Has Science Buried God? — John Lennox at SMU

John Lennox

Has science buried God? Well, asking whether science has buried God is a bit like asking whether the advance of automotive engineering has buried Henry Ford. You see, Henry Ford invented the internal combustion engine. Now, automotive engineering explains how the engine works — the combustion process, the fuel injection, the mechanics. But that explanation doesn't replace Henry Ford as the inventor; it doesn't even address the question of who made the car in the first place. In a similar way, science explains how the universe works, how physical and biological processes function — but it doesn't address the question of whether there's a God who created and sustains it.

The question "has science buried God?" assumes the two are in competition. What I want to argue is that they're not in competition at all — and that the real conflict is not between science and God, but between two different worldviews, two different ways of interpreting the very same scientific data.

John Lennox

Let me put it another way. If I ask why that kettle over there is boiling, I can get two perfectly good and valid explanations. First: the water is boiling because the heat from the element is causing kinetic energy to increase in the molecules until they reach a temperature at which they vaporise. That's a scientific explanation — a perfectly good one. But I could also say the water is boiling because I want a cup of tea. Now, which of those two answers is correct? Both of them are. But notice what they explain differently: the scientific explanation tells me about the mechanism; the second explanation tells me about the intention, the purpose, the agency behind it.

The mistake at the heart of much contemporary atheism is to assume that a scientific explanation at one level rules out or replaces an explanation at a different level. It doesn't. God is not a scientific hypothesis; God is a personal agent at a different level of explanation.

John Lennox

Here's a remarkable fact: Newton discovered the law of gravity. Hawking used the law of gravity. Same law; opposite conclusions. Newton used it to conclude that there was a God; Hawking used it in a way that he thought did not require God. What divided them? Not the science — they both used the same science. What divided them was their philosophy, their worldview, the interpretive framework they brought to the science. If we're honest with ourselves, science does not come with philosophical interpretations pre-attached. Those interpretations are added by the scientists themselves, based on assumptions they bring from outside the science.

The media tells us "science says there's no God." But science doesn't say anything; scientists say things, and they sometimes confuse their philosophical commitments with what the science requires.

John Lennox

The new atheists argue that science is the only way to truth. I want to examine that claim. "Science is the only way to truth" — is that a scientific statement? Could you put it in a laboratory and test it? You couldn't. It's not science; it's a philosophical claim. And therefore, by its own standards, it's not true. It's self-refuting. The moment you say "science is the only valid form of knowledge," you've made a statement that science itself cannot validate. So you've defeated your own position at the starting gun.

This is what philosophers call scientism — the view that the only knowledge worth having is scientific knowledge. And it's not science; it's a faith position. A very dogmatic faith position.

John Lennox

There's another thing the media rarely tells you. Of the first 300 Nobel Prize winners from 1901 to the mid-20th century, over 65% expressed a clear belief in God. Not a vague spirituality — a clear belief. These are people like Max Planck, who founded quantum physics and was a devout Christian. Heisenberg, who said "the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you to atheism, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting." Einstein himself said, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

These were not stupid people. They had thought carefully about the relationship between science and faith. And their view — shared by Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Faraday, Maxwell — was that science and a rational belief in God are not in conflict but are deeply complementary.

John Lennox

The new atheists love to accuse Christians of believing in a "God of the gaps" — a God who fills in what science cannot yet explain. And they're right that such a God is a shrinking God, retreating before the advance of science. But that is not the God of mainstream Christian theology, and it is not the God Newton believed in. Newton was not using God to plug gaps in his science. Newton used his science to reinforce his belief that there was a God — because law-governed regularity in the universe pointed to a lawgiver. His God was not a God of the gaps but a God of the whole edifice.

The confusion arises because some people do use God as a placeholder for ignorance. But the mainstream theological tradition has always distinguished between God as primary cause — the one who sustains the existence and rationality of the universe — and secondary causes — the physical mechanisms that science uncovers. God is not competing with the law of gravity; God is the reason there is a law of gravity at all.

John Lennox

Wittgenstein put this beautifully. He said: "The great delusion of modernism is that the laws of nature are explanations of phenomena." They're not — they're descriptions. The law of gravity describes how objects of given mass behave; it does not explain why there is mass, why there is gravity, why the universe obeys mathematical laws at all. As Einstein asked: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible." Why should a universe that arose from pure mechanism be susceptible to rational mathematical analysis? That's the puzzle naturalism cannot explain and theism explains very naturally: if a rational God created the universe, you would expect it to be rationally ordered.

John Lennox

The word "faith" has been poisoned in contemporary discourse. People think it means — in Mark Twain's phrase — "believing what you know ain't true." But that's not the Christian meaning at all. The biblical word for faith is *pistis* in Greek, and in the Latin tradition *fides* — from which we get "fidelity." Faith is trust. Trust grounded in evidence. When I sit down in an aeroplane, I exercise faith — trust in the engineers, the pilots, the maintenance crews. That trust is based on evidence: track records, qualifications, instruments, procedures. I don't say "I have blind faith in aeroplanes." I have evidence-based trust.

Einstein had faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe. He said so. That faith — that the universe is ordered, comprehensible, mathematical — was the engine of his entire scientific career. All science operates on faith in the coherence of the universe; the question is what grounds that faith.

John Lennox

Freud argued that religious belief is wish-fulfilment — that we invent God because we can't cope with the terrors of the universe and want a cosmic father-figure. The German psychiatrist Manfred Lutz has pointed out that the same argument cuts both ways: perhaps atheism is wish-fulfilment — the wish that there is no God to whom you will be accountable. "I wish God didn't exist" is just as plausible a psychological driver as "I wish God did exist." The argument from psychology proves nothing either way about whether God exists. If I believe two plus two equals four because it makes me happy, that doesn't make it wrong.

John Lennox

There's a question science cannot answer: why? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe comprehensible? Why does moral intuition persist even among people who intellectually deny any objective morality? Science answers "how." For "why" — for purpose, meaning, personal agency — we need another kind of knowledge. We need someone to tell us.

Aunt Matilda has baked a wonderful cake. I invite every scientist I can find to analyse it. They can tell me everything about the flour, the eggs, the chemistry of baking, the physics of the oven. A comprehensive scientific account. But none of them can tell me why she made it — unless she tells us. "I made it for my cousin Jane." Now I use my reason to evaluate that. Is it credible? Is she a reliable witness? The act of telling — revelation — doesn't replace reason; it gives reason something it could not reach by observation alone.

That is what Christians claim about the Bible. Not that it replaces science, but that it addresses questions science is not designed to answer.

John Lennox

The great questions are: Is there a God? Does my life have meaning and purpose? Is there such a thing as right and wrong? What happens after death? Science, properly understood, does not answer these questions. It is not designed to. The attempt to extract meaning from physics leads either to silence or to the kind of contradiction where physicists tell us we live in a universe of "no design, no purpose, no evil, no good" and then in the next breath tell us they're fighting for scientific truth, justice, and the good of humanity.

These questions matter enormously. People die over what they believe about them. And the Christian claim is that these questions have answers — not answers derived from our own speculation, but revealed answers that we can then reason about, test, and find coherent with everything else we know about the world.