John Lennox on Suffering, the Problem of Evil, and Why God Allows It

John Lennox

Thank you very much, Alex.

John Lennox

Interesting. I find that sometimes when you're making an offhand comment with not very much time and you're forced to say something very succinctly, it can be some of the most effective rhetoric. This also happened with my first debate with Richard Dawkins. Towards the end we got a message that neither of us expected — we'd only got two minutes left, when we'd been told in advance we had nine minutes for a concluding speech. I'd spent hours on it. So I decided to go for the heart of Christianity, which was the resurrection. And again that bit went viral, because Dawkins reacted very strongly against it. He said, 'How petty. We've been talking about great philosophical ideas, and now we come to the resurrection of Jesus. It's so unworthy of the universe.' And I remember thinking: if the resurrection actually happened, it's one of the biggest things there is, because death is the ultimate mystery and it comes to us all.

John Lennox

Oh, I can. You make me think of an incident not far from here, where I was invited to address 500 physicists at a laboratory just south of Oxford on the big questions — God and science. Afterwards a professor of physics came up, very friendly, and said, 'I found that most interesting, but I discern you're a Christian. That obliges you to believe God became human. Can you explain that to me?' I said, 'Let's have a quid pro quo. Let me ask you something simpler. Tell me what consciousness is.' There was dead silence. He said, 'I don't really know.' I said, 'Let me try something easier. What is energy?' He said, 'Well, we can use it, we can measure it.' That wasn't my question. I said, 'What is it? And be careful with your answer, because I've read Richard Feynman.' He said, 'We don't really know.' Then I said, 'You don't know what either consciousness or energy are. Do you believe in them?' He said, 'Yes, I do.' I said, 'Why do you believe in things you don't know what they are?' He said it was because these concepts have enough meaning to give a sense of explanatory power. And I said, 'Those were easier questions than the one you asked me. If you can't explain energy and consciousness, do you think I'll be able to explain how God can become human? Of course I can't. But I believe it because, as I consider all the evidence, it's the only explanation that makes sense of the rest.' He said, 'I buy that. Let's go on talking.' Here I am at 82, and in one sense my faith is stronger than ever — mostly because I've listened carefully to people who take opposing views, or make inquiries, like you do.

John Lennox

Auto is self. People kept asking me to write my story, because they knew bits of it were not in the public domain at all — especially my earlier travels behind the Iron Curtain, Russia, Ukraine. Then I came across a statement in the Book of Acts, where Paul visits a church and explains what the Lord had done with them. That caught me. I thought: if Paul can go to a church and simply relate what he believed the Lord had done, without pride and bombast, perhaps I can do the same. That broke the dam. So I wrote my autobiography, just printed, called My Story: An Intellectual and Spiritual Biography.

John Lennox

That's exactly what happened. Unfortunately, when I was at Cambridge I didn't get involved in the debating society, and we had no tradition at school, so I'd never done a debate. The suggestion came from someone who'd heard me speak. I instantly thought, 'No, I'm not the person to do that.' And I don't think Dawkins was very keen either. But Larry Taunton, a historian from Alabama, wanted to give the deep south a taste of the Oxford God debate. He persuaded both of us. I'd never met Dawkins before — Oxford's a big place, I'm in a different subject. We met in the green room, and as we walked towards the stage he said, 'You know I don't debate.' I said, 'If it's any comfort, Richard, what I intend to do is put some positive evidence for the truth of the Christian worldview into the room, to counteract your atheism.' He very amiably replied, 'I'll buy that.' And the rest is history.

John Lennox

That's right. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. It was most strange, because I'd already debated Christopher at the Edinburgh Festival. At the beginning he and I hit it off very well, because I challenged him: 'Why do you get all your arguments from mainly one source?' He was surprised. 'Do I? Which source?' I said, 'Tom Paine.' And he said, 'You're right.' That changed the chemistry between us. The thesis that evening was that the new Europe should prefer the new atheism — which struck me, because the new Europe was created by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had been erected by atheism. I thought that was a great gift, but I kept it under my hat. They took a vote at the start and again at the end, and the shift had gone, to everyone's surprise, very much to my side. The moderator said, 'Christopher, shall we have a recount?' And I heard him say, 'No, I think Lennox has it.' He shook my hand and said, 'I want a rematch — no voting this time.' And Birmingham was the rematch.

