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I'm in Israel for a couple of weeks, leading a history tour for our friends at SILA and scooping up some extra material for episodes in Season 2. So we've got a bit of a bonus for you this week. So many people liked our episode with John Lennox from Oxford. We decided to play the entire interview with some bonus stuff you haven't heard. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're going to try and undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
John, you've had a long career in maths and science. Is this just because you have a maths science brain and were attracted to what you were good at? Or is there a deeper love of this way of thinking about reality? That's quite difficult to say because looking back, I was first attracted to arithmetic simply because I was good at it.
and at the little primary school I went to I was known to be the only pupil who ever asked for extra homework which I did on a regular basis. And I suppose that meant that I got rapidly interested in mathematics. But I wondered quite a bit because I then had a brilliant languages teacher so I got interested in grammar. I loved Latin grammar and of course that relates to mathematics because
Pure mathematics is a compressed language. So gradually it filtered out that my main interest was there in mathematics. But why I concentrated on it in the end was simply the opportunity to go to Cambridge because I wanted to do electrical engineering. And the school headmaster told me I had a chance of getting into Cambridge but only for maths because they didn't have teachers who could teach physics and chemistry to an advanced enough level.
So I took advice and took the chance. So I ended up in Cambridge doing maths. So that's the decision process. Your introduction to the clash between religion and science...
was pretty confronting. A professor at Cambridge gave you a dressing down, I read in your new book, and said something like, you'll never excel in science if you keep this God business up. That's right. Can you tell us about that? He wasn't simply a professor, he was a Nobel Prize winner. And what happened was there was a special scholars' dinner event
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 uncomfortably God.
So being a kind Irishman, I backed off. And he turned to his next neighbour. And 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'd invited, I can't remember exactly,
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. 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 a seminal moment. We often hear that the higher-up in science,
someone goes, the less likely they are to be a religious believer. What do you make of that claim? Well, I think it's complex to answer it. The first way I would look at that is historically. Let's take Nobel Prize winners between 1900 and 2000. I'm told that over 65% of them believed in God. So that rather flows in the opposite direction. The survey that was done
in light of trying to repeat the Luba survey that was 70 or 80 years ago, still found that of active scientists in the USA, 40% believed in God, a personal God who answers prayer. So it may be true in the academy there certainly are fewer and I haven't unfortunately read the recent report that I believe was commissioned by Richard Dawkins no less.
But I'm not sure that I agree. I mean, even if you've got one Nobel Prize winner, and currently we've got more than that, who believes in God...
then that gives the lie to the fact that science and religion are essentially incompatible. Otherwise, they would all be atheists. There's a lovely footnote in your new book that actually outlines the statistics. And it makes quite clear that, in fact, in physics and chemistry and peace, Nobel Prize winners are heavily populated by Christians. Yes. But when you get down to economics and literature, not so much. No. Well, I...
I rather hesitate to comment on that because actually I'm quite passionate about literature but I think inevitably because literature is somewhat nearer to philosophy
than physics is, that you get all the enlightenment background pouring in, which doesn't necessarily affect the hard sciences in particular. So I'm not surprised at that. You often make the point, and again in the new book, that the first modern scientists were devoutly religious, Kepler, Faraday, even Galileo. That's right. But couldn't someone respond that everyone was religious back then? Well, they could, but they'd be wrong.
Dawkins did that to me on one occasion and what interested me is again the historical thing and I'm so glad I'm talking to a competent historian in you because you appreciate these things. You see in the world at that time there were other countries and empires than Western Europe.
And the Chinese were developing, in particular, various technologies, the invention of gunpowder printing and all this kind of stuff. But the interesting thing was the attempt to show or to try to find out why the Chinese didn't stumble on the abstract sciences, because they never did get there. And there is some very famous work by...
His name escapes me just for a sec. He was a chemist at Cambridge and a sinologist. He was a genius at Mandarin and all the rest of it and spent a lot of time in China. And he was a neo-Marxist. And for many years he tried to come up with a neo-Marxist answer to why the Chinese didn't come across abstract science. And in the end he concluded, and he wrote it,
It's most interesting stuff to read, that the only difference he could find was the fact that the Chinese lacked the idea of a creator who had created the universe to run on certain laws that we could decipher. So that's quite a remarkable bit of a discovery. And I pointed that out to Dawkins. I said, you're only talking about the West, so you're simply not correct.
