John Lennox on Science, God, and the Rationality of Belief

Has Science Buried God? Reframing the Question

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure to be with you in this beautiful university — what a delightful setting for this evening's conversation. We are to address the question: has science buried God? I'd encourage you, if you have a question, to write it down while I'm speaking, since that's when questions occur to you, and we'll take as many as we can afterwards.

Asking whether science has buried God is, in one sense, obviously answered: not — how could it be? It's like asking whether automobile engineering has buried Henry Ford. In that sense we could all go home. But the question needs more unpacking than that, because one of the biggest problems in this topic is the nature of explanation itself, and the confusion in the contemporary world about what an explanation is, and whether God competes with science as one.

On the face of it, it puzzles me that there's such an ingrained impression in the West that science and belief in God are incompatible, because between 1901 and 2000 over 65% of Nobel Prize winners believed in God. Take two physics laureates: Steven Weinberg, of the University of Texas at Austin, an atheist; and William Phillips, also American, a Christian. Both are scientists of great eminence — equally brilliant. What divides them is not their science but their worldview. So the idea that science is arrayed against God is false. The deeper issue is to pinpoint where the conflict really lies, and it lies not between science and God but between worldviews — the worldview of atheism and the worldview of theism, Christian theism in my case — which are diametrically opposed. The real question facing us tonight is where science sits: does it point, as Weinberg would claim, against God? Does it point nowhere? Or does it point, as I would claim, towards the existence of God?

I'll be talking about evidence, not proof. I'm a pure mathematician, and in English the word 'proof' has at least two meanings that get confused. There's proof in the mathematical sense, where you start from axioms and proceed by strict logic to a conclusion — the only field of human thought where you get that kind of proof is mathematics, and I'm not here to talk mathematics tonight. There's also the informal sense, proof as a lawyer would use it: beyond reasonable doubt, built from evidence and pointers. I couldn't prove mathematically that my wife of 47 years loves me, but I'd stake my life on it. I couldn't prove logically that the plane that flew me here two nights ago would land safely, but I staked my life on that too. So we're talking about pointers, about evidence that is cumulative — it builds up, and it comes from different areas, more than I can cover in one evening.

History is a good place to start. Modern science — to which we owe our phones and everything else in our self-absorbed technological world — arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its great figures, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, all believed in God. That's such a striking fact that historians and philosophers of science have given it a great deal of thought: is there a connection? By and large, yes, a strong one. CS Lewis, summarising the historian and philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead, put it this way: men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver. For the pioneers of modern science, their faith in God was not a hindrance to their science — it was the motor that drove it. That's often called Whitehead's thesis.

To be fair, when I debated this with Richard Dawkins, he objected that everybody believed in God in that period, so it's unsurprising that science arose in a God-fearing environment. But the world is bigger than Western Europe, and not everybody believed in God in those days. The Chinese are the most interesting counter-case: they discovered a great deal of brilliant technology, but never developed abstract science. Joseph Needham — a Cambridge chemist and sinologist, author of the definitive history of science and technology in China, and a committed Marxist — wrestled for years with why the breakthrough that happened with Galileo and Kepler never happened in the Far East. In the end he had to give up the Marxist explanation, concluding that the Chinese lacked a unifying concept of a single Creator who had fixed the laws by which the universe runs. That's evidence from the other side. So, historically, there is precedent for linking faith in God as the intelligence behind the universe with the doing of science — and that's why I'm not remotely ashamed of being a scientist and a Christian: arguably, Christianity gave me my subject, so it would be rather foolish to be ashamed of its origins.

Same Physics, Opposite Metaphysics

To cut to the quick: Isaac Newton believed in God — probably the greatest natural scientist who ever lived. Stephen Hawking, whom you've all heard of, was just ahead of me at Cambridge and, in brainpower, years ahead of me; he did not believe in God, and until recently he occupied the very same Cambridge chair that Newton once held. Here's the fascinating thing: Newton discovered the law of gravitation and used it as a reason for believing in God. Hawking used the very same law as a reason for denying God's existence. That focuses the question beautifully: how do you get from Newton to Hawking? How can one man use the law of gravity as evidence for God, and another use it as evidence against?

