God science
43:52 Share

What happened was there was a special scholars dinner and I sat beside him. I was placed there. I'd never met him before, nor had I ever met a Nobel Prize winner before. And I thought this is going to be very interesting because I can do my usual thing and play Socrates and ask him questions, which I did. But I noticed the nearer I got to the God question...

and his relation to the bigger issues of science and so on, the more uncomfortable he got. So being a kind Irishman I backed off and he turned to his next neighbour. That was it as far as I was concerned. But at the end of the meal we were just dispersing and he said, "Lennox, come to my room." And it just sounded a little bit threatening. You know, it wasn't really an invitation, it was a command.

And I found myself a few minutes later in his room and he invited, I can't remember who exactly, but two or three senior people, there were no students, and he sat me down. And as I recall it, they stood round and he said, "Now Lennox, do you want a career in science?" And I said, "Yes, sir." Well, he said, "This evening then, in front of witnesses, you need to give up your naive belief in God."

Perhaps you've already guessed, but that's my favourite Northern Irishman, John Lennox. And he's telling me about his first introduction to the clash between religion and science while studying at Cambridge University.

John is now Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, also at Oxford. I caught up with him for lunch recently and we chatted in the beautiful college gardens about science, God and miracles. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions. Music

Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that is either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth...

Back to John Lennox and his first experience of what life might be like as a scientist and a person of faith. Astonishing. I couldn't help reflecting subsequently that if he had been a Christian and I'd been an atheist, he would have been in trouble with the university authorities the next day. But he felt he could browbeat me, you see. And I managed to gather together

enough presence of mind to say, I would like to know from you what it is that you can offer me that's better than what I've already got. So he immediately quoted Émile Bergson, of course expecting that I'd never heard of Émile Bergson, but then I'd read C.S. Lewis. And Émile Bergson turned out historically to be a very bad choice because he said late in life that he really wished he'd become a Catholic. But anyway,

I said to this Nobel Prize winner, I said, look, if that's all you've got to offer me, I'll take the risk and stick with what I've got. It had a profound effect on me, and I remember resolving, if ever I got the chance to be in any kind of academic position where I could talk about these things, that is the last thing I was going to do, is browbeat, but rather put arguments into the public space and let people decide.

So it was, it was a seminal moment. A seminal moment indeed. Lennox is renowned for his intellectual defense of Christianity, debating celebrated atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer, and a host of others. He has an extraordinary ability to take giant concepts and make them simple.

three earned doctorates helps with that. But he is also able to do it with great cheer and a kind of soft, gentle spirit toward those who think he's an idiot.

He is one of our great undeceivers. John's latest book is called Can Science Explain Everything? He's addressing one of the great deceptions of our age, that science explains everything so there's no need for religion. And when I sat down with him, he didn't pull any punches. I think some people can understand

almost said deceive themselves into thinking that science will keep them going but they're usually people who are having a very good life and they're not hitting the big existential problems of existence where science doesn't really help very much unless it gives you a medical solution to your immediate problem. I just want to try to

get across to people that science is wonderful, but actually a lot of its success is due to the fact that it only attempts to answer a limited number of questions. But there are lots more questions out there, particularly the why questions of purpose. John's not the only one who's been challenged with the science does away with God thing.

In year 10 biology, the first class of the year, my biology teacher asked everyone in the class to put up their hand if they believed in God.

And I had just become a Christian, so I was feeling pretty under the pump. I looked around, I saw one or two sheepish people put up their hands, and so I put up my hand. I guess there might have been five or six of us willing to do that. And then this teacher said...

seriously berated us as people who generally in her class don't do well in science. She said, you're going to want to resist everything I teach you about evolution. Your belief in God makes you narrow-minded, so you won't be able to take the scientific evidence and follow it wherever it leads. I sat there, I put up with it, I was embarrassed, but I decided that day to do as well as I could. And I did, at

at least for that year, for that class. In my adult life, I meet loads of people who see things just like my biology teacher did. In fact, just a couple of days ago, in a small course I run for sceptics, a thoughtful French woman put it to me really bluntly, how could I believe in Christianity when I believe in science? It's a view John Lennox loves to engage with.

