. He suggests that there are two major reasons - The two reasons are:
Stephen Hawking directly dire ctly says to people:” You You must choose between Science and God” - He knows the power of the pressure, and he hopes that Hawking radiation wins a Nobel, but he also says that well, when he was our age, he was in Cambridge, meeting his first Nobel Prize Winner.
He as a student was feeling chill with the Laureate. He knew so much about the universe, he claims, and he thought he would have a conversation with him. The laureate had said, after a pleasant dinner,
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“Please come to my room at once”… And he invited 3 other professors, and no other students, to have a dialogue.
They sat him in a chair, and The Laureate had said to L: “Do you want to make a career in science?”
L had said yes.
Then The Laureate and the Professors had said, “You give up your infantile belief in God, it will cripple you, your peers will reject you, you’ll never make it. Give it up”.
L was courageous and he said: ”What would you offer me than what is better than what I’ve got?”
After a long conversation, he said that he would stick with what he’d got.
He looked at Stephen Hawking’s career, and he considered the example of a young person was driving along with a “Hawking Says that there is no God” - His thought was that if Hawking said that he was God, then what was he to say that there was - Who was he to challenge an eminent Scientist? Reputation mattered, whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
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Yet, the first thing he realized when he debated Dawkins? Hawking didn’t use the same definition of God that he does. Hawking is talking about the God of Lightning, and about how God did certain things. if you do one class on Atmospheric Physics, God no longer exists - God of the Gaps, so it is said, becomes a concept created, such that God is used to explain everything we do not know.
There are scientists who criticize the concept of God, pushing God into the gaps of knowledge, and God is squeezed out until he disappears like the smile on the face of a Cheshire Cat. What he realizes is that if you define “God” to be the explanation for what Science has not yet explained, naturally you must choose between God and Science as a matter of logic. If you’ve defined God in opposition to Science, no doubt you must choose between the Two: This holds true by construction.
Yet, God is not the God of the Gaps.
Many of you have seen the first statement in the Bible: “God created the bits of the universe that we don’t understand”… Was it? Is that what it is said? That’s not what he said.
Rather, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth” are the words in the Bible, from Genesis 1:1.
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He created the Heavens and the Earth.
When Newton understood Gravity, he said “What a brilliant God to do that!” - He did not deny God.
The reality is, the more you know about engineering, the more you know about an engine. The more you know about art, the more you understand Rembrandt… As so it goes, the more you understand the Universe, the more you understand the God that created it.
This refocuses the debate: A lot of the debates are about opposing a “Greek” kind of God. If you know anything about the Ancient World, you know that these Greek Gods, so to speak, are utterly distinct from the God of the Bible. The man who was most proficient on this wrote that the Gods of the Ancients all appeared from the basic matter of the universe. All those mythologies has not only have a cosmology but also a deontology - The Egyptians and the romans and etc came out of the Fabric of the Cosmos Then this expert says… The God of the Bible is distinct because he created the Heavens and Earth and to put them in the same category is to create a grave mistake. We have thus these profound statements, that the beginning was the Word, that all things came to life, and without him nothing came to be that came to be, answering the question “Who created the Creator?”
Creator. But That is Problem #1: The Problem of the Creation of the Creator. But
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now, what do we mean by “Explanation”?
L was a classicist and wanted to be a linguist and he was told he could only go to Cambridge if he did Math. Explanation began to fascinate him, because Science, it was said, explained, but what was Science explaining? When he went to School, and his Physics teacher told him that it had explained Gravity, he had realized: This was a lie. Newton himself claimed he didn’t understand Gravity, he knew that one could capture calculations that would allow landing rockets on the moon, but he didn’t know about it. If you are skeptical about it, he proposes reading Richard Feynman to facilitate understanding.
Nobody knows what energy is and what Gravity is, he remembers the physicists saying… And at the time, he was fascinated. Everyone believed in Gravity, but nobody understood it. Many of the ultimate realities, the deep things we deal with in Physics, we don’t know what they are - But we know enough about equations and laws governing them that we can do brilliant things we them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein got it dead right when he said “The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of nature explain the universe - The laws of nature describe the universe, the regularities, but they explain nothing.”
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The laws of gravity give you a limited range of explanation - According to your own standards for what constitute an appropriate explanation… They explain nothing.
Consider this.
Why does water boil?
The idea is that the heat energy is conducted through the kettle, agitating the molecules… Is it? No, the answer is “No, it’s boiling because I want a cup of tea!”
