John Lennox argues that science and Christianity are not in conflict
A detailed conversation between atheist podcaster Alex O'Connor and Christian mathematician John Lennox, recorded in the Goodman Library of the Oxford Union.
Summary
Alex O'Connor interviews Professor John Lennox, Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist, in the Goodman Library of the Oxford Union. Lennox argues that the Judeo-Christian worldview gave birth to modern science, pointing to the fact that founders of the scientific method like Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were believers in God. He contends that the real conflict is not between science and religion, but between theistic and atheistic worldviews, with scientists on both sides. Lennox addresses evolution, arguing that while it may explain adaptation, it cannot explain the origin of life itself or the linguistic complexity of DNA—which he sees as evidence of an intelligent creator. He discusses his debates with prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, criticizing the debate format itself as more sport than truth-seeking, and explains why he now prefers moderated discussions over formal debates.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and setting the context
Alex O'Connor: Today's episode is being recorded in the Goodman Library of the Oxford Union. The Oxford Union is a debating society which has hosted a wealth of illustrious speakers over its hundreds of years of history. And today it allows students to come face to face with some of the most important intellectuals on the planet and listen to and sometimes even debate them. I myself have debated at the Oxford Union before as you may have seen. They're currently running a fundraiser to help restore their Grade 2 listed building and there's a link in the description if you want to help out. Professor John Lennox, welcome to the show.
Professor John Lennox: Thank you very much.
Alex O'Connor: Are science and religion in conflict?
Professor John Lennox: I don't really think so. And I've had that impression actually for a very long time in the sense that when I was at school, I started reading C.S. Lewis. My father gave me some of his books and it was very interesting reading those books because his take on the history of science which was based on Alfred North Whitehead actually was to quote more or less men became scientific because they expected law and nature and they expected law and nature because they believed in a lawgiver. That fascinated me and a little bit more research showed me that if you take modern science, I'm not talking about medieval science, modern science, and you start with people like Galileo and then you move on to Kepler, Newton and so on. These people were all believers in God with slight variations on it. And it seemed to me there was a pretty close connection between their theism and their approach to science and in general historians of science. And when I came to Oxford after a while, I worked for a time with John Hedley Brooke who was the first professor of science and religion here and a wonderful historian. And he was very cautious but he said there certainly does seem to be a connection between the biblical worldview and the rise of modern science.
So sometimes I say to people who ask me that question that I'm not remotely ashamed of being a scientist if you count mathematicians as scientists and a Christian because arguably it was the Judeo-Christian worldview that gave me my subject. So I think there's a deep resonance there and I do think there is a conflict though just to explain a little bit further but it's not between science and faith in God and I often illustrate this by thinking of the Nobel Prize in physics because take for example Higgs, Peter Higgs who won a Scotsman atheist brilliant physicist and then there's another person I know, Bill Phillips, an American Nobel Prize winner for physics and a Christian. And what that tells me really is this that their difference isn't in the realm of physics at all or science. It's in worldview.
And I see a real conflict between the theistic worldview and the atheistic worldview. And there are scientists on both sides. And so I feel that if we take that on board, we can make a more sensible exploration of this well I think it's a myth and a lot of historians do as well that science and religion are necessarily in conflict.
I think as a final codicil I would say it depends what religion you're talking about. I'm talking about the Judeo-Christian worldview because science conflicts with a lot of religions.
Why Christianity specifically enabled modern science
Alex O'Connor: I think this question of the history of science and it being tied up with the Christian worldview is an interesting one because to me it's slightly different to asking whether the findings of science after the scientific method gets off the ground conflict with the sort of tenets of religious belief. And so I think what a lot of people will think is okay the founders of the scientific method were Christian but of course they were because everyone was Christian and if science does somehow undermine Christianity then of course they would be Christians because they hadn't invented the scientific method yet to undermine it. And so people will point to the findings of science and say that the explanatory power that these Christian men who wanted to understand the universe found in the scientific method removes the space needed for the explanatory power of God. Now I know you disagree with that too of course but I was hoping you could tell us why.
Professor John Lennox: Well I think it is an argument that's pretty fair if you apply it to a limited proportion of the earth. But the interesting thing to me about that and I've thought about it a fair bit because it's the obvious point to make and it's a good point to make is that modern science did not develop among the Chinese and a lot of study was done on that particular topic by a very famous sinologist who actually founded the Academy of Sciences in China. I'm wrestling for his name. You probably know it.
Alex O'Connor: I'm not sure I do.
Professor John Lennox: But he did a lot of research and he was principally a Marxist in his viewpoint and that is what makes his conclusion very interesting. He certainly was the author of a massive dictionary of science and all that. He tried to explain within a Marxist framework why modern science of the type you described didn't arise in China. And the conclusion he came to was it was a difference in a fundamental presupposition of the idea that there was a unification in the sense that there was one creator who had created the universe and created the human mind to study it and the Chinese didn't have that. That was his view.
So it seems to me that that is an interesting response to this. If you take the whole world, modern science arose in a particular place in a particular time where in a sense the general background was Christian but on the other hand it didn't arise where the general background was very different. So I think that's how I would respond to it.
Islamic contributions to science
Alex O'Connor: So two questions come to mind for me. One is the question of the so-called Golden Age of the Islamic world with particular reference to mathematics which will make people think okay science arises in the Christian west but we also have this rich tradition of science and discovery within Islam as well. And the extent to which you said it depends which religion you're talking about. I wondered if you had a view on whether Islam can be similarly credited with scientific knowledge.
Professor John Lennox: I'm not an expert on Islam, but I used to be very interested in what went on in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where a lot of work was done and some of it by Christians, by the way, working away at translating some of the more ancient classical documents into languages that were available to people around. And at the very least in the Islamic tradition you have a very strong transmission of more ancient texts that of course helped with the advance of modern science. But as far as I know not a great deal of innovation.
But again I would say my field is algebra. And the word algebra comes from al-jabr which is an Arabic word and in the Islamic world you had tremendous understanding of observational astronomy and their ways of solving equations and so on back into the Babylonian world. So we had certainly a great deal of stuff that was transmitted forward and helped I would say helped enormously but in the sort of innovation and experimentation and all this kind of thing and the vast steps forward taken by people like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, they didn't get that far but we must credit them.
The Galileo affair reconsidered
Alex O'Connor: The other question that came to mind then is one concerning the difference between say belief in God as motivating your scientific enterprise and Christianity as a world religion because when I think about someone like Galileo, an important founder of the scientific method, and I think about the way that he's treated by the reigning Catholic authorities for presenting an alternate view of the heavens, although not proving it arguably at the time, running into a bit of trouble and ending up finishing his life in house arrest in Tuscany—
Professor John Lennox: Rather luxurious house.
Alex O'Connor: Yeah, it's quite he got it quite well. I think this idea that he was tortured for his beliefs is a mistaken one. Although allegedly some people believe that he was shown the instruments of torture as if to say that could be—keep quiet.
Professor John Lennox: Here again, I think that using Galileo as an example doesn't work because if you look at what actually happened the first people to criticize Galileo was not the Catholic Church. It was the philosophers who were building on Aristotle and believed in a fixed earth and the church got involved rather foolishly because it had climbed on the Aristotelian bandwagon. So you could argue that this is not really science versus Christianity because Galileo was a Christian. He believed in God before he started all this and when he finished. So I think I would agree with the historians of science that say that the Galileo incident is not really one to be used to show that there's a huge conflict between science and religion. Yes, I think the book Galileo's Daughter is well worth reading on this story.