Obviously, science can't explain everything, but it explains enough, doesn't it? Certainly, I admit, not only admit, I welcome it. Science has done marvels in producing the technology that we all enjoy and so on. But when you start to ask the bigger question, where does science fit into the bigger picture, you suddenly run up against the fact that science cannot answer the really big questions. What I mean by that is...

Sir Peter Medawar, again a Nobel Prize winner who worked here in Oxford, he made it very clear by stating that it's obvious that science is limited. It can't even answer the questions of a child, as he put it. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life? And Einstein pointed out, and Feynman agreed with him, incidentally, that you can talk about

the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot talk about the scientific foundations of ethics. We all know Einstein, the smartest man in the room, every room. Theoretical physicist, the theory of relativity, and another Nobel Prize winner. Feynman was another theoretical physicist and another Nobel Prize winner. There's a few of them in this episode.

There's a whole area. Let me put it even more bluntly. If science is the only way to truth, then you'd have to close all, half the faculties in every university in the world, including yours, Faculty of Ancient History. Literature would go, languages would go, philosophy would go, theology would go. And that's just sheer nonsense. So obviously science can't answer some questions. But when it comes to the material universe, surely it gets to the heart of the matter, right?

Well, you see, that raises the question: what do you mean by "science explains something"? And I, in my days at school, I was taught the law of gravitation and I used to enjoy teaching it to students and deducing the elliptical orbits of the planets from it. But what I didn't get clear at school was that the thing the law of gravity didn't explain was gravity.

And Newton realized it. Later, when I read Newton, I saw the famous statement, non fingo, hypotesi, I do not make hypotheses.

He's talking about Isaac Newton, who developed a theory of gravity in the early 1700s. His famous Latin expression that Lennox quotes here is, Hypotheses non fingo. The full sentence is, I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. That

That is, I'm not pretending to tell you what gravity is. I can give you a wonderful mathematical equation that you can work out the behaviour of heavy bodies in motion relative to each other under gravity, but I don't know what it is. And therefore, a scientific explanation is rarely comprehensive, even within science, to go no further.

And a lot of this whole topic revolves around what do you mean by explanation? And in the book, I explain it very simply in the hope that even some professors can understand it. By asking the question that you get asked at school, why is the water boiling? Well, because the molecules of water are being heated up

by the Bunsen burner and they're getting agitated, moving faster and faster. And that's why it's boiling. But equally well, I can say it's boiling because I want a cup of tea. And that's very simple, but it indicates that there are two levels of explanation. They don't conflict, they don't compete, they complement.

And interestingly enough, people have been enjoying tea for millennia before they knew anything about heat transfer and heat equations. The point being that when you say explain this, the scientific explanation is usually incomplete and it usually doesn't deal with the most important aspect of it. Scientific explanation is marvellous, but be careful. It's not exhaustive and in fact exhaustive.

by simply sticking with it, you may be missing a far bigger answer to a far bigger question. Lennox even warns that scientists are becoming the new priests of our generation. And that's a problem, especially when they cross over into fields where they're not experts. You might call this competency extrapolation. Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics, he is a wonderful scientist.

the statement long ago where he said, outside his or her field, the scientist is just as dumb as the next guy. And he's right because it's very easy to try to use, in fact, abuse authority. So you take someone like Carl Sagan, who was very famous.

and he did a television series called Cosmos and he started by saying the universe is all that is, was or ever shall be. Now there's a scientist making a statement but it's not a statement of science, it's a statement of his own atheistic belief. But unfortunately the general public tend to accept these things. You take Stephen Hawking, the late Stephen Hawking who also was a genius

But in his book, The Grand Design, he says very near the beginning, philosophy is dead. Well, that's a statement by a scientist, but it's not a statement of science. And it is rendered ludicrous by the rest of his book, which is about what? The philosophy of science. So I warn people, be very careful, because many of the statements which sound as if

They are using science to get rid of God or doing no such thing. They're just assertions without evidence of atheistic worldview. I'm saying that scientists are regarded by many people as a new priest. It's almost a fulfillment of what T.H. Huxley wanted to do around the time of Darwin's Origin of Species. He wanted a church scientific. He wanted churches scientific.

changed into centres of admiration of the goddess Sophia. Sophia is the Greek goddess of wisdom, and some people took this idea so seriously they actually built buildings in honour of human wisdom. Go to Hawking again in that book.

