Can Science Explain Everything? with Dr. John Lennox

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here,

back with some self-brain surgery.

It's Thursday, and it's normally Theology Thursday, but today I'm going to release an episode.

It really is theology, but we're going to talk about faith and science and have a special guest.

Dr. John Lennox is a world-renowned Oxford mathematician, professor emeritus.

He has lectured everywhere, and by that I mean all over the world,

the the United States, Russia, Great Britain, everywhere.

He's been interviewed by everybody. He's debated some of the most famous atheists,

Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins.

He has been a profound apologist for the Christian faith and a person who's

written tremendously with great clarity about the interface between science and faith.

He's a great thinker, tremendous, tremendous lover of Jesus,

us and has an incredible sort of credibility when we say, can faith and science mix?

The book we're going to talk about is one of his smaller books called Can Science Explain Everything?

I read it a few months ago, and I just was so taken by how Dr.

Lennox carefully and very precisely laid out the fact that science just can't explain everything.

And so if you're struggling with that idea, if you want to know if it's reasonable

to to have the faith that you have in Christ, or if you've found that science

doesn't quite give you the answers or the satisfaction in your life that you're

looking for, and you want to find some hope, Dr.

Lennox will help us get there today. We just had a great little conversation.

He's agreed to come back on the show a couple of times in the future to have

deeper conversations about other topics and to go more deeply into some of his other work.

But the book is Can Science Explain Everything?

It's a little short book you can get on Amazon. on. It's a tremendous overview.

And if you've got somebody in your life who's struggling with these big questions,

you have a child, a grandchild,

a friend who's in college, or somebody who's wondering why all the smart people

seem to be saying that there's no need for God or that God's been overturned by science,

John Lennox is a credible voice

who knows the truth and can help you understand it in a very clear way.

So today we're going to talk about the big question, can science explain everything?

With Dr. John Lennox, I'm so honored that he took the time to be with us today.

And before we get into the answering of his question, can science explain everything?

I have a question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith.

Everything starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. this is your time my friend let's get after it.

Music.

Friend we're back and i'm so excited and honored today to have oxford mathematician

and really well-known author john lennox dr john lennox is here with us all

the way from the uk today welcome to the show dr lennox thank you very much

indeed i'm delighted to be be with you.

It's so great. I've been telling my audience about you for a while now,

and we're going to talk about one of your many books today, Can Science Explain Everything?

But before you do that, would you mind starting us in prayer today, sir?

Not at all, because it's always a delight to start a conversation by referring

it to the God that we believe in because He's real. So let's pray.

Father, we thank you for every opportunity of discussing the truth of your existence

and your revelation through Jesus Christ.

Help us as we discuss these things.

And may the people watching and listening begin to see that Christianity does

not mean committing intellectual suicide, but there are reasons to believe, very powerful reasons.

And we pray that as we discuss us, this may become clear.

For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, John. I appreciate your time with us today.

And I think we'll probably have another conversation or two,

Lord willing, in the future about some of your more recent work.

But I wanted to talk today about a little book that you wrote a few years ago

called Can Science Explain Everything?

We have a lot of people listening here who have been through hard things.

My wife and I lost a a child a few years ago.

And that's really what led me to start writing and podcasting.

And a lot of the people listening here are going to be people who had big questions about faith and doubt.

And sometimes they hear scientists speak and it challenges what they think they

believe and they want to know where to turn for hope.

And I thought maybe you could help us to dispel some of the notions around the

idea that you can't be a curious scientific person and also a person of faith.

Well, I am a very curious scientific person, and my response to the question

might intrigue some listeners.

Everybody is a person of faith.

The question is, faith in what? And it's a very interesting thing because I've

debated with many atheists, and they tell me that atheists have no faith,

which amuses me greatly,

because then they write lengthy books about what they believe.

That's right. And the point is, I think, and it's a good place to start,

that every one of us has a worldview that we believe.

And the question to ask is, what is the evidence for its truth?

And I am a Christian because I believe there is powerful evidence for the truth

of Christianity of two kinds.

Minds there's the evidence of what

i call the objective evidence that's using the

term a little loosely from observing the

world around us and the evidence of scripture

and all the rest of it and history and

then there's the evidence of personal experience and

the two marry together i think superbly and

i think perhaps the first obvious point to make is let me put it this way I'm

not remotely ashamed of being a scientist and a Christian because I would want

to argue that it was Christianity or more exactly the biblical worldview that's given me my subject.