One of the things that stops people almost dead at the outset of this debate is the very vocal confidence of some scientists. Carl Sagan opened his book Cosmos with 'the universe is all that is, was, or ever shall be,' and people think, isn't that wonderful science? It isn't science at all — it's a statement by a scientist, not a statement of science; it was simply a statement of Sagan's atheism, his belief system. One of the first things to learn in trying to understand our culture is that statements by scientists are not always statements of science. Alongside that, put a comment from Richard Feynman, the brilliant Nobel-winning physicist from Caltech, who liked to puncture people's pride: outside science, the scientist is just as dumb as the next guy. That's true of me too, so don't leave me out of it.

The next thing to realise is that science is not the same as rational inquiry generally. Science has had such powerful effects through technology that there has grown up a view we call scientism: that science is the only way to truth. That is logically false, because the statement 'science is the only way to truth' is not itself a statement of science — so if it's true, it's false. Some of the greatest scientists, such as Sir Peter Medawar, another Nobel laureate, have said we do science a disservice if we ever suggest it can answer all questions. It can't — it can't even answer the simple questions of a child: where do I come from, where am I going, what's the meaning of life? And, incidentally, here lies another answer to why science hasn't buried God: God and science answer different questions. Charles Townes, the Nobel-winning American physicist who invented the maser, the forerunner of the laser, put it this way: science deals mainly with the 'how' — how does this work, how does that work — it doesn't deal with meaning and purpose; religion, Christianity, deals with meaning and purpose. They don't even address the same thing, so it's hard to see how one could eliminate the other.

I'm passionate about science, but it's very dangerous to say it's the only way to truth — the great scientists all know it isn't. Einstein once said you can speak of the ethical foundations of science, but you can't speak of the scientific foundations of ethics. Science is powerful precisely because it asks a limited number of questions; it doesn't deal with every area of existence. Weinberg himself admits, in his most recent book, that science doesn't deal with beauty and love — in fact, it doesn't deal with all the things that are most meaningful to every one of us. It's limited, it's powerful, it's successful, but it cannot say anything about the big questions in that sense.

Is God a God of the Gaps?

Another difficulty is Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, one of the world's best-selling books, and this often stops the conversation when some scientist says God is a delusion, an illusion, just like Santa Claus. I get this a lot from people who ought to know better. I was once speaking at a forum like this at the Technical University of Delft, in Holland, and a physics professor said my belief in God was just like belief in Santa Claus, in front of about 2,000 people. So I put it to the audience: put up your hand if you came to believe in Santa Claus as an adult. Not a hand went up — there weren't even any lunatics in the audience. Then I said, put up your hand if you came to believe in God as an adult, and hundreds of hands went up. I said to him: please don't insult our intelligence. Some of the brightest people in the world have spent centuries thinking about God; our universities were founded by people who thought about God, and Oxford and Cambridge still carry Christian mottoes — the motto of my own university is Dominus Illuminatio Mea, the Lord is my illumination. Please don't put God into the same category as Santa Claus.

Stephen Hawking was once asked by a leading newspaper about religion, and said religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. Asked for a one-line comment, I said: if that's true, then atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light. You laugh, but you shouldn't, really, because it doesn't prove anything — it's Freud's argument, and it often stops the entire debate before it starts. One of the most brilliant psychiatrists in Germany, Manfred Lütz, has written a book on this: if there is no God, the Freudian argument — that God is wish-fulfilment, a father figure in the sky — is a fine explanation of religion. But if there is a God, the very same argument explains atheism, as the wish never to have to meet God or give an account of the things you've messed up in life. Either way, the question of whether God exists can't be settled by Freud, or Frankl, or Jung, or any of the others; we need to think more carefully than that.

Which brings us to the claim, pressed by Hawking, that you have to choose between science and God — that in a scientifically literate age, an intelligent person has to give up on God. I used to think, and still do to an extent, that the problem was his understanding of science. But I came to realise the bigger problem is his understanding of God. When I was young, if I used the word 'God' in public in Ireland or England, people understood I meant the God of the Bible, the eternal creator and sustainer of the universe. That's no longer the case — so much pressure has been brought to bear to relegate the God of the Bible to the sort of god you get in Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian, or Assyrian religion, the gods of the pantheon. Think of the Greek god of lightning: they didn't understand lightning, they were afraid of it, so they posited a god behind it — but do a bit of atmospheric physics and that god disappears, because it was a god of the gaps: it really amounted to saying 'I can't explain it, therefore a god did it.' Many of our contemporaries, including Hawking, take that to be the Christian position.