John Lennox

Two factors. First, they decided that aggression and mockery would be the best way to deal with these things, and that was a fatal mistake, especially for people who claim intellectual pretension. Ad hominem arguments and mockery get nowhere. But what they got wrong about God — if I had to give one point — was relegating the God of the Bible to a God of the gaps: the gods of the ancient world. We don't understand lightning, so we postulate a god of lightning, who will disappear once we do a rigorous scientific analysis. God as a placeholder for what we don't yet understand. It was Stephen Hawking who really enabled me to see what was going on, because towards the end of his life he said you had to choose between science and God. I thought that was odd, because I'd learned as a teenager, from serious sources like Alfred North Whitehead filtered through C.S. Lewis, that there was a deep connection between the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the biblical worldview. Here's Hawking in Newton's chair — and Newton didn't make that mistake. When Newton wrote the Principia Mathematica, arguably the most famous book in the history of science, the early editions carried an invitation to thinking people: he hoped it would convince them there was a deity. Then the penny dropped. If you define God as a God of the gaps — a placeholder for what you don't yet understand — then of course you have to choose between God and science, by definition. I used to amuse audiences by saying, 'Of course you've all read the first line of the Bible: In the beginning God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand.' Which isn't what it says. It says he created the heavens and the earth — a merism, spanning everything. God created it all, the bits we understand and the bits we don't.

John Lennox

Exactly. We're sitting in a room with famous paintings, some by Hockney. If you're really trained in art, you can see much more of the genius of the artist, because you understand more of how art works. It's the same with the universe: the more I understand of it, and of the way it's mathematically describable, the more those things point me towards a creator. They don't prove his existence — proof in the mathematical sense gets us nowhere — but they are pointers, they are evidence. The related mistake is misunderstanding what faith is, and redefining it as believing where you know there's no evidence. That led to ridiculous statements — Christopher Hitchens saying our faith is not a faith, our belief is not a belief. He was wrestling with the shift Dawkins had caused, redefining faith. But faith is an ordinary word, not a religious one. It simply means trust, and it leads at once to the logical question: what are your grounds for believing that? There was a massive output of pressure — here's Lennox, he's a man of faith, that means he believes where there's no evidence, so there's no point talking to him. A clever move, but it backfired, because more serious thinkers saw that Einstein was right when he wrote that he could not conceive of a genuine scientist without faith — meaning every scientist must believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe. John Polkinghorne, who taught me quantum mechanics at Cambridge, kept emphasising that physics is powerless to explain its faith in the mathematical intelligibility of the universe. You've got to trust that before you can do any science at all.

John Lennox

Yes. And I'd encourage you to make that video — it could be real fun. Because this logical incoherence of statements that sound very plausible has come back in full force, in the form of scientism: science is the only way to truth. But that's not a statement of science. It's a meta-scientific statement about science, so if it's true, it's false. It's interesting that Richard Dawkins and I both have a hero in science, the late Sir Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize and wrote a book every scientist should read, on the limits of science. He points out that science can't answer all questions, and he points to the questions of a child — where do I come from, where am I going, what's the meaning of life? — and says we must turn to religion and literature for those. The implication is hugely important: science is not coextensive with rationality. If it were, we'd have to shut half the faculties in Oxford down. It would have stopped C.S. Lewis dead, because there'd have been no English faculty for him — no history, no literature, no languages. It's nonsense, and yet it's believed by the most impressive people in science.

John Lennox

That's hugely important, Alex. Wittgenstein made a profound statement: the laws of nature explain nothing; they describe. And they're not causes either. Hawking made this mistake — it prompted me to write God and Stephen Hawking — the idea that the laws of nature could create something. It's like saying Newton's laws of motion cause billiard balls to hurtle across the table. That kind of misunderstanding makes me think we need to get back to where Scotland was centuries ago, where every student was taught a bit of philosophy — the problem of induction, the nature of science.

John Lennox

Your illustration is excellent. I hadn't heard it before, and it works very well because it's perfectly intelligible. Well done. To say a scientific law is a cause is like saying Newton's laws of motion cause billiard balls to move. They don't. They describe how the balls will move once they're in motion, but they don't put them in motion. As Hawking says at the end of A Brief History of Time, there's still the mystery of what breathes fire into the equations. That mystery remains, and that's basically where the new-atheist type goes wrong.