Any slight acquaintance with the history of science will tell you that the great

pioneers, starting with Galileo and then Kepler, Newton, Clark Maxwell,

and so on, they were all believers in God.

And my intellectual hero, C.S. Lewis, put it together very aptly when he wrote a long time ago now.

He said, men became scientific because they expected law in nature,

and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.

So far from their faith in God hindering their science, it was the motor that drove it.

So that's where I want to start, that there is a deep, deep,

very deep connection between what we might call the Judeo-Christian, the biblical.

Revelation of God and the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries.

And then of course we build on that, but it seems to me that's a very easy and

important point that's recognized by virtually all historians of science.

Absolutely. And, you know, we have people like Maxwell inscribing the Psalms

on the door of the Cavendish Laboratory.

That is correct. Great are the works of the Lord.

Yes. Yes. Right. I love that story. And I love, you know, how you address the

idea in your book about how science really started as an investigation of how

to show the things that God has done.

And somewhere along the way, somebody decided to only investigate things that

they could touch and feel or look at in the material world.

So tell us about what naturalism and materialism really are and how that came to be, maybe.

Well, it's very odd, really, because Because scientists, of all people,

tend to believe lots of things that they cannot see, touch, or feel and have

to ensure their existence.

But naturalism is a worldview, really. It's the atheistic worldview.

Let's put it this way. Let's stand back from this, Lee, because it's best,

I think, to paint a bigger picture.

I said everybody has a worldview. view.

Then we go to the fact that there are really only three major worldview families.

The first is my own, which is theism.

That is, there is a God who created the universe, but the universe is not part

of God, nor an emanation of God.

He created it, so to speak, outside

of himself, and he built into it the regularities on which it works.

The diametrical opposite view to that is naturalism, atheism, materialism.

They're almost essentially the same.

There are subtle philosophical differences, and that is the view that there

is a universe, but there is no God behind it.

And then in the middle somewhere, there's a view, pantheism,

which really says that God and the universe are one great...

Kind of entity, which is in a sense, not, which is, which is in a very real

way, not personal, an impersonal universe,

which is regarded in some sense as God.

But the main debate in the Western academy, at least, is between atheism and naturalism.

And naturalism says this world is all there is.

And so it takes a reductionist view to things.

Everything can be reduced to the material, mass energy, so to speak.

And I have great difficulty with that because.

The myth that is spread abroad in our culture is that science and faith in God

do not fit well well together, but that science and atheism fit so well together

that you can deduce atheism from science.

My view is that science and God

fit beautifully together, but that atheism actually undermines science.

So science does not sit well with atheism.

So some of my main reasons for not not being an atheist, or not because I'm

a Christian, but because I'm a scientist.

Right. And I unpack that in my little book.

And I think you did it beautifully. And I think you parsed out something that's

important, that sometimes,

especially the media and general public knowledge,

gives credibility to scientists when they say things, but discounts philosophers

or people of religion or other types of people who know things when they speak

because they're not scientific.

So tell us about the difference between scientific statements and statements by scientists.

That's a very important distinction.

You know, the great American Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman,

a physicist, won the Nobel Prize and he wrote once, outside their own field,

the scientist is as dumb as anybody else.

And that's absolutely true.

And I need to watch because I'm speaking outside my own field of mathematics at this very moment.

But I think the point that you're making, Lee, is that.

Science has a big cultural authority for us, and there's reason for that,

because of its spinoffs, technology,

we live in the information age, the advances in computer science and artificial

intelligence are simply bewildering, and the things that we can do that would

have been unheard of 20 years ago.

But the problem is that scientists start to speak on things outside of their field.

And people think that they're speaking with the same authority.

And I often say, you know, when people like the late Stephen Hawking said,

there is no God, that's simply a statement of his personal belief.

It's not a scientific statement.

It's not based on any scientific evidence. In fact, it goes against the evidence.

But because these people are brilliant, and they are, I remember Hawking at

Cambridge, and he's a genius.

I've written a book about him, which has just been revised recently, by the way.

There's a new edition of my book on God and Stephen Hawking.

But the sad thing is that once they say there's no God, people say,

well, who am I to query that?