Philosophy is dead. Well, what does he say next? Well, it's left to scientists to bear the torch of truth in this generation. Now, that is scientism, the notion that science is the only way to truth. But there you are. Priests are normally regarded as people with some handle on truth. And there is a lot of pressure in the public space to adopt this view.

I was once on ABC's Q&A program with Lawrence Krauss. It was the scariest moment of my public life. Krauss is a theoretical physicist, a cosmologist, and a famed atheist. He's also the author of A Universe from Nothing, which really digs into religion in a big way.

I went into my foxhole with some trusted advisors to prepare for what I knew Krauss would turn into a confrontation between religion and science.

Putting science and religion as if they're competing theories does a disservice to science because science, you know, you can say... That's not what you're hearing from me, though. Well, no, it is because you're saying that explains the world to you. Christianity doesn't explain how airplanes fly or how... And the bait and switch that worried me is when you say all of this provides clear evidence that there's intelligence or design. The point is the universe behaves... I don't think I said that. But the universe, if you look at it, it doesn't...

It behaves as if there's no purpose to the universe. Now, does that prove there's no purpose? Absolutely not. But a universe that behaves without purpose, and a universe created by God to look like a universe without purpose, well, they might as well be the same to me. It makes God irrelevant. And God is irrelevant. Okay, I don't want to make the rest of that panel irrelevant. And science, in fact, is a better kind of spirituality because it's real.

I mean, the fact that I see the meaning in my life is the meaning I make and the meaning for all of us. We're so lucky to be here on this planet and have brains and being able to understand the universe back to the earliest moments of the Big Bang and be able to impact on our future. And we should use those brains and we shouldn't rely on someone else guiding us. What I'm saying is I get all of that. I get all of that. But hold on. Jesus. Jesus.

Atheist scientists like Krauss often point out that science is a neutral discipline. And at its best, it certainly is. But many atheist scientists go beyond that and suggest that atheism itself is the neutral position. John Lennox has no time for that. Oh, I don't think it's neutral at all. But it's neutral in one sense, which they think is

they can get away with. "Ah, Theos, there is no God, so what's the big deal?" And to take Dawkins as an example, the God delusion is not a one-page document saying there is no God. It's a 400-page argument detailing what atheists believe. On the positive side, if you call it positive, that is an explanation of their naturalistic philosophy.

So I don't buy into that, that it's no big deal. And certainly I don't buy into the idea that it's neutral. Everybody has a worldview. But are there any positive arguments for God's existence? I was asked to face up to one of our famous professors of philosophy here, who's an atheist. And he wanted me to talk to about 100 of his students, most of whom were atheists.

And he said, I hope you're going to use your best argument for theism. Oh, I said, what is that? I said, I'd like you to tell me something I could use it. I promise you, if you tell me, I will use it. Well, he said, if I were ever to become a theist, he said, I think the thing that would convince me most is fine-tuning. I said, are you serious? He said, absolutely serious.

He said there is no real solution to the problem with which the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants of nature pushes you, you see. And I found that intriguing. I did use the argument, but I used many other arguments as well. Fine-tuning. That's the way the fundamental constants of the universe... Let me phone a friend. PHONE RINGS

Hello, Luke speaking. Hey, buddy. John here. Great. How you doing? That's Luke Barnes, postdoctoral researcher in astronomy and cosmology. His PhD was all about fine-tuning, and he's the author of a fantastic book called A Fortunate Universe. Producer Kayleigh says he also plays a mean bass guitar. Hey, Luke, tell me what fine-tuning is.

Fine-tuning. So more generally, in physics, we want to know whether some idea about the universe is broadly correct. And we get suspicious if your theory has to start making all sorts of fine-tuned, jerry-rigged, ad hoc assumptions. And so we think that's suspicious. And specifically, it seems like when we look at the deepest laws of the universe we see around us, the deepest laws we know about,

they have to do some suspiciously jerry-rigged, fine-tuned thing in order for the universe that they describe to be able to produce life forms like us. Can you give me an example that I might understand? So, for example...