And Galileo was a bit silly, you know, and unwise in what he did. He insisted first of all on writing in Italian and that irritated the experts who thought everything should be done in Latin. And secondly, he wrote a text and put the views of the then pope who had been his friend into the mouth of a character he named Simplicio the fool. And as for PR, I think he comes fairly near a zero actually and he'd been told by the Catholic Church not to write about heliocentrism. But there was some dispute over what he was allowed to do.
Alex O'Connor: And so he writes this philosophical dialogue where he's like well, I'm not writing an essay in favor of heliocentrism. I'm writing a dialogue. It's just that the character that disagrees with me is called the fool. And that's what finally did it, it seems, for the church.
Professor John Lennox: For me, I think you're right to say that this isn't a good indication of the conflict between science and religious belief. For me, at best, with the most uncharitable view of the Catholic practice here, it might show a conflict between say the scientific method of Galileo and the Catholic Church. But I want to very carefully tease apart the historical question of world religions and their potential suppression of the scientific method with the more specific point I think you're making which is about the personal belief in an ordered universe as being necessary to engage in science.
Alex O'Connor: I think that's fair enough. And if you look at various times in church history, I would say that to their shame and as of the Galileo case, it was only in my lifetime that the Catholic Church rehabilitated Galileo.
Alex O'Connor: Yes.
Professor John Lennox: And that's pretty shameful. Finally said that he was correct. And the same is true, I suppose, of the so-called conflict between Huxley and Wilberforce, you know, after Darwin.
The Huxley-Wilberforce debate
Alex O'Connor: Yes. But again, that's represented as—this is a debate that happens just down the road at the Natural History Museum here in Oxford and it's between Thomas Huxley who is a sort of protege of Charles Darwin and so the newly discovered idea of natural selection is being defended by Huxley. And then you've got the Bishop Wilberforce who is arguing against it. And this is again seen as archetypal science, evolution undeniable fact versus the—
Professor John Lennox: Yeah, that's right. It's very interesting. I've read the whole debate and I find that many people haven't. And Wilberforce was the kind of cleric who was an amateur scientist and he seemed to have a lot of leisure for doing that, which might tell us something about the church in those days. And Huxley was dead against this. He wanted a professional class of scientists. That's the first. There was a strong bias against it.
But when it came to the argument, I was fascinated to discover that very early on in his speech, Wilberforce said, "I am not going to use religious arguments. I am only going to discuss the science." That's often left completely out of the discussion. And again, it was John Hedley Brooke, the professor of the history of science at the Open University, said that this event should not be used to drive a wedge between science and Christianity. It was a much more complex thing. It was a sociological thing as well. The push to have professional scientists get rid of the clerics, turn the churches into temples to Sophia, the goddess of wisdom and all this kind of stuff. There was much more going on than simply dealing with science. But poor old Wilberforce, I think he gets the rough end of the stick and it's not always very accurate.
Alex O'Connor: I mean instinctively I think of people who are motivated by their religious beliefs but so as to convince the non-religious will abandon that as a strategy of argumentation and say "Well, look, I'm not going to rely on my religious views here to convince you." And yet that is still their motivation to presenting these arguments. And I really don't know—I don't know what you suspect Wilberforce's motivation was or if there's anything else that indicates that he really was—
Professor John Lennox: I take from what you're saying that it's always difficult to second-guess motivation and to understand what it is and we can only see what I find actually interesting is that it actually occurred to Wilberforce to say what kind of argument he was using. I thought that was pretty insightful of Wilberforce. In spite of the fact that generations afterwards, nobody took any notice of it. He was actually passionate about the science and felt a case could be rested on the science alone. That's an attitude I like.
Scientific revolutions and Christian belief
Alex O'Connor: Do you think some of these archetypal scientific revolutions—the Copernican revolution, the revolution of biology with natural selection and Charles Darwin, even things like the revolutions in physics with quantum mechanics—do you think that any of these pose any challenges to say the Christian worldview? Is there anything about the Christian worldview that you think is at least challenged by these scientific developments?
Professor John Lennox: Well, we need to take them separately.
Alex O'Connor: Sure.
Professor John Lennox: And certainly as one person has said at least one that Darwinism proved to be an engine of atheism.
Alex O'Connor: Well, I think this is the most important example here is probably evolution.
Professor John Lennox: It is. Quantum mechanics actually to take your other example for some people opened up the possibility of freedom and all the business of putting it this way which I don't really like, space for God so to speak and not confining the universe to be a deterministic entity.
I think that it is a very interesting case in point that a lot of people jumped on the Darwinist bandwagon. Until relatively recently, it was often used as a reason to get rid of God in some way or other. My thinking of it is well it's quite complicated actually. First of all, the idea that there is a creator God is not going to be refuted by a biological theorem. I'm not even convinced they're in the same kind of category. That in other words evolution whatever it does and I'm saying that quite deliberately whatever it does is not an argument against the involvement of a creator.
I spoke to one very leading well-known biologist who is a strong believer in evolution and is a Christian and I said to him in the end if I'm pushed, God can do it any way he liked. So that if it happens to be that way, that is not an argument against the existence of God any more than the existence of an automatic self-winding watch which uses random motions of your arm to wind itself up is an argument against the existence of an intelligent watchmaker. That calling in of randomness doesn't get rid of God at all.
But of course, if you're going to use evolution as an argument against God, first of all, you've got to know that evolution is true and you've got to define what it does. That's the first thing. And here you run into very many more difficulties now than you would have done 20 years ago. And I just make two points and they're quite important points and that is we need to distinguish between evolution and the origin of life.
Evolution cannot explain the origin of life
Now Richard Dawkins as you know who's a brilliant writer I must say, I remember reading his book The Blind Watchmaker. And what arrested me in reading it and I can almost quote it verbatim. So that's a compliment to Richard. Evolution, the blind automatic mechanism that Darwin discovered, is the explanation for the existence and the development of all of life. He said that. It's in the book. And it took a very long time for him to realize that the first part of that statement is false for a very simple reason. Because evolution again whatever it does or doesn't do depends on the existence of life to do anything. So it cannot be the explanation for life. Now, of course people these days get round that by talking about chemical evolution and so on. That's nothing to do with mutation and natural selection.
And we could go into that but as a mathematician, it's the former interests me more that is the origin of life itself because it's almost equivalent though not quite to the origin of information. I see there a huge problem. But staying with now the second part of Dawkins's assertion, it explains all the development of life. Now here's where I think one has to be nuanced. And to be fair, because Darwin was brilliant. He observed things that people had not observed. He observed changes. For example, the famous study of the finch beaks in the Galapagos Islands. And I have a 1,000-page book at home, famous book on that. And I've read most of it. And that was hailed as evidence, but of what? It certainly was evidence of cyclic change. What not so many people were aware of is that once the drought conditions disappeared, the proportion of long beaks to short beaks actually moved back to what it was before.
But nevertheless, he could see that something was happening that filled niches and enabled existing creatures to adapt to new niches. Now, that seems to me to be uncontroversial because we can observe it. But when it goes beyond that to the creation, if I might use that word, of new life forms or all this kind of thing, I think that's a very different matter.
Now, I'm very aware that I'm not a biologist. And secondly, I believe in Richard Feynman's wonderful dictum. He says the scientist outside his own field is as dumb as anybody else. And I've got to remember that. But I have tried to read my biology especially in recent years and I comfort myself that everybody from Darwin to Dawkins wrote for the intelligent public. They expect us to understand what they write.