John Lennox

One of the main things they got right, even in my case, was inspiring wonder about nature. Dawkins is a very good writer. Peter Atkins has a gift for explaining, and though he's a feisty warrior and we've clashed several times, I enjoy reading his work for that reason. Anything that inspires wonder in nature and its marvels. What you and I have been talking about is the nature of explanation — that's where they were going wrong. But what they were describing, a lot of it, was absolutely brilliant. It was their explanation for the origin of it that failed. Hawking is the classic example. At the end of A Brief History of Time he talks about the mind of God, and that mystery, and I'd agree with him. But in a later book, The Grand Design, he writes: because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. To my mind that's a multiple category error. Because there is a law like gravity — so there is something — the universe will create itself from nothing. A flat contradiction. And sneaking in: do laws create the universe? They don't. So I owe the new atheists a lot — the wonder of nature, and the importance of getting people to think. It's positive and negative at the same time, because analysing their arguments has helped me think much more clearly, and to recognise that often in the past Christians like me were sloppy. They used God-of-the-gaps arguments, and religion in certain circles created an anti-scientific outlook, which I've fought against strongly. It's important to learn from one's opponents, because they're not opponents at every point. There's a difference between the science and the interpretation of science. You can have an atheist Nobel Prize winner and a Christian one; their science doesn't divide them. It's their understanding of how it fits the bigger picture that differs.

John Lennox

There is a real mystery there, and I'm very sympathetic, because it's a question I asked myself a lot, since it was asked of me a lot. I came from Northern Ireland to Cambridge, and almost the first thing people said when they heard my accent was, 'Oh, you're Irish — you Irish don't believe in God, you fight about it.' In other words: it's a cultural phenomenon; if you'd been born elsewhere you wouldn't hold these beliefs. To a certain extent that's true — we're all influenced by our culture. But two things have helped me. First, it's possible for people to change their worldview; I've seen it happen often. Second, this problem forced me to be open and vulnerable, to let counter-arguments into my personal space and investigate them without fear — because there was a time I was afraid. I remember walking up and down King's Parade in Cambridge, passing Mowbray's bookshop, and in the window was a book titled Why I Am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. Dare I buy that book? I bought it — and it was such a help to my faith, because I realised Russell sadly seems to have had very little contact with genuine Christianity in his argument.

John Lennox

There are people who don't want there to be a God, and say so — some of them brilliant scientists. Thomas Nagel, the philosopher, wrote an essay saying, very honestly, 'I don't really want there to be a God,' and yet he sees the difficulties in naturalism and wrote a whole book about it. But there are others you sense are crying out — and why don't they believe? It's very difficult to see into a person's experience. I was once at a high-powered conference in Siberia, organised by the Club of Rome, and gave a short talk. A politician from South America lost his temper in the plenary session, grabbed the microphone, and denounced me as very dangerous, saying this kind of talk would inspire revolution. When he'd finished I asked for two minutes. I looked at him and said, 'The God you don't believe in, I don't believe in either — it was God-of-the-gaps stuff. And I'm on your side when you say religion can be very dangerous. But I suppose you'd disbelieve in a watchmaker once you understood how a watch worked.' That caught him. Afterwards he came and said, 'We need to talk.' I said, 'I think we do. You've had a very bad experience of Christianity, haven't you?' He was quiet, then said, 'I've had an awful experience' — abuse by people who were professing Christian clerics. He said, 'How did you know?' I said, 'Because what you were saying was completely irrational, so I reckoned there was something deep.' We parted as friends. That was one of the sharpest examples of someone boiling with rage because of a negative religious experience. It's so difficult to see down into people's hearts to know whether they have a genuine objection — and I think some do. People say to me all through my life, 'I'd love to be able to believe like you, but I can't. My family were murdered in the Holocaust.' I don't trivialise that; it's the hard objection. But I don't think atheism answers it either. Christianity doesn't solve it like a problem to be solved, but gives us a way in to cope with it.

John Lennox

Yes — or what evil is.

John Lennox

That's the hard bit — the apparent arbitrariness.