But there's a massive problem with that: gods of the gaps disappear with advancing science, and thank God for that, because those ancient gods were deifications of the forces of nature. One expert on the gods of the ancient Near East put the difference this way: the gods of all the ancient mythologies were products of the original, primeval stuff of the universe — they descended from the heavens and the earth. The God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth. You can't put them in the same category. And, secondly, the God of the Bible is not a god of the gaps. The first sentence of Genesis doesn't say 'in the beginning God created the bits of the universe we don't understand' — that's what many people think, that God is a kind of placeholder: I can't explain it, therefore God did it, but once I can explain it, I won't need God. That's simplistic and naive. The God of the Bible created the whole show, the heavens and the earth, the bits we understand and the bits we don't — and in fact it was the bits Newton did understand that increased his faith in God. Isn't that true of you? The more you understand a painting, the more you can admire the genius of a Rembrandt, not the less; the more you understand engineering, the more you can admire the workings of a turbofan jet, not the less. So it was with Newton: as he found the law of gravity, he didn't say, 'I've got an explanation, I don't need God' — he said, 'what a brilliant God, to do it that way,' and he wrote the Principia Mathematica, dedicating it in the hope that a thinking person would come to believe in God through it. That's the right way around.

Here's the crucial logic: if you think God is a god of the gaps, you have to choose between science and God, because that's how you've defined God. Many of the new atheists, I believe, are telling people to choose between science and God because they hold a primitive, thoroughly pagan concept of God. That may surprise some of you, but it helps explain a lot of what's going on.

But there's a scientific side to this too. Why did Newton not abandon God when he found gravity? For a simple reason: he didn't think God was the same kind of explanation as a scientific one. Why is the kettle boiling? Well, it's boiling because the heat energy from the flame is conducted through the base of the copper kettle, stimulating the water molecules to move faster and faster — that's why it's boiling. Or: it's boiling because I would like a cup of tea. Which of the two reasons is correct? Both — and you need both, the scientific explanation and the personal-agent explanation. People made tea for millennia without knowing anything about the science of heat, and, if anything, it's the personal explanation that's more important. My two explanations of the boiling water don't conflict, don't compete — they complement each other. But you need both of them. God no more competes with science in explaining the world than Henry Ford competes with the law of internal combustion in explaining how a motor car works. I'm afraid many of the new atheists are talking sheer nonsense here, because they don't understand the nature of explanation.

It's worse than that. We hear people say science 'explains' something — take the law of gravity, which I was taught at school. I thought it explained gravity. It doesn't; nobody knows what gravity is, even today — read Richard Feynman if you don't believe me. The law of gravity is brilliant: it gives us a mathematical way of calculating the motion of the planets, it enables us to land a person on the moon, but it doesn't tell us what gravity is. Newton himself realised this — hypotheses non fingo, he wrote: I don't make hypotheses, I don't know what gravity is, but here's a mathematical description of how it works. Wittgenstein, the great philosopher, put it best: the great delusion of modernism is that the laws of nature are explanations of the phenomena of nature, when they're not — they are descriptions, not explanations. So even at the purely scientific level, the nature of explanation is very different from the popular understanding of it, and the God-explanation doesn't conflict with a scientific explanation, because, for the most part, they're answering completely different questions. The idea that science can bury God begins to look more and more foolish.

Faith, Trust, and Evidence

There's a third confusion I want to address: the nature of faith. In the introduction, the phrase 'science and faith' was mentioned — what did you think that meant? Science here, faith there: is 'faith' shorthand for religion, or faith in the sense of trust? This is where all the confusion comes in, because Dawkins and company have redefined faith. In English, 'faith' is used in two ways: one, to stand for a body of teaching, as in 'the Christian faith' or 'the Jewish faith'; the other, faith in the sense of trust — do you have faith the Red Sox will win, or faith in the stock market? That's the ordinary use of the word: it means trust, fidelity. And whenever you use it, the next question is: what's the basis of your trust? If you've none, you're merely credulous.