And I have a huge difficulty with that kind of what we may call macroevolution. But much more interestingly is what has happened in the last few years with so-called systems biology where the Darwinian mechanism—well natural selection was his, mutation was later but if we put both together and we have the neo-Darwinian hypothesis—that has been called into very deep question as being totally inadequate here in Oxford. Dennis Noble, one of the most fascinating characters, fellow of the Royal Society and he's debated Richard on a number of occasions and his argument is really in the end that natural selection, that neo-Darwinian thesis doesn't need to be modified, it needs to be replaced because it's completely inadequate.
DNA as linguistic information
Because now and here I'm just saying what I read, the problem is and it's a chicken and egg problem that most simply perhaps can be realized here is DNA. You can't get DNA without a cell. You can't get a living cell without DNA. So, how does that work? And what seems to me to be happening and I've actually written quite a lot about this in my recent book Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix, there appears to be a top-down causation and it leads to a huge problem because it was enough level of complexity to discover that the DNA molecule was not simply complex. It was linguistically complex. That is it gave us a 3.4 billion letter long word in a chemical alphabet and all those letters had to be in the right order. That is a stupendous level of complexity which is no chance of being generated by random processes and Richard Dawkins agrees with that. He brings in something that natural selection actually has a different kind of operation but we'll not go into that at the moment.
But the point is now with the more recent discoveries of the nature of the living cell and all the chemical factories in it, there are levels upon levels of complexity beyond the genome. And that just beggars into unbelief the possibility that any known mechanism can produce that without the input of intelligence.
Alex O'Connor: Now, I'm in your boat, but at an even sort of lower level below the deck in that it's not just so much outside of my scientific expertise, biology, but I'm not even a scientist. And so, I'm also aware of my limitations in being able to engage with this material. I do understand that on the popular level I think Steven Meyer has been talking about this kind of thing quite publicly and I understand that a lot of people are beginning to question at least macroevolution.
But to understand you correctly would that entail doubting for example that say myself and a chimpanzee share a common ancestor? Because I understand that the mechanism of getting DNA off the ground and this kind of thing is this unimaginable mystery. But once we've sort of granted that intelligently produced or not, does that suspicion go to that depth of evolution? I mean do you think that there is reason to doubt that I share a common ancestor with the chimpanzee?
Professor John Lennox: Well, it can do. People are divided on that and I understand the point very well. You know, from a mathematical point of view, if you take a set of things, you can often order them in a hierarchy. And that's clearly true in the animal kingdom. You could use various criteria for organizing them. But the whole question of common ancestry assumes that you've got a mechanism that drives them one to the other.
And I often use, well, I sometimes use an argument that I think Darwin was aware of in some way. I have a vague memory that I got it from one of his letters, but it's something like this. You and I are biologists and there's desperate need in the world for some kind of grain that resists, let's say, floods and so on and so forth. And we sit in the laboratory and we genetically engineer a new type of wheat that's very successful. A thousand years hence people are investigating the archaeology of this and they're trying to determine what is related to what. Now they know nothing about us or what we did and their research, if it's done on the basis of a dominant naturalism, will completely miss the fact that there was an intelligent input at one point creating this new level. And that'll be due to their methodological assumption.
Alex O'Connor: Yes, that's right. And you can't blame them in a way if that's the way they're working.
Professor John Lennox: So, it seems to me we've got to be extremely careful that the ability to organize things into various hierarchies is an indicator certainly, an argument for development without input of intelligence, but it's not conclusive. And it seems to be in other words my faith in God doesn't depend on whether there's a common ancestor or not. Certainly God could do it that way but I'm not convinced that he has because the analogy I gave you has got more to it than you may first realize because it's saying that at a certain point there was an input from outside the system, an intelligent input from you and me as the scientists involved.
"In the beginning was the Word"
Now from the biblical point of view and this has always interested me the biblical description of creation is very minimal. It's a hundred words I think Genesis 1 in Hebrew something like that. But what is emphasized in that description has always fascinated me because several times over you read "and God said" and "God said." So these various stages, the days of Genesis, whatever you make of them, these stages are each introduced by God speaking.
Now again the New Testament says very little about the how of creation but it does say something and it says something very profound to my mind and that is "In the beginning was the Word." That is the Word already was and this is an existence statement because it then goes on to say "through the Word all things came to be" is actually what the Greek says. It's fascinating. So the Word already was, the Word never came to be. The world came to be. You and I came to be. And then of course there comes the huge statement which shows John's fascination by existence and the Word came to be human or came to be flesh. God became human which is the central Christian claim.
But sticking at the creation level my reaction to that is this is a word-based creation. Now do we see any evidence of that? I believe we do first of all in the fact that lots of things in our universe are mathematically describable. That is we can use the language of mathematics to describe them. And that is so amazing that really clever people like Einstein saw that there was a problem. And you remember the famous thing he said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible. He could see that there was something absolutely amazing that someone thinking here could come up with equations that described what's going on out there. So a word-based universe at that level. But then much later than Einstein we discover that in biology life is a word-based phenomenon as well. An information-bearing macromolecule DNA.
So at the heart of the two sides, physics and biology, it's word-based and that resonates very much with me "in the beginning was the Word" and I remember this will amuse you years ago. I was working in Cardiff and next to me or almost next to me was Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe. I don't know whether you've heard of him. He was an astrophysicist and worked a great deal with Fred Hoyle. And we were talking about this one day and he'd been in America and he'd got into one of these so-called creation trials. And he said, "It's such a pity. The people in America, the Christians were very nice, but they're so hopelessly naive. They believe the Bible."
And I felt I had to defend my Christian brothers and sisters in spite of how extreme their views might be. And I said, "Well actually, I believe the Bible in the sense that I take it very seriously because of course it's full of metaphor and all this kind of thing." And he said "Prove it to me." So I walked over to the board. I'll never forget this. He threw me a piece of chalk and I had to prove it to him. So I wrote, "And God said, 'Let there be light.'"
So Chandra roared his head off and he said, "There you go. You're as naive as the rest of them. Do you think God is a voice box and lungs?" And I said, "Chandra, now you're being naive." This is very simple language, but if you don't mind, let me put it in different language. So underneath this, I wrote, "In the beginning was the Word." And he said, "What does that mean?" And I went on "and all things came to be through the Word." Well, I said word, speech, information. And he stopped me at that point. He said, "What did you say?" I said, "I said information. You heard me."
He said, "Are you meaning to imply that this biblical text somehow refers to the concept of information?" I said it looks like it. He said, "Does Fred Hoyle know about this?" I said I don't know. So he told him. He arranged a meeting where we had a long discussion with Fred Hoyle before he died and I remember that so very well.
So it seems to me that summing this up, sorry it's been a bit long, this has been one of the big things in my own understanding that God started biology according to the Bible. That is he told human beings to name the animals and taxonomy is the basic intellectual discipline naming things. In all disciplines we use taxonomy and God wasn't going to do it for them. He said you go and do it. So God is for biology you see and that is a mandate to my mind that we are left to have the interest, fascination and enjoyment of finding out a great deal about the world ourselves.
But the Bible does make this steering comment that says it's a word-based universe. And what I say is that science has come up for the evidence for that. And that's my big problem with the naturalistic worldview. There's no believable generator of word-like information that any of us know about. It always is associated in our experience at least with a human intelligence.