A pause.
“No, of course that’s the reason!”, L says - Because the question was asked upon the wrong premises. But the scientific explanation is not as important as the other explanation. The question - The explanation is important in a Physics lesson but not outside it - People have been boiling tea for hundreds of years before they knew about conduction, and it has never stopped them from doing so.
Professors, he often says, can’t see it, but well, there are different levels of explanation: The explanation, scientific in intent as it may be, does not contradict the explanation of personal agency. The people who move in the
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direction of scientific explanations, they often say the only explanation is science - But that’s not true, certainly not with a whole range of things.
The explanations are both necessary, and are not necessarily in conflict.
Newton’s Law of Gravitation no more competes with God as an explanation of the Universe than the law of Internal Combustion competes with Henry Ford for the execution of the Car.
His colleague, Swinburne, claims that “He does not deny that science explains, but he postulates God to explain why science explains. The success of science in showing us how deeply orderly the natural world is provides strong grounds for an idea that this is more exotic”.
Explanation, to be valid, he notes, must proceed from the simple to the Complex: To To take something complex, explaining it in terms of things thing s that are simpler to merit an explanation.
Dawkins says, “Using God as an explanation is absurd since God is by definition more complex than the thing you are explaining” - That’s a good argument… If you apply it to Dawkins. He asked once, concerning The God Delusion, “What is the origin of this Book?” “Dawkins”, is the response by the interlocutor.
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L’s response is: “Well, the explanation is more complex than the thing you are explaining - It is a non-argument.”
Why is it a non-argument?
Because it is an area where explanation flows the other way and causality cannot be determined. Dawkins’ book has a semiotic content, words with meaning… But now, suppose L was going through a cave in China with a Chinese lady tour guide, seeing the marks on the Cave wall, and he has a scientific archeologists, and he says… “Don’t be stupid!” because he does not understand the semiotic content of the sign on the wall - The Chinese lady would know that there is intelligence, and in turn would question his.
Because it has semiotic content, he must postulate a mind behind it, which interestingly, does not stop science. The next question we ask is “What is civilization?”
We infer. We infer upward through language, and he recalls when he had tested this.. At Oxford.
Oxford, some undefined time period in the past:
A Biochemist asks L:
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”What do you do?”
L says Math, and The Biochemist replies:”How boring!”
After a brief argument after a question about whether the Universe is related to God or not, the Biochemist declares that he is an atheist, thus a terrible evening will be had because of their incompatible beliefs.
L says he is fascinated by reductionists. He asks The Biochemist:
“Are you a reductionist?”
The Biochemist says, “You are a methodological reductionist, but we are both. Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Biology, it reduces red uces to these things.”
A lively discussion takes place, and L says that the ontological reduction is what they agree on - The reduction of big things into smaller parts.
Reduction of big things into smaller parts?
Menu, and the Biochemist says… “Well, They do an experiment with the Menu, how do you know this is chicken? Isn’t it through reductionism that you have that knowledge?
L says… “You seek an explanation, but you seem already to have
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determined the answer for yourself. Look at this roast chicken on the menu. Let’s take away the first letter. Now, Now, explain the ‘oast’ part of this word - Use the physics and chemistry of paper on ink.”
The Biochemist’s Wife is there, smirking silently - She says: ”Get out of that if you can”.
He said that it was devastating because certain ideas cannot be constructed with these ideas - L notes that one cannot cannot construct everything with everything, because one must Postulate a mind. Postulating a mind is postulating the best explanation - It’s better an explanation for the menu than with these ‘laws of nature’ that we form for ourselves.
He asks the audience:
“Do you recognize these things?”, and shows us a picture of DNA, which is composed of A, T, T, G, C genetic code units combined together to create crea te semantic meaning.
“Here’s a word, and we use computer language to describe it in semiotic codes and stuff for proteins. Well, what’s behind this? A five letter word, you postulate intelligence, you see a 3.5 billion letter word we call DNA, and
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you postulate that there is science - You’re looking at natural processes like a black box, and stamped over it are semiotics and mind.” - John Lennox.
His last point is, point is,
“We’ve done brilliant math because of thinking” - Let’s think about thinking.
Look at these equations on the board: They explain things. Consider, that Einstein, though, said “The only thing comprehensible about the universe is that it is incomprehensible” - Wigner says that math is mysterious, and there is no rational explanation for it.
