"Has Science Buried God?" - A Discussion with John Lennox at The University of Chicago

8/17/2019 "Has Science Buried God?" - A Discussion with John Lennox at The University of Chicago.

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“Has Science Buried God?”

Talk by: John Lennox, author of “Seven Days That Divide The World” and

Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at The University of Oxford.

Notes taken by: Victor Tan, at The Chicago Festival of Thought, The

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:

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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

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, we put these things side by 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

cares about mass/energy, Theism posits Ultimate Reality as God, L notes:

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 it is not alone: The idea is that God is

a Freudian creation.

Now, Hawking says that…

“Religion is a fairy story for those afraid of the dark.”

L’s reply is as 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, 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 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, 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.

Faith is not just a religious concept.

Often, the Scientists forget that Faith is essential to 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, 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 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, 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, but 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 in a deity.

Hawking, however, did it differently.

A genius, bound to a wheelchair, creates a shock when he Claimed that

God did not create the 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 says to people:” 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?”

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 take something complex, explaining it in terms of things 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, it reduces 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?

They do an experiment with the Menu, and the Biochemist says… “Well,

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, 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, G, C genetic code units combined together to create

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,

“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.”

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 do science with the brain, he says… It is interesting, he says.

L says, “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. To L, the very 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 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 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 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.

“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.

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 - 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 peer-

reviewed 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… 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 all begins with what

God had said: The 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 Interpretation… 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:

We look at the Bible, The Third, Fourth, Fifth Days etc, the book

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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What is The Truth about this universe? We can get science, art, historical

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.

Documents

"Has Science Buried God?" - A Discussion with John Lennox at The University of Chicago