And that's why I want to come in and say, look, you can query it.

You have every right to query it because they're just making a statement of

their own personal belief without evidence.

Wow. So then there's a difference then between science, which you can give us

a good working definition of science in a moment, and this idea of scientism

or the worldview or religion built around science.

Science well it's actually quite

hard to define science the philosophers

of science have virtually given up on it and

they they prefer to be more modest and they say we can talk about certain things

that are connected with science like repeated experimentation like formulating

hypothesis to account for observation testing that hypothesis by means of experiment

and all all this kind of thing,

and coming to a conclusion tentatively and then stronger and stronger as we go on.

But there's no one scientific method.

But scientism is a very different thing altogether.

Scientism is the view that science is the only way to truth.

So if it doesn't come under the the natural sciences, then it's not going to give you the truth.

And I want to make several points about that. First of all, it's logical nonsense.

I have loved logical logic, mathematical logic, and all other kinds of logic since I was very small.

If you think of the statement, science is the only way to truth,

does that statement come from work in science?

Well, absolutely not. not. It's a statement about science.

So if science is the only way to truth, and that statement.

Is not a statement coming from science, then the statement is true and false

at the same time, which means that it is logically incoherent.

And it's very important for people to realize that it is absolute nonsense.

It's very much like a statement I meet in another context where people tell

me all truth is relative, but they expect me to believe that statement as an absolute truth.

It's nonsense and we need to push back

hard at it now to come to our senses on

the scientism thing peter medawar was a nobel prize winner in oxford and he

once wrote a brilliant book advice to young scientists and he said it's very

easy to see that science is limited limited,

it cannot even answer the questions of a child.

Where do I come from? Where am I going? And what is the meaning of life?

And Medawar then said, you have to turn to literature, to philosophy.

And I would want to add to religion and the Bible to answer questions like that.

And the fundamental mistake is this, that people that espouse scientism,

saying that science is is the only way to truth, make a second mistake.

And that is to think that the natural sciences, I emphasize that,

by the way, Lee, for a reason, because science originally, it comes from Latin

sciere, to know, it's all knowledge.

So if you think of science as all knowledge and then say it's the only way to

truth, that's a tautology, that's obvious. But we're talking about the natural sciences.

That's what in the English speaking world, we use the word science for today,

but not in the German speaking world. That's another matter.

So what we're saying here is that science is.

Is not coextensive with rationality. Just think about it.

If science was the only way to truth and coextensive with rationality in every

single major university in the world, you'd have to close half the departments

because history is not natural science.

Neither is philosophy, neither there is linguistics or literature,

but they're all rational disciplines.

So it's an utterly fatal mistake to go in for.

And sadly, Dawkins and Stephen Hawking tended to espouse this view.

I don't quite understand how they managed to get their heads around the illogicality of it.

But such was the authority of science.

If it isn't, in their mind, science, then it cannot cannot give us any information

whatsoever, which is sheer nonsense.

But we need to say so. And unfortunately, the media don't give enough attention

to people who are capable of saying so.

That's right. You said something in your book that I thought was a really good

point, which is science can often get to the how and even the why.

Science can observe something, break it down, figure out how it happened or

figure out things about how it happened, them, but it can't ever give us the why.

And you told a story about your Aunt Matilda baking a cake, like unpack that

for us, because a great example. Yeah, this is important.

You're right in saying that science generally talks about the how things work.

It also deals, there are two kinds of why, that complicates the matter just slightly.

There's the why of function, you know, why is this bit there?

You can often answer questions like that in science, But it cannot answer the why of purpose.

And my illustration, actually, it was due to my mentor many years ago.

But I modified it and used it up hill and down dale because it's so easy to understand.

I find even professors can understand this sometimes.

The idea is here's my Aunt Matilda, fictitious aunt, and she's baked a cake.

Cake and we're in a room full of Nobel Prize winners and I say to them,

look, please analyze this cake.

And so they look at the chemistry of it, the biochemistry of it,

the physics of it and all the rest of it and give us a very detailed scientific description.

And then I finally put them this question, please, now you've analyzed this

cake, tell us why she made it.

Now you you physicist, why did you make it? Well, a physicist sticking to her

trade will have to say, I don't know.

Physics cannot tell me, and so on and so forth.

And no matter how brilliant they are, their scientific disciplines cannot tell

them, and they will never know. And here's the important point.