There is a counterexample that pushes it in the opposite direction. And on top of that, there is quite a number of very competent scientists, like Melvin Calvin, who won a Nobel Prize as well, who said as he researched this historically, he said the real idea that drove forward modern science was something discovered, as he puts it, by the Jews centuries ago, millennia ago.
that this is an intelligent creation. And that was the real reason that science accelerated. And that thesis is generally held by historians today with various nuances.
they stick to that, that there is a strong connection and an obvious one because why would you believe science could be done? Well, the basic reason in the modern scientific period was the universe is created by an intelligence so we can follow its footprints.
You make the fascinating comment in the new book that I want you to tease out, that we must learn to distinguish between statements of science and statements by scientists. I think that's immensely important because Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics, he has a wonderful 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. Are you almost saying that scientists are the new priests? I'm saying that scientists are regarded by many people as the new priests. It's almost a fulfilment 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 and all this kind of thing. And I think that's absolutely right. 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.
Obviously, science can't explain everything, but it explains enough, doesn't it, for thoughtful people to think there's not much room for God? Well, there is enough for people to think that, but it's wrong-headed thinking. And I want to weigh into that notion.
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 what he called Karl Popper's questions, but they're really 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 science
ethical foundations of science, but you cannot talk about the scientific foundations of ethics. So 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. I think some people
can, I 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 and it's very easy to adopt Dawkins' attitude to say these questions are meaningless but they're not meaningless people ask them and have done for centuries and in fact
They tend to be more important than the how question. But even leaving aside the existential questions, which are obviously important, couldn't it be said that science can fully explain the material universe? No, I don't think it can be said. 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 realised it later when I read Newton. I saw the famous statement, non fingo, hypothesi, I do not make hypotheses. 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 saying,
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.
And that's why all I simply want to do is say scientific explanation is marvellous, but be careful. It's not exhaustive. And in fact, by simply sticking with it, you may be missing a far bigger answer to a far bigger question. Take a break from your high-paced life with Silar.
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Can I ask you straight up, what do you think are the most compelling reasons for believing in a creator, broadly understood, not even Christian theism? Oh yes, broadly understood. I would say the very fact that you can do science, if you want to keep away from religious documents. Because you see, go back to what you said earlier, this conviction that there was a creator is arguably, historically wrong.
the motor that drove the rise of science. Now, in the scientific world, in which I've worked for most of my life, there are a mixture of people, of course, there are many atheists, agnostics, people of other religions, but they have in common that they believe that the universe is rationally intelligible. It's accessible, at least in part, by the human mind. And I raised the question, why would you believe that?
Now the early pioneers with Galileo, Newton and Kepler and so on, they had their rationale, they believed in a creator. But absent a creator, and I have a lot of fun with some of my colleagues on this topic, you see, I say to them, what do you do science with?
And they often say, well, they rarely say their mind because they don't believe in the mind as distinct from the brain. I let that pass. Say, OK, you do your brain. Tell me about your brain. What's a brief history of the brain? Well, the brain is the end result of a mindless, unguided natural process. And I just look at them and I say, and you trust it? Really? And then I say, tell me honestly. If you knew that your computer...
that you use every day was the end product of a mindless, to quote your reasoning, was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it or use it? I've asked many people that, and I've always got the question, no. And then I say, I see you have a problem. And you see, it seems to me, therefore, that the creator concept is...
has much greater explanatory power than the mindless, unguided process concept. Now the point is that contemporary scientists, whether they're believers in God or not, they believe that science can be done. What I'm claiming, when you push, you find they don't have any real evidence base for that belief, but they do it anyway because they see the results of the sciences. But
That's talking about the way science works. If you come to what belief reasons we could have for believing in a creator when it comes to the results of science, as distinct from the philosophy of science, 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. I think it's a good argument because what it connects with is, if you turn to the biblical story, which says,
claims that God created the universe with a purpose, and to put it in scientific terms, the purpose is of sustaining carbon-based life. This is what the astrophysicists say about the fine-tuning of nature. So there's a convergence, at least at this stage.
So those are some of the arguments, but there are many more. Do you think there's anything to the response to all of that, that positing a creator just moves the explanation back one and we're going to then have to ask, but who made the creator? Yes, I think there is an absolutely trivial amount of weight to that, but 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 creation.