Distinguishing different meanings of "word"
Alex O'Connor: Well, what jumps out at me from what you're saying just at the end there you say word-like information and I think that this term word, I want to be careful not to use it too promiscuously because there's the words that I'm using to speak in the language that I'm using. And then there's the so-called language of DNA which as far as I understand is something of an analogy. I mean, we're not talking about words in the sense that I would use words to construct a linguistic sentence, but it might sort of work in a similar way, information being put together in such a way as to produce something larger than the sum of its parts.
You've also then got the word that God speaks in Genesis, which is when he says, "Let there be light," which reads to me like a pronouncement of the divine. And then of course, you've got Jesus being the Logos, which is usually translated as the Word. But if I were to equate the Logos of John's prologue with Genesis chapter 1, then I'm thinking how that would read to me. You know, when God says, "Let there be light," he sort of does it through Jesus, which is in keeping with the vision of creation in John 1. But I'm wondering exactly how you, I don't want to say equivocate, but how exactly you equate this Logos of John 1 with Genesis 1.
Professor John Lennox: Well, I used the word resonate and I certainly didn't use the word literal which is a very dangerous word in my view. That's one that's used promiscuously if ever there was one within computer science and biology. Nowadays, people use that kind of terminology. They use computer language in biology and they use ordinary language about words in computer science because there's a very intimate relationship in that.
I think what many biologists say to me and in reading their material that it's word-like in the sense that the DNA letters code for the amino acids which code for—that's the word—which code for the proteins which are the building blocks of life. So if you like to say it's an analogy, but it's an extremely powerful analogy because at the very base level you're communicating information.
Now this is a difficult area. I'm very well aware that if you ask me what do you mean by information, it's like so many things, we don't exactly know how to define it. It's like Augustine said about time. Everybody knows what it is until they're asked to define it. It's one of those things. But one of the things I believe that has come out of physics although that's debated up to today is that information in the sense of we live in an information-based world is not derivable from physics and chemistry.
Now that to me is a massive block in the way of a materialistic explanation of life, mathematics, everything else. Because if information is not in the end material then no material explanation is going to work for it. And it seems to me the death blow to materialism in the ultimate sense has been given by physics in talking about information not being reducible to physics and chemistry. So these are a lot of the things that go around.
Evidence versus proof
You originally asked me was biology a threat to belief in God. It has been and is been used in that way. But if somebody comes to me who's not a biologist and not particularly interested in the details as I am, I want to say, well, okay, you believe in evolution. It means at least five different things. But let's assume you think there's a natural process that does this. One, the fact that there may be one, if that is so, that doesn't mean that there's no God involved in it. Because after all, what it has achieved is something absolutely mind-blowing that no human mind, let alone natural process has been able to achieve. We cannot build birds and we cannot build living cells and so on.
Now, none of this and I would emphasize this as a mathematician, amounts to proof. And it's important to say that because people—you haven't done that. I know because you're too much of a philosopher to do it. But it's worth saying because people often say to me, can you prove that God exists? I say, what meaning of the word proof are you using? If you're using it in the axiomatic mathematical sense, here are the axioms, here are the laws of logic and here's the theorem. No, you can't.
But if you use it in the ordinary sense, as a lawyer would say, can you prove beyond reasonable doubt? What you're talking about is evidence. And so my view therefore is to go on that side. It's evidence-based. Best explanation. What is the best explanation of what we see? And it seems to me that the notion of a creative God is not a gap explanation. We can't explain this. Therefore, God did it. No, it's in the nature of the thing.
How can I illustrate that? If I look up, well, there I see a sign that says "Exit," let's say. Now, I immediately deduce that whatever natural processes, mechanical processes gone into production of that sign, there's a mind behind it. Just four letters will tell me that. But that is not a mind of the gaps that I'm postulating a mind because I don't know what ultimately caused it. The fact is we do know in our human experience where it comes from and by analogy it seems to me that therefore the best explanation of the word-based universe as I put it is that there is a Word ultimately who is God. That's only one strand of evidence for my belief in God.
Alex O'Connor: I mean, for me, the most powerful argument for the existence of God has long since been the argument for the existence of God from the number of arguments for the existence of God. It seems like anywhere you look, you can construct one. There's an argument from biology and consciousness or beauty or contingency, the existence of this microphone. It's quite phenomenal in that respect.
But with regards to this and I want to be clear for our listeners, when you point to the fire exit sign and talk about how we know that that has a mind behind it you're not drawing an analogy there to evolution directly. People might be misunderstanding you. Like, you're not saying, well, because I know that that had a mind, I know that biology must have a mind. I think you're saying something more specific which is that saying that there was a mind behind this word "exit" is not just plugging in a gap because you've got no better thing to fit inside of it. You've instead got a reason, there's something in the nature of the thing which gives you reason to think that a mind created it.
Now, I think I agree with you in saying that to say God is behind evolution is not at least necessarily a God of the gaps argument. I'm happy to say that there is very plausible reason for somebody to look at the majesty of the natural world and the language coding of DNA and say, "Yeah, there must be some intelligence behind this."
For me, the question is then well, is that argument or is that consideration convincing enough? I also agree with what you said about language. I described it as an analogy, but when you mentioned computer coding and I thought about binary code, a series of zeros and ones, which of course is only analogous to the words that I'm speaking in English, but to say that it's not really a language would be perhaps a sort of confusion of terms, I think. But okay. So the question for me then is whether I have good enough reason to think that a god might be behind this.
Can humans create a bird?
You said that this process is something that no human mind could ever create. We can't create a bird. I think the reason we can't create a bird is because firstly we don't have enough time because birds take I don't know probably billions of years if we accept that evolution does begin with some single-celled organism. However that got to be there. And I'm happy to say, okay, perhaps there is some kind of intelligent creator of this first, this first sort of prime biological being. Fine.
If we then sort of track this process of evolution, the reason why a human mind can't create a bird is because it's not done by a direct intelligent design. It's done by a sort of series of billions of years of trial and error such that I could create a bird in the sense that if I could somehow set up some simple beginning conditions, I could then just sort of let it go in its environment and in billions of years it would turn into a bird.
Professor John Lennox: The important thing is getting it going. That's to me where the really important question is. It's not so much in the process of evolution that I discover something.
Alex O'Connor: Well, that's interesting because to my mind getting it going is one of the hardest things. The origin of life is much harder because you don't have life to—
Professor John Lennox: No, I'm agreeing with you. I mean to say that to me is where the question is like this mystery of how on earth would you get this initial being but for me what I'm saying is that once you have that and even if you need God to get that I don't think you then require this concept of intelligent design to describe the process that then goes on as it begins to replicate in environments that select for different qualities if you know what I mean.
Professor John Lennox: What I would say to that is if you've got God already to start it off you've got God and perhaps you needn't worry too much about the rest.
Alex O'Connor: So for me, I then look at this and say okay, I've got then this now what is actually a mystery which is the beginning of life which some people tell me is good reason to believe in a god. And other people say it might be, it might not be. There might be some kind of explanation. Maybe the lightning zaps the ocean or whatever it is that they believe. Okay, fine.
So now then I'm looking at this process of evolution which as I've just said separate from the mystery of the beginning of life, I'm happy to accept that there's some naturalistic process and as you've just I think importantly pointed out proof is not the same thing as evidence and it's not the same thing as sort of convincing somebody. And so of course I don't think that the process of evolution somehow disproves the existence of an immaterial mind behind the universe.