There's the basic sort of bits of the universe, the Lego bricks that you're made out of. So you may remember from school, there's electrons and protons and neutrons, and actually protons and neutrons are made out of smaller things called quarks. And a basic property that those basic bits have is their mass, just how heavy are they. Now it's a very small number, but we know what that number is.

And it turns out when you look in the sort of the equations, the best ideas we have about how they behave, if you change those maps a little bit,

then for various reasons the basic Lego bricks of the universe would stop sticking to each other. They wouldn't stably make something like atoms and the elements of the periodic table and all the chemicals you can make out of those and so any sort of advanced life form that's not particularly going to work. How many of these fine-tuney things are there?

So there's about 30 constants of nature and constants of initial conditions. Of those, about a dozen, we find that some sort of limit, some of them are reasonably wide and some of them are incredibly small, that there's some sort of limit you've got to hit, some sort of dial you've got to change.

tune in order for a life-permitting universe to result. So about a dozen. Hey, thanks so much, mate. Just tell me... But bringing up fine-tuning and the existence of a creator raises the question, who created the creator? It's a question Lennox gets all the time. Richard Dawkins once asked it in a debate with John.

It's tempting, once again, to import the easy, facile idea of a designer and to say that the designer twiddled the knobs of the universe at the Big Bang and got them exactly right, got the gravitational constant right, got the strong force right, the weak force right, and so on.

But it seems to me to be manifestly obvious that that is a futile kind of explanation because, as the quotation says, who designed the designer? It's a very silly response, if I might be honest. Because if you ask who created the creator, philosophically what you're doing is asking...

This sounds a curious descriptor of it, a complex question. It's complex not in its formulation but in what it conceals. If you ask me what or who created X, I immediately know that X is in the category of the created. Who or what created God? You're saying God is created. But you see,

First of all, created gods are a delusion, to go back to Dawkins' terminology. We usually call them idols. And the notion that there could be an eternal God is not addressed by the question. Once you say, who created God, you're immediately assuming that there's no such thing as an eternal God. So you're not talking about the biblical God. And you'll have to have a lot stronger evidence than that.

But there's another point to be made. Do the questions go back forever? The answer is no on either side. You see, my atheist friends, well, they used to go back to mass energy or the Big Bang, and then they stopped there. That was where the laws of nature broke down. Now they tend to go a little bit further in several different directions. They go back, well, the most common thing these days is they go back to nothing.

a universe that creates itself from nothing. Well, I have a lot of things to say about nothing in that sense, because it turns out in every case that nothing is not the absence of anything. It's a quantum vacuum and it certainly isn't nothing. It all sounds so rational until you get to miracles.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.

To be a believer in Christianity, you must also be a believer in miracles, like the resurrection of Jesus. This seems fundamentally incompatible with rationality and science. The French woman the other night said to me straight up, if you believe in science, you could never believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Well, it could be at odds with some claims for miracles.

I hope I'm not gullible in believing every claim for miracles like weeping statues and all this kind of stuff. But the basic issue behind your question goes back essentially to David Hume, but not really because it was raised long before him. That miracles are violations of the laws of nature and therefore we can't in the end really believe in them. Well, I reject that descriptor.

And it's interesting that in late life I was granted an interview with Anthony Flew, who was Hume's great interpreter in the Dawkins of his day actually. And I asked Anthony Flew, what about the argument against miracles? Oh, he said Hume was wrong. And he said, my books were wrong.

David Hume was the 18th century Scottish philosopher who argued that since miracles violate the laws of nature, we could never believe in miracles unless the evidence were even more miraculous than the miracle itself. To quote his famous dictum, "...no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

Basically, he's saying that a report of a miracle shouldn't be believed unless the report is so strong it'd be miraculous if it turned out to be false. I think that's what you call stacking the deck. It's a statement designed to rule out miracles, not probe whether they can be rationally accepted.

And Hume's great 20th century advocate was Anthony Flew, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK. He was one of the greatest intellectual atheists of the last 40 years. He accidentally came to believe in God near the end of his career. But that's another story. This idea of violation of a law

fits much more easily into the realm of jurisprudence. You know, in America, you see the signs on the side of the road. If you park illegally, violators will be towed. And I think Lewis has got it absolutely right to show that the problem lies in two concepts of law.