John Lennox

We have to find some way in, and I share that question with you. The level of one's own personal experience becomes important. This is a real issue, not a trivial one. The undergraduate form of the question — surely a good God would just — is the Lucretius problem, and David Hume raised it, and we never get anywhere. Ever. So, I'm a mathematician, and when mathematicians have tried for a few hundred years to answer a question and can't, they very sensibly try to change the question. So I changed it to an equally difficult one: is there any evidence, oblique or indirect, that I can trust God with it? That's where my personal experience, based on the revelation of scripture and the life of Jesus — and the way he responded not only to others' suffering but to his own — is where I see the way in, and where I see people who are really suffering being helped. There are two perspectives here. The perspective we have, sitting here, is observing suffering. It's one thing to observe it, another to experience it. One needs intellectual answers; the other needs pastoral answers. We need a pastoral understanding — a deep sympathy that recognises the depth of your objection, that it is real, not pretend. And there's no generic person. People ask me, 'What would you say to a person who...?' and I say, 'Unless I know that person, I wouldn't know what to say.' People are too quick to give a generic answer, and it's meaningless, because we're all individuals and our emotional experience goes very deep. The key thing that has guided me all my life: I must take you seriously — what you say, how you feel, how you think — and open myself to the questions moving you at their deepest. To some I'll have no immediate answer, but I'll go away and think about them, in the hope that even within the suffering I can show enough empathy to open a new window.

John Lennox

Like in New Zealand, when I got to Christchurch just after the earthquake and had to give talks on this topic. It wasn't easy, because natural disasters are harder than moral ones — we understand war and bombs, but earthquakes are different.

John Lennox

Yes. As I finished one talk in the biggest congregation that church had had in years, a note was pushed into my hand. It said, 'I lost my husband in the earthquake. You have shown the first ray of light I have had on this.' She didn't get a solution, but she felt she'd seen a way in. To my mind, it really is one of the evidences of the truth of Christianity — the array of people throughout history who, in the deepest suffering, were made stronger. I've met people who showed immense courage, particularly in Siberia, people who'd been in the gulag, and they told me how God had helped them face it. One man really humiliated me, if I'm honest. He'd been put in the gulag for seven years because of his faith. He looked up at me and said, 'You couldn't face that, could you?' I was so embarrassed. I said, 'No, I couldn't.' Then he smiled — I'll never forget his smile — and said, 'Nor could I. But do you know, I discovered something. When I went into the gulag, I would faint at the sight of my own blood if I cut myself shaving. And I saw things there that no man should ever have to see, in terms of gratuitous cruelty. But I discovered that God comes in and acts in the situation, not before it.' That has stuck with me all my life, because it resonates with what Jesus said to his disciples — that when they were brought before courts and persecuted, they would know what to say in that hour. There's enough evidence, in my mind, from people to whom this happened, that this relationship with God is so real that it comes in to encourage them subjectively in situations they cannot plan for, that are gratuitous and horrible, and supports them. To my mind that's part of the evidence — it's what I would expect if Christianity is true. It still doesn't completely answer your question.

John Lennox

I agree with that completely, and that's why you need both the subjective and the objective, rational side. It's the whole person. I've tried to devote myself particularly to the rational side, because that's often what gets knocked down first, and the new atheists did quite a good job of knocking away the irrationality of some arguments Christians used to use — and I hope use a lot less. So it's tightened up the whole position. And at the level of academic philosophy, Christian philosophers have risen to seriously influence the discipline — Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig — people impelled to take philosophy and science seriously because they had to face these challenges. That's a good thing.

John Lennox

This is fundamental to grasp, because in life you come to a point where you're being asked to trust God for a situation you've never been in before. But it's very much like the trust between me and my wife. You can face a new situation because, although you've no specific evidence for this situation, you've had a lifetime of other situations. You say, 'I trust that person,' and so I won't believe a wild speculation about her. Evidences are of different kinds, and with people — as distinct from trusting facts — trust is a broader, more cumulative thing. Which is why I asked Dawkins in the first debate whether he trusted his wife, or whether he had evidence. He tried to back away — 'Leave my wife out of it' — but it was so telling, because I think he realised that evidence-based faith is the only kind worth having, even when you don't have the specific evidence in that instance. The New Testament virtually defines faith at the end of John's gospel, where John writes that Jesus did many other signs — semeia, signs that point to something — 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.' There are the facts about who he is and what he did, and then a commitment level — a commitment to a person. So it's important not to reduce faith to facts or propositions. At its most important it's to do with the person. God is not a proposition; God is personal. We react to God intellectually, morally, spiritually, emotionally — but we know about that because we know about trusting persons, why we trust people and why we don't.