Evolution and the problem of evil
But it does seem unlikely that if God's design was to bring about me and people like me so we could enter into a relationship with him that he would choose to do so through a method which historically speaking relies upon the death and destruction of the unfit creatures which brings up a problem of evil. But as well as that just seems a little bit arbitrary in that presuming that my chimpanzee cousin doesn't get to inherit eternal glory and was not made in the image of God. If I track back this evolutionary lineage, either being made in the image of God is something which slowly develops which seems not quite in line with the idea of God breathing life into Adam—
Professor John Lennox: Absolutely not.
Alex O'Connor: Or there is some apish ancestor and God breathed life into that apish ancestor such that that ancestor can now inherit eternal life is now part of the Christian story. But his mother is not and she has no redemption available to her. And it just seems a little bit arbitrary and—
Professor John Lennox: Well it does if you put it that way. And I think you'll understand what I'm saying in that I'm not going to present this as some disproof of the existence of theism. But it certainly does give one pause for thought when you're thinking about a Christian design behind the universe.
Professor John Lennox: Oh absolutely. And it raises an absolute multitude of questions and is based on a whole lot of assumptions.
God revealed in Jesus Christ
I think there's another way of coming at this because as a Christian, I don't simply believe in God. I believe in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Now that brings us to a completely different level of understanding. In other words, it's not that I look around the universe and say is there evidence of an intelligence behind it? I believe there is. But on the other hand, I believe that there's a God who has revealed himself in terms that I can understand in terms of a person like myself in some sense that it's not simply I'm searching for God and I in the end come to the conclusion well there must be a God. People might be likely to say well so what?
So what? It's that I think logically and of course my life didn't develop this way and that's probably a question you may want to ask is that intellectually one's reasons for God often come after one's experience of God and that's quite important. Because if it were the case that people had to understand a huge number of philosophical arguments and answers to them to come to faith in God, I would doubt whether that God was worth believing in in a sense.
Alex O'Connor: I agree with that.
Professor John Lennox: And what I think the wonderful thing is is that God has revealed himself. And people sometimes say to me look, this is arrogant. You can't know anything about God. There's a so-called apophatic tradition which you will know all about that if you say this is God, it can't be God because you can't grasp God. Now, that's a very humble attitude except that what scripture reveals to me is that God wants us to know certain things. "This is eternal life that you might know God."
And if God allows me to know certain things, then it's arrogant to say that's impossible. So, on the one hand, of course, you can't put God in a box and know everything. On the other hand, if God has revealed himself and says there are certain things you can know, then I want to know those things. And that's where you mentioned earlier the relationship with God becomes extremely important because in my life it was really the first thing about God I learned within the Christian tradition that my parents explained to me and that's another whole story by the way.
Lennox's early religious formation
Because they were very unusual parents and I should mention this that they loved me enough not to force their beliefs down my throat and actually encouraged me to read other worldviews. And there's a lovely story where my father when I was about 14 gave me a book and I said, "What is it, Dad?" He said, "It's the Communist Manifesto." I said, "Have you read it?" He said, "No." "Well, why should I read it?" And I'll never forget his answer because "You need to know what other people think." That was a very enlightened view for a father in Northern Ireland in that period of time. And I owe a lot to my parents because they presented the Bible to me as intellectually exciting. It got me into history. It got me into archaeology. It got me into evidences. It was far from boring. And it certainly wasn't bigoted in any way.
And I'm very grateful for that because the moment I got to Cambridge, it gave me the opportunity to meet people who didn't share my worldview and I've been meeting them ever since. So that's really a brief bit of my background. But it was encountering God, the fact that I could get to know God as a personal God who would give me certain basic things that I knew I needed even as a young lad. And the first was peace with God, forgiveness, knowing I had a relationship. And as I look around young people today, and I feel I've got to mention this in view of the stuff we hear in the news all the time, young people looking for belonging, looking for meaning in life, looking for a purpose. You see, I found all of those things in my relationship with Christ very young when I was about 10 years old. And in that sense, the rest of life, 70 years after that, I'm still exploring that relationship. There's a lot of mystery to it, but there's been a lot of reality to it where God, I believe, has proved himself, his existence, his reality, his involvement in my life way beyond philosophical and intellectual arguments, but in the business of everyday life. And that seems to me to be a very important dimension.
Alex O'Connor: Yeah. I like to remind people that the whole project of what they call natural theology which is arguments for the existence of God, the Kalam cosmological argument, this kind—a lot of people and I think particularly atheists mistake that very specific kind of thought for religious thought as a whole and believe that that is sort of the appropriate methodology through which everyone should engage with the subject material. And I like to remind people that most people don't believe in God because of an argument. Arguments are sustaining or they give you justification for your beliefs, but the belief itself came through some kind of experience.
That's time and time again. The only person I can think of as a counter-example to this might be Anthony Flew who says that he was convinced by various arguments I think involving free will and things but for most people it's an experience and I think that's perfectly legitimate.
Anthony Flew's conversion
Professor John Lennox: Well Anthony Flew by the way whom I knew towards the end of his life and I asked him about this it was a specific argument that convinced him.
Alex O'Connor: Which one was it?
Professor John Lennox: It was the argument I've mentioned about the language-like nature of DNA. It's very interesting. I suddenly got the opportunity—he was in high old age not long before his death—to visit him in his home and I asked him about this. I said what was it? Well, he said, I just this argument seemed to me to be conclusive and seemed to be where the evidence led and if people didn't like it, they could lump it, you see. So, he came to believe in God. He didn't—he became a theist or a deist I think technically speaking. And then the amusing thing to my mind is he wrote a book with N.T. Wright and he got N.T. Wright to write about the Christian evidence for God as part of that book.
But he had come to the conclusion and I remembered very well the conversation because of its honesty. I asked him, "What about the objections to Christianity that you've used all your life against miracles?"
Alex O'Connor: To be clear for our listeners, Anthony Flew is a at the time especially quite well-known atheist professor who had sort of made a career at this point out of in part arguing about God's existence and was famed for atheism.
Professor John Lennox: He was a professor at Reading who was a world authority on David Hume and who regarded miracles of the type in the Bible as violations of the law of nature and they couldn't therefore occur. And what he said to me when I asked him about that, he said, "I was wrong about Hume." That's something for a philosopher to say at the end of his life. He said "I was wrong about Hume. All my writing about Hume would have to be rewritten, but I'll never live to do it." I thought it was very touching actually. In other words, Hume's analysis of miracles is false. And that's another matter altogether about which I've written. But yes, it was the DNA, the language-like nature of DNA. And I think Steven Meyer mentions that in one of his books somewhere.
Alex O'Connor: Yes it's certainly picked up steam I think in the popular apologetic space as well as of late. But you're right. You're right in the sense that you meet relatively few people for whom the intellectual argument was at the top.
Professor John Lennox: Alister McGrath might be another person who was challenged intellectually. He came up here as an atheist to Oxford. And I think I don't do him an injustice. He started to investigate. I have met a number of people like that. But as you say, they are relatively few.
Alex O'Connor: And also it kind of feels as though I like to imagine if Christianity were true, what might I expect? And I suppose what I would kind of expect is for God to meet you where you're at. Which means that if you are of that kind of mindset, he'd meet you there.
Professor John Lennox: Exactly.
Alex O'Connor: But I think the point that you made before, which is important to stress, is that you might find God at the bottom of a microscope but it would be unreasonable to suspect that you have to.