Unless Aunt Matilda reveals it to them.

Now, watch what happens when she tells them. Does their rationality cease? No.

They use their rationality to understand what she says, but their rationality

will never get inside her brain,

unless you're going to tell me that neuroscience has got that far,

will never get inside her brain to know why she made it until she reveals it.

And it's exactly the same at the large level about the universe.

We can find out a great deal of fascinating things about how it works,

how it runs, all this kind of thing.

But if you ask why it was made and what's it for? four.

We'll never find out unless there is someone who stands in the same relationship

to the universe as Aunt Matilda stands to the cake. She made it for a purpose.

And of course, I believe there is someone who has revealed it,

and his revelation is called the Bible.

So we start with that phenomenal statement, in the beginning God created the

the heavens and the earth.

And we read fairly soon after that, that God created human beings in his own image.

And the purpose of the whole natural world is to have a home for human beings

made in the image of God, which of course means, incidentally,

that we can learn something about God by studying ourselves.

But that's another matter. So that's the idea to indicate that that science

is powerful, it's wonderful, but it is limited.

And one of the reasons actually, Lee, why science is powerful is because it

only answers or asks a much narrower set of questions.

And as I said, it cannot answer the why questions of meaning and purpose.

That's right. Can you give us then, so we've discussed science and what it is

and what it is not and what it should be for and all those things,

but can you give us a rational basis for trusting in Scripture as God's Word?

Why do you, as a highly educated scientist, why do you think the Bible is reasonable

and potentially hopeful for people to follow and believe? Eve?

Well, that's a huge subject because

I've been living with Scripture all my life and I'm 80 years old now.

So it's been a long time. I've been fascinated by Scripture for just under 70 years, I would say.

And it's a cumulative effect.

Now, we need to start somewhere. And the striking thing about the Bible is that

it is what we call today a metanarrative. It's overarching.

It starts at the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the

earth, and it overarches right

through history, placing humankind made in the image of God on earth.

And the whole thing is a narrative about God's dealings with human beings and

God who's revealed in the Bible.

And I often say to people, look, don't dismiss the Bible or Christianity before

you've listened to what it has to say, because the criteria for truth,

there are two main ones in philosophy.

The one is, does it tell a consistent story?

The second one is, does it gear into my understanding of reality?

Is it meaningful in terms of my experience of life and all the rest of it?

And my general statement would be that both intellectually,

emotionally, and experientially, I have come step by step to trust more and more,

not simply the Bible, but the God who who stands behind it, because God revealed

in the Bible is not a theory. He's a person.

And we need to grasp that because the supreme revelation of God,

I believe, is when God became human.

And I'm amused a little bit these days of artificial intelligence,

where the attempt is being made to turn us into transhumans and become little gods.

So it's a story of human beings James becoming God.

The Christian story is the exact opposite. It's about God becoming human in

order that we can get to know him.

And therefore, you have to ask specific questions.

Does the Bible make sense when it comes to the big picture of nature and creation, all of that?

Does the Bible make sense historically? Is God?

Are its central claims evidence-based? And of course, immediately in terms of the Christian story.

The central claim is that Jesus claimed to be God incarnate and demonstrated

that by God raising him from the dead.

And so at this point, I would want to do what I have done in great detail in

one of my books, Gunning for God.

And to look through the eyes of a fairly skeptical scientist,

I'm a skeptic by nature, and ask the questions, what is the evidence that Jesus

actually rose from the dead?

Now, I'm sure you've done this in your podcast many times, but I find that increasingly convincing,

not only in terms of the intellectual side, but the fact is if Jesus rose from

the dead, then he's alive and we can encounter him.

And therefore, I would then go into the level of experience that I believe that

in my life and in my family, in my marriage, with my children and grandchildren,

that there has been a constant experience of the reality of God.

Now, of course, a psychologist could come and say it's all a delusion.

But, but, but, if that's all a delusion, then the whole of life's a delusion and we get nowhere.

But that's a bigger topic. So one would have to pinpoint some of the specific things.

And one of the reasons I wrote the little book you started with is to give a

bit of evidence to what people's appetite so they can look further. Yeah.

Well, you've done a beautiful job. We're going to give away three copies of

the book to listeners that are going to write in, and it's going to be a delight for them.