Faith has been redefined in the Mark Twain sense: faith is believing what you know ain't true. And the new atheists treat faith as a religious term meaning believing where there's no evidence. Both of those are dangerously wrong. Faith is not just a religious term — it's an ordinary word meaning trust — and, certainly in the Christian sense, it does not mean believing where there's no evidence. Christianity is an evidence-based commitment. Here's a classic case: towards the end of John's Gospel, John writes that Jesus did many other signs — semeia, from which we get 'semiotics,' indicators, pointers — in the presence of his disciples, not written in this book, 'but these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name.' In other words, here's the evidence on which faith can be based. It's evidence-based faith. I wouldn't hold this position for a moment if I didn't believe that.

But here's the rub: if you talk about 'science and faith,' you obscure the fact that science is itself faith-based — you obscure it completely. Einstein said, I cannot imagine a scientist without that faith — he didn't mean faith in God, he meant faith in the rational or mathematical intelligibility of the universe, faith that science can be done at all. I wouldn't do science if I didn't believe it could be done; that's the basic credo. And to talk about 'science and faith' immediately hands the ground to the atheist — that's an atheist formulation, not a Christian one, so I never frame it that way. If people want to say faith in science and faith in God, that's fine, so long as we see there's faith on both sides.

Mind, Reason, and the Limits of Materialism

I have fun in Oxford — well, I have fun in most places, because I spend a lot of my life playing Socrates, asking questions. Sometimes I say to my scientific friends: what do you do science with? Oh, they say, I've got this machine worth a billion dollars. No, I say, what do you do it with? Oh, you mean my mind — and they're about to say that when they remember there's no such thing as the mind, according to them, so they say, my brain. Fine, that'll do. I happen to believe the mind is distinct from the brain, but that's another story. You do science with your brain, do you? Yes. Tell me about the brain — what's its story? The short version: the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process. And I look at them and smile and say: and you trust it? If you knew your computer was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, you wouldn't trust it for a moment. How can you say your thinking is valid if it's coming from an apparatus that cannot be trusted?

This is enormously important, and it's not a new argument. CS Lewis saw it in the 1940s: science has done wonders because we've been thinking about the universe, but we've forgotten to think about thinking. When we begin to think about thinking, any theory that renders thinking invalid cannot be true, because it was itself generated by thinking — and if thinking is invalid, it cannot be true. But if you reduce all thinking simply to the physics and chemistry of neurons, molecules, and atoms, you empty the universe of thinking altogether. The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has formalised this as the evolutionary argument against naturalism. More strikingly, Thomas Nagel — an atheist, a strong one, who doesn't want there to be a God, and is totally honest about it — says there's something seriously wrong with materialism, because if evolutionary naturalism is true, it undermines any reason for believing any theory at all, including evolutionary naturalism itself. That's a very serious objection.

One of my main reasons for thinking about tonight's title differently is this: I've got a new title — has science buried atheism? I believe that's the case. The very fact that we can think rationally is, to me, prime evidence that there's something more to this universe than physics and chemistry. In a very real sense, your first step towards recognising that the supernatural exists is human reason and intelligence itself — that's big stuff, and important stuff.

We started with two worldviews — the Christian worldview and the atheist worldview. Putting God into the equation makes perfect sense, because the reason we can do science, from a Christian perspective, is that the same God created the universe out there and the mind in here that studies it. The atheist removes the grounds for that — and I believe atheists don't only shoot themselves in the foot, which is painful enough; they shoot themselves in the brain, which is fatal. The two worldviews are so different because one begins with mass, energy, particles, or, more popularly, with nothing — a universe from nothing, as Lawrence Krauss puts it — and everything, including mind, consciousness, and life, arises spontaneously and is derivative. The other begins: 'in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... all things came to be through him.' In the atheist worldview, everything, including mind, is derivative of mass and energy. In the Christian worldview it's the exact opposite: mind is the ultimate reality — the mind of God — and mass, energy, physics, and chemistry are derivative. Not only as a Christian, but as a scientist, that worldview makes infinitely more sense to me. Thank you very much.

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