L asks: Is he right, and is mathematics unreasonably effective? L, quoting his old Professor Polkinghorne, claims the following:
“Physics is powerless to explain its fundamental belief in the mathematical intelligibility of the universe… For the problem is that you must believe in mathematics as describing that reality.” reality.”
To build on the story of the Menu, to have an interesting conversation with his Colleagues. He asks these Colleagues:
“Well, what do you do science with?”
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They say, “The mind”… But oops his colleagues disagree, because in their eyes, there is no mind: He thinks that the mind and brain story are different - You You do science with the brain, he says… It is interesting, he says.
L says, “Tell “Tell me about the brain, the short story” - As he debates his colleagues from start to finish.
Eventually, the phase is reached in the argument where the mind under discussion becomes simply “a series of unguided mental processes”.
L then recalls, that he had asked… “And you trust it?”
If you knew the computer were the end product of some series of Guided processes, would you trust it? Well, if not, L says… Why do you trust your brain?
He is getting at Darwin’s Doubt.
“With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value are at all trustworthy” - Darwin said, and it bothers many philosophers, for the problem.
Plantinga notes,
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“If Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, he has given strong reason to doubt reliability of human cognitive faculties and to doubt validity of any belief - Including Dawkins’ own atheism.”
Note, then, that this science is undermining the rationality that was used in formulating the answer.
Well, L says, Nagel notes that this is a problem.
“Mind and Cosmos claims, “If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science,”
Evolutionary naturalism implies that we should not take convictions seriously including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism… But you cannot indeed reduce the mind to some few structures - Over-reductionism. Over-red uctionism. To To L, the very ver y assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of the brain.
The world of rational discourse is just some neuron firing, some say… But few if any believe that, not even in the community of science.”
Returning to The Question - Has - Has Science Buried God?
L’s answer:
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“Absolutely not, it was believing in God that drove science. However, Science buries Atheism. You You can’t pull those together - Atheism, taken to reductionist extremes, undermines the discipline of any rational discourse, including science. Atheism is the danger of burying science, which doesn’t mean there aren’t great atheists, and there are mismatches when we think about thinking…
As C.S. Lewis noted, ‘Any theory depends on assuming the validity of human rationality’.
Any theory that brings rationality to question cannot be valid. If reason is called into doubt, it cannot be perfect.
The describability of the universe can be seen in words, and in Biology, the ideas are expressed in well, words: This is a Words Based Universe. The beginning was the Word, and All Things Came Through Him…
The alternative is that there was mass energy, and mind was derivative, and not only as a Christian, but also a scientist, L believes the other world view of faith is pretty much preferable, although for the scientists, who claim they have valid grounds for what can be studied, it is great: Christ and Christianity, L claims, implies historical specifics, and you cannot get into specifics… You You need evidence of a different kind.”
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Questions and Answers
Q1: How can we view Christianity as a proponent of Science when Church blocked developments in the Enlightenment Era?
L says, this is an Important Question. Usually they can be cleared up by studying history - It is commonly supposed that Churches were obscurantist, persecuting Galileo, and it showed that Science fought religion - Galileo believed in God, did not believe in other things. He believed in Scripture - It was not the Roman Catholics who fought the Galileo, it was the philosophers who disliked him for criticizing Aristotle. The Church had criticized Galileo by jumping on the bandwagon, but the claim from the Church.
He was questioning a scientific paradigm, and he had written a book, and he had written that the view of the book, was not very good PR with the Vatican. Everyone knew that the scholars were doing something sneaky… You cannot use the story of Galileo to illustrate the story of conflict between science and religion because there was none at the time.
Another great debate involving Huxley was another one where the depiction of the debate was often construed such that the Ignorant Bishop fought with theology, against the rational scientist.
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Allegedly, Darwin says that he’d found the other argument - L says that he claimed that well, the analysis did not reveal a war between science and Christianity.
L claims there is not the slightest excuse to do what was done to Galileo.
That doesn’t fit into the kind of paradigm, and well, read John Henry Brook, Peter Singer, and well…
But what about another perspective?
What about The Falsifiability of Christianity?
Well, God created the Heavens and Earth, and in 1960s, there was a startling discovery: It was beginning within cosmology, that there was beginning to be stronger and stronger evidence that there was a beginning to spacetime - The shift of the galaxies, redshift, suggested expansion of the Universe, and the discovery of the Microwave background radiation, and you know what happened? it was suggested in that we were being forced in Science, and there was an editorial - The claim by Maddox was that we should not go down the route of beginning of Spacetime - He said that it would give leverage to people who believed the Bible… Because it paralleled the story of the Bible.