Dr. Lennox, you've had an incredible career, and you're standing up for the faith.

And I guess as we are bumping right into that half an hour that we agreed on,

and I do hope that we can do this again in the future, but would you leave us with a word?

Like if there's somebody out there who's hurting, who's gone through something

really hard, and they're wondering where they can turn to find hope,

just from your perspective, what's the thing that can give people hope?

Well, it's a very good question to end on, because I wouldn't talk to you unless

I believed there was a real hope, real hope in the face of evil and the suffering world.

Now, the hardest question that anybody gets asked, or that any worldview has

to face, is the problem of suffering.

And I have tried to deal with it in some detail. I wrote a little book,

Where Is God in a Coronavirus World, which is cheaper than a cup of coffee.

And if you want to know my thoughts on that, they're all over the internet.

But I would just like to say this.

One of my main reasons for being a Christian is because Christianity doesn't

so much give me a solution to the problem of suffering and evil,

but it leads leads me to a person who understands and who himself is the solution ultimately.

Now, let me unpack that just a little bit.

You see, there are two issues here. I could be talking to someone who is watching

suffering, but they're not suffering themselves.

That's one perspective. I call it the observer perspective.

There are other people who are suffering. And that's the personal perspective.

And when we try to approach this question, we have to approach it from both

sides, because the one person will be looking for intellectual answers,

the other will be looking for comfort and pastoral help.

And those two things don't always go together.

But to cut a major story short, Lord.

Christianity talks to us about a God who suffered.

And if it were not for the fact that Christ suffered on the cross,

and the claim is that he was suffering there for us, then I wouldn't be able

to say a word on this topic.

And if he'd simply died on the cross, we'd never have heard of him.

But the thing that changes everything for me is that God raised him from the dead.

Because, of course, death is the thing that everybody dreads.

And the marvellous thing about the Christian message is it doesn't stop us dying.

It doesn't stop us suffering, but it gives us a hope that transcends death.

And that is something that I am not embarrassed is to share with people.

Because no matter how much we may be suffering,

to look at the one who came into our world and gave his life for us,

if that's actually true,

that's something we can begin to cling on to, even though we haven't tied up

all the loose philosophical ends that this huge huge problem deals with us.

Now, that's totally inadequate, but it's my conviction that Christ both died

and rose again, and therefore is alive, which tells me that.

My death isn't the end. Whether I die suffering or I die in my sleep,

it's not the end because Christ is going to raise me from the dead one day.

And that gives me terrific hope in the face of all the problems that exist in our world today.

And I've actually written a book about the future in connection with artificial

intelligence, which raises many questions for people today.

And it's called 2084, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity.

And that's been available for the last three years.

So there is something that you can look at.

But on the question of suffering, if I may mention it, Lee, I've just come out

with a book on Abraham, who.

Of course, over half the world's population owes some sort of allegiance to him historically.

Historically and he was a man that went through a

huge amount of difficulty and I've tried to grapple with

the problem of suffering in his case in that book

so that's probably all I can say at the moment but don't give up I would say

to people watching and listening try and find some help there's many things

on the internet and if you google my name and many of the leading universities

universities in the USA.

I have done public debates on the problem of suffering, and you can find them quite easily.

That's right. We'll put links in the notes.

Dr. Lennox, thank you so much for your time today and for your great work,

your great defense of the faith.

I'm honored to have a minute to talk to you, and it's just such a pleasure.

Thank you. God bless you, sir.

My pleasure. Thank you very much indeed, Dr. Warren.

What a tremendous talk. I'm so grateful and honored that Dr.

Lennox took the time to be with us. We have three copies of Dr.

Lennox's book, Can Science Explain Everything?

You send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com, with your name,

your mailing address, and your zip code.

Name, mailing address, and zip code, and Lisa and I will select the winners

48 hours after this episode goes live.

We have three copies of the book, Can Science Explain Everything?

From the good folks over at The Good Book Company.

Abigail Gale and the other publicists there have agreed to give us three copies

of Dr. Lennox's book, TechCat Dr. Lennox.

He is an incredible thinker, and I'll put a link in the show notes to his website,

and I would love for you to read some of his other books.

And if you're wondering about the big question, can science explain everything?

Dr. Lennox will help you find the answers. And the good news is,

my friend, you can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audiobooks.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.