John Lennox

It's more complex than that. What's being said is that their trust is an essential ingredient, and Jesus is affirming that — but the power for the healing came from him. And remember Peter on the water: he was invited to come to Jesus on the water, and Jesus was already supported by the water. Your rickety bridge isn't Jesus; Jesus isn't necessarily inviting you onto that bridge. The difference matters hugely, because in the history of Christianity people have done the craziest things, thinking God would catch them as they fell — and he didn't. We have a name for that theologically: putting God to the test, in the negative sense. 'God, you promised to save me whatever happens, so I'm going to jump off this precipice' — which was a temptation put to Jesus in the desert. So I'm very nervous of people abrogating to themselves the idea, 'God has told me you should do X.' That's a dangerous thing, and one of the unacceptable sides of religion — interfering in people's lives in ways that do huge damage. 'If you've got enough faith you'll be cured of that cancer,' and then it doesn't happen, and they're left with a God who doesn't fulfil his promises. I have to talk to people devastated in their faith because they were encouraged to make unrealistic decisions. Trust is complex at all its levels, and dynamic — it grows through life. My faith in Christ is much deeper than it was years ago, but also a lot more realistic.

John Lennox

I was. I nearly died. I recorded that for the very reason you've raised. When people say, 'Are you grateful to God for that?' I say I am. But I realised that that same year my sister lost her twenty-two-year-old daughter to a brain tumour. I need to be careful how I describe my own reaction, because I need to be able to say it to my sister as well. You can become very narrowly focused on yourself — 'isn't God good to me?' — and we must be careful of that. Yes, I'm thankful to God; he's given me an extra lease of life. The surgeon said, 'I don't know what to say to you. You should be dead. Your right coronary artery — nothing was going through it. You should have had a massive heart attack, and if you'd survived, which is unlikely, you'd have had five per cent quality of life. But there's no damage. You can go home tomorrow.' The relief was immense. I'd said goodbye to my wife at the door as they ran me down the corridor, because I didn't think I'd see her again on this earth — and both of us had complete peace. That's a testimony from a near-death experience I couldn't explain to you. On the table he said, 'You want to watch?' I said, 'Yes.' There was nothing moving. He said, 'I have to work quick.' Dead silence for forty minutes. Then suddenly, on the screen above me, I could see blood flowing everywhere. He said, 'We're in.' So you're absolutely right — we must be sensitive. That selfish 'God is good to me, and God will do things for you if you've got enough faith' — that's very dangerous stuff, and you don't get it in the New Testament.

John Lennox

Christopher said to me afterwards, 'That was heavy stuff.' I said, 'Christopher, it was right. You ought to be on his side, because he of all people was on your side against false religion.' It's an aspect the new atheists got partly right. But they didn't do what they should have — what John Gray did, an atheist himself, in denouncing atheism for the extremes of its persecution. They were pretty silent about that. We need to balance it up.

John Lennox

I'm not sure they were right about that. Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have agreed. In my travels in Russia I asked a lot of intellectuals, and they said, 'No — this destruction was done in the name of atheism. You cannot say it wasn't.' Remember Solzhenitsyn's famous words: if you ask why a hundred million of my compatriots perished, we have forgotten God. It was more than that — they denied God, and Stalin perpetuated his pogroms and persecutions of Christians because of atheism. That was an attempt by the new atheists to smooth out something they didn't like in atheism, and historically they weren't right.

John Lennox

Oh, massively overplayed. There's a book in German, Toleranz und Gewalt — tolerance and violence — by Arnold Angenendt, about that thick. From a historian's point of view he concludes it's seriously overplayed, even in the case of the Inquisition.

John Lennox

Christ was put on trial, and we have record of why. He was accused of being a terrorist, of fomenting evil, and the Roman procurator declared him guiltless of that. Pilate saw him as a political threat to Rome and asked, 'Are you a king, then?' Jesus said, 'You said so — but I'm not a king in the way you mean. My kingdom is not of this world; otherwise my servants would have been fighting so that I shouldn't be delivered up. But my kingdom is not from here.' Then he said, 'To this end I was born, to this end I came into the world: to bear witness to the truth.' And Pilate — perhaps not so cynically as people think — said, 'What is truth?' and went out and declared Jesus innocent. That cameo is truth speaking to power, which is a very big issue. The one thing you cannot impose on people by power is truth — especially truth about forgiveness, peace with God, a new power to live. You can't impose truth like that by violence. I think Pilate realised that, which is why he said Jesus was innocent. People who take up rifles, swords, bombs to defend his message are not following him — they're disobeying him. People readily blame religions, and Christianity in particular, for war and violence. Christ can't be blamed for it. Disobedience to Christ can — but that's another story.

John Lennox

Thank you so very much. I've enjoyed this, as always.