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There are many scientists, and he had discussed this with them - He had said:
“In the beginning, the Gods created the heavens and the earth”, and the reply was as follows: “Please tell us you’re joking, because the Bible is not a textbook of science”.
L agrees, with a sigh - He notes that he has never taught calculus from the book of Leviticus: The audience laughs hysterically. hysterically.
“Although it is a limited book,” he notes,
“It has statements about the universe you’re talking about.”
Now, God has created the Heavens and the Earth. L says, if you took the biblical predictions more accurately, you would have created better predictions, but because you trusted the Aristotelian predictions so much, well, here are the statements and they are testable, and he believes what the fellow scientists think:
There may be truth we don’t have access we can get there eventually, but yes, it is important to realize it is falsifiable.
Testability. Although, though Falsifiability is important, as is Testability.
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Q2: Where do science and rationality fall short in terms of explaining the universe if human logic is flawed?
L says, this raises more questions than it solves:
“What do you mean it is flawed? Why is it flawed? The logic we use everyday is likely to be flawed.
The most important statement is not the first part, but rather the ‘and’ - One of the great confusions of the modern age is that science and rationality are coextensive - If they are, and science is the only way go… Then well, let us shut down the faculties of UoC, well, history, economics, Linguistics goes.
Well, rationality is much bigger than science. Theology is rational, I’d like to believe. A discipline that thinks about God, organizing ideas about God. The response to this is not that these ideas fall short in explaining the universe… The argument against God is successful because it asks only a limited kind of question.
Take another matrix ma trix - Ethics, we do, and it is very different. This is the dispute about which I have read - Ethics yields other things. These are other disciplines. Are explorations of the universe in terms of the paradigm of “Science-cists” sufficient? We are not just studying what happens at the moment, we have experimentation- We make an inference as to what
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happens, and the next thing is well, is there another category?
Science, Literature, Art, they are all explorations of the universe by the Human Mind. If there is a God behind the Universe, if he is the Word he speaks and communicates, that is what we call Revelation.”
There are two sources of evidence in the universe, L says: One is the natural world, and the Book of God’s Word claims to Revelation, God’s word speaking to us.
Suppose you want to get to know L, you could look at L on a table, do CAT scans up and down on L, but would you get to know him? You would only get to know him is if L reveals himself to you.
If L reveals himself to us, do we shut our reason off? We’re using reason to understand him.
As concerns God, L says… Could it be that instead of just leaving us, he has Spoken into Space-Time? The central claim of humanity is that well, Jesus Christ is encoded into humanity. God is incarnate, talk to us in terms of humans we can under humanity… Never only human, but certainly quite human. We must expound our horizons - If you’ve seen naturalism, revelation by definition is nonsense. The University, like this, is great for Listening to the examples of what Christianity offers, before one writes it off.
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How many scientists include their peer-reviewed literature? Almost none. When he teaches, all that stuff, he doesn’t write that stuff because he’s taught to teach math. He doesn’t put down things related to God because there is no relation - Here, the papers written have nothing to do with things. 99.999% of science, he says, isn’t interested in this issue, why stars pulsate, so on. What is this creature, he asks? It’s not talking about God at all.
The Scientist will sometimes put in front of a book, “Only to the Glory of God” - A Dedication written, so it is said - But God appears not in the peerreviewed articles, which doesn’t mean that there is no Him, or there are no arguments… It’s just that it’s not the internal concern of the discussion.
Q: Thoughts on the Age of the Earth?
“Age of the Earth”? Well, L notes that the question says that the creationist view is wrong, the truth is the opposite, the Earth is 15.7 billion years, not sure about what yesterday’s version was, he cheekily notes - The Bible claims, he says, The Universe is Young… Young… The Earth was created in Seven Days… But what does that mean?
He questions, he distances himself from that idea: He considers a Provocative Thought.
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“I think it doesn’t say anything about the age of Earth at all” - His logic follows.
Point One, it is said that In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth: God talks about The Days: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It 6. It all begins with what God had said: The Beginning was Beginning was when God created the Heavens and the Earth: This is not Day One and we cannot infer the timeline accurately.
Point Two, the different past tenses of Hebrew bear different weights - The first two verses are one past tense and it changes to the narrative sense. He asked the professors of Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge, and they told him that this meant that the events recorded at the beginning occurred before the sequence described: The Bible, L says, spoke nothing of that.