John's talking about C.S. Lewis, who has been greatly influential on his thinking. Lewis was the author of the famous Narnia series. He was an academic at Oxford and Cambridge and the author of many books and essays advocating for the Christian faith. One of them is called Undeceptions. Lennox is the only person I've ever known actually to have heard Lewis lecture.

He was there in 1962 when C.S. Lewis was giving his final John Donne lectures in Cambridge. John Lennox says that Lewis just burst into the packed lecture theatre and started lecturing as soon as he opened the door, walking past the students, still lecturing, gave an hour lecture and continued to lecture as he walked up the aisle and out of the lecture theatre, shutting the door behind him. He said it was extraordinary.

One is the mathematical concept, the other is the legal concept. And he tells this lovely little analogy to illustrate it. He says if I'm in a hotel and I put £100 in the drawer on the first night and £100 on the second night, so £100 plus £100 is £200, and on the third morning I wake up and there's £50 in the drawer, what do I conclude?

that the laws of arithmetic have been broken or the laws of England? Well, of course I conclude the laws of England have been broken. But why do I conclude that? Because the laws of mathematics have not been broken. And the reason I recognise, and here you can extrapolate to a much bigger scene, my mistake was to think that the drawer was a closed system of cause and effect and therefore there's nothing outside it that could come in.

and feed something in or take something out, I was wrong. And mathematics cannot say to the thief, stop, stop, stop, you're about to break the laws of arithmetic. That's absurd. It's our knowledge of the laws of arithmetic, and in a more general sense, it's our knowledge of the laws of nature that enable us to recognize a claimant for miracle. If you didn't know...

the dead bodies stayed in the ground, well, the resurrection of Jesus would be no big deal. But the point is, in the world of the New Testament 20 centuries ago, they knew the relevant laws of nature, and that's why they're recognised as a miracle. So Hume is multiply wrong, I think. And therefore...

People say today that science and miracles clash. No, science can tell you nothing. In a way, plus or minus, although you have to be careful with that. If there is a God who created the universe and has it running on certain recognizable laws, he's not constrained by them. He's not a prisoner of them. He can feed a new and a special event in and out.

Our knowledge of the laws will help us recognize that. So you need both things. You need a universe that does run on laws in order to recognize the hand of God when he gets involved. So I don't see a problem here. Christianity is based on some central miracles. The biggest one is, of course, what C.S. Lewis calls the grand miracle, the claim that God becomes human.

And once you begin to investigate something that is history specific and something that is existentially specific, like Christianity, then you and myself, as I hope a thinking person, has got to face the intellectual implications of this. You can't dodge them.

At the end of Lennox's book, he makes an explicit call for the reader to explore the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. I wondered, is this just a devout Christian who couldn't help himself promoting the faith? Well, I asked him about that. It's not because I'm an enthusiastic Christian who can't help himself. It's because I'm an enthusiastic Christian who sees an intimate connection

with the God who reveals himself in the universe. The end of that book was really written to answer a question that I get asked more and more. You're a scientist, you believe in testability. Well, the answer to that is twofold. One, yes, I do for things that can be testable. But a lot of science has to infer to the best explanation because you cannot repeat the history of the universe to see what happens. For example...

Can you test Christianity? Well, what would that mean? It would mean testing historically the issue of the resurrection. Is there historical evidence for it? And I think that there is, but that's another story. But then, can you test it experientially? And the way I approach that is simply to observe that Jesus makes fundamental claims, truth claims. And he says that if people trust him,

And as Lord and Saviour, then they will receive certain things. One of them is peace. Now, most people know whether they've got peace or not.

they will receive a new life. They will receive a new power. They will receive forgiveness. And that's very meaningful to people. And the way I approach this is just to say, look, whatever you make of this, I meet people and they're in a mess, basically. They may be drug-dependent, suicidal students, etc., etc. They're utterly miserable. And then you meet them six months later and they're totally changed.