Professor John Lennox: Well, absolutely. Because what this does, I think a lot of people don't realize, is it creates an intellectual barrier for entry to relationship with God, which if Christianity is true, that simply can't be the case. It sets the bar far too high and makes it simply an intellectual process.
Alex O'Connor: Well, really any bar is too high if you're talking about something like intellectual understanding.
Professor John Lennox: I agree.
Alex O'Connor: And I mean there's going to be a bar in terms of what you have to do, what you have to sacrifice, the relationship, the time you have to spend, all of this. But in terms of intellectual input, it would be far too exclusionary, I think, to say that this was a requirement of belief in God.
Stan Ford: an example of God meeting people where they're at
Professor John Lennox: It is. And I have a stunning example of that. The man that married us 56 years ago was an ex-fairground heavyweight boxer of the type who went to a fairground and faced open challenge and if you beat him you got some money and so on, that sort of chap, tough, absolutely tough, uneducated, couldn't read or write. And at the age of 19, he was in a pub and all the guys were there and a very small Salvation Army lady came in with the magazine, War Cry, it's called.
And he looked at her and he said "Missy." And he lifted her with one hand and stood her on the bar. And he said, "Missy, if you sing for us, all these men will buy your War Cry. Just imagine the situation." She did. And he through that started to think about Christianity and very soon became a Christian and went and sat with primary school kids to learn to read and write. Now, can you imagine that? Now, when I met him, he was a veteran preacher. He's the only man that I've ever met that could give you a summary by heart of every chapter in the Bible. Absolutely phenomenal.
And I thought, but I was a student at Cambridge, it would be interesting to bring him in amongst a bunch of very clever young people. And he came in and I never forget what happened to my college, Emmanuel, at Cambridge and he gave a talk, lunchtime, short talk, very alliterative, very simple, very down to earth and there was a theology student, very cynical, sitting on the floor and I could see it now, he looked up and he said, "Well Mr. Ford, what about the parable of the sheep and the goats?"
And Stan Ford, that was his name, was very polite and he said, "Well, young sir, not everybody in this room may be familiar with the parable of the sheep and the goats. So tell it to us." So this chap started to splutter and mentioned a couple of lines of it. And without batting an eyelid Stanford finished the entire parable and the cheering and they loved him. And he used to come regularly to Cambridge because he was a living example of what God can do to a person. It changed his life completely and he had a profound influence.
So my wife and I invited him—she wasn't my wife then—to conduct her wedding and those kind of examples where God meets people where they're at have been hugely important in my life. The intellectual side has been important because it's what you said is beautifully correct. That is one of the biggest evidences for God is meeting people where they're at and I think that for me is a conclusive thing as I look back at my life and I've been trying to record this in my autobiography. Where are the places where I really think that there's evidence for God meeting me where I'm at?
Why is intellectualism associated with atheism?
Alex O'Connor: I'd really like to know then why it is that in the popular imagination this assumption has developed that intellectualism, scientists and philosophers and the academy is sort of tied up with atheism that you know once you become a bit intellectual and you start learning about stuff and if you actually read the Bible oh you'll be talked out of all of that. We've already talked about how you think that's just untrue. But then why that association in the popular mind?
Professor John Lennox: That I think is a complex question to which there are several different answers that one can think of allegedly. First of all, in this country there has been media bias. I believe there's much more communication of atheism. Secondly, there's been in our recent lifetimes the so-called new atheist movement which has picked up a lot of people I feel and if you want to trace that back you're going back to the Enlightenment in a way, forgetting the evil side of the Enlightenment and just sticking with the intellectual side and also the idea that is either consciously or unconsciously perpetuated by some scientists that science is the only way to truth which we call scientism.
And there are a number of people around here that believe that. Peter Atkins whom I've debated several times and you must know very well holds to that view and to my mind it's almost amusingly false because the statement "science is the only way to truth" is not a statement of science. And therefore if it's true it's false. It's logically incoherent. But that impression has been given. And I can't explain it any more than perhaps there's also an element of the site where the culture is at and disgust with some of the aspects of public Christianity.
And you know the country I come from, Ireland, but also here, the number of scandals. And people often say to me, well, you know, how can you be a Christian? You coming from Ireland with all the fighting there was, let alone the moral scandals. And I think that's a real question and my response to it is—and I talked to Christopher Hitchens at great length about this and he took the point in the end—is that what I said to Christopher, I said "Christopher, I don't understand you because if you'd really understood what Jesus said to the religious rogues that were around him, you'd be on his side, not fighting against him because all your objections to bad religion I share."
And Christ criticized them and I said, you know, you talk about Christianity being cause for war. Well, that was what Christ was put on trial for, that he was promoting terrorism and Pilate declared him innocent because, and here's the interesting thing that I remember discussing with Christopher very clearly. I said, you know, Pilate was threatened by any threat to Rome. And was Jesus a king who was trying to overthrow him politically? And Jesus' answer was, "Well, I am a king, but not in the sense you mean. To this end, I was born. To this end, I came into the world that I might bear witness to the truth." And Pilate said "What is truth?" And went out and said "Jesus is innocent."
Because he was bright enough to see what most of us can see that the one thing you cannot do by force and violence is impose truth, especially if it's truth about salvation, peace with God, forgiveness, a new life and all this kind of thing. And therefore the thing that answers it is and I'm very strong in this that my fellow countrymen who took up arms whether on Protestant or Catholic side to defend Christ and his message are not Christian because they're disobeying what Christ said, not following him.
And I think that makes a lot of confusion and has done in the past. And another thing I often say well, the existence of false coinage doesn't prove that the real stuff doesn't exist, but may make it hard to find. And but as you will have noticed I see encouraging signs on the horizon because many young people particularly in Gen Alpha are beginning to come back and be interested in God and exploring these questions not so much against the background of what science says or doesn't say but against the much more cultural background of meaning and purpose in life. And that heartens me. I find that immensely encouraging. The focus has shifted.
Alex O'Connor: And I think there was some—I think was it the Bible Society that just released a study about young people going back to church at a quite incredible increase of people. And it wasn't I think the thing that surprised me was not just that people were beginning to believe in God again or something but to attend church which is quite a thing in itself.
I mean, I agree with people like Justin Brierley when they say that I don't know if the statistics bear this out, but I can kind of feel something in the air you know, the conversation shifting a little bit. And I was sort of like, okay, I can feel that too. But if church attendance is going up I think that's quite an important indicator.
Addressing Christopher Hitchens' concerns about religious certainty
These discussions, I agree the important question is with Christianity Jesus and for me it's quite straightforward as I feel like it might be for you too in that if somebody says well what about this thing that these Christians did, if the question is whether Christianity is true then the question is wholly would Jesus have condoned or commanded such a thing and if the answer is no and it's not an objection at all.
But the fear that someone like Christopher Hitchens has is that the kind of certainty that comes along with that conviction which as you've just explained when somebody has a religious experience that is what compels them. And it happens in a way that is indescribable and is immune to any kind of scientific or philosophical inquiry. But that certainty can then spill over into areas where it doesn't belong, such as certainty on doctrine, certainty on moral practices specific to our current time that weren't discussed by Jesus for example. And I think that's the kind of fear that he had. And you've debated these people. You've debated I think you in a way you were an important part of the new atheist movement as one of the key figures in opposition.