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 saying,
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, and you hinted at it. 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. With particles popping in and out of existence. That is exactly right. I got the opportunity actually to do a debate in no less than the Harvard MIT Faculty Club.
And my debating partner was Alan Guth, who's the father of the theory of inflation. And I warned him in advance that if you choose a topic, the topic was God and inflation, you see. I said, what he'll do is give you a seminar on his work. And that's exactly what he did. He's a very nice chap. So I took an opportunity to ask the first question, which I don't usually do. I said, Alan, tell me, out there in the public, there's much ado about nothing.
And when you as an astrophysicist use the term nothing, do you mean the normal, ordinary, philosophical sense of the word absence of anything? He said, no, we do not. And I said, thank you very much. And they haven't solved the Leibniz soul problem. Why is there something rather than nothing? You see, to put it more accurately, I think it's important to say from the biblical perspective that
The universe is made out of nothing physical. It's not made out of nothing. Its source is God, who is not physical but is spirit. But that's a matter for further exploration elsewhere. I have atheist friends who like to point out that atheism is the neutral position since it basically just fails to find...
positive reasons to believe in God. You're not so sanguine about the neutrality of atheism, are you? Oh, I don't think it's neutral at all. But it's neutral in one sense, which they think 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 about 400 pages giving you the...
what I would call the positive flip side of atheism, which is the philosophy of naturalism. 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. And roughly speaking, very roughly speaking, people either are somewhere in the theistic spectrum, somewhere in the atheistic spectrum, or somewhere in the pantheistic spectrum with
perhaps the relativists, but most of them belong to one of those three anyway. So I just want to say that there is a table at which every worldview has a right to sit and a right to argue its case. And the case for atheism is not simply saying, well, it just simply means not believing in God. Well, what's the evidence that there's no God? And they want to give you that evidence. So they don't really believe what they say.
You've talked a lot about mathematics and rationality and the laws of nature and all that sort of thing. Isn't all of that a little bit at odds with believing in miracles? Because I know you're also a miracle believer. I mean, even if there is a rational mind behind the universe, isn't that at odds with these miracles that break the rationality of the universe? 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?" Anthony Flew said, "My books were wrong and I'd have to rewrite them and I'll never get the chance." It was a very honest statement.
And I think the way to see that Hume was wrong, well, he was wrong on many things. It was interesting, he talked about miracles being violations of the laws of nature because Hume didn't really believe in cause and effect, so he couldn't set up a law of nature. But leaving that aside, 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. 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
the world of the New Testament 20 centuries ago, they knew the relevant laws of nature and that's why they're recognized 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 recognisable 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 our knowledge of the laws will help us recognise 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. You end your book with a pretty explicit call for the reader to explore Jesus Christ, the life, death, and resurrection. Is this because you're just a devout Christian who couldn't help himself? Or do you see a genuine intellectual connection between the science of your book and that ending?
Oh, I see a definite connection because interestingly enough, you've made the bridge, you see, by asking me about miracles.
Because 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...
I hope a thinking person has got to face the intellectual implications of this. You can't dodge them. And 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 and, if you like, in the fact that we can do science, with the God that reveals himself in a history-specific dimension and in particular in Jesus Christ. And what we have to do here is to realize that science and rationality are not coextensive. History is a rational discipline.
And clearly we cannot apply the normal inductive method on the resurrection of Jesus. You can't repeat it in the lab to see what happens. But we can use a very powerful method that all historians and legal people use, and that is inference the best explanation, and ask ourselves where does the rational evidence of history point?
which is why I feel that your discipline is immensely important, because the trouble is with many scientists, once they meet the historical claims, they just dismiss them as if history had no rational discipline to itself. And that gets me very irritated. So 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.
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 now,
The proof of the pudding is in the 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. Final question. This podcast is called Undeceptions. What do you think is the greatest myth out there about science and religion? And 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 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, than 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. We'll return to our normal format in a fortnight, but next week we're going to drill down even deeper with the wonderful Professor Theresa Morgan from Oxford.
Hey, if you've got questions about this or other episodes, I'd love to hear them. And in a future episode, I'll try and answer them. Leave your question as a voicemail by calling 02-9870-5678. 02-9870-5678. Or head to undeceptions.com. While you're there, check out everything related to this podcast and sign up for the Undeceptions newsletter to get access to bonus content and plenty more from each episode.
See ya.