And you say, what happened to you? And they say something like, I became a Christian, or I met Jesus, or I got converted. They may use very different language. But when you see that again and again, you're tempted to put two and two and make four and say, look, there's actual evidence in people's transformed lives that this is true. And from where I sit today,

The proof of the puddings that they're eating, if that were not happening, then I'd be sceptical of the whole thing. So it's a cumulative argument. Intellectual arguments, arguments from science, but also existential arguments and historical arguments. And that gives a full-orbed argument.

set of reasons for believing that Christianity is true. I ask this great undeceiver what he thinks is the greatest myth out there about science and religion. Can you please undeceive us? I think the greatest myth is that they are essentially in conflict. And that's simply true, as I've argued from the history of science. If they were in conflict, then a

Newton probably wouldn't have given us anything, nor Kepler, nor Galileo. It is a huge myth. And it comes about, I think, from a deep failure to see that the God explanation and the science explanation don't compete. I often say, look, God no more competes with scientific explanations, true scientific explanations for how the universe works.

then Henry Ford competes with the law of combustion, internal combustion, as an explanation for the motor car. You need both. And what the great myth that's been set about is that the scientific explanation is enough. No, it is not enough, even within science. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus.

It's common for scientists, physical scientists especially, to believe that their way of knowing stuff is the only real way of knowing stuff.

It's a bit like the man who, after a long night at the pub, refused to search for his lost keys anywhere but directly under the streetlight. When a passerby offers to help by getting on his hands and knees and feeling around in the shadows of the gutter, our friend snaps, don't be ridiculous, they must be under the light because you wouldn't be able to see them in the dark.

I've pinched this analogy from the philosopher Alvin Plantinga. But just as there are other ways of finding things than seeing them, so there are other ways of forming solid, rational judgments about the world that don't involve observing them and running tests on them, like the physical sciences do.

There are loads of real world things the physical sciences can't explore. The date of Emperor Tiberius' reign, the political power of his mother Livia, the barbarous activities of the European crusaders in the Holy Land, the

The genius of Bach or Shakespeare, the principal causes of World War I, the cruelties of Auschwitz and their effects on survivors, a biographical account of my great-great-grandmother, and a million other things in the real world. This is no criticism of the physical sciences. It's just a statement about the strict focus of science on things mathematical, observable, repeatable.

But by definition, almost everything that has ever happened in the world is no longer happening. They are unobservable, unrepeatable and can't be mathematically verified. We need another way of knowing that stuff. We have to move outside the glow of the streetlight and start feeling around in the dark.

Imagine if our courts of law were only permitted to admit as evidence things that can be observed, repeated or mathematically assessed. Very few legal judgments could be made. Almost by definition, if we're in court arguing about a matter, that matter is in the past and therefore can't be verified in any scientific way.

DNA and forensic evidence only appears in a small minority of legal cases. The vast majority of court decisions today depend on a. the testimony of witnesses, which is a kind of historical evidence, and b. expert opinion, which is evidence from authority.

History is a discipline uniquely qualified to tell us about the past. It's in no way inferior to the physical sciences. It just deals with a different field of inquiry, stuff that happened in the past. History can't tell us about the age of the universe any more than science can tell us about when Jesus lived and what he did. The age of the universe is calculated by assessing the cosmic microwave background radiation.

History is definitely the wrong tool for that. The details of Jesus' life, on the other hand, are discernible by cross-checking various Greek, Roman and especially Jewish sources. And science is definitely the wrong tool for that. In other words, the discipline of history is no more subordinate to the physical sciences than the historic past is subordinate to the observable present.

Both disciplines are the right fit for their own field of inquiry, and both are pretty much irrelevant beyond that. You can press play now. The relationship between science and religion is certainly fraught, even if, as we've heard from Lennox, it doesn't have to be. We're not done with this topic, though. Later in the season, we're going to speak to one of the world's leading physicists about how they approach the myth of science versus religion.

Have you got a question about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them and I'll give my best go at answering them in an upcoming episode. Leave your question as a voicemail by calling 0298705678. That's 0298705678.

5678 or head to undeceptions.com and while you're there check out everything related to this episode and sign up to the undeceptions newsletter to get access to bonus content and plenty more next episode we're digging up the classical world of ancient rome my happy place what was life really like for the average roman and how did christianity upend everything see ya

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by the awesome Kayleigh Payne and directed by the OK Mark Hadley. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing is by Bella Ann Sanchez. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and everything related to this episode.