You've debated at this Oxford Union. I should mention we are filming this in the Oxford Union who have very gracefully lent us this wonderful Goodman Library. They're currently fundraising for a restoration project of some beautiful paintings they have at the top of their old library. So for people listening there's going to be a link in the description for a fundraiser to help keep this wonderful building and this institution of debate and discussion in action.
You've debated in the chamber across the way. You've debated Hitchens. You've debated Richard Dawkins. What do you think was going on with new atheism? Why was that something that was so popular? And why was it so difficult for someone like Christopher Hitchens to see that all of his criticisms were journalistic? They were about religion as an institution on earth. And what would you say to quell his concerns that it is that religious impulse, that experience that somebody knows they have God on their side that gives them the license to do all kinds of evil?
Professor John Lennox: Looking back, I wish I had more time with Hitchens. I liked Hitchens. And answering your question is difficult because I sense its thrust and its power actually because it seems to me a very valid thing that certainty can become what I call fundamentalist certainty. And I think that's what you're referring to where people are so certain that their receptors are completely closed to anything else and that justifies almost any kind of behavior. And that's appalling.
And I asked myself, what has saved me from that? Because as I sit talking to you, I have that sense of certainty of my relationship with God. I think what has helped me immensely in life is that I've been very privileged to—how shall I put it? I've been prepared for the last 70 years or more to be vulnerable. In other words, I'm always prepared to question what I believe. And I have seen in my life the sadness that comes about when people become fundamentalist in any direction.
And I was very honored to be invited by the British Academy some years ago to give a lecture on, wait for it, scientific fundamentalism. Which I think is a much better expression than scientism. "Science is the only way to truth." And what fascinated me that day, I was terrified you know, going into the British Academy and all the academicians there and so on, was the positive response was absolutely amazing. The talk was eventually published in a book.
But I've always been afraid of that. I suppose because I was brought up in a culture where my own family suffered bombing because of that kind of attitude. My father ran a business and just your listeners and people watching this will be interested to know that in a country where there's huge tension between Catholics and Protestants that was fermented by a lot of extremists on both sides, my dad employed equally as far as he could Protestants and Catholics in his shop in the center of one of the most difficult towns in the country. And because of that, I said, "Dad, this is really dangerous. Why do you do it?" And I never forget his answer. He said "Son, scripture teaches us that every man and woman, irrespective of what they believe, is made in the image of God and I intend to treat them like that."
Now, that was amazing. That and the fact that they let me think were two of the biggest things they could have given me. But that as a moral guide has been very important to me in life. In other words translating it, I can learn from everybody. And when I arrived in Cambridge, week number one, I looked around looking for someone who did not share my background. And I've been doing it ever since.
And I think and it might sound arrogant to say this but I think the way in which God helped save me from that kind of cocksuredness that legitimizes any behavior is that I'm constantly prepared to listen, seriously listen to people that don't share my worldview. And so when I debated the people you've mentioned, I prepared, read all their books so far as I could and thought through how seriously am I to take this and I think my confidence and I prefer to use the word confidence than being cocksure has grown because of those exposures. But I'm still ready at the age of 81 to take the arguments seriously because many other people are facing these arguments and discussions.
And my little contribution I think to the debate is to show that there's another side. And I remember the little story about Richard Dawkins that may interest you. The first debate we did in Alabama of all places. He at the beginning we were chatting together and he said "You know I don't debate" and I said "Well if it's any consolation I'd never done a debate before." I said "What I'm going to try to do is to put before the public a rational answer to your atheist viewpoint and then leave it to the public to decide." And his answer was "I'll buy that. Let's go."
So that's what we did and I think that's the attitude I want to preserve in days where people are being no-platformed and university students are afraid of hearing new ideas. I want to say look one of the things about Christianity is it allows people to think and to form their own opinions. And I want to be part of that debate but I want to justify you also being part of that debate even though you disagree with me. And that's what I understand to be the true nature of tolerance. To tolerate a person is to disagree with them, but support them in them having a public space. We're in danger of losing that, I think.
Alex O'Connor: Yeah. Well, I think my success in talking to Christians, for example, correlates with both of our abilities in that conversation to ignore our confidence and to sort of treat everything as if it could be false. Because Hitchens was right that there is a lot of arrogance and certainty and violence in the history of religious thought. But let's not pretend that he didn't have a bit of confidence himself.
I'm not sure. I think a lot of the time people say things like, "I always read people who disagree with me" or "I always put myself in positions where I debate people." And I always think to myself do you really? I mean, do you mean that you meet people who disagree with you and you have like a jousting match with them because you enjoy debate or do you mean that you've actually sat with it? I'm sure a lot of people actually have, but I think it happens to varying degrees.
Why debates fail and discussions succeed
And I think when you're watching something like a debate, it is clear to me that someone like Christopher is listening very carefully to what someone's saying and thinking about how to pick it apart. But I can't think of many examples of him listening in such a way as to say "Okay, I'm going to consider that for a moment and see what I think about it." It's almost like a lot of it was sort of pre-prepared. And so I've kind of gone off debates a little bit.
Professor John Lennox: Well, so have I. I've gone off them completely and I'm so glad to hear you say that. I'm not surprised. I felt that the so-called confrontational debate of the kind that I was invited to do, I didn't invite myself to do them at all, I was thrust into that position, have serious defects. And one of them is cutting corners, not really listening to the other person and trying to win. When what I feel the best thing is to have a discussion.
So for a long time now I have asked no debate. Let's have a moderated discussion. And the ability to moderate is pretty rare to moderate well between two people. And Justin is one of the good ones. You know, bringing people together is very good. And you're a good one too, if I might say so.
And I think one of the things you said a moment ago I liked. Actually, I hadn't heard it put that way before, that we ignore our confidence, that we're not coming into a discussion saying, "Look here, I know I'm right." We're saying let's talk about the issue at stake. Let's present our case as best we could and have enough confidence in people who are watching or listening that they can make up their own mind. Yeah, that's in many ways how I feel about this podcast.
Alex O'Connor: I've long since thought that the best way to do debates of the format opening statement, rebuttal round. I thought the best way of doing that would be to produce your opening statement and then everyone goes away for a week and then you come back and you do your opening statement. Then everyone goes away for a week and then you come back and you do your rebuttal and if you want you can then stitch the videos all together to make it easy to watch because otherwise what's the point in presenting ideas? It becomes more about who can think on the spot. It's an ego. It's a test of many things other than the truth.
You know what I think it is? I think it's a sport.
Professor John Lennox: Yes.
Alex O'Connor: And I've said this, listeners to this show will have heard me use this analogy all the time. I compare it to a boxing match and the crucial thing about a boxing match is that it tells you who's the better boxer, but it doesn't tell you who the better fighter is.
Professor John Lennox: No.
Alex O'Connor: And in this kind of verbal interchange, it doesn't tell you what the truth is.
Professor John Lennox: Yeah. Quite. And that's another thing. We haven't we've gone around it a bit but from a very early age I was very fortunate in the books I read as a boy and they questioned my beliefs you see and they introduced me to a much wider world. Although I confess I tried to read books that were far too difficult for me, too early, like Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead. But I had a group of people, two or three guys, and they were older than I was. So they went to university before I did and we used to read books and discuss them all the time.
So although there was no debate, there was discussion because I believed that by and large we were interested in finding out the truth. And I saw the danger of these debates right away that they were a test of how fast you could think, how clever you were on your feet and etc. And that got some ideas out into the open because that's the way things were done. But after I'd done six or so big debates, I felt no let's go into a moderated discussion.