Taking the language seriously as regards what it says is important:
He says that many people, particularly Christians are put under pressure to accept a Young-Earth Young-Earth Interpretation… Interpr etation… Because if they don’t accept a Young Earth Interpretation, they are characterized as not being Christians.
That is a sad thing to do, he says, because for centuries there have been problems here.
For Christians like him, convinced that there was a creation, that Jesus became incarnate, that He rose from the dead, ascended, they believe all
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those, but there are 25 other interpretations, at least, for the same texts: Where people disagree who are men and women of equal conviction, you can be sure it’s not an easy matter. Just for the word of the day… These days, people say the day is a day is a day.
He asks:
What is the definition of a day?
Well, Darkness and Light define the day: The very first mention of Genesis is not a 24 hour day, pointing out a multivalent characterization.
Day 7, there’s no formula, and there’s evening and morning. Day 7, and people far back as Augustine said that there has been no more creation since the times - Most Christians, so it seems, believe God is keeping in it with creation.
However, Day also means indefinite time in the past, and be careful when you interpret it in a certain way. The ground comes when we look at the ground:
Days etc, the book We look at the Bible, The Third, Fourth, Fifth Days etc, discusses the way in which the definite article persists, in Hebrew. If you were looking at an ordinary article, or the definite Article, thus opening up a
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new possibility. God Speaks, something happens, Day 1, Day 2, everything happens. What is the possibility?
Well, work six days and you’re retired - And note that people try to draw straight lines, when they do not exist.
In other words, “seven days” could refer to six days that were spaced many years apart, and would not be inconsistent with the evolutionary hypothesis.
The final question, is answered by L in a Book written for North America, that many staff conflicted with… A book titled “Seven Days that Divide the World” .
This question defers to CS Lewis, as L loves listening to CS Lewis… He’s that old, he jokes. Lewis said that Christ caused a dividing of the pagans: He stood on Planet Earth 20 centuries ago, and he said well, he was the truth.
If one of your friends came to you and said that he was the truth, you would send him to the psychiatric institution - Jesus was saying that he was The Truth.
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Truth about this universe? We can get science, art, historical What is The Truth about truth to explain for us, but as the questions go deeper, Behind It All, There is Christ.
It was hard to say he was important. This is a point Lewis was getting at: It’s a superficial explanation of Christ that says he is just a teacher… For he made claims about himself in relation to the Universe and Time.
If I said that there was a discussion about Time, “Before Abraham, I was”, for instances, these would be huge claims, and how are we going to settle this? We might say, don’t come around with some patronizing nonsense, maybe we would say he is utterly mad, but well, this is a thing. Lots of people have given different aspects of these in their own personal lives.
Here, then, is the question about Falsifiability.
L:”The flip side of falsifiability is testability - All this, it is said, should be testable… But it’s not testable… Isn’t it?
Well, of course it is: Here is an example.
Christ stood on Earth, meeting friendless people with Evil and Suffering, and he said, come all of you weary, take rest, and they discovered peace and rest. What Jesus Christ said to the ancient world, was that well, Jesus would be the last day… He’s not merely human.
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If I face the mess made in my life, and Trust in the Savior and Lord, Trust in Peace in God, I gain Forgiveness.
Well, Forgiveness and Guilt? They are a huge issue amongst young people today. L says he had met so many people and they’ve known peace through God during his speeches, after they made the Fundamental Step of Faith.
Once, he didn’t know that there was a young Chinese student listening to him, a student at Harvard.
After he’d finished, the student screamed, “Look at me!”, from a rafter.
Everyone looked at him, and he said to L:
”I heard you speak at Penn State. Something you said resonated.”
A few weeks later, he said he’d gone to the Lord.
When Young people are in despair, he goes back to saying that well, going back to Jesus is a thing, you see that hundreds of years throughout and meet hundreds of people, and know there’s something in this, it actually works. In the end, he wouldn’t do these lectures if he didn’t believe it actually works. He firmly believes that if you tonight that you’re in that kind
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of a position, and are ready to make that sort of commitment, you can experience with God and peace and forgiveness before you leave this building. Science only gets you so far, then you must get more specific…
“Because ladies and gentlemen, God is not a theory - God is a person, and it is infinitely more satisfying getting to know a person than to know a theory.” - John Lennox, April 18th, 2016, The University of Chicago.
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