I remember an atheist professor in America, very bright man, and he wrote to me afterwards and he said, "Thank you so much for not asking for a debate. The discussion is much better." Because then it gives the public, it gets into the public space the fact that these people have thought about these things and they're inviting you to think about them. Not they're inviting you to believe what they believe because they believe it and using their authority but because the things in themselves carry a conviction.
So I'm very much in the same line as that. Debates are artificial and they're entertaining, but they are different from a discussion or a moderated discussion.
The challenge of podcasting: moderator or conversational partner?
Alex O'Connor: And when I'm doing a podcast, I find it very difficult to temper between being a moderator and being the conversational partner.
Professor John Lennox: I can imagine.
Alex O'Connor: Do you know what I mean? There's another world in which if we were both invited by someone like Justin to have a conversation on his show or something. I think for a start I would have proposed more objections to what you were saying. I probably would have done more talking. And yet I don't feel like as a podcaster I try not to just be someone who just asks questions. And it's a very sort of interesting line to tread and I don't actually know whether I'm more like the conversational partner or more like the moderator as an analogy to what I'm doing in this show. And I think it can also depend on the guest.
Sometimes I feel like somebody's really up for a fight. So, you give them a fight or I'll try to give them—
Professor John Lennox: Yeah.
Alex O'Connor: And sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes somebody clearly just wants to tell a story. But I feel as you sort of put this like I'll have a conversation with you and I've had Richard Dawkins on my podcast two or three times and people can now just listen to both of them.
Professor John Lennox: That's exactly and they can listen to them separately and they can listen to them and think about them, you know, and so I much prefer it that way. But I think there will be people listening to this who think that, you know, they're screaming at their screens like, "Why are you not pressing this objection to John Lennox, why are you not saying this? Why are you not saying that?"
Alex O'Connor: But it's interesting that I kind of get it in both directions. When I have a friendly conversation with a Christian, a lot of my Christian listeners say, "This is so great. Thank you so much for platforming a voice that disagrees with you." And my atheist listeners will sometimes say, "Yeah, you should have pressed a bit harder." But then when I start pressing a bit harder the Christians start saying, "Oh, I knew you were dishonest and you"—so it's a hard thing to get right.
Professor John Lennox: It's a hard thing. But let me say that you're very successful at doing it. And I think that is represented by the fact that so many people listen to you.
Alex O'Connor: I've pointed out that the viewership of the channel went up considerably when I adopted this policy.
Professor John Lennox: That's interesting.
Alex O'Connor: Of just doing what I would naturally do. I'm no longer thinking in the back of my mind is like gosh, should I have really pressed you on the evolution thing? Should I? But if that's not the conversation that I'm actually interested in having in that particular moment, then I just don't have it. And since I started doing that, I get a lot more criticism in the way of "You should have brought this up" or "You should have brought that up." But the viewership goes up because the conversations are more—
Professor John Lennox: You see, that's interesting because whether you know it or not during this conversation, I've done exactly the same thing. In other words I know that you're a friendly person and I decided not to push you on certain things beyond limits. And I actually haven't pushed you on any of your beliefs.
Alex O'Connor: That's true.
Professor John Lennox: You see? And as you sit there, I don't know exactly where you stand because it's your podcast, I have allowed you to make the running. But it's similar thinking that this podcast achieves more because it's yours. If you do what you like doing and I'm in that sense the receptor of it.
Alex O'Connor: Yeah. Well for what it's worth, I think my beliefs are I'm not a Christian, and that has a lot to do with my lack of trust in the reliability of not so much the Gospels as a whole, but particularly things like the resurrection narratives. But this theme of religion is bad and evil and corrupting of thought, I'm not on that boat. Nor am I. And I'm also not on the boat of saying that God doesn't exist and religion is false. I'm more of an agnostic these days, but I tend to take a more critical tone because that's just sort of who I am and what I do.
But I think I remain quite thoroughly agnostic, which is one of the reasons it's quite difficult to interrogate my beliefs because there are so few of them that are solidly held. But one of them would be, for example, so there's the reliability of scripture, but when you're talking about theism as opposed to Christianity, one of them really is the problem of evil, which we haven't spoken about at all today, except for that brief mention in the evolutionary tract. When we were talking about evolution, I do find it mysterious and bewildering especially in the context of evolution.
Professor John Lennox: Oh, it's the hard question for any worldview.
Alex O'Connor: The one of the reasons why it actually comes up so little is because it almost feels trivial to bring up because it's the obvious point. It is the argument. And it's been discussed ad nauseam.
Reframing the problem of evil
Professor John Lennox: Well I don't know if I can—I think that might be a good topic for another time.
Alex O'Connor: I think so too.
Professor John Lennox: But I will say one thing about it because whenever this comes up, it often comes up in terms whether people who are discussing it realize it or not to go back a long way to people like Lucretius and so on. Surely a good God and all powerful God should do this or that. And I've reflected on that a lot because we've all had endless arguments like that that have never come to a satisfactory conclusion. And I've started to think about that fact because as a mathematician you get problems that people have attacked for centuries and have got nowhere. And the way mathematicians react to that is that they say perhaps we're asking the wrong question.
And I find that helpful in the following way. And I'll be brief. It's this that what faces everybody is a mixed picture. I call it beauty and bombs. In other words, we look at the world, we see some beautiful things and we see some horrible things, especially these days. And any worldview has got to take that into account. That is a fact. And we can argue as long as we like about the theoretical side. If God is good and all powerful, why this and why that, why the other? And we never come to a satisfactory answer.
So I propose another question equally difficult but I think it gets us a bit further. Granted that it's like that. Is there any evidence anywhere that there is a God who understands it and to such an extent that I can feel not that I've got an answer but that I can see there's a possibility of coming to some peace about it? And my answer to that is that yes I think there is and it's the fact that the God presented in the Christian gospels is a God who in that sense has suffered because the central claim of Christianity is that God became human and that Christ is God.
So crudely put what is God doing on a cross? Well, one thing it certainly shows me is that God has not remained distant from human suffering, but has become part of it. And the very interesting thing is that in 2011, I arrived in New Zealand three days after the earthquake and I had to meet people who were really going through grief and so on. And I talked in those terms. And I'll never forget when I'd finished talking to the largest congregation this particular place has ever seen. I think there was a little piece of paper pushed into my hand that said, "I lost my husband in the earthquake. And what you said about the cross has given me the first glimmer of hope."
And it ties together something you said just a few minutes ago, which I'd love to discuss in detail, but it would have to be another time. If the cross were the end, we'd never have heard of Jesus. And so for me, the resurrection becomes the central thing. And it's what the apostles preached. It's what Jesus claimed. It's evidence that he was who he claimed to be. And it has those two dimensions. It has the intellectual dimension. How can you possibly believe that Jesus rose from the dead when we know the laws of nature? Hume and secondly, what is the evidence in terms of personal experience of encounter with Christ who is alive? So that would be possibly a discussion for another time.
Alex O'Connor: Yes, I think so. And I'm just so grateful for you taking the time to sit down and speak with me today. I've wanted to do it for a long time. And I'm just so glad that we could finally put it together.
Professor John Lennox: Well, I have appreciated your patience and I've enjoyed this much more than many discussions I've had. So, thank you and I wish you all the best with your podcast.
Alex O'Connor: Thank you so much. Maybe next time we can